Surprise feedback
One of our customers gifted us some surprise feedback last week. It was an extra surprise because they didn’t tell us they were collating the feedback. They didn’t share it with us first, they simply wanted to share with their social media audience what had inspired them; their key takeaways from our athleteatwork® programme.
This feedback is from the great folks at Clancy Docwra!
What we loved about it, was the focus it had on all the key ideas that the people on the programme had taken away from their session with us, those things that had stuck in their minds.
To be honest, this hasn’t happened before, which makes it even more useful for us. Feedback is important, so we ask for it a lot and we also provide it to each other, which helps to keep us growing in our confidence that we’re working really well with the people that choose to work with us.
This feedback was interesting and has got us thinking about how we can commission unsolicited feedback (!) because of the additional value it brings us.
Here’s why it was so valuable to us:
1. Commitment
This feedback demonstrated the commitment that Clancy Docwra have to this programme of work. They’re sharing the impact within their company and with the people they work with because they really value the messages this sends out, about how they’re supporting their people and how passionate they are about being the best versions of themselves. That’s pretty cool.
2. Engagement
Clancy Docwra taking these steps showed us that the people we’re working with are highly engaged. We now know we can challenge, support and share enthusiasm with them further. The pride attached to the programme and the impact it’s having is now a shared source of additional motivation, to ensure the foundation that’s been put in place (no construction pun intended), is used to deliver maximum long term impact.
3. Perspective
The word cloud show us Clancy Docwra’s view on what’s been delivered. There are words in there we recognise; there’s also words in there that are a surprise.
Now we’ve seen the very personal take-aways from the programme, we can go and ask for the meaning being attached to those terms and identify which bits of the work we’ve done inspired them.
That then gives us another point to build deeper understanding and add even more value with the concepts we’re passionate about. Without this unsolicited feedback, we’d be missing some really powerful opportunities to ask some more questions, rather than moving on with our typical sharing approach. In that sharing approach, we’re usually assuming that everyone is now seeing and understanding the world in the way we’ve invited them to!
4. The role of feedback
Whilst enjoying the feedback, it was also valuable to us, because we were reminded to check back in with some the messages we share about feedback in our work with customers.
We’re very focused on making sure that feedback delivers great value to a specific performance agenda. We regularly suggest customers ask very specifically for programme feedback, to illuminate the progress being made on the chosen things to work on.
This has probably made me personally devalue the role of feedback that isn’t directly focused on a specific agenda, but that it’s simply information that can be used to inform progress and make decisions.
So, it was great to see the feedback shares and great to be prompted to celebrate the value of all kinds of feedback, with the reminder that great performance comes from how you use any feedback to grow, independent of how you came by it.
In so many ways, thank you, to the great people at Clancy Docwra.