The art of asking for feedback - Ep. 3

Giving feedback is a lot of work.

So when you really need other people’s feedback, you should do everything you possibly can to make it easy for them.

You should try your best to make it easy for someone to give you feedback.

How?

What does that mean in practice? Here are some tips:

• Put yourself in their shoes. End of the work day? Probably not the best time to request feedback (people wanna wrap up their own work and go home!) Does the person you asked have a looming deadline? Perhaps pick a different person.

• Make artifacts easy to consume. One standard way is to break things up into smaller chunks. It is much easier for someone to review a chapter at a time than a 1000-page manuscript in one go. It is also much easier to review 100 lines of code than 1000.

• Ask for feedback contextually. It is much easier for someone to provide feedback as soon as something has happened when it is still fresh in their head (i.e. contextually). Best time to ask people how a meeting went? Right after the meeting. Best time to nudge someone in the right direction? As soon as you spot them making a mistake.

This was the third post in a series dedicated to requesting feedback when you really want it. Read to the first and second posts.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.