Let's Get Uncomfortable: How to Ask For and Process Feedback

Right. Hi, everybody. Um, hopefully you're in the right room. Uh, this is. Let's get uncomfortable. How to, uh, ask for and process feedback. We do have a fun, like, Slido thing here. Um, to get started with, if you're just walking in. No worries. Um, I wanted to take a quick look at this. This is a really good gauge generally for me to tell where everyone is at, uh, before we get into the conversation. So I'm seeing definitely like a mix of good and bad associated words. Uh, opportunity to improve. That's great. Uh, uncomfy growth. Totally identify with that criticism. Sorry about that one. Bossy pants. Oh, not not great defensiveness. Yeah. Um, these are pretty standard things that I would expect to see in this word cloud for this session. Uh, but we'll get into it kind of talking about like, the actual practice of asking for feedback. And if you've never done it before, what is the steps that you can take to start trying it in your workplace? Um, this is a relatively small session.

So if you have a question at any point during it, like feel free to just, you know, interrupt me rather than waiting to the end. You can do that as well, but we can just have a conversation if you'd like.

>>:
All right. So this is. Hopefully the right session. If not, I'll watch people sneak out. So fine. So who am I and why do I care about the feedback process? My name is Corey Neslund. I'm a program manager at Palantir net, and a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked for a different company doing a completely different thing. Uh, this is how we received feedback. So this is a scatter plot. It came out on a quarterly basis, and it was an open and anonymous survey. So at this company, anyone could look you up during the feedback window, quote unquote, and rate you based off of these two questions. These aren't verbatim what the questions are, but this is what they were getting at. The first one was, do you like this person? And the second one was, if it was your money, would you give this person a raise? So pretty loaded questions, especially given that this is an anonymous survey and anyone can give you feedback. It's important to note that this is not tied to a conversation.

There is no manager conversation here. There's no like support. There's no you're barely aware of how you're going to come out on this. And what makes this worse is that every single dot on here is your colleagues. These are your colleagues at your level, and you are the darker dot. So in this case you're in the top quadrant. But plenty of people are not. This is known as a fear based system. And its entire purpose is to say because it's anonymous, because you have no control about how the feedback is being given to you and how it's being recorded at the company level. You better do everything you possibly can to be viewed as likable and worth the money. Raise of hands. Who really likes this system? Who would like to implement this? Does this seem like a good feedback system? No. Nobody wants to try this. That's great. Uh, excellent. What happens if you're here? Right? If this is your only experience with feedback at this company, and you. You may be lucky, right? Maybe you have a manager that cares about giving feedback that wants to talk to you, but more likely than not, you do not.

And they're not required to have those conversations with you. So if you're this person, what do you think you're feeling on the day this comes out?

>>:
I guess at least I wasn't way at the bottom. So this person is probably having a way worse day than that person. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Uh, funny story, I guess, about this system. When this came out, the company would tell us what week it was going to drop, but not what day. And so people would be neurotically, constantly checking the scatter plot. So you'd be like, is it up to date? Is it up to date? And when it actually came out, the entire office would go silent, it would be dead silent, and we would crash the internal intranet. So the amount of people trying to pull this specific data would crash everything. Um, and yeah, then you would see people suddenly disappearing, going off to get coffee or whatever, or you'd have someone who's just like, whatever, I don't care, right? Like that's the public way you have to process that if you're this. So don't recommend it. And this is why I care about feedback, because for many years this was all the feedback I ever received, unless I went out and asked for it on my own.

So what is in scope for today? We're going to talk about why you should have control over the feedback process, particularly. So you don't have to rely on that scatter plot. What being feedback positive means, how to proactively ask for it, and then how to assess it when you receive it. Sorry. One second. I do want to say as a bit of psychological safety, we are actually going to look at my real example. So when we actually go through the assessment, we're going to show the actual feedback that I got about two years ago. Um, so it is real. It is not manufactured. And uh, would be nice to me. No. All right. What's out of scope for today? Um, how to give feedback to others. So I'm really glad that you clarified that in the very beginning. We're not going to talk about the other side of this equation. This is solely the you side of the equation. All right before we get into it. And because this is a practical session, there are some assumptions that I want to clear. Make clear one. You know your situation best.

If there is something in here that doesn't apply to you, that doesn't apply to the way that you work or that would be harmful, please disregard it. You know your situation best. Um, two you're you're capable of adopting a growth mindset. What this means is that you are willing to accept that where you are right now is not maybe where you want to be in the future. You want to grow into that new position, that new skill set, whatever it is that you're trying to do, and you're capable of doing that, you're not a static person. Three. You work in an environment where it's safe for you to ask for feedback. That means if you go to your manager or whoever in your team and you say, hey, I would really like your feedback, that is not going to be a dangerous thing for you to ask. You're not opening a can of worms necessarily by doing that. So we're we're assuming in this situation that you have a safe workplace. And then number four, that you are able and capable of assessing the feedback that's given to you.

