 For the next couple of minutes, if you guys are able to, you can join using the Slido.com link or the QR code. I know that the screen is a little dim in this room, so if that doesn't work, just use the dot com. And the question is, what are some words that you associate with receiving not giving? And maybe we'll time box it to like two minutes. Three to shuffle in, if you just got here, we're doing a little word cloud exercise. You can see the Slido joining stuff on the left in like 30 more seconds. This is giving me a great perspective on where you guys are all at in the spectrum of receiving feedback. This is not a surprise whatsoever, and a lot of what we're gonna talk about today is how to kinda deal with this, right? And whether or not we're thinking about feedback in the right way. So welcome. Let's get uncomfortable, how to ask for and process feedback. My name is Cori Neslin, and I am a senior project manager at Palantir.net. Yeah. So I kinda wanna kick it off with like why I care about the feedback process. Like why is it important to me? Why am I here talking to you about it for half an hour? So I don't know if you can see this, but in a previous life, when I had a different position and worked at a different company, this was how we received feedback. I don't know if anybody else has ever experienced a system like this. It is a scatter plot, and there are two questions that they ask, the people that work with you. It's these two questions. Do you like them? And if it was your money, would you give this person a raise? All of these little dots, these are the people at your level, at this company, and you are the darker colored dot. So you get this every quarter, and it basically tells you a rank system of where you are in comparison to everybody that you work with. Raise of hands if you think this is a good system for delivering feedback, and you absolutely want this system implemented at your workplace. Let's do it again. Fantastic, yeah. Everybody get up and we'll pretend to be the dots. Yeah, no, it's not a good system. This is a fear-based system. This is a threat-based system. This is saying, hey, if you're not in this top quadrant where everybody likes you and everybody wants to pay you more money, you're in trouble. And this is not associated with a conversation, okay? Maybe some managers, maybe you're lucky. You've got a manager who is comfortable giving feedback. Who likes you? Who wants to talk to you about how you're doing? But if you don't, this is all you get. All you get. So what happens if you're this person? If this is you, how are you doing the day that this drops? You're great when this drops. You're bad when this drops, like, not good, right? When I went to this company, they would tell us what week this was gonna come out, but they wouldn't tell us when. So everybody would just be sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting. And then the second that this hit, the entire office would go completely silent and everybody would be checking this. It would get so many hits that the internal internet for the company would shut down. That's how, that's what this did to people. So, I don't know if you guys are familiar at all with Aaron Dignan. He is a really smart guy. He talks a lot about new ways of working, how to be a human at work, how to treat the people you work with with respect outside of just like a performative action. And he says that leader led feedback means that the person receiving it isn't in control. They aren't developing based on their own agenda and they're being performative. Like in that scatter plot, you're gonna do everything possible to get into that top quadrant, but maybe that doesn't align with your values. Maybe you're working in extra 20 hours a week just so on the off chance that when your manager gets pinged, they're gonna be like, yep, totally love this person. They're working 68 hours a week instead of 40, right? And we all know that if we drop into that bottom quadrant, we're in trouble. That's the purpose of that system. So what's in scope for today? We're gonna talk about why you should take control of the feedback process, what being feedback positive means, how to proactively ask for feedback, and how to assess the feedback that you receive. The whole context of this conversation today is talking about how you have control over this process and you do not need to be beholden to the way that your company does it, particularly if it's doing it in a way that's not helpful for you. What we're not gonna talk about today is how to give feedback to other people. That is a completely different conversation. And we're also not gonna do any, like, fake, like, give anybody some feedback, exercises, and all that. So, I wanna kinda start out with some assumptions. One, you know your situation best. So to the extent that anything in this presentation doesn't apply to you, or you think it would be harmful rather than helpful, you know best, do or don't do it, your choice. You're capable of adopting a growth mindset. That means that you're able to think about your future and how you wanna grow more so than being overly punitive on yourself about mistakes that you've made. You work in an environment where it's safe to ask for feedback. That means if you go to your manager and you're honest and you're like, hey, I really wanna talk to you about my performance, how