Harvesting Feedback to Accelerate Professionally

I have prepared for meetings with peers who mentioned, “I am going to leave the negative pieces out of my section, because I do not want the boss to say anything.” Bosses exist to improve their team. Assuming their judgement is trustworthy, wanting them to say nothing is the equivalent of wanting to stagnate our growth. In quickly growing companies with many moving pieces, management may not be able to give an appropriate amount of attention to each project or individual. Knowing that our time with management is scarce, we need to clearly discuss our results, whether positive or negative, and thoughts to demonstrate our abilities and ambitions. To accelerate professionally, we need to harvest feedback by actively seeking it and genuinely learning from it.

Harvesting Feedback

If we only execute great work and are not getting the appropriate feedback, our learning and professional development will begin to stagnate. If we are not learning and progressing, we will not receive high impact projects; or if we do, we will not perform as well on them. If we are not excelling in increasingly difficult projects, we will not progress professionally. So in order to continue learning, improve our perception to management, and thereby accelerate professionally, we need to harvest feedback.

Feedback can come from collected data, manager comments, or stakeholder comments and can be positive or negative. Today, we will dive deeper into harvesting feedback from manager or stakeholder comments, which should highlight both our shortcomings and our victories. A future piece will be created to address harvesting feedback from collected data. In my previous article about providing tough feedback, I gave the manager’s lens on how they should give feedback to insight discovery and encourage further growth on their employees.

I want to differentiate self-promotion and harvesting feedback to ensure they are not confused. Self-promotion is used to highlight your personal accomplishments. Harvesting feedback is used to continue developing from our past accomplishments. Furthermore, harvesting feedback can be done with or without Solution Oriented Thinking. When looking for feedback with Solution Oriented Thinking, we should first think about potential next steps based on underlying causes of our situation. If we are not sure of the solution, we should narrow down our options to a multiple choice format as opposed to an open ended question. Reaching this level of thought before seeking feedback will make the conversation more productive. To help illustrate these ideas, let’s assume we have a sales associate speaking to their manager:

• Self-Promotion: Look, I managed to double revenue this quarter vs. last quarter.
• Harvesting Feedback — Basic: Revenue doubled vs. last quarter. I want to grow it more. What should I do?
• Harvesting Feedback with Solution Oriented Thinking: Revenue doubled vs. last quarter. I think we can grow it more by doing A or B. What do you think?

In short, we need to practice Solution Oriented Thinking beforehand to elevate the harvesting from all of our feedback sessions. If you would like a deeper look on Solution Oriented Thinking, you may review my article about the topic here. Taking the initiative to harvest feedback in this manner will also make your work more visible, which is especially helpful if our manager is juggling multiple projects at one time. This enhanced visibility will ensure your work is still going down the right path to make a significant impact on the overall objective.

Knowing that solution oriented thinking and harvesting feedback are necessary to accelerate professionally, we need to consider how these will interplay with manager behavior. Managers give feedback in areas where they believe they can create an impact, namely important projects and people they believe can be molded. Ideally we are working on important projects and demonstrate our willingness to learn and grow. We have some control over getting important projects, however we have 100% control over our ability to be molded. We can demonstrate our willingness to learn and grow by actively seeking and learning from feedback. After demonstrating the hunger for feedback and the ability to develop from it, important projects will soon follow. Channel wise, we can harvest feedback through ad-hoc chats and scheduled meetings. Let us further dissect each one.

Ad-Hoc Chat

Think of ad-hoc chats as quick discussion periods with a manager to get their opinion. Our goal with each discussion should be to go in with potential next steps and come out with manager guidance on direction. These conversations are less formal, typically one-on-one between us and the manager, and can occur in a multitude of settings, such as, a room, a phone call, a hallway, a coffee break. Depending on the topic, these conversations can range from 1–10 minutes. We should look to keep these conversations short because these are not working sessions, but rather quick feedback sessions. If we expect the topic to take more than 10 minutes, we should schedule a formal meeting to allow for time to discuss in further detail.