So when we get into the like assessing the data that you received part, it's really important to be cognizant of where you're at, how you're feeling, what you're thinking about, the feedback you're receiving, because it's going to be critically important that you can remove some of your bias and perspective to look at what people are telling you in a less, um, defensive or like, seized position. So before we get into it, does anyone have any questions about what's in scope or what's out of scope or any of these? So why should you own this process outside of the fact that nobody wants to receive a quarterly scatter plot with a little gray dot, that's you against all of your other coworkers? Um, the reason why you want to take control is because when you set the goal, when you decide what the value is, the purpose for asking for feedback, you get to go in the direction that you choose. When it's when we're talking about a company based or performance based feedback, where it's your employer putting their system onto you that has their goals in mind, right?

They have specific goals about what they want you to do, how they want you to be performing, how they want you to develop in some level of rigidity or flexibility. Right. Some of us work for very flexible organizations, where skill growth is more independently determined, and some of us work in more rigid structures where the path of improvement is set, regardless of your interest. So in this case, we're talking about the feedback we're asking for ourselves, for our goals. There are two types of buckets, roughly, of feedback. One is traditional. This is the scatter plot. This is the annual performance review. This is your managers going into a black box and coming out and saying, you've got a 3% raise and you've got a 7% raise, and you didn't get any raise at all versus self driven, which is what we're talking about today, where you have the ownership of all phases of the process and you are responsible and accountable for doing them. Traditional feedback, just like that scatter plot, it's going to trigger fight or flight.

This is when we're most likely to get defensive because again, it's just someone putting their opinion on us without our potentially consent, but also not our goals in mind. And self driven is proactive. It's the complete opposite of a traditional system. Okay, so in order to accept and work through the feedback process, you have to adopt a feedback positive mindset. And essentially what this means is that you view feedback as a gift, even feedback. That is a real bummer to hear things that you wish were different or whatever. It's really important to say that the person who chose to tell you about that, especially if they're doing it for your best interest, right? Let's say I just dropped the ball on a client presentation, and I operated in good faith, but I dropped the ball. If my manager tells me, hey, you dropped the ball, they're not doing that to hurt me. They're doing that so that the next time that I go into a client presentation, I can learn from the mistake that I made in the past.

Yeah.

>>:
So we're assuming good intentions from the people giving the feedback. All of this is assuming safe, like a safe, well intentioned, um, interaction. And that's that's a really good point to clarify. We'll get into it a little bit later. Um, so you're going to do feedback as a gift. You're going to accept that sometimes it's going to be uncomfortable. Hearing critical feedback or improvement based feedback is always going to be tough. I do feedback every six months, and I've been doing it for a few years now, and even when I hear that stuff, it's still tough, even though I have done it now many times and I'm very comfortable with the feedback process in general. Um, so we're going to accept that sometimes it's going to be uncomfortable. We're going to accept responsibility for our growth. Meaning, when people tell you something, you've started this cycle, you're going to go and ask for feedback. And when they tell you things that you've deemed are legitimate, you are now responsible for responding to that legitimate feedback.

If it's legitimate and you do nothing, you break the trust in that relationship with that person, and they're less likely to give you honest feedback in the future. And then last, you're going to exercise your agency as a person with your own goals, standards and values. And this is going to come into play when we talk about whether or not you're going to accept or reject the feedback that you're given. Any questions about any of these? Okay, so I worked with this absolutely wonderful person, Jill, and I thought that the Drupal community might like this. Feedback is user research on yourself. Uh, we we I don't know, that's a bit of a nerd joke. Sorry. I really just wanted to put it in there. Thanks, Jill. Uh, okay. So how do I proactively ask for feedback? Asking for feedback is a cycle. You don't get to do it just one time and then say, okay, I agree, I've checked the box off, I've done feedback. I now never need to come back and do this ever again. It's not how it works. If you accept and enter into the feedback cycle, what will happen is over time, you can see your own growth much more clearly than if you didn't kind of operate in this methodical way.

And for me now I have three years. Of which questions did I ask? Who did I talk to? What was I concerned about in each feedback session? And I can literally see how my skills have grown over those three years, because I keep it in this cycle. So for me, the right timing is every six months, but for you it might be slightly longer, slightly shorter. Um, but when we start, we're going to start in our planning stage. This is where you're going to identify your goals. You're going to do all the background stuff you would need in order to actually go and get the feedback. Then you're going to action on it that's actually talking to people or sending out a survey. However you're going to do it, then we're going to be an assessment which is taking all the data, putting it together, making some context judgements, looking for bias perspectives that are helpful or harmful. Then we're going to go into the growth phase. This is the longest phase right? This is the one where you've heard the feedback.

You've got your action items. You are going to work towards whatever your goals are, and then you're going to iterate. So after you've gone, maybe, you know, a few months, six months or whatever trying to practice those action items, maybe it's time for the next version and then you do it all over again. So what's in the planning stage? Planning stage has three steps. The first one is to identify your goals. The second is to choose the format of the feedback, as in how are you going to request feedback from others? And then the third is what questions specifically do you want to ask? All of this needs to be done before you go and ask anyone for feedback. If you don't do this before asking for feedback, it's going to be really nebulous and you're going to have a hard time saying, well, did I actually get the feedback that I needed for how I want to improve or how I want to do a temp check? Um, you don't want to just jump in to asking questions without doing some of this thought work beforehand.

