On Feedback

I’ve recently had a number of conversations on the topic of “feedback”, and I want to share some thoughts. Everybody agrees feedback is important. When one joins Meta, for example, they are told, as one of the first principles, “feedback is a gift”. Maybe they do a quick course on how to give and receive feedback, and after that they are supposedly ready. They are not. I think feedback is really, really hard. The interesting thing is that all aspects of feedback: giving feedback, asking for feedback, and receiving feedback are highly non-trivial. Let’s consider them separately:

Giving Feedback

There is a lot that has been written on the topic of feedback. It has to be specific, it has to be actionable, it has to be useful, it has to be non-personal, and so on. But I see what some people miss is that you can’t just give somebody feedback unless you have a relationship with them. Unless there is trust. Unless the person knows that you care about them, and that’s why you give feedback. If you don’t have this foundation of trust, the feedback will not have any impact. Maybe this is another place where the “focus on impact” principle is useful: the point of feedback is not to give feedback. The point of feedback is to impact some change in another person’s behavior.

Asking for Feedback

Now, asking for feedback is not easy either. Most people, for whatever reason, don’t want to give you open feedback. We can discuss these reasons, but trust me: to really get useful feedback, the honest feedback that helps you grow, you need to push for it. There are two ways I know how to do it: First, just ask, very explicitly, for brutally honest direct feedback. Use these, or similar, words. Make the other person know you really don’t want them to filter their feedback. It may help, or it may not. Another option is to ask somebody else, typically your manager or mentor, to ask others and aggregate similarly brutally honest feedback. This sometimes works better. It was one of the more useful things my Meta manager did for me at some point. The feedback he gathered for me was definitely more direct and useful that what would have been shared with me directly.

Receiving Feedback

Finally, receiving and accepting feedback can also be challenging. I’ve seen, more than once, a situation where somebody asks for feedback, you give it to them, and they instinctively immediately push back. They focus on whatever part of feedback that is not true, or not completely true, and loudly reject it. Remember, if you are given feedback, then most likely a) it’s true or b) it may not be true, but the perception of it is true. In either case, you want to make sure that whoever is giving you feedback feels like you appreciate it, and take it seriously. It’s ok to discuss the feedback, and even to disagree with it, but please come from the position of accepting it, rather than immediately pushing back.

This is what I wanted to share. Do you have any questions or any (brutally honest) feedback on this post?

Dmitriy Budko

Tuning the box with Schr?dinger's cat

1 年

Mark, how does the people's cultural differences affect your advise here? For example, here is an apocryphal (but very believable based on my experience) story about giving the feedback: "When Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, came to Moscow his lecture was translated by Yevgeny Lifshits, Lev Landau?s student and co-author, who was fluent in English. When someone from the audience asked Bohr how he had managed to build such a wonderful school of physicists, he replied that his secret was that he didn?t mind telling his students that he was a fool. Misunderstanding, Lifshits told the audience that Bohr never minded telling his students that they were fools. He promptly corrected himself, but the future Nobel Prize-winner Pyotr Kapitsa, who was at the lecture, remarked that the slip of the tongue reflected the difference between the schools of Bohr and Landau."

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