Referring to the ‘Harvesting Feedback with Solution Oriented Thinking’ example above, we found our manager in the hallway and said “Revenue doubled vs. last quarter. I think we can grow it more by doing A or B. What do you think?” The manager might ask for the additional supporting rational for A and B, suggest moving forward with a suggested solution, or suggest an alternate path. In all cases, we need to properly think about the key learning. If the manager asked for additional supporting details and we had the information available already, great. If we did not have requested information ready, we should take note the type of information needed to make such a decision and gather it beforehand next time. If the manager made a decision on A, B, or Other, we should then look to understand the logical reasoning. Collecting these thought pieces will enable us to make tougher decisions and take on harder projects in the future.

With this channel, the absence of formalized feedback sessions should not stop us from harvesting feedback. If we do not have a part (i.e., opportunity to present) in a formal scheduled meeting to get feedback or the manager is ‘too busy’ for a meeting, we need to use ad-hoc chats to ensure that we get the appropriate feedback when necessary. Additionally, if there is discomfort in speaking during larger meetings or if it would be beneficial to have manager approval before a larger meeting, ad-hoc chats can be used to ensure we get the appropriate feedback.

In my article about Upward Management, I mentioned there are managers who like to see finished products and those who prefer to be involved during working stages. For the latter, we can be more liberal for ad-hoc chats, but for the former, we should be more selective about appropriate times. The optimal frequency will need to be worked out between each manager and team member and may vary project to project.

Scheduled Meetings

Anything beyond a 10 minute discussion should be a scheduled meeting. These are typically more structured conversations, that may range from regular cadence updates, project results, general team meetings, or longer one-on one meetings. We should leverage scheduled meetings to get feedback and increase visibility to the greater team, other departments, and more senior management. We will focus on those meetings where we are responsible for leading at least part of the discussion (i.e., meeting is about our work). Given that more individuals or ‘bigger bosses’ may be involved, boredom, fear, or other emotions may sink in, so it is important that we approach these meetings with the correct mindset. As with the thesis of this article, we should actively look for improvement points and learn from this feedback.

In the beginning of this article, I discussed a colleague hiding facts to avoid management comments as a negative example. A better approach to scheduled meetings would be to show the truth with an action plan. So, if we under performed, we need to develop a plan to get back on track. If we exceeded expectations, we need a plan for continuing our wins. When developing a plan, even if our solution oriented thinking is imperfect, it is better than hiding the truth and having no plan. If our plan is imperfect, we can harvest feedback to improve. If we did not practice solution oriented thinking and do not have a plan, we cannot harvest feedback.

Whether utilizing ad-hoc chats or scheduled meetings, I want to emphasize that we do not want to simply give status updates (i.e., self promotion), which would not result in meaningful feedback. Instead, we want to discuss our work and plans such that the manager can provide feedback that we can use to learn and develop.

Closing Remarks

My peers who executed their work and wanted the boss to say nothing were looking to maintain the status quo of their role. If we do not want to stagnate, but rather accelerate, we need to develop solutions and harvest feedback from our bosses.

Solution oriented thinking will help us arrive at logical next steps based off of prior underlying circumstances. Then to accelerate professionally, we need to have a burning desire to harvest feedback from our past results, whether positive or negative. We can acquire feedback from our managers and stakeholders through ad-hoc chats and scheduled meetings. After acquiring the feedback, we should look for personal development areas and ways to improve our thought processes. Over time, this continued refinement of our thought process will lead to greater roles and responsibilities.

Demonstrating mastery of harvesting feedback is a channel to improve management perception and thereby gain access to harder projects. Cleanly Navigating Corporate Politics, one of my former articles, is another channel to gain access to harder projects. In both cases, we still need to harvest feedback to continuously accelerate our learning and progression and elevate our level of performance on our projects.

Are there nuances that I missed? If you have any comments or questions, feel free to respond below or connect with me on LinkedIn. Follow me on medium.com/@dhuynh2979 for future articles on leadership and management.