learning

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How to Ask and Get the Feedback You Need Without Any Stress and Awkwardness?

“I want to give you some feedback.”

If you are like most people, once you hear the above statement, your heart will start to beat a little faster, your palms might begin to sweat, and in certain situations, you might even begin to shake. Feedback can make anyone anxious and stressed – not because there is something inherently negative or bad about it, but because most people have never been trained in giving and receiving feedback. If you give and get feedback only once a quarter at work (even worse if it is once a year), and without any preparation, obviously it will be a strange conversation.

What I have learned over my career is that feedback can be an immensely valuable and insightful tool in our growth and progression, but only if we are ready and prepared to digest and use it for our benefit. Today I want to share via this article my thoughts on the value of feedback, what is the best way to receive it, and then what to do with it. I hope that after reading this article, instead of just waiting for feedback you actually start asking for it. If you are thinking why would anyone do that, let’s dive right in.

Why Do You Need Feedback?

Feedback is one of the easiest and most insightful tools to uncover your blind spots. A blind spot is anything that others know about you but you yourself don’t. For example – if you think you are confident but others find you arrogant and cocky, how the hell do you figure that out if nobody ever tells you that?

Feedback is like a beam of light which shows you how others perceive you. It can be the simplest way to uncover your strengths and weaknesses, but it is often not easy to digest and process it. Feedback lets you know how others perceive you and your talent, skills, behaviour and performance. And knowing them is a good thing. When used correctly, feedback can be a very useful tool to move in the right direction, change course if necessary, and grow in your career (and in life).

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
– Winston Churchill

How Do You Ask For Feedback?

Just like hearing feedback can be stressful for you, providing feedback can also be a stressful experience for the person on the other side. But there are a few ways you can make the feedback conversation a pleasant experience :-

  1. The best way to make the process easier for both sides is to actively and explicitly ask for it. When you invite feedback regularly, it removes the formality surrounding the process and makes the conversation more “normal”.
  2. Explain that you see feedback as a tool to learn and grow, and that you welcome any negative or uncomfortable feedback. You can also go one step ahead and assure the person that the feedback will not have any negative impact on the relationship. Knowing this always puts the other person at ease and allows the conversation to continue more maturely.
  3. Know what you are looking for in feedback. Feedback is not always critical. You should also ask for acknowledgement or appreciation for a task well done. Positive feedback will help you understand your strengths, and gives you the confidence and assurance required to look objectively at your weaknesses.
  4. Be specific and ask for examples. Don’t let anyone get away with a vague feedback. Always dig deeper and ask for specific events and evidence in support of the feedback you receive. Here are a few questions you can ask :-
    a) Can you explain what you mean?
    b) Can you give an example to support your point?
    c) Paraphrase the feedback and ask – Is that what you mean?
  5. Seek feedback from people all around you and not just your boss. Ask people above, below and sideways in your organisation. Multiple sources of feedback can eliminate any outliers and helps to surface any obvious blind spots immediately.
Feedback Is The Breakfast of Champions

Feedback Is The Breakfast of Champions

Powerful Questions

Whenever you are looking for some powerful and insightful answers, there are always corresponding powerful questions to go with them. Below are a few such questions you can ask to solicit deep and meaningful feedback about yourself :-

  1. If I were to wow you with my performance, what would that look like?
  2. What’s one thing I could improve?
  3. What would you have done differently had you been in my position?
  4. What’s your opinion about how I handled that conversation, presentation, task, etc?
  5. What specifically can I do to handle that task, conversation, project better?
  6. What is one thing you can always count on me for?
  7. What is one thing you will never count on me for?

What To Do After Receiving The Feedback

The worst thing that you can do with feedback is to do nothing with it. The feedback conversation is just the beginning on the road to learning and growth. So once you are done with the feedback, you can take the following steps to make the most of it.

  1. Thank the person for providing you feedback. Not only is feedback essential for your growth, it is also often a courageous step to provide it in the first place. Acknowledge the person for the conscious act of providing you feedback.
  2. Do not defend yourself during a feedback conversation. Do not get into a game of blame and justifications. Respond to the feedback, not react to it.
  3. If the feedback is critical, take responsibility (not blame) for what you hear. Let the other person know that you will evaluate the feedback and get back.
  4. Take time to introspect and evaluate the feedback. Does it resonate with feedback from others? Can you gather more data or feedback to validate it? If no, explain to others how you see it. If yes, let them know what you will change. Make certain promises and then do what you say.
  5. Take all the positive feedback and put it into a “complements” document. Often we tend to focus too much on the negatives and ignore what we are doing well. Visiting this document regularly will give you motivation and positive reinforcement. Sometimes reading one little positive feedback can make your day.

Following the above guidelines doesn’t mean that your feedback conversations will be painless, but they will certainly go more smoothly. Once you see feedback for the powerful tool it is in your learning and growth, you will fall in love with it. The more you seek and get feedback, the faster you can move learn, adapt and change course if necessary. To conclude I would like to leave you with the below quote by Ken Blanchard.

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
– Ken Blanchard

Five lessons I have learned from failure

We all are human beings, we plan new things, we try them out, sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail. Although we always want to succeed and see failure as something which was ‘not expected‘ to happen, failures are inevitable along the way. And more often not, failures teach us more than any success can. Failure is often related with negative emotions. I want to challenge that negativity. Failures have taught me a lot and brought me where I am today. Even me writing this blog post is the result of failed attempt to do so in the past. Let me list down the five most important lessons I have learned from failure :-

1. Nobody is Special
If you think you are extra-talented, or very hard working and dedicated, it doesn’t matter. YOU WILL FAIL. Nobody is a guaranteed winner. We all are human, and like all humans, we will make mistakes too. So if we have any sense of being superior, better than others in skills or knowledge, we should give that up now before life hits us with reality. The only person who does not fail is the one who never tries anything. Many venture capitalists, when looking for a business to invest into, look for leaders who have started and failed before, because they know they are more likely to succeed in the future.

