Seek Interesting Feedback
(2 Min Read) A type of feedback that will help you grow.
All of us want to grow in our personal life and professional careers1.
We need to uncover the growth areas currently hiding in our blind spots to grow. Seeking critical and constructive feedback is one of the tools that can help us with that.
Constructive feedback provides us with the direction in which we want to grow. So it makes sense to collect more of such feedback from the people around us.
And yet, during the performance cycle, we all gravitate towards peers that we know will give us positive feedback and are likely to skip constructive or critical feedback.
This behavior is understandable because peer feedback plays a crucial role in our promotions and compensation at work. Naturally, we want to maximize that.
But the second-order effect of seeking only positive feedback is the lack of constructive feedback in the long run. And without constructive feedback, we can feel lost because we don't know which direction we need to move in to grow.
I have struggled with this during my IC days. I asked the following question to one of my mentors "How do I seek critical or constructive feedback without blowing up my promotion."
They paused, and then we discussed Why's to get to the core. Finally, we ended by reframing the above question.
"How do we seek interesting feedback."
Now, that's the principle I follow and recommend, i.e., "Seek Interesting Feedback."
What is Interesting Feedback?
Interesting feedback can be positive or constructive. But it's interesting for sure. The goal of feedback is to improve and perform better in the future.
Interesting feedback does that.
When we seek interesting feedback, we learn about ourselves and work that people enjoyed and appreciated and things they think we could grow in.
To me, both are interesting feedback to receive.
Who to ask for Interesting Feedback?
I don't have an exact persona. Here are several heuristics that I use to see if a peer will provide me with interesting feedback:
Someone who you think will share interesting feedback.
Someone who was impacted by my work and is one-two hop away. Like as the manager of the IC I worked with or the director of the manager I worked with.
A peer who I can ask for targeted feedback. For example, I collaborated with peers to set up a committee and seek feedback, especially on brainstorming and alignment.
A word of caution. Every performance cycle, seeking a small volume of interesting feedback works better than seeking only interesting feedback. The latter can affect performance rating if it's all constructive.
Also, this only works if we can receive feedback without getting defensive. But that's a topic for a different post.
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