are you doing? You're gonna be met with someone who's willing to meet you in that same spot. Maybe they're not super great at delivering feedback because it's a skill that we have to develop. There we go, okay. I'm gonna be nervous for a second. Maybe it's a skill that they have to develop, but they're willing to meet you there. They're willing to try. And you're able to assess the validity of the feedback provided to you, meaning you can tell when someone is not giving you the truth, you know when someone is being affected by a bias or some kind of perspective that isn't really intrinsically related to you. So why should you take ownership of the feedback process? This is Greg McCone. I don't know if I'm saying his name right. He has an absolutely amazing book that I was earlier using as a mouse pad, but let's not tell him that, called Essentialism. And he says, when we forfeit our right to choose, we allow ourselves to be pulled in a direction that we don't wanna go. That's obvious, right? Your manager may have completely different goals for you than you do. They may be more related to, they may be more focusing on, well, you didn't close as many tickets as Bob did last week or something like that. We don't care about that, right? We care about our goals, not theirs. So that's a traditional model. The one that I showed you with the scatter plots, any kind of performance review thing that comes only once a year that you really don't have any impact on. Your manager just comes to you and says, hey, we met in the black box and we think you're a great 8% or whatever. That's a traditional way of giving feedback and it's tied to the intentions of the person giving it to you. It's, do they wanna praise you? Do they wanna punish you? Is it tied to compensation, et cetera? And the people who have control in this system is everybody but you. You have almost no control in that situation. Maybe you work in a place where you can provide some feedback, but ultimately it may not move the needle very much on how this is received. And then we have self-driven. So that's goal-focused and it's proactive, it's you. It's you saying, hey, I wanna take this opportunity to figure out if there are ways that I can grow and to really identify how I'm adding value. Cause maybe for example, you spend a lot of time answering customer emails, but that's not really a value to the company or yourself. It has nothing to do with your growth. Your ability to be like, yeah, Bob got it. I'll handle it, is not necessarily tied to your skills as a UX person or whatever. So we're trying here to take control of the process so that we benefit from it. And in order to do that, we kinda have to adapt a feedback positive mindset. So being feedback positive means that you are willing to be able to enter this conversation and to drive it and to understand that you have responsibility and agency in the process. And I kinda wanna like divorce that a little bit from how you respond to a year-end performance review or respond to the company's version of feedback. That's what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is when you choose to kinda own it. You are choosing to know, take the responsibility for knowing on your own terms for your goals. So maybe you want to grow to the next level or you wanna start taking on more responsibilities that are outside of what you currently do. If we have a feedback positive mindset and we own the process, we can go out and ask people how could I get from where I am right now to where I wanna be. But I kinda wanna do this for a second. Acknowledging fear. Who here is nervous about asking for feedback or has had a bad experience when you've asked for feedback? Okay, cool. I have like hands up. I'm gonna assume that people who didn't raise their hand have had this experience but you decided not to participate and that's fine. That's okay. So, acknowledging fear. The reality is, is that asking for feedback is very hard. It requires a lot of emotional strength on your part and it's not always gonna go well. It just isn't. But that's okay. Like it is not a requirement for us to only participate in asking for feedback when we think that we have 100% total control over exactly how it's gonna go down and what we're gonna do when we hear something bad and blah, blah, blah. No. It's more about showing up and saying for my benefit I'm gonna do this thing that's uncomfortable. And while it doesn't super matter to the context of this discussion, the person who's giving you feedback it sucks for them too. Like it is not a fun experience for anybody. People who do like it are very strange. I will never be one of these people. And I just wanna be very clear in that when we talk about this stuff it's okay to be nervous. It's okay to be really uncomfortable. It's okay to say like, I don't know if I'm ready to do it right now but maybe I'll do it later when things are a little bit more calm or something like that, that's all right. It's okay to be nervous but there's no reason to allow our fear of what we don't know or our fear of what someone's gonna say to us to keep us from doing something that's ultimately in our long-term best interest. So if we can drop this, if we can say I'm gonna put it to the side then we can do the feedback process the way that I think it should be done. So I work with this absolutely wonderful person like