So how do you identify your goals? That's super personal. I don't know your lives or what you're trying to do here, but here are some ideas. One, you could be going up for a promotion. Or maybe you want to. You see a promotion two years in the future and you say, oh, I need to develop these six skills to get to that promotion. So I've got to create a roadmap somehow of getting from where I am now to developing those six skills so I can go up for it. Maybe you want to validate your beliefs about yourself, like maybe you think you're a great performer. Maybe you should go find out if you are, or you think you're a terrible performer. Maybe you should go find out if you are. That one seems important. And then maybe you want to develop some soft skills or technical skills. And the last one is temperature check. So temperature checks are like you just started a new job. You've been there six months. You want to know how you're doing. Like are you meeting expectations or it could be you. You got a promotion a year ago.

Are you doing okay or you didn't get the promotion and you want to figure out what happened? Like, why is it that we didn't go forward? But it's kind of like a mix of all of these. It is worth saying that you should try and target. Don't say all these are all my goals. All these are all my goals. Because essentially, then your questions are going to be too like generic. They're not going to be targeted enough for you to actually get anything worthwhile out of it. It'll be too, um, disconnected. So in general, there are four sort of types of feedback requests. Every person who talks about feedback has some branded version of like a type of feedback. And they're like, yeah, you should go get radically canderous feedback or something like that. But roughly, they all kind of fall into these, one of these buckets. The first one is in the moment. This is like you just gave a presentation and you quickly just want to ask someone else who's in the room like, hey, how did I do? Like, what could I have done better, that kind of thing.

The next one is a short interview. This is particularly helpful if you have a relatively large team and you want to hear from everyone, because the time commitment is very short. So this is just a ten, 15 minute meeting, uh, very quick. Or you could do a deep dive. You generally do these with fewer people, but you really get into it. This is like you go with your manager and you're like, I want to sit down for 30 minutes or an hour. I got 20 questions. Let's go through it. I want to know your perspective really in depth. And then the last one is the feedback survey, which is, you know, uh, very easy to do in our technically forward space. I will say, just in general, the most helpful one on a day to day basis is in the moment, obviously. Right. Because people's thoughts are like, right there, it just happened. You can't use this one after every single interaction though, right? People will get tired of it. This is you should definitely like use this in a targeted way, but it's very helpful for immediate course changes.

I prefer the short interviews. That's because my team has like 10 or 11 people on it, and it's very important for me personally to feel like I'm getting all of their opinions. So if I had done deep dives with all of them, that's like 11 hours. I'm not going to do that. I can get all of these done in one day in a relatively short window that isn't that disruptive to my teammates. You know, 15 minutes is not a big deal for them. Deep dives are particularly important if you're coming up on a big moment of change, either you're going to attempt to go for a promotion or you've gotten it and you want to set expectations for how you're going to perform. Going forward is really, really good for those big transition moments. And then the feedback survey, I would say use it with caution. If you're someone who's really uncomfortable with feedback, if you've never asked for it before and you're really scared and you're just not not ready to have a face to face conversation, please use the feedback survey.

Please start here if this is the only place that feels comfortable to start. But the problem with feedback surveys in general, if you use them too often, is that they're indirect and the people who are receiving it will feel a bit uncomfortable with the idea that they're giving you this anonymous sort of feedback that's just going to go into a bucket. Many people would rather see your reaction. They'd rather see how you are, how you're processing it when they talk to you. And it it has the possibility of coming off as impersonal, particularly if this is the only thing you use and it's not targeted. If you just send a survey that says, how am I doing? That's not a that's not a particularly helpful question to ask in a in a survey format. All right, so then what should you ask? So now you've decided what your goals are. You know what you're pursuing. You selected a format in which to ask for feedback. So now what should you ask? Well, obviously you should tie it to your goals, right? Don't ask something that has nothing to do with what you've just spent all this time preparing.

Um, what is important for you to know to further that goal? For example, um, if I want to level up my client management skills, client risk management skills, I would ask something that's like when I interact with clients, do you think that it has a positive tone or a negative tone? Do you think that we come across a professional that I come across professionally, or do you feel that I've managed, uh, any issues that have arisen with a client effectively? Right. You're going to ask something that's specific that these people would know that they've seen. You want to refrain from questions that can be answered with a yes or no, because I guarantee you, if you ask a yes or no question, you will get a yes or no answer and we'll get no more than that. And that does not help you at all. You want people to give you an action or a behavior, something specific? Uh, not yes or no. And then consider action oriented questions. I always have at least one action oriented question in my feedback list, because I would much rather crowdsource than think it up myself.

I would much rather you guys tell me what I should be doing instead of me figuring it out on my own. Excellent. All right. Any questions about the planning stage? Okay, so now you're in the action stage. You're going to go and actually get the feedback. Um, a couple of tips here. Tips before I go into notes one, if you're going to do a, um, short interview, send the questions in advance. So let the people know what you're going to ask so that they have less anxiety and they have the opportunity to prepare. Many people cannot come up with examples on the spot. And so if you send it in advance, they have time to like think about it critically. You also want to ask and make sure that they're okay with giving you feedback. So don't just like send out some random Google Meet invite. Say hey, I'm looking to ask for. I'm looking for feedback. I would really love to talk to you. Are you willing to give me feedback? Get their consent first? Um, yeah. So tell them what you want to ask and ask for consent.

