When my blindspots almost cost me my career

Do you know the positive and negative impacts you have on your coworkers?

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” ― Dolly Parton

Many years ago I failed to mediate a conflict between two of my teammates.  I was impatient. I failed to help them find common ground. I made an executive decision on how to proceed and assumed I had solved the problem. I didn’t.  

To make matters worse, that evening I flew out for a vacation leaving behind my cofounders to clean up the mess.  When I returned my cofounders were understandably pissed, and they gave me an earful. Feedback like “I should have briefed them on the final situation before leaving, I should not have not tried to mediate a conflict right before leaving for vacation, maybe I shouldn’t be mediating conflicts at all”. 

Looking back now I feel like an idiot for not handling both the mediation and their feedback better, but at the time I was defensive and didn’t acknowledge their feedback for what it was, a gift to help me improve.

For years I simply denied to see myself at my worst.  I was defensive when I heard negative feedback and couldn’t see the value in opening myself up to all feedback.

Thank goodness my teammates gave me the opportunity to grow and change.

Not everyone has that luxury.  As we've seen in the recent fall of the Away Travel CEO, “not knowing” your own blindspots and can be career ending.

Learn from these mistakes by collecting feedback and being open to the feedback you receive. Feedback is is a gift that helps you know yourself.

My intention for this article is to:

• Show why we don’t ask for feedback.
• Help you understand the power of feedback.
• Show how you can ask for feedback now.

Why didn’t I just ask for feedback?

“All feedback is relevant, even if it's not true.” ― Ford Taylor

It took me years to be more receptive to feedback, but it took me even longer to directly ask my teammates for feedback on my behavior. Why?

• “I didn’t know how and it seemed daunting.”
• “I hadn’t seen the value in positive feedback.”
• “I took negative feedback way too personally.”

As a gut check, I asked a few friends if they asked their teammates for structured feedback.

They said: 

• "I already know what people will say"
• "I don't want to kick a hornet nest"
• "My colleagues won't know what to say"
• "That sounds like a hippie California thing, it wouldn't work here"
• "It will take too long"
• “I am afraid of what I’ll hear”

In the face of these objections, it's easy to see why so many of us want more feedback at work (as much as 65% of employees, if you trust stats from Officevibe).

A few years ago it clicked in my head:

1. Feedback is a gift.  Even the worst delivered feedback gives you information about how your behavior is perceived. 
2. Positive Feedback is incredibly valuable at helping you reinforce your strengths. 
3. I can change. I am not fixed. I can grow and improve.
4. It is easy to ask my teammates for structured feedback.

The power of feedback

“Feedback is a gift.” – Jim Trinka and Les Wallace

3 weeks ago I used a tool we built to survey to our management team:

• How would you describe our vision to a friend?
• What was my most positive impact on you this quarter?
• What was my most negative impact on you this quarter?
• What do you wish I did more often?

This process was so easy that it inspired me to write this post.

The feedback I received was gold laced with opportunities to reinforce what was working and improve on what wasn’t.

Here are a few examples of feedback and a direct action I am taking because of it. 

This feedback encourages me to keep drawing on my experiences and bringing in outside resources to help my teammates. It's great to hear Radical Candor struck a chord here.

I am still thinking about how I can improve my delivery of feedback when an objective is not met.  One approach I may try out is to make sure I scope my questions to the current quarter, and state my intention for what a positive outcome for a check-in looks like.

These are just two recent examples.

In 2017, I learned that my teammates wanted me to I give more positive feedback.   In the most amazing karmic turn of events, this change led me to write a nice note to Madalyn highlighting the positive impact her openness about Mental Health had on our organization.  She tweeted it. This note snowballed into worldwide attention on mental health in the workplace leading to interviews on CNN, NBC, FOX, CNN, and features in the WSJ, Time, and more.

Without asking these questions I would not have known that my short push around Radical Candor had such a profound positive impact, or that my approach to the end of the quarter feedback had been so stressful for one of my teammates. I may have never had the chance to share my philosophy about mental health in the workplace with the world.

Asking for feedback is easier than you think.

About four years ago we had just hired a great new marketer named Karl, and about one year into the job he sent out a survey to all the people at the company he interacted with.  In this survey he asked us a couple of questions about the impact he was having on us and the company.

At this time we had no formal feedback methodology.  I had never even seen peer feedback surveys outside of group projects in college, and here Karl was, one year on the job showing us just how easy it was to ask his peers for feedback and remove blindspots.

With Karl’s DIY project as an example, and our personal challenges with feedback in mind we set out to make it easier for anyone in our organization to take ownership over their growth -- starting with easy to gather feedback.

Three months ago we released an internal tool to simplify team feedback within Olark. Based on positive feedback from our team we decided we to open up our tool for any team. 

To collect structured feedback you’ll need:

• A survey tool (try Wulu)
• A set of questions (try my example questions to start)
• A group of trusted teammates

Five minutes from now you could be collecting feedback from your colleagues, and in ten minutes you might learn something new about yourself.

Start your timer, Get set and go.

1) Install the Free WULU Team Feedback App from Olark, if your organization isn't using it yet.  We built this tool specifically for written peer feedback. (up to 3 minutes if you need to ask someone else to install the app, or fiddle with slack to install the app).

2) Start with a blank template on https://app.getwulu.com.

3) Write a description (copy and paste mine below to save time)

"Help Ben Grow" and "Please help reflect on the positive and negative impacts I have had on you at work this year.”

Wulu forces you to be brief in your questions, answers, and descriptions to help you be very direct about what you want. 

4) Change the questions to match the questions above. (1 minute)

• What was my most positive impact on you in Q4?
• What was my most negative impact on you in Q4?
• What do you wish I did more often?

5) Click on send-form

6) Select your recipients

7) Click Send - Your coworkers will be invited to answer your survey on slack, you’ll be notified when they respond.

8) Come back in a few days and send a message to everyone who hasn't responded.

9) Read and reflect on the feedback.  I have a lot of tips for this, but it will take more than 5 minutes :)

Tell me how Wulu was helpful to you. At Olark, we have already seen increased high response rates by asking our teammates for lightweight feedback via Slack. About 50 other companies are trying Wulu out for all sorts of team feedback and are already reporting positive results:

If you enjoyed this post, follow me on LinkedIn. I am passionate about improving communication inside and outside of organizations from making it easier to talk to your customers, to improving feedback within your organization.  I write my thoughts here.

Thank you Larry, Nancy, Ricky, Sarah, Alex, Tammy, Alicia, Brandon, and others for reading drafts of this.