Jill and she said this after we tried a couple of different ways of giving feedback and getting feedback and she said that essentially feedback is user research on yourself. Which I hope that many people in this audience identify with the statement. You are basically getting information about yourself that's perceived by other people that doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean that it's 100% totally accurate. It just is what other people think of you at any given time. Which is super helpful if you're trying to make any kind of growth decision. So how do you proactively ask for feedback? Asking for feedback is a cycle. When we take control of this process separating from our yearly performance review or however it is that your company mandates feedback be given to you if at all. You're kinda gonna go through the cycle. You're gonna start with the planning phase and then you're gonna go into action and then you're gonna go to assessment to growth and then iteration. You don't get to do this one time and then say you're done. Like you're done for now but you're gonna need to do this again. And the benefit of adopting this is that if you do it enough times if you have enough data points over a long enough period of time you can actually see the growth in yourself. You'll see that the questions that you're asking people are different. The responses that you're getting are different and you're gonna be able to more closely target what you're looking to achieve by even starting this in the first place. Does that generally make sense? Be cool? Does anyone have any questions so far? So before we actually start talking about the steps I'm gonna admit to a little bit of psychological stuff here. We are gonna use a real example and it's me. It's actually how I did it with the actual feedback that I received and so just keep that in mind that it's a real example and I'm a real person and I try real hard, okay? So our first step in asking for feedback and being proactive about this is to identify our goals. So are you new to the company and you wanna know how you're doing? Have you had bad feedback in the past and you wanna know if you've resolved an issue? Are you gonna grow to another level in the company or are you aiming to grow to another level in the company and you wanna know from someone who's done it how do I get there, where are my gaps, what should I be doing? So number one is to identify your goals. Those are intensely personal and they'll be different based off of each individual person's needs and wants. The second is we're going to choose the format which I'll get to in another slide and then we're gonna select targeted questions. So let's say we've identified our goals and now we're like, okay, I'm gonna pick my format. What formats are available to me? There are four general types of asking for feedback. They've got a whole bunch of different names depending on which like feedback resource person you talk to but generally they fall into four categories. In the moment that's like, oh, I just had a presentation and my manager was there. Hey, manager, how did I do on this? I was nervous about this section. Do you think I did it correctly or whatever? You also have short interviews. These are really short. They're really good if you have a team that's short on time or if you really just have like a couple of questions that you wanna just ask everybody and get a general sense of what's going on. The deep dive which is you sit with someone for a longer period of time and you ask them a bunch of questions and you can have like a full conversation. And then the feedback survey. Somebody wrote survey in the word cloud and I know that like some businesses use it and some people use it. That one I'd be a little bit careful with when you're self-selecting to use it in this particular case. It's really, really, really good if you are an introvert or you're gonna have a hard time breaking into asking for feedback, that's okay. All you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna wanna preface it before you send it out to people. Don't like go on a Slack and be like, hey, send me some feedback, here's this link. Like that's not personal enough. You need to give people a reason to think it's not just this formulaic thing that you're asking them to do. If you've never done feedback before but are really not that nervous about it, like you've got good psychological safety with your team, you're solid, you feel okay, I strongly recommend short interviews and I would do this with as many people as possible. One of the things to factor in with these formats is that the scope and how you can use them is different. If you wanna have a deep dive with nine people, like that's not realistic. Who's gonna be able to like put nine 30 minute meetings on a calendar, like I literally could not do it. But short interviews, if you really wanna talk to like your entire scrum team, maybe that's six or 80 you, like go for it, 10, 15 minutes. Tell the people in advance what you wanna talk about, send them the questions that you're gonna ask them to resolve any fear that they might have and just go for it. In the moment is really good, just be careful how frequently you use that one. Because some people, if you ask them every five minutes, how did I do on this, how did I do on this, how did I do on this, they're gonna