Some important notes, though. Don't request feedback if you're not in a place where you can hear it. If you just came off of like, the worst project ever or whatever, and you're like, everybody hates me and I hate everybody, don't ask for feedback, then you're not going to enjoy what you hear, and it's just going to push you further into like, uh, being sort of like frustrated, um, be in a good spot. This isn't always possible. You know, I can't say like, I'm not going to say, like, you have to be in the best mental condition ever. And only in that condition can you ask for feedback. That's not what I mean. I just mean if you're in the pit, don't go digging, okay? This is what I'm saying. Um, and then recognize that an individual's opinion is only their opinion. Everyone is looking at the world from their own perspective. Me, you, you. It's all different. You have to look at that and say that's their perspective from where they're standing. They may not have all the information. Uh, and just kind of repeat that to yourself.

Contextualize what people are saying to you over and over and over again as that's their perspective. And then really be explicit when you ask for the feedback that you want honest feedback. And what I mean by that is in the invite, say, hey, I would like your honest feedback. When you start the session, say, hey, I want your honest feedback. Say it clearly. Be very intent, intentional about asking for that, because if people don't hear it, they may not believe it, right? They may think, oh, you're just doing this performative action or whatever. So really be explicit about that and then just go get it. And if you have to work through some uncomfortableness or whatever, that's okay. It's all right to have a moment of fear or panic or be upset about what people are telling you. I always recommend not responding to what people say to you in the moment. Just say thank you for giving me the feedback. I will consider what you said and then end it. Don't respond. Don't say, well, you know what, Bob?

Um, you're the one who really dropped the ball on that. I'm just the one who had to pick it up. So, like, I don't really care about your feedback. Don't do any of that. All right. You've done the planning stage, you've done the action stage, and now you need to do the assessment stage. And this is where the real life example comes into play. So we have three steps here. Step five is compile all of the results. So when you go out and ask for feedback create some kind of doc or spreadsheet or something where you're going to put all the feedback that you hear in one singular place. And then after you've done that, you're going to assess the context of the information, what's going on with that person, what's going on in our relationship at this time, what's going on on our project, etc.. And then you're going to look for a perspective or bias, both for them and for you. You have to consider both sides of this when you're looking at what people are telling you. And then step seven, you're going to decide what information to accept or reject.

In the feedback theory community, step seven is very controversial. A lot of people think that you should not reject any feedback that's given to you, because there is at least a nugget of truth in everything that people say, but I count I don't agree with that. And I counter it with, if you are a member of a minority group or a marginalized group, you already know that there's plenty of interactions in which where someone is giving you feedback or saying something to you that has nothing to do with you and has to do with their biases. You can absolutely reject that feedback if you if that is at play, their feedback is not valid. And I don't think it's acceptable to say, oh, you have to look for the nugget of truth and what they're saying, if that's how they're approaching it. Absolutely not. The trick that comes with seven, if you go this route and you believe as I do, that you can reject it, is that if you reject all criticism of you, now, you have a problem. That's the actual indicator of an issue, is that you're not willing to accept that you're not perfect.

I'm perfect, but the rest of you guys might have this issue. So I'm just saying, like, you can't you can't reject all critical feedback. So that being said, feedback has nothing to do with your identity or your value as a person. It is literally just another person's opinion, and you are the only person who gets to decide if it's valid or not. You're the only person who gets to decide if it has value. You're the only person who gets to decide if you're going to implement anything from it. Again, this is our feedback cycle, not our performance based thing that our company does. This is us. We get to decide. So here's the original data. I'll give you just a hot second. But essentially I asked three questions to everyone. I did a short interview format, and I think this is half of what I received. And I talked to like 8 or 9 people. So I've got action oriented questions in here. Actually, I think they're all action oriented. No two of them are action oriented, and one is sort of retrospective.

So I put them all in a sheet and I've collaborated. I've collected everything and shortened it to get to the gist. Right? If you have a 15 minute conversation, they're going to have lots of umms and whatever. You cut all that out and just get to the point of what they're trying to say.

>>:
And now we come to the checking for. Bias or perspective part. So what's a good indicator that. There might be a perspective at play or a bias at play. You have an emotional response if you have in your. If you feel tense suddenly, or you get angry or upset or just immediately frustrated or on guard defensive, whatever. If you have any kind of emotional response to it, that's a really good indicator that there's something there that you've got to investigate. So. I'm extrovert and this light blue one. Just curious, does anyone have an idea of how I might have felt when I heard in some circumstances I should be less chatty? I loved it, right? You can tell. Like I was really into it. Yeah. Um, so that is an indicator for me immediately. Okay, I have to put this piece of feedback aside and look at it independently. Now this dark blue one communicate less. Great eye at the time was a project manager. That is not possible for me to do. It is literally my role to go out and be like, hey, what are you doing?

