The most impactful feedback comes from your team
The most impactful and helpful feedback I have received has come from people in teams I have managed.
I recently co-facilitated training sessions for new managers and we included a section on giving and receiving feedback. As facilitators we wanted to start by sharing some of the challenging and helpful feedback we had benefitted from. Both our examples were from people we managed.
There are so many sources of feedback I have learnt from in my career - residents and service users, my peers, line managers, friends - yet it is feedback from people I have managed that I seem to hold most tightly.
🫣Tough Feedback
In 2019 I was Learning and Development Lead at Camden Council. It was a team of 17, the largest team I’ve managed and the first time I’d managed people who managed people.
I was about 18 months into my role when I received the following feedback:
“It is like Brexit. You are London and we are The North.”
What they meant was that I often too focused on my own work and the ideas and projects I was trying to get moving.
I was pretty well known in the organisation and would spend a fair chunk of my time working from Camden HQ and not at the Learning and Development Centre.
I thought the networking I did was helping the team but it came across as not being interested in the work people were doing back at the training centre. A lot of this was the vital but not always glamorous work of organising training, battling with a learning management system, getting people onto courses, uploading registers.
The Brexit metaphor was about the team feeling a lack of investment in terms of my time, energy and interest. The feedback to me was that it wasn’t a problem with the team, it was a problem with me.
🌪️Leaning into the discomfort
I’m not going to go full Brené Brown here but it felt important to take on board what I was hearing and learn from it.
I think (hope!) I managed that over the next couple of years. That people across the team felt more valued and more engaged in all the work we were doing and used that platform to become engaged in work outside the L&D team.
🏗️ Building opportunities for feedback
This feedback came to me at the end of a long day in the office, when everyone else had already gone home. These types of informal feedback opportunities are harder to find when we spend more time online so consciously building them in is vital.
Here are a few ideas I found helpful. I’m sure you’ll have your own:
🚶♂️Walk and talk — there is something about walking with someone that helps people to open up. It isn’t so much the walking as being side by side that matters.
❤️ Make it safe — telling your manager they could do better is a brave move. It becomes easier if we demonstrate a desire to learn and do better and people can see that you are acting on feedback.
👂Ask the question of everyone — asking people “how am I doing as a manager" can feel scary. We talk to our own manager about it too rarely do we ask our teams.
