Getting feedback

Imagine being a few weeks into a new job, and getting negative feedback, no feedback or positive feedback. Put them in order from best to worst. How did you order them?

Here’s the reality: things are much, much worse if you are getting no feedback on your performance than if you are getting negative feedback. It’s a principle that is startling but true, hard to internalise, and crucial to success.

feedback	you might feel	the reality	what you should think	what to do
positive	pleased	You’re doing well.	What can I do to improve?	Enjoy the moment. Then, also ask for corrective feedback: “What could have been even better?”
none	relieved	You are probably doing badly and no-one realises or cares.	Why is no-one paying attention to what I’m doing?	Go looking for feedback, urgently and persistently. Act on it.
negative	dismayed	You need to improve, but there’s someone there to help you, who is paying attention.	At least I know what I should focus on.	Ensure you understand what is missing; work to provide it; ask for more feedback on it as soon as you can.

The risk of no feedback

Someone who is new to a workplace or role quite can quite naturally feel a strong need to fit in. When it’s also an unfamiliar culture, with unfamiliar expectations, it can feel very important to know that you are meeting those expectations.

There’s nothing wrong or problematic about this in itself, but it’s very easy to take another, false, step.

You want to make a good impression, and you certainly don’t want to find out that you’re doing things wrong.

It’s tempting then to think that not getting corrective feedback, not being questioned or challenged, is a good sign. It might feel safer not to be noticed or have your work scrutinised. You might think: “No news is good news; if no-one is picking me up on my work it means it’s OK!”

It is not OK and it is not a good sign. It just means that you’re not being noticed, which is disastrous for you.

The conspiracy of inaction

If your performance at work is not being challenged or questioned, it’s probably not because you are meeting expectations well. It’s more likely that it’s easier for everyone not to do anything about it.

It’s human nature to take the easy way out.

Other people are disinclined to act

If you are making a visible, spectacular, unignorable mess of things, someone will have to do something about it. But otherwise, the temptation is for other people not to confront it, even if it’s not up to the required standard.

They will tell themselves that your substandard performance is not an urgent matter. They will ignore it in the hope that it will rectify itself. They’ll say to themselves: “There’s plenty of time - if it’s not looking better by next week, we can have a proper look at it then.”

It takes a lot of energy, intellectual and emotional, to apply a course correction to someone else.

You will be disinclined to act

At the same time, for the person whose work is at risk of not meeting standards, it’s also easier to do nothing, to stay quiet, and to keep their head down. If you’re not completely sure that everything you’re doing is up to scratch, why risk drawing attention to it? By next week you might have it figured out.

And so on. Nobody wants to bring a problem to the surface. Everybody hopes it will go away. Everyone will look for the easy, uncomplicated path. It’s like a conspiracy of inaction. Every human instinct combines to prevent a confrontation with underperformance - and then suddenly one day it will be unavoidable, and quite possibly, too late to save the day.

Nobody wanted that to happen, but it’s a risk that creeps up on you, cunningly.

Crisis and survival mode thinking

When things get bad, a person who is anxious about how they’re doing is likely to go into survival mode, in which getting through the day without having faced difficult questions or critical comment feels like a kind of success. Of course you can avoid getting negative feedback by avoiding any feedback.

Now you really are locked into a spiral of doom. It’s amazing how effectively someone who fears feedback can avoid or delay receiving it, mostly through unconscious strategies and the signals they give out to other people. It’s hard enough for many to give negative feedback in the first place. Someone who is actively avoiding it - even without realising that that is what they are doing - is likely to crash, without ever having reached out for the one thing that could help them, all the while telling themselves that they are surviving.

Asking for feedback can be a terribly hard thing to do when you already sense that things aren’t going well, but it is the first and necessary step to get yourself out of survival mode thinking.

Feedback on good performance

On the converse side, if you are doing well, you need your good performance to be seen, and you still need feedback on it. It’s not good enough to be doing the right things, unnoticed and unremarked.

You need feedback and insight, so that you know what you’re doing right, and why it’s right and how to keep on doing it right.

Work that represents an excellent start for someone in a junior position will not be adequate for the same person once they are settled in; you need to keep raising the quality and value of your work. That requires a lot more than the occasional nod of approval from a senior. It requires active, close engagement, with multiple people, who are able to give your work real attention, thought and time.

Once again the conspiracy of inaction can creep up on you here. Someone starts well, gets good feedback and continues sailing along happily. But the expectations don’t remain the same, and neither you nor the people around you will notice immediately if you begin to fall short of them. Now, alarm bells should be ringing if you’re not getting feedback.

To know that things are going well, you need to be getting positive feedback. At least you should be getting corrective feedback, so that you know people are still paying attention to you.

Make sure you get feedback

Make getting feedback normal and expected, from the very beginning. Don’t wait for it to come. It might not.

Record it, so you know that you are getting it, from who and how much. It will also help you see patterns that show where you need to turn your attention, but the point here is simply to ensure that you are getting feedback - that others are noticing your work, and caring about it and about you.

Normalising it also helps make it easier for you to get feedback when it really matters, when it’s going to help you, and makes receiving feedback, even the dreaded negative feedback, easier.

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Getting feedback is crucial - but you also need to deal with feedback effectively.