Don’t Fear Feedback
Fear the absence of feedback
We had an Early In Career (EIC) group at Microsoft designed to help set up our new hires for long term success. We recruited junior engineers to design and lead this EIC group, and gave them an advisory board of senior engineers to support them in their efforts. I was on this advisory board.
I recall a meeting with the EIC leaders when they were iterating on their mission statement. It was a very lively discussion that included a steady stream of feedback from the advisors. At one point during this engagement, I stepped back to observe the room1. Seeing this meeting from the vantage point of the junior engineer leaders, I saw the potential for feeling deflated amidst the high volume of feedback that was flowing. I then began my next response with a little pep talk. “It can be discouraging when you share something that you’ve worked hard on and see it met with so much feedback. But just imagine the opposite: getting no feedback.”
I don’t use this line to excuse feedback providers. When asked to review something, we are obligated to provide balanced and objective feedback, and to be aware of audience receptiveness so that we don’t overwhelm. And there’s an art to uniting multiple feedback voices without “ganging up”. It’s the difference between “+1”ing and “piling on”.
Instead, this line is meant to pivot the recipient from thinking, “Ugh, I still have more work to do,” to thinking, “I’m so glad they’re helping me improve my message.” I used to struggle with absorbing feedback. I came into the conversation far more convinced of my precision and readiness than I had the right to be. The good news is that repeated experiences with feedback loops makes it easier to prepare for and receive feedback. That’s when you begin to see the true value of feedback. Continuing on this progression, you reach the point of craving feedback irrespective of it being good or bad. You now recognize the valuable honing that this feedback drives. The good feedback reinforces parts of your message and the bad feedback highlights where you need to direct your attention next.
Chuck Jazdzewski was a veteran engineer that joined Microsoft from Borland. I had the benefit of working closely with him for a good while, in which time I learned a lot from him. Chuck’s biggest influence to my approach was his line: “The longer I’ve been doing this job, the quicker I want someone to tell me when I’m screwing up.” This mindset did wonders for making me more welcoming of feedback.
The alternative
If you’re still building your feedback absorption muscle, and still cringing at the thought of an upcoming design, document, or code review, then let me remind you of the far worse alternative: getting no feedback. There are two main scenarios for getting no feedback. The first is bad: you couldn’t convince someone to care. The second is disaster: you convinced someone to not care.
When you can’t convince someone to start caring, it’s a “screaming into the void” experience. But this is more readily addressable. Look at your pitch2 and debug what isn’t resonating with people. Is it just a matter of honing your pitch to connect with your target audience? Or (get ready for some tough love here) is the reality just that the value proposition of your pitch is too low?
When someone stops caring, it’s a far more dire situation. I remember talking with a peer manager who was working through a challenging org situation. He had been getting a steady stream of feedback from one team member in particular, signaling that the employee was getting increasingly frustrated. At one point, the manager informed me, “He’s stopped raising red flags, so I think things have gotten better.” I presented the alternative, “Or it hasn’t, but he’s just stopped telling you,” meaning he had given up and directed his energy elsewhere. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, this now-silent employee announced that he had gotten an offer in another team and was leaving.
The more encouraging you are to others to give feedback, the more you will get them to start caring. And the more receptive you are to that feedback, the more you will get them to keep caring.
Real-time feedback
Your company’s infrequent review process most likely has a peer feedback element to it. This will inevitably result in everyone requesting and providing feedback right around review time. This surge can overwhelm people, and will result in far less feedback gathered. Feedback requestors will not be able to remember all the different people they’ve worked with over the last six months so they’ll miss opportunities for feedback. Feedback providers will be buried in feedback requests, which they will handle either by selectively providing feedback or rushing through the process to give all requestors less useful feedback.
The solution is very straightforward: move more feedback to be in the moment.
From: Feedback at review time
It’s time for your six month review. As you’re writing up your own review, you recall working with Billy on a v-team effort to pilot a new tool his team was building. You contributed to this piloting quite heavily, and it definitely helped shape Billy’s team’s final offering. So you ask Billy to provide some feedback on your involvement in the piloting.
What are the chances that Billy responds to your request? They’re very low, maybe 5% chance, for the following three reasons.
Billy’s new tool was piloted by 150 people across the company. That’s a lot of people for Billy to have to reflect back over.
You were in on the ground floor, and provided input that shaped later rounds of the pilot. But with several iterations of the pilot, Billy may have forgotten about this pivotal first round.
With the elapsed time since this pilot, it becomes a memory game for Billy. It’s four months since you contributed, and his team has already completed and delivered this tool.
To: Feedback in the moment
Shortly after you are done participating in Billy’s v-team, his pilot reaches a milestone at the end of the month. When you see Billy’s pilot summary report mail, you reply with a feedback request. “Thanks for involving me in your pilot, Billy. I’d like to know how impactful my input was to the direction of your team and your tool. While this experience is fresh in your mind, can you share your perspective on my participation? Thanks!”
Now what are the chances that Billy responds to this request? They’re much higher, probably 60% chance, for the following three reasons.
The prompt is precise. It gives Billy context on the scope of the feedback. This scope makes it much more approachable for Billy.
The request came right after his milestone. This pilot experience (and your participation in it) is fresh in his head.
Your request is in the flow of his work. When Billy reads your response, he’s already in the context of this pilot and this milestone, which will make it more likely that you’ll get a quicker response.
It’s hard enough to get feedback. So do everything you can to make it easy for the person you’re requesting feedback from to respond. Be timely in your request, and be precise in what you’re looking for feedback on.
Proactively giving feedback
You can’t talk about requesting feedback without also talking about providing feedback. Every individual in your company needs to be a requestor and a provider of feedback. So be proactive about giving feedback, and do it in the moment to make it easier on you and more beneficial to the recipient.
Let’s take a look at the above scenario, but from the feedback provider’s perspective. How could Billy have made the whole experience even better? By eliminating the request step entirely.
Billy just conducted a pretty significant pilot. There was a ton of great guidance and suggestions given that helped his team hone their tool for maximal impact to their target audience. The pilot is now done, and Billy is sending out mail to all of the participants to summarize the results of the pilot and to thank them for all of their help. After Billy sends this mail to all the participants, he stops and reflects about the 5-10 people from that 150 participant pool that had the most impact on their tool, whether it was the precision of their feedback, their customer focus, or the creativity of their suggestions. Billy then sends individual mail to each of them, cc’ing their manager. The mail details the impact their participation had on the tool, and thanks them for taking the time and for giving it their attention.
You and your manager can now both process Billy’s feedback and you can immediately benefit from this heightened awareness. And when it does come around to review time, you can pull up this email and copy Billy’s feedback into your review.
Given the word "feedback" triggers a negative physical response, I really liked the alternate language Microsoft introduced (which you included above in one example) of "can I share my perspective with you?". I find this increases receptivity a ton.