get a little bit burned out by it, but it's really good for that like situational thing. Like you just got out of a meeting, you just did a big presentation, whatever. And then what you've asked. So the first one is tie your questions to your goals. If you maybe had a quarter where you didn't do as well as you were hoping to do or whatever, and you wanna figure out how to do it better or how to have better time management or something like that, ask a question specifically associated with that. It's okay to have very specific questions when you talk to people about feedback when you're asking them for it because the whole purpose is to help you. We're free from questions that can be answered with a yes or no, almost 95% of the time if you ask do you have any feedback for me, the answer is no, I do not have feedback for you. I gotta go, whatever. But if you ask what feedback do you have for me, you're kind of precluding the option for them to be like yeah, I do or no, I don't. If you do have it, please share it with me. And then consider action-oriented questions. These can be really powerful. I personally use that first one quite a bit. What can I do to make working with or interacting with me better? I have a very strong personality in most cases and so sometimes it's nice to have a little of a reminder when I talk to new people or people that don't have as strong a personality as me to not overbear on them. So this is like a really important question like for me specifically. Again, tie your questions to your goals. I don't wanna be overbearing when they pick one that'll figure out if I am. Okay, so now you've got, you know what your goals are, you know what format you're gonna use and you've picked some questions. What a great step, step forward, go get the feedback. Yeah, you're just gonna have to do it and that's really all there is to it. Couple notes though. Try to only request feedback when you are actually in a space to hear it. Like if you have personal things or even things that are happening at work that is distorting your ability to be objective or to hear people, that may not be the right time to ask for feedback. Does that mean you can't know but that means that when you're assessing the feedback that you've received, you're gonna really need to dial back down your bias. Like you're gonna need to make sure that you're not clouding kind of what other people are saying based off of where you're at emotionally. Second, recognize that an individual's opinion is only their opinion. It is not truth and it is not objective fact like it's just an opinion. And to help them out at the very beginning of the session, tell them very honestly in whatever way that you want to do it, that you really are there to hear their feedback, you really care about their opinion, you want to hear what they have to say. A lot of people, even when they have some amount of psychological safety with us are gonna be uncomfortable when being asked for feedback. So you want to be as gentle as possible and want to give them permission to say, thank you for coming to me. Last sprint, you were not communicative enough with me and you didn't get enough done and you should have told me on Wednesday that you weren't gonna be able to get stuff done so I could assign someone else, right? That's valuable feedback for us. That's something that we can take and consider but if we don't make it very obvious to the person that we're asking that it's okay to say that to us, they will not say that to you. They will not. Okay, so now you have feedback, you actually have some results. Step five is you're gonna compile them, put them all together. Step six is that you're gonna assess the quality of what you received and make sure that there's not some perspective or context or bias in there from them or you and kind of control for it if possible. And then you're gonna decide what of that information to accept or reject. And you are completely empowered to accept or reject anything that you hear because feedback does not equate to an evaluation of your intrinsic value or your identity. It has nothing to do with that. You are not any less of a person or any more built up or diminished based off what somebody else says about you. That's not how this works. You are the only one who can decide if what you hear has value and you're the only one who can action on it, period. Again, in this system, in the performance based system where some employer is coming down to you and telling you their feedback on ask for, that's not this system. But this one right now is 100% for you. So real world example. So last quarter, I did the short interviews version of getting feedback. This is just a sample of what I received and this is all real. So again, like be a little bit nice to me. I asked three questions. What is one thing that I'm doing well and should keep doing? What is something I could do to make working with interacting with me better and how can I make your job easier? Because for me, my goal here was to identify areas for growth so that I could be more valuable and could help make us more money. That's what I care about. Or at least it is for this. So you can see there's like a variety of things in here but this is just a five. This is compiling. So now we're gonna check for bias. So I highlighted two. The blue one, which I don't know if you can see it very