Show Notes:

Welcome back to another edition of Optimize Your Life with me, Dr. Sharon Grossman. Today we are going to talk about the importance of feedback at work and get crystal clear on what good feedback looks like so you can use it to your benefit. 

Throughout your day, you might have ups and downs, not only in your mood or way of thinking but in your perception of your ability to be successful. Reflect on this scenario: Equipped with your existing skills, you enter into your place of work where you have specific resources. Given your view of yourself based on past experiences and that of your environment, you form an initial judgment of your ability to complete the task at hand.

You notice anxiety forming. This happens whenever you feel less confident about what is asked of you, usually when the task is unfamiliar, complex, or one where you have failed in the past and have not yet learned from that failure. Whenever you experience anxiety, you cannot help but feel wary about taking action. Despite this hesitation, you plunge ahead but are ultimately unsuccessful.

Should this scenario happen without you figuring out what you did wrong so you can self-correct, you will be left guessing. 

Feedback refers to information received from a manager or supervisor whose job it is to examine your work and share their expertise and knowledge about your performance. Ken Blanchard called feedback, “The breakfast of champions.” 

To be effective, feedback needs to be accurate, timely, and specific. Feedback that misses the mark on any of these three factors is ineffective and can start a negative spiral whereby you lose confidence in your ability.

Let’s break this down. 

Accurate feedback is feedback that is factual, fair, and balanced. If you’ve ever received feedback that didn’t meet the mark here, you know what I’m talking about. 

Secondly, feedback needs to be timely. Ideally what this would look like is receiving feedback on the task you just completed before you move on to your next task. That way you are learning as you go instead of waiting 6 months for that performance evaluation or until your weekly staff meeting. And mind you, feedback doesn’t have to be formal. It can be a quick check-in with your manager showing them what you’ve done and finding out whether you’re on the right track.

Having immediate feedback lets you know whether you will get your intended results or if you need to change course. It also informs you when you are finished with that particular task. What follows a completed task is feeling a sense of accomplishment.

Lastly, feedback that is specific addresses the cause-and-effect nature of your performance. It’s easy to tell someone they are doing a good job, but that’s useless information. You want your manager to say, “This is what I think you did well” followed by “It really showed me that you understood the mission of our organization” as an example. Or “I would like to see you focus more on x as it relates to y.” Having specific examples is crucial and looking at what you did and how your actions led to your results is a great way to connect the dots. 

There are 3 types of feedback:

The first is appreciation — that is, recognition of your work. That tells you that not only are you doing a great job, but that you are being valued for your work. When we talk about effective feedback, this is not what I’m talking about. This is just a feel-good type of feedback.

Coaching is a little different. The purpose of coaching is to help you improve so a coach might take a look at what is going on for you at work and tell you how you could do it better or elicit that from you whereby you’re ultimately giving feedback to yourself.

The third type of feedback is evaluation.  This is often done quarterly or yearly. If you’ve ever had a formal evaluation, you know that it’s a time when your manager takes a look at your job responsibilities and compares it to your performance and lets you know where you stand.

When I think about these three different forms of feedback, what stands out to me is that appreciation is about what you’ve already done. As I said, it’s a feel-good practice which perhaps can help with morale. Evaluation is similarly focused on the past, but it may not feel as good, especially if you are not meeting expectations. And finally, coaching is quite different than the other two forms in that it focuses on future performance and your potential. This is in line with research by Richard Boyatzis, a professor at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western, which shows that when feedback is negative and focuses on past performance, it shuts us down whereas, when we focus on what we can do in the future, it motivates us to improve. 

So when we talk about feedback, it can mean different things.

When it comes to receiving feedback on the past, what’s important, we said, is accuracy, immediacy, and specificity.

The fourth aspect of effective feedback is that it should focus not on your shortcomings, but on your potential. This enables learning and motivation. Remember, ultimately failure is linked to excellence because that’s the metric, that if used well, can help you know what doesn’t work and focus more quickly on what does. 

That’s what comprises effective feedback. 

But the question is whether you have a hard time receiving the feedback that you get. If so, ask yourself, “What am I making it mean about me?”

Too often, we shut down when our performance is criticized. We take it personally. We make it mean that we are not good enough. We might fear losing our job or feel ashamed. 

If that’s you, keep in mind that you likely have some underlying beliefs that are rising up to the surface. That is because you are projecting those beliefs onto this situation and you are taking a local problem and making it global. 

What I mean by this is that your performance is never an indication of your worth. If you make a mistake at work, it doesn’t mean you are less worthy. When you truly grasp this, you will stop feeling panicked about messing up. You will stop overcompensating by being a perfectionist. You will stop beating yourself up or comparing yourself to others. 

If you’re not quite there now, that’s OK. This is a journey. You might consider working with a coach to help you get there sooner because this is your subconscious programming and it will continue to creep up as it has been. 

If that’s not you, you should have an easier time staying grounded in the face of failure and when receiving feedback and ultimately that’s what I want you all to be able to do. Remind yourself that the point is not to be flawless. The point is to grow and you can only do that by learning. If you already knew everything, there would be nothing left to learn, life would be boring, and you’d burn out. So not knowing is kind of the point because it is an opportunity. Embrace it each and every day and you will find more rewards in the process than in the outcomes. 

Feedback is essential for you to be able to fine-tune your performance. While it is true that you came to the job with a particular skill set, you must fit into the company culture and need guidance about how to tweak your actions accordingly.

So here’s what you can do to ensure you get effective feedback to help your professional growth:

1. Request specific, accurate, and timely feedback from your manager. If you know when you’ll finish your task, schedule a meeting with your manager for the deadline or just beforehand to review your performance and elicit detailed information about the causal relationship between your performance and the end result.
2. Ask, “Is there something I can do to improve?”
3. Keep a log of your goals, the tasks you are working on to achieve those goals including the actions you took, and whether those actions got you closer or further away from the mark. If you made a mistake or experienced a failure, reflect on it and why it went wrong and write down what you have learned as well as what you can do differently next time. If it went right, write down what you did so you have clarity about what got you there for next time around.

As you can see, feedback is something that you get, something that you can ask for, and something you can give yourself. By ensuring you have the right kind of feedback, you are putting yourself on the right path for growth.