Hey, what are you doing? I cannot just be like, you can just go operate the black box and I don't care. So I also have an immediate reaction to this. Just a thought. What do people think is happening in this relationship? What's happening there? Yeah. The employee or whoever your, your, uh, direct report is, is thinking you're providing too much oversight or too much, you know, giving them the same instructions over and over or something in that regard. Yeah. That's an option. Yeah. I know that's a little antic, but I would actually want to have a definition for communicate in this context because it could tie into the first one, which is just chatty, because some people just see talking a lot as communication. Yeah. Or is it communicate as in like hard data. You're literally just going like what are you working on or constantly feeding direct like so for me, in this context, the word communicate, I feel like it needs more of a descriptor because it could go a couple of different directions.

Yeah, that's actually a really good call out. That's a really good thing to pay attention to. Um, as a developer, I was coming from a developer. It might not be what you're doing, but what are you doing it right? Like, you know, if you're breaking up my day, you know, I might not be as happy as if the communication happens beginning or the end, and I've got hours in between. So, I mean, it's something that I would think you would just want to dig into more to figure out that. Exactly. And that's a great segue way to say we are looking for context here. The context of this relationship is that I have a person on my team who is not actually producing any work. So what's happening is I have a project manager, I'm reaching out and saying I have no completed work, I have no completed work, I have no completed work. What's happening? Right. And and that is indicative indicative of a problem in our relationship. Right? I'm not causing this person to do whatever it is that they're doing, but for them to say, oh, the problem is communication.

We have a problem, right? There's a context. There's context in our relationship that needs to color the feedback that they're giving me. I need to think about that when I process this piece of feedback. So we have my perspective or bias and light blue. And we have someone else's perspective and bias in the dark blue. There's nothing else here that is causing me to have a reaction to it. So we're going to say, okay, these the rest of it is ready for us to move on to the next step. And now that I've thought about the perspective and bias of these two, I'm ready to move on to the next step. So now we're going to layer in our assessments. The green ones are ones that I'm going to say I accept. Right. And I'm accepting this one. I didn't like this right. But this is very valid. It is entirely possible to talk over lots of people and to not be meeting the communication needs of other people in a situation. So even though I don't like it, I'm going to accept it as that's a valid experience from someone else.

But I'm going to reject the communicate less. And I've chosen to do this because I've examined the context of our relationship. I know that we have a problem that is not going to be solved with the feedback process. It is a problem between two people that needs to be dealt with through conflict resolution, not feedback. And conflict resolution is different than feedback. They are not the same. And then we have yellows. Another question for the group what? What does nothing identify? If someone says, oh, there's literally nothing you could do. I have no no notes on how you can be better. What might that signal to you?

>>:
You're not comfortable sharing feedback with you? That's absolutely a strong possibility. They don't care. They don't care. That's also a possibility. Yeah. They're too busy to do this. They're too busy. Yeah. It could just be that they legitimately don't have any direct complaints with you because you mesh well with them and you just get along on the same wavelength. That's totally possible. Any other ideas of what's happening with the nothing identified? We don't want to hurt your feelings or they're afraid of offending you. Yep. Absolutely. You don't have the psychological safety necessary in a relationship for them to give you critical feedback. Yeah, I would just be curious. Did they did they just leave it blank or did they literally put nothing identified? No. I talked to all these people in person. Okay. So they literally said, oh, I don't have any no notes. Basically the other one we haven't talked about is maybe this person and you don't have spheres that operate enough together where they see anything that would affect their job.

So that's the only thing that we didn't come up with. But you're absolutely right. And in this case, this situation was someone who we did not have enough psychological safety in our relationship yet for them to give constructive feedback. We had only been working together for maybe like 1 or 2 months at this point, and they just weren't ready. So when I see this, I'm going to flag it because I want in the next iteration of feedback to make sure that I've developed enough psychological safety with that person for this to not be a yellow box, for this to be something else, really good call out. And then the other two are things that I could do maybe, but are not in my job description. They would be elective. I could choose to do them, or I could choose to try and pursue that. But it's not really feedback associated with my job and my role and my growth, if that makes sense. It's just an action item that technically I could take, and in this case, I'm choosing not to take them as part of my feedback process.

Not because they're not worth doing, but just because they're outside of the scope of what I'm asking for. Okay, so now we've done all of our assessments. We have decided what feedback we're going to accept or reject. And now we're going to go into the growth stage, which is made up of two steps. This is the longest time wise stage that you have. And one is you're going to determine your action items. This comes directly right after you're done gathering your feedback and doing your assessment. And then you're going to implement your action items. You cannot should not I should not go and ask for feedback if you do not intend to action on that feedback. The ones that you accept immediately, like do not start this process if you are not willing to do the work at that time because like I said earlier, you will damage that relationship with the people that you're talking to. They will believe now that when they give you feedback, you're not going to do anything about it and it's not worth their time to, you know, maybe even buck up the courage to tell you something uncomfortable.

