If you want to feel like a bad bitch at work, you need to stop saying shit like “any feedback welcome!!!” Or at least, don’t have that be the only type of feedback you ask for.
Ah, feedback. It’s a corporate buzzword that we all have to use on the daily. We even have to do things like pretend we love feedback even if we go and cry about it after it’s given. I wish we could all just be perfect angels who never need to get better at stuff. Wouldn’t that rule?
Despite all my shit talk, I know two things to be painfully true about professional life.
Feedback is your ticket to success.
You will get the feedback that you ask for.
A few disclaimers
I am a lucky writer who has never had people read my work in bad faith. But, the internet is the internet. Every now and then one of my posts will get a lot more views, and I fear it falling into the hands of web gremlins who don’t have reading comprehension or know how to give authors the benefit of the doubt.
So, to stave off the ever present threat of web gremlins, a few disclaimers here.
You shouldn’t take just anyone’s feedback. You should probably allow it from more sources than you think, but random joes on the street or at work aren’t entitled to give you feedback just because they’re in your general proximity. You should, in my opinion, generally allow feedback from your friends, your romantic partner, your family, your boss, and coworkers with whom you regularly work. Within that group, it’s up to you to decide who will give you feedback in good faith and who will not.
Feedback isn’t the same thing as being micromanaged or told what to do. I’m talking today about feedback given in good faith, even if it’s not always well-delivered.
If you’re in a toxic work environment, this advice/opinion post probably doesn’t apply to you. I wish you the best of luck in getting out of there.
Feedback isn’t the only thing that powers you finding professional success. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet to professional success, despite what numerous LinkedInfluencers trying to sell you their overpriced courses are trying to imply. It’s not the only thing that powers your success, but it sure as hell is very powerful.
Everyone feeling like they understand the target audience? This one is for the girls (said gender-neutrally) in a decent working environment who are generally good with their bosses and want to take their professional selves up to the next level.
We good? Let’s go.
Feedback is your ticket to success
Adjusting to a new role is just as nerve wracking and difficult as adjusting to living in a new country. For the length of this post, I would like to be the sole arbiter of the truth of this statement seeing as I have done both things a couple of times.
My first corporate job was basically a spreadsheet monkey position where I rarely set meetings with other people. Nothing wrong with that-it was the nature of the position and it was the job I needed at the time. When I joined my last job, I was immediately thrust into a much more collaborative position. My first couple weeks into my last job, my boss had me set a meeting with him and a coworker to get the specs on a dashboard project.
I messaged my boss, the coworker, and myself, with a couple of time proposals. My boss almost immediately DM’d me right after that and told me that it just made more work for people to have to choose a time, and it would be better if I just looked at all our Google calendars and picked something out myself. I messaged back the little group chat “ignore me! I’ll check everyone’s cals” and did as he asked. Good thing no one on slack can see your face flaming red with embarrassment.
There were lots of little things like that in this job. My weekly standups with the team where we would give each other updates on what we were working on were another language to learn. I came to a standup one day after having solved some particularly difficult bugs in a project, and I regaled the team with the details of that bug fix.
Afterwards, in my next 1:1 with my boss, he tole me that there was no need for me to get so in the weeds with my update. A better path would have been just giving a summary and having written details prepared to send out if anyone wanted them. I took his advice at the next standup meeting.
And, if you read A fembo’s guide to feedback last week, you’d know all gory details of one of my most embarrassing feedback incidents. I was essentially being a know-it-all at a lunch & learn I was delivering, and I needed to stay in my damn lane.
Feedback is often embarrassing. Probably like you, I try hard at my job and I care about performing well. I also care about respecting my coworkers’ time and energy, and it’s embarrassing to make missteps or do something in a suboptimal way that results in you receiving feedback. It can feel like a repudiation of my care and effort, a “fuck you” to me, who is really just trying her best, just like you.
Even if the feedback you get is not about you doing anything wrong, but rather how you could have done something even better, it’s still embarrassing.
I think that instinct to feel a bit embarrassed getting feedback is super normal. I haven’t been able to let go of that response at all myself, I just think I’ve gotten better at processing it.
I’ve worked hard professionally and personally at reframing stuff that I find distressing. Like this: Every time my boss delivered feedback to me at my last job, it was an invitation. It was an acknowledgement of what I was trying to accomplish, and how I could have gotten there better.
It’s more respectful of someone’s time to just schedule a meeting and not make them pick between times. It’s more respectful of someone’s energy to give them the cliff’s notes of your project update, rather than increasing their mental load with emails. Sure, it was embarrassing to be told I fucked up, but these were invitations to improve my communication at work, and that is worth its weight in gold.
Putting aside my bruised ego and taking what my boss offered in feedback really improved the way that I work. I left that job with a lot of accomplishments I’m really proud of, including building a data stack, an analytics function, and getting to speak at a conference for a cool 25 minutes to share my experiences. Things would not have gone as well at that job if I wasn’t willing to to receive and implement feedback1.
Not letting ego get in the way has also been critical at my current job. All of my customer calls are recorded and analyzed, and once a month (sometimes more frequently) I’ll get feedback on my live teaching. Each of my engagements ends with written feedback from customers as well.
