The art of asking for feedback - Ep. 1

Giving feedback is real work that needs to be rewarded

Author

Ale Gnoli
April 15, 2024

After sending Thursday’s and Friday’s emails last week I got a flurry of replies (thank you).

Clearly many of you are passionate about feedback, so I'll try to focus on feedback-related topics all week.

One of the messages I got was from my really good friend Gianluca (replying to “We’ll do it unless…”, emphasis mine):

Could be very valuable in a follow-up piece to also read about how to request feedback when you have high uncertainty and you truly want to solicit feedback: “I would like to do X, but I truly don’t know if my approach is valid”. For when you don’t want to put the burden on the blocker because you want a lot of people to engage.

The single most important thing to ensure that you’ll be getting the feedback you need is to create a culture where feedback giving is expected and rewarded work.

As I discussed already, incentives matter.

Giving feedback takes a lot of effort and time, often more than doing your own work.

If your culture doesn’t reward people for spending time giving feedback, people will soon stop spending time providing feedback. 🙂 

To avoid this, you need to make sure to recognize giving feedback as “real” work.

Do you recognize people spending time reviewing other people’s proposals?

For those of you working with code, are you regularly rewarding people who spend a lot of time and effort reviewing other people’s code, as opposed to writing their own?

Giving feedback to each other is a habit. If you don’t have the system and the incentives in place, whenever you ask for feedback you’ll get 🦗🦗🦗.

-Ale

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