So don't don't start this if you're not going to implement your action items. All right. So for me, these are the three action items that I decided to come up with. So this one was in the other part of the feedback. So we'll ignore that. But be self-aware in order to not monopolize conversations and look for opportunities to loop in team members into decision making. Because if you remember, some of these over here was around information sharing and decision making. So I had a lot more feedback, right? I could have written a 20 action items. It's really important that you find the themes in your feedback and then decide what is the highest value thing for you to do, and consolidate it down into a limited number of action items. You will not be able to keep up with 20 action items over the next six months, but you can keep up with three. You can keep up with two. If you only have one, that's totally fine. One is also good, but don't. Don't create an action item from literally every feedback conversation you had.

When I see that, it generally indicates that you haven't thought enough about how the feedback is connected, right? Because generally you'll see themes and things in areas where you should improve or areas that you're doing really well in. And if you haven't kind of put it all together yet, you might feel that everything is much more disparate than it actually is. All right, so here are my action items. But what is the action? So from my action items I'm sorry, from my, uh, intents, I guess we're going to come up with actions, specific things that I'm going to do to try and push move the needle on these things, um, and then actually go and do it. Right. So this is how you translate all the information that you've received into actual things that you can do over the next four months or whatever until you go into your next. And then I told you, you have to do it again. Like you have to do all this over again. I oh, yeah. Go ahead.

>>:
Just curious, how is your corporate culture like? I think this kind of setting needs some agreement and some willingness to share and ask. Yeah, if you want to have a short interview, you may need a few people, at least 2 or 3. Um, so if it is just you asking for feedback or many people, um, want to hear what they do to other members or in the company. What is your corporate culture like? Our our culture is very self driven. As in, if you want to go get feedback for yourself, you can absolutely go do that. It's at Palantir. We're much more individually focused as far as whatever your goal is or whatever you want to do, it's up to you to go and do it. So asking my colleagues to do this, they're okay with it. They're they're fine with it. And if they had said no, I would have excluded them from the feedback list. Right. They can absolutely opt out. Um, from a corporate culture perspective, it might be more helpful to think of it as like a team rather than the rest of your company. If your team is willing to have this conversation with you, that's a better place to start and not worry so much about.

Like, how will it be perceived? Uh, in the general corporate corporate atmosphere, I have found that if you go and ask for feedback and you're the first person to do it, like no one's been doing this at all, and you're the first one after a cycle or two, other people will actually start to do it if they see you doing it, and then you're actually, like, growing from it, and then they see improvement. They'll be like, oh, I guess it's safe for me to ask too, and it's safe for me to do it too. So then I will. So I've seen that even in my own team. Yeah. Did that answer your question? Yes. Thank. Yeah, I was just curious. You mentioned like, when you when you broached the subject of collecting feedback and to your colleagues and it's a, it's a good faith, you know. Hey, you know, give me your time so I can, you know, do this thing. Um, and then you just went through the last two stages of identifying. Yeah, those ones and implementing and then. Yeah, I mean, identifying and implementing. Right.

Yeah. How do they know, like, do you provide any of that feedback like do you say, hey, you know, this is what I took from this and you provide that back or that's absolutely. A great question. Yes, I do so in this one. Specifically the talking too much one. When this one came up, uh, and I heard that feedback and I heard it from multiple people, like I said, a condensed it down. Um, I went to my team and was like, hey, I heard this in my feedback session. Um, I'm going to do this. I'm going to try not to do X, Y, and Z. If I start doing this again, please tell me. I would like you to tell me that I'm not doing what I said I was going to do. And that way you're closing the loop where everyone is like, okay. She went out, she asked for feedback, so me giving my time to that was worth it. She heard me. She chose to do something about it. And then she made it publicly known that I was doing it. And then there you go. And that also sounds like if you get like a one off feedback, that's not really relevant for something like that from somebody or that you rejected, and you don't give that as your feedback, then that's like a a hint or suggestion to that person that maybe it's them or maybe it's not not relevant or something that.

Presumes a lot of, uh, ability on that person to self recognize when they themselves are contributing to an issue which is not necessarily a skill that everyone has. I would say self awareness has a wide variety of ranges on what people can do, it or not. Um, but yes, that could if they were. Yeah. So you took the longer cycle of the self-improvement, um, with, with the interview and stuff. And then for the bottom one, you effectively turned it into a in-the-moment feedback option for the people. Yes. To, like, help you check in and keep up with your feedback long term. Yes. Correct. Yeah. I gave them permission to to check me on it, to hold me accountable for what I said I was going to do. That's very important. So all this being said, um, I'm very comfortable with my personality. I'm very comfortable with just telling my team like, hey, I think you guys told me I talked too much. I'm so sorry. I'll try not to do that. You do not have to make a public announcement to your entire company that you are acting on feedback.

You can also just follow up with a person or a couple of people who gave you that direct feedback and say, hey, I just want to let you know, I heard you. These are the things that I'm going to do. If you see me not doing them, just let me know. Right? You can. It can be much more quiet. Yeah. Oh, we do have a.