This job has a much higher volume of feedback. Naturally, that means there are pieces of it that I will not take into consideration. Customers don’t always give feedback in good faith, and sometimes they will use the instructor feedback form to make their opinions known about something unrelated to me. But, that doesn’t mean their feedback isn’t valuable.
You’d think the volume of feedback I get at my current job would mean it doesn’t still embarrass me depending on the contents. But it absolutely does. My long-suffering fiance will attest that I’ve needed to cry about feedback from my boss and from customers multiple times, and I expect that will happen again throughout this gig. The emotional response is normal and also really fucking irritating. But girlies, we can’t let it get in the way of kicking ass at work.
We owe it to ourselves to go cry about the feedback privately, then hike our pants up and go and implement it. In halfway decent work situations, people giving you feedback want you to succeed and get better. Taking the advice that you get will usually make you better at your job, I swear!!
Taking the feedback I get at my current job has yielded noticeable improvement. I don’t think it’s arrogant to say that I came into this job with some pre-existing skill in teaching and communicating, but I’d never done technical instruction as a full time gig before. Teaching is the type of work where you can always and should always be improving, and I can see evidence of that at work with my high NPS scores from customer engagements. I know what I’m doing and I’m good at what I do.
But that isn’t true because I just muscled my own way there and am some prodigy or something stupid like that. No, it’s true because I am constantly aware that other people at work know more things than I do, purely by virtue of them being different people than me and having a different experience set than me. We each have continuous little tidbits to offer each other when it comes to getting better at our jobs.
And, reminding myself over and over again that feedback is an invitation is a mantra that gets me through a lot. I am not naive enough to think that I’ll ever be able to take feedback without cringing or being embarrassed about it. But I am able to take it and use it to get better at my job. It’s actually very punk rock to know that your peers have valuable advice to offer professionally, even if you cry about it sometimes.
Maybe you want to be a little more punk rock, a little more badass at work. You can do that. You have to ask for the feedback you want, because you will get the feedback you ask for.
You get the feedback you ask for
Hopefully you’re well and truly convinced that feedback is your ticket to success. Now here’s a practical bit of advice.
A common place you’ll probably need to get feedback is on some sort of written work product. In the data world, this is most frequently your SQL and perhaps a write-up of your work. In other jobs, it’s probably some sort of written prose or copy.
It’s important to not let your work go out into the world un-peer-reviewed. I don’t care how careful and detail-oriented you are, you will not be able to catch everything that might be an issue with your work. Find a peer reviewer for everything that you do, and thank me later.
Once you’re ready for your work to be seen by a peer reviewer, you need to ask for some feedback. Don’t just hand them your work and go “whatever feedback you have, thanks!” This is such an annoying look, and it doesn’t make you seem all open and humble like you might think. It just makes it seem like you have no idea where you could stand to improve.
I have been trialing and errorr-ring ways to ask for more specific feedback on work products for awhile now, and it generally comes down to variations on 3 bullet points. No matter what it is I’m working on, I’ll usually ask (in a comment or a feedback form) for some variation on:
One thing the reviewer would add or take away
This is fairly general, so depending on your use case, get more specific with it.
For example, in a SQL query you’re having reviewed, ask your reviewer if there’s any steps they would add or take away. Good SQL is usually written in logical steps. Usually, if I ask for something a reviewer would add or take away, they point out repetitive pieces of my code, or steps I could add that do an operation more effectively. This sharpens my ability to write performant SQL.
In a written proposal or (for me, these days) lesson plan, ask your reviewer if there’s any sections they would add or take away. This helps you get at underdeveloped (add) or overly wordy (take away) pieces of your writing.
One tricky part that you feel good about but want confirmation you solved in a reasonable way
I usually find most data or writing work has a knot in it somewhere. Some little piece that was harder to solve than I wanted it to be, or some hump I had to get over before the writing really took off. Look through your code or prose and ask yourself what that hump or knot is, and summarize how you solved it in a comment for your reviewer. Ask them if they would have done anything different. This sharpens your problem solving skills.
One part you’re not so sure about, if you played devil’s advocate with yourself.
If you don’t have any parts of your work that you’re not super sure about, I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. There’s always room to improve as professionals. So ask yourself, if you were playing devil’s advocate with your code or writing, what would the weakest point be? Point that part out to your reviewer, and ask if they’d express what you’re trying to express in another way. This sharpens your ability to be self-reflective, and to accurately assess your strengths and weaknesses.
After asking for those three points of feedback (or some variation thereupon), I’ll also add a comment that requests “any other feedback that may come to mind.” The point of asking for specific feedback is not to constrain your reviewer to only commenting on certain things. It’s to give them direction and to help you build specific skills. Your reviewer should, of course, be invited to give any general feedback they may have that falls outside of these bullets. But for the love of god, don’t just ask them “for any feedback they may have!”. Don’t be like early career me and think that your laissez-faire “I’m cool with whatever” attitude is actually helping anybody. Ask for something specific, and you’ll get specific skills out of it.
Thanks for reading this week!
I’m hoping to queue up some posts for while I’m on my wedding and honeymoon—but if I don’t have time, you will see me after my honeymoon and after Coalesce, so sometime around mid-October. Please subscribe! Promise I’ll be back!
just a shoutout to my last boss. A truly excellent people manager and someone I am so lucky to have worked with. Hope you’re good, homie!