Feedback is important, but there’s a time and place…
Coinbase has been hit hard by the temporary cryptocurrency crisis, and is trading at more than 80% below the starting price of its recent IPO, obliging it to clarify that it is not at risk of bankruptcy. Nevertheless, it has just announced a management practice that caught my attention: it will ask its employees to evaluate each other regularly.
To do so, they will use an app, Dot Collector to provide feedback. I cannot imagine what kind of corporate culture would think this is a good idea: coworkers systematically evaluating each other is bound to lead to uncomfortable situations and some tension. But the initiative caught my attention because I have been thinking for a long time where this would work much better: the world of education, and specifically, business schools.
One of the realities of being a teacher is that my students evaluate me and that those evaluations, moreover, are absolutely “radioactive material”: if I were to fall below four out of five, my area director would call me to find out what the problema is; and if my score regularly fell below four, I would be in trouble. In my case, fortunately, student evaluations have never been a problem, and in fact, I value them highly as an indicator of what they like and don’t like. Given my school’s fees, students have a right to be extremely demanding about the quality…