>>:
Public high fives thing and we use it and people pay a lot of attention to it. And it is nice like on our slack we've got a bot. Yeah. Like for what's it called. Plus plus bot. No. Kudos. Kudos. Oh sorry. Kudos I don't know I just see the plus plus. So yeah you can do that if you want to put it on your slack and high five each other like I think I like that. Do you like that? Well, yeah. I love public praise. Of course I do, I love attention. What are you talking about? I speak confidence, come on now. I love this stuff. Um, but yeah, exactly. You can, in your own culture and your own, um, in office environment or remote environment, there are going to be ways that work for you to do this and ways that don't work for you to do this. All I'm saying is making it visible to the people who spent their time. To give you feedback is really important. Whether you do that in a larger format or a smaller. Yeah. So now it's just question time. So, um, I hope that was really helpful. Yeah. Dan.

>>:
Do you ever have to pause or, like, put the brakes on the process? Do you, like, get to a state where you're putting too much pressure on yourself and you go like, I need to like take a week off from feedback. And still it seems like you could kind of stir up a lot of like, frustration and self doubt and. You have to, just, like, hit the button. Um, I could do that, but I would much prefer to just continue running through the fire. But you could absolutely do that. If you're getting maxed out on it, just take a break or take it as a lesson learned that maybe asking six people was too many. And so you want to just do two next time. But whatever you need to do to get through it and feel like your time is worth it's worth your time and mental energy. Do that. Yeah, but I just would rather just burn. Or, you know, take it to your therapist. Or that too. You can also do that. And do that. Yeah. Have you found any subset of feedback to be more valuable or more actionable than.

>>:
That's your direct reports. People you direct report to or peer level. So Palantir is technically a flat structure, um, meaning that like, we don't have direct reports and we don't directly report to anyone. I would say if you most places are hierarchical, right. So let's ignore the fact that for me that's not currently applicable. It used to be applicable. Um, you want to get every perspective. If you're in a hierarchical, hierarchical institution, you want your your coworkers like the people who are your same level. You want your boss and you want your direct reports. Um, they are all going to have very different perspectives of you and your performance and how you're affecting them, because the position of power is different. So I think, you know, Christian and I work on a team where we're working where we have, um, people from another consultancy, sort of, you know, long term embedded with us. Yeah. And so. I always tell them when I feel like they're doing a good job, but I have not.

I haven't asked them for feedback the way I would ask one of our colleagues at our own company for feedback, because then I'm adding like a client relations thing to the feedback cycle. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. I think you've already hit the nail on the head there, right? Like it's going to it's going to depend on your relationship with that client and your company's relationship with them. If your co vendor is on something the second you exit your corporate environment, you're adding in another layer 100%. So I would say. Tread with caution, but also maybe talk to your team about what is going to be appropriate. What does everyone else think is okay to ask versus not okay to ask? Um, yeah. Once you once you exit the environment, you add a lot of stuff to it.

>>:
Pushing.

>>:
Yeah. Go ahead. Uh, similar to that, um, I should have read the description for your presentation before I came in. I thought it was going to be about soliciting feedback from, you know, from potential prospective clients and things like that. But but does that mean do you have any suggestions for how do you engage, like, you know, whether it's internal feedback or soliciting or external feedback, how do you say, hey, this is this is important, you know, to me or to the cause or whatever, and then and then get buy in. Yeah. Um, this is definitely more in the personal focus lens, but we actually do with our clients. So I'm in the continuous delivery portfolio. It's a maintainer based relationship for many clients that are served by the same team. And about a year and a half ago, we implemented feedback and road mapping sessions where literally we're going to them and they're like, please tell us in what ways we suck and in what ways we're doing really great, and let's have an honest, transparent conversation about it.

You totally can use a lot of these principles in that, but when you it adds a different layer of like assessment onto it though, right? Like because if you're hearing critical feedback from your clients, that's a very different threshold than it is, like your coworker, because you have that client relationship that you have to manage, you can't just reject their feedback in a way that you could if it was personal. I can say, hey, that feedback doesn't fit my goals, so I'm not going to implement it. But if the client has now told it to you, you have to be much more public in how you are resolving those things. And I will say our we had a lot of clients that were very skeptical, and in the second version they were much more transparent than they were in the first one. And that also holds true for personal feedback. It is very possible that the first time you do this, you're going to get very lukewarm responses, but the second time you do it, and the third time it will become more and more valuable.

Makes sense. Yeah. Anything else. Okay. Oh, sure. I guess I was just going to say that I remember earlier you said, like, do a survey. And one of the things I think is you said very like it's very easy these days to technically do a survey. And I think one thing that I always I've noticed, just as someone who receives surveys sometimes is just sometimes they're just not well written. And it's very easy to write a not well written one where it's like, you know, the first question is like, are you one of these things? And I'm like, I'm none of those things, you know? Or like, those are the choice questions. Like, I don't feel like that replies to me or, you know, just there's so many questions. I'm kind of like, I don't think I have time for this or something. So it's something to be careful with too. When you have a discussion, obviously, and do an interview, there's a lot more nuance there that you can pick up on than just. You can ask follow up questions, but you can't do in a survey.

