2 Ways to Act On Feedback Without Getting Overwhelmed
Radical Candor?
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By Kim Scott
It’s hard enough to get yourself to listen to your team members and let them know you are listening; getting them to listen to one another is even harder.?
If you're walking the Radical Candor walk and actively soliciting feedback, you might get more feedback and ideas than you can realistically act on. However, not acknowledging people's efforts or not implementing their ideas could cause your team to stop giving you and each other feedback altogether.
It's easy to get overwhelmed. However, there is a 2-step process that will get you out of the weeds.
1. Have a simple system for employees to use to generate ideas and voice complaints.
This system should not merely empower anyone to point out things that could be better but also enable others to help fix those things or make changes. You have to agree to let them ask?you for some help and to champion the system enthusiastically.?
Define clear boundaries of how much time you can spend — and then make sure that time?is highly impactful.
At Google, people constantly came to me with good ideas — more than I could handle, in fact — and it became overwhelming. So I organized an “ideas team” to consider them. For context, I circulated an?article from? Harvard Business Review that explained how a culture that captures?thousands of “small” innovations can create benefits for customers that are impossible for competitors to imitate.?
One big idea is pretty easy to copy, but thousands of tweaks are impossible to see from the outside, let alone imitate.
Next, I talked through some key principles that ought to guide the ideas team, first among them empowerment. The ideas team had to commit to listening to any idea that anyone brought to them, to explain clearly why they rejected the ideas they rejected, and to help people implement?ideas that the ideas team deemed worthwhile.
If somebody’s idea seemed especially promising, they could even negotiate with the person’s manager to give them some time off from their “day job” to work on implementing it.
They were encouraged to assign me up to three action items a week. After this innovation, instead of feeling stressed whenever I would hear a cool idea in a meeting or receive an inspired email, I could react enthusiastically and delegate it to the ideas team.?
2. Make sure that at least some of the issues raised are quickly addressed. Regularly offer explanations as to why the other issues aren’t being addressed.
Soon, lots of people were submitting ideas they had for improving the product, growing the business, and making our processes more efficient. We created an ideas tool (basically just?a wiki) that allowed people to submit an idea, have it reviewed by the team, and voted up or down.?
That was a form of listening, and people whose ideas got voted up definitely felt heard by their colleagues. People whose ideas were not voted up knew that their ideas had been explicitly rejected: a much clearer signal than radio silence from overburdened management. However,?a vote is not always the best way to identify the best ideas or to make sure?people are listening to each other.?
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Therefore, I asked the ideas team to read all the ideas and talk to all the people who submitted them — to listen. After that development, the team used a combination of votes and judgment to?select the best ideas.
More importantly, the ideas team helped people get the selected ideas implemented. Occasionally this was about getting time for people to work on them, or getting some input from me, but often all it took was just the validation and encouragement that came from listening and responding. “Yes, that’s a cool idea! Do it!”
Sarah Teng, a recent college graduate on the AdSense team, came up with the idea of using programmable keyboards to create shortcuts for phrases or paragraphs they used over and over when communicating with customers. It seemed like a good idea, so the ideas team asked me to approve the budget to buy programmable keypads. I did as they asked, and this simple idea increased the global team’s efficiency by 133 percent.?
This meant that everyone on the team had to spend far less time typing the same damn words?over and over and had more time to come up with other good ideas — a virtuous cycle. Bam!
When Sarah presented her project to the team, I didn’t just thank her; I also showed a graph of how this idea would improve our efficiency over time. But efficiency is not what people cared most about, so I also stressed to the team how her innovation would make people’s jobs more fun and help them grow in their careers since they’d get to spend less time doing grunt work?and more time doing work they found interesting.?
I explained that Sarah would have an opportunity to share her idea with leaders from another,?much larger team, for an even larger impact. And I sent around again the HBR article showing how competitive advantage tends to come not from one great idea but the combination of hundreds of smaller ones.
Why did I add all that context? First, to demonstrate just how great the impact of her idea was. The use of programmable keypads by itself was hardly revolutionary, but when people saw the cumulative effect of that idea and others like it over time, Sarah’s innovation felt a lot bigger.?
Second, it inspired people who had other ideas like this to be vocal about them. Third, and most?importantly, it encouraged people to listen to each other’s ideas, to take them seriously, and to help one another implement them without waiting for management’s blessing. It’s so easy to lose “small” ideas in big organizations, and if you do you kill incremental innovation.
Hundreds of really smart people had been working in online sales and operations for years. It was hard for me to believe that nobody else had ever had the programmable keypad idea before, but if they had, management hadn’t listened.?
If you can build a culture where people listen to one another, they will start to fix things you as the boss never even knew were broken.
Most meaningful to me was that morale on the team soared. At one point the “Googlegeist” survey on employee morale showed that the team of people who were answering customer support emails for AdSense felt much better about the role that innovation played in their work than the engineers working on Search did — despite the fact that those engineers were probably some of the most creative engineers in the world.
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Leadership Coach to Introverted Leaders ? Leadership Facilitator ? Leadership Strategy Consultant ? Team Development ? Speaker ? Equipping Introverted Leaders to build Influence & Visibility
1 年Good read!