2. Nobody can do everything perfectly
No matter how much multi-tasking we can do or in however many fields we are an expert, we can’t do everything perfectly all the time. There is a saying that an expert is merely someone who has failed more than anyone else in that field. Michael Jordan, considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time, says that he has succeeded because of his constant failure. He lost almost 300 games and missed over 9000 shots, which is more than an average NBA player even plays in. He says he has used failure as motivation for his success. So no matter how good we are, we will need help from others to do what we want to do.

One of my favorite quotes about life

One of my favorite quotes about life

3. Plan for the worst case scenario
When taking upon something, I have learned that we must always prepare for the worst case scenario. What I mean is we should always have a Plan B and Plan C ready in case of when Plan A doesn’t work. And more often than not, you will need these backup plans. There is no point wondering over why Plan A did not work out as expected. It is more wise to learn our lessons from it, and move on to Plan B. The famous author Denis Waitley once said “Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.” That says it all!

4. No matter how successful in the past, we will fail again
When we taste success, our self confidence increases and we move ahead with more ambitious plans. At a time when everything has been going well and successes have been coming along on the way, a failure can be even more devastating. It can leave us in the ‘This can’t happen to me‘ state very easily as we were, more than ever, expecting a success now. The point is no matter how successful you have been in the past, you will fail again in the future. That is life, because successes don’t lead you to more successes, but failures do. Even the best of businessmen fail continuously as they expand their businesses. The only difference is that they welcome the failures and see them as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, in their way.

5. Failures are good, they lead to success
It might seem very ironical, but failures are good. Let me repeat again, Failures are Good. The only thing important is how we perceive it. There is a huge difference when a man says to himself, “I have failed three times“, to when he says, “I am a failure“. For it is said that failure is not the falling down, but the staying down. Thomas Edison, considered the greatest inventor of his time, kept on failing but he continued to try and try and try. He tried so many times that it took him 10,000 attempts to invent the light bulb. But we can see the positive outlook we should have towards failure when he said, ‘I have not failed. I have just found 9,999 ways that do not work.’

So let us try. Then try again. Then fail again. Fail better. Fail forward.. towards success!!

What I learned when I brought 99acres down with a stupid piece of code?

This is a story of an incident which happened in 2007 while I was working with InfoEdge in Noida. I regard this experience as one of most humbling experiences of my professional career. After this incident, I realised that anyone can make mistakes, and stupid ones at that. I also learned the importance of accepting your mistake and the consequences that come with it. I realized that accepting your mistakes is the only way to leave it behind in the past and move ahead towards the future.

At that time, I had been working with 99acres for more than two years and was a senior member of the technical team. I was implementing a small module on the homepage and search results page, the most important pages of the website. I was always very good at programming, and am very confident (sometimes over-confident too) about my programming skills too. I coded that module successfully, it was tested and Abhinav (my team leader) made it live on production servers. This was during the late evening time. After that, the load on the server was very high and abnormal, but I just left without giving it another thought which was so wrong, both as a member of the team and also knowing the fact that my code has just gone live on the site.

The next day, around 10 am the website stopped responding. Nobody knew what had happened, we could not even get a remote SSH connection to the servers. We had to ask Vivek, who has heading technology for 99acres and was the business head of Jeevansathi.com, to call the service providers in the US to do a manual reboot of the server. Once that was done, the site was back up again. But in another 2-3 hours, the same thing happened again. The service providers had informed us that the CPU and memory resources were getting depleted very fast. We thought it could be a hardware issue and asked the service providers to verify the same. Meanwhile the same cycle kept on repeating all throughout the day without any luck.

Lots of sweet and not so sweet memories between us two

Me & Abhinav in 2005

Abhinav asked me whether this could be because of my code, but I remember exactly what I had done and was sure that it could not have caused the problem. Even Abhinav and other members of the team checked the code and found no problem with it. It was only around the end of the day that I realised what was causing the resources to be exhausted. I modified a piece of code in one place in such a way that it being called from another place caused it to call itself recursively. And since this other place was the homepage, it was getting recursively called and quickly taking all the server resources resulting in the server crash. There was nothing wrong in the code, and this could have happened with anybody’s code, but my mistake was that I was so confident that I did not even bother to look into my code to check if anything could have gone wrong.

Once I realized this, I fixed the part of code that was causing the problem, and Abhinav quickly made it live. But as this had become a major issue, we had to let Vivek know what was the problem. I asked Abhinav what should I do, and he asked me to tell Vivek the truth and accept my mistake. I went to Vivek’s cabin, and informed him what was the issue and that it has been fixed. He said that I was one of the senior most guys in the team and he didn’t expected it from me. I apologized and said that I will be careful from now on and it will not happen again. He further added to forget this issue now and get back to work.

I could have easily covered that issue up and let nobody knew what was the problem. But accepting this in front of Vivek gave me the freedom to see ahead rather than getting stuck with the issue. The point was that anybody and everybody of us will do mistakes (as we are all human) so it is better to accept it ourselves, learn the lesson from it and move ahead for the future. Now when I look back, I realize that this was one of those days when I learnt a lot. Accepting this mistake gave me the courage and strength to lead the 99acres team in the future and accept others mistakes as a natural thing which will happen. I learnt that it is very important to forget the mistakes, but always remember the lessons that come with it, and move ahead with life confidently!!!

And for those who were with 99acres, the module which I coded was the “Featured Projects” module which was placed on the Homepage and the Search Results Page 🙂