Do You Use Feedback to Build Stronger Relationships at Work?

In today’s work culture people are encouraged to use the feedback as an instrument to recognize work and help identify areas and blind spots that may impede their further development. But feedback is also a great instrument to achieve a whole different goal — build strong(er) relationships.

Whenever I think about personal development and furthering the leadership skills, I tend to refer to a strength framework Gallup created, featuring the four domains of leadership strength: strategic thinking, executing, influencing and relationship building. The ability to build relationships isn’t taught on MBAs and doesn’t come natural to a lot of people (me included), however it becomes paramount as one grows into a leader and starts controlling broad(er) organizational resources. The more organizational edges you need to touch, your ability to impact them will become less a function of your execution capability, and more a function of your ability to influence people, which in turn is very dependent on the quality of the relationships you have built with them.

There are many strategies to develop strong relationships at work, and a lot has been written on the subject. But there’s one thing that should be in everyone’s toolbox. A cultural and process element that’s at arm’s reach, and widely used in the corporate culture today. The feedback.

People will rarely feedback you in the areas they care little about.

Getting an authentic feedback is a unique opportunity to understand what’s important to people you touch. It’s an opportunity to learn about other people’s value system, and leverage that knowledge to build or improve the relationship with them. I’ll share my three key learning how to maximize the feedback potential to further your relationships within an organization.

1) It is absolutely irrelevant whether you agree with the feedback or not

Let’s say you receive the feedback along the lines of: “I understand that you can’t deep dive into everything, but I think your situational awareness of less important projects can sometimes be a bit superficial”. Now, you may or may not agree with that statement, but what you definitely should not to do is argue about it — and especially not try to bring up examples which show that their perception of you is inaccurate. A person might be dead wrong by thinking the way they do, but it really doesn’t matter — by arguing you would just cut off the access to an authentic and honest feedback in future. There may be others feeling the same way about your communication, leadership style, or execution. Are you going to talk to every single one of them and try to explain why their perception is wrong?

What can be learned from this feedback is two things:

1. What this person cares about. In above example, they deeply care about conscious competence, so showing signals that you’re on top of things across the board, no matter how small is what will help build trust and relationship with them.
2. What signals did you (not) send to create such impression. What made your competence dilute/erode? We all have our strong opinions and cognitive biases, and more often than not, the signals don’t get passed those barriers unless very direct and strong. You might think you’re doing things, but unless you learn what signals the other party expects and where to aim — you’re just hitting the bullet-proof vest.

2) It is not what you think you do - it is how you’re being perceived

If you’re not a pivotal part of a incredibly big and important project where the only thing that counts is to deliver it, the success of your tenure will typically depend as much on the social capital you created as it will on your merit.

My wife once told me — “I can go an extra mile to understand whether you’re being an asshole or maybe just not properly understood. But I’m invested in you, I got kids with you. Other people don’t.”

Now, I’m not equalizing “how you’re being perceived” with “go build your brand”, I personally think that building own brand is a whole notch up from what’s needed here. The important thing is — people will rarely just get how (i.e. to which extent) you contributed to an impact, especially if you’re expected to create impact across multiple places. Be subtle, but always aware that it’s you who have to make sure that others see how you helped. Feedback can help great deal to gauge whether that perception exists, and to what extent — or not. By using feedback you will learn whether the perception of others about an impact you created equals your perception of yourself.

3) Don’t rely on the organizational feedback process

The culture of feedback makes it easy for you to instrument it for your needs. However, you shouldn’t rely on the actual organisational process of providing feedback, as it is built around a whole different problem — performance evaluation. You have to build your own process to get people to give you early, authentic and continuous feedback. By default, people are cautious about being honest and direct for variety of reasons (which is why organizational feedback process is always anonymous), so you need to work your way through their guardrails — and that takes time. Start small. It’s very useful to show that you’re self-reflective, so you may e.g. ask for a feedback on how did a meeting go (“I think I could have made the problem statement a bit shorter and more to the point, seemed like everyone lost me half way through…”). By being perceived as a person who appreciates constructive feedback, people will gladly open more and feedback you on bigger and more important things, because you will grow their confidence that you’re able to take it.

Using feedback to understand what organizational edges you touch deeply care about, enables you to build the relationships hence social capital effectively, and in turn create an opportunity to increase your span of influence. The larger the organization, the span of influence becomes more important over the span of control.

If there’s one thing you should be asking often and regularly in the workplace — it’s not “what can I do to help you”. Just ask for the feedback.