You can't be like, what do you mean by that specifically? Yeah, you're very tied to their that person's level of effort. Um, yeah. And so, um. Your company, do you have an annual review or semi annual review? You mentioned that there is no manager level. Correct. Um, yeah. So how how does that get evaluated and or did you choose, uh, voluntarily or did you take initiative to replace that kind of review if you don't have. Yeah. So we don't have a formal annual review. There's a suggestion that you review yourself with your pod. We have a different system where we have like kind of coaches who are our colleagues that help us navigate, um, problems and growth and all that kind of stuff. There's a recommendation that you do that every 12 to 18 months, I think, but you're not required to. And there are many people who haven't done it in years. Um, there's no forced, uh, cycle. Um, is me asking for feedback is is separate. But I do tie the information into my request to go through that process, which I do every year.

But you don't have to do.

>>:
Kind of. Spread that kind of. Vibe to other team members. Yeah, as you mentioned before. So it's kind of the. A review or evaluation. It's not a replacement of the review because this is me. I'm deciding to do this outside. Even if Palantir had a formal review process that I was mandatorily required to go through, I would still be doing this, because any set system that is created by the corporation or your your employer is focused on their goals and their definition of growth and their definition of value. And you can align with that. You could say, oh, I agree, all of these areas are the areas that I would also want to grow in. But you could also differ from that. You could say, no, that's that's not my values. So we want to separate these things. They can feed into each other as in you could get good and bad feedback and then action on it. And then that affects your formal performance review. But they're not the same thing. Um, and they're not technically connected. And you don't have to connect them at all, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Go ahead. Uh, so it seems like a lot of this is framed about personal growth and taking taking charge of your own personal responsibility as part of the goal also to create a culture of this, or is that just a helpful knock on if it happens, but that your real focus is your own growth? My real focus is my own growth. However I want and care. I want my coworkers to also do it because I care about them, and I want them to also step into the uncomfortable and do this with themselves. Because a lot of people don't do that, they're nervous. I would love it if everyone did it. There are more people who and I have colleagues in this room, obviously, but like there are more people who do it now than there were before. And part of that is because of me doing it and creating documentation and plays and practices that I then shared with them. And I said, hey, if you want to do it like I do it, this is how you accomplish that, but it can't force them to do it. I do hope that they do feedback somehow, and if they don't do it the way that I do it, yeah.

I just wanted to add that the answer to both questions. When you're working in a system like this, I wouldn't say I feel pressure in a bad way, but I feel like it's my job to go out and do it, and I see people who have been there a lot longer and are more senior than me, like Cory, and other people who like, are very well respected, are the people who do that. And so I think in our organization there's a culture of like, oh, the all the badasses are doing this, so I should do it too. Well, it's true. Like, you're like, you model it and it makes us all want to do it. Great.

>>:
Thanks. Well, um. As someone who works with Cory, I'm going to expand a little bit to is feedback like, this is it's kind of like working out a muscle group because like, if Cory is like, say, for example, um, your abs. Right. And. One muscle group working out alone? Yes, you see improvement, but getting other muscle groups to also work out whether it's the same way or slightly different specific to that muscle group, can bring overall growth and development. So like within Palantir, it is very self-driven. Very little is forced on employees for getting better. Um, but we're all very encouraging each other. We're all very supportive. And if someone wants help, they can get the help. And generally speaking, like if you are surrounded by people that are supportive and doing things for themselves and you see them getting better and doing better, it's, you know, hard not to just be like, well, I have I know I have the support for it, so I'm gonna go and go for it. Um, which in my previous job would never have happened.

Like, it's definitely going to be dependent on the culture you're in on how much a buy in or safety you have. Um, so like we're very fortunate in council where we have that. But that's not to say that you can't also get that in your organization. It might be a little bit harder. You might have to find some unique ways to kind of get buy in from other people. But like as a whole, it's it there's definitely ways that you can go about it to get the net positive. Um, and then going outside the corporate landscape, like therapy is a good thing for people. And honestly, this feedback thing is something that a lot of therapy goes into just in a different format. But it's effectively the same at the end of the day is this is for mental well-being, this is for mental health, and that impacts everything else. That's why I mentioned corporate culture. And my first question, yeah, with Palantir, that which is unique culture. Yeah. Flat. Yeah. Management system. It can be more possible and open and welcoming environment.

But now it doesn't apply to every 100%. I mean, where I showed you that scatter plot from that's not a safe environment, right? There was no way I was ever going to open myself up to public criticism of any, any shape or form because I was like, if I get it in writing, if someone says to me, you have this problem, I now have to address it regardless of whether it's valid or not, because within that system, I'm now locked in to acting on it, even if I don't agree with it at all. In even if you're even if your corporate culture is not as extreme as this one is, you can influence your team, right? Even if you just influence one person, even if you're in a team of only three people, you can change the dynamic within that three people and not worry about what the rest of the corporation is like. There's like a theory that's like, there is no such thing as a corporate culture. There's only team culture, and teams make up the corporate. Right. So your leadership team has a cult, a culture. They assume that's the rest.

It's not. Each team has their own way of operating. And you as an individual in that team do have the ability to influence other people. And if you can't, if you don't work in an environment where you can ask for feedback, consider finding another job, another environment. And I and I don't mean that like flippantly. I mean that legitimately. If you cannot grow, if you cannot get feedback, if you can never know where you stand, really it's not a good place to spend your time if you have the ability to leave. I think we're way over. But if anyone has any other questions. I agree. Thanks.