Take control of your feedback
In most organisations ‘feedback’ is something that is done to people and ends up being a concept that brings a certain degree of fear to mind for people when they know they’ve “got to have a feedback session”!
This is a strange phenomenon for us when we know that the most successful people we’ve worked with actually own their own feedback, seek it out regularly, feel they’re missing something if they’re not regularly learning from their feedback and never see feedback as a threat.
Feedback is a gift!
Imagine a situation where nobody else was ever able to provide you feedback unless you specifically asked for it. If others simply “giving” you feedback was no longer an option, you’d have a couple of choices.
- Simply trust that your own view of how you’re doing and how to improve is sufficient and carry on using your own judgments forever more or,
- Work out your own feedback acquisition process that ensured you requested feedback about the right things, at the right time, from the right people.
If you can create your own feedback agenda, which is being actioned weekly, it makes a huge difference to the meaning and quality of “formal feedback” meetings that typically take place once or twice a year in personal performance reviews.
Take control of feedback and you’ll really start to get the benefit of the knowledge you obtain about yourself.