well. This one, this is my bias. I'm controlling for myself here and purple is someone else. I'm controlling for their bias in this one. So in some circumstances, be less chatty. Wow, okay, fine. That's cool, I guess. I kind of like talking, but you know what? That's valid, right? That's a very valid statement and that was probably pretty hard for the person who said that to say that to me, right? So when I'm looking at this, I can choose to be offended and just be like, well, I should be able to be chatty in all circumstances and it's fine. Or I can say, hey, maybe this person has a reason why they're saying this. Is there a grain of truth to it? Should I think about this? Are there any experiences where I could think back on and be like, oh, maybe I was too chatty? The answer is yes. So I'm controlling for my bias in that top one. The second one, communicate less. This is someone else's bias. This is a person for which I have communication problems. Go figure. Additional context, if people are trying to work together and you guys can't align on a common goal, you're gonna have friction. With this person, they dislike that friction, but instead of taking responsibility, they're pushing a little bit onto me. So do we have communication problems that I'm somewhat responsible for, that I need to also help with? Yes, but is this really a valid statement to a project manager who has to control scope timeline budget? Probably not. So I'm gonna say this is someone else's bias and this is not really a comment on my actual performance. So now layering assessments. I'm so sorry that that's coming out so bad. All right, red, I've rejected this. I'm saying that's fine if this person wanted to share this with me, but I don't take this as any kind of action item for myself. There's additional context to it. I'm gonna reject it. No longer applies in this case. And then I've got three yellows. These are ones where I'm saying I'm choosing to step away from this simply because there's nothing for me here to do. These top two ones are not actually related to my job performance. This is just a random suggestion that someone else has made and they're not really related to anything that I have control over. Could I do the first one? Yes, is that a valuable thing for me to do? At this time I'm determining no, it's not. And I don't have authority to do this. So this is not something that I can do. I can advocate for others. I can advocate for my team, but I don't have final control. And this one is a bit of a red flag. So if you're asking for feedback and you get to the questions, and in the questions that are positive, they're like, oh yeah, I have all this great stuff to tell about you, but then when you get to the constructive part, like tell me how it could be better. And they say nothing identified, basically. Like, no, you're great. You're not, there's nothing I would improve on. It's probably an indicator that you have low psychological safety with that person or that person does not feel confident sharing their opinion with you. It doesn't necessarily always mean that. Maybe this is someone, you don't actually work with that frequently and so they're like, I don't know what to tell you. Like you deliver all the things that I ask you to. But it's up to you to decide, is this because of low psychological safety or is this because there really is nothing more? I send this person an invoice. That's all they care about. You have to figure that out. And then the green ones, which you can't see are green, are ones that I'm accepting. I'm saying, hey, this is feedback that is legitimate. It's coming from a good place. I have removed the impact advice to my knowledge. I'm doing the best I can. So I'm going to take all the rest of that and say, what can I do from here? So that's your next step. What's your action items? It may be helpful for you to group things in categories after you have the feedback. Like, oh, here's the communication category and here's the commenting on code category, whatever you have. You can categorize them if that helps you. And then from there, you can decide what your action items are, but then importantly, you have to then do it. So if you go out and you ask for feedback and you do any of this stuff, you're signaling to the people around you that you want their feedback, you want their opinion, and that you are going to action on it because why would you be asking if you're not going to do something about it? If you get all the way to step seven and stop, you're not really continuing the cycle. You're actually not fulfilling your goal because you're not doing anything that would allow you to do that. This one can be kind of tricky, but it's just part of it. You just, you have to implement it. So for me, I took all of the feedback that I've received, I grouped it and I decided what are three actions that I'm going to choose to take to try and address some of the feedback that I received. And this includes doubling down on things that you're really good at. Like, if you were a really good communicator or you're really good at working on accessibility issues or something like that, double down on it. Like, should you be even better at it? Should you be going to the next level and sharing that information with other people? Alternatively, if there are areas for improvement, otherwise known as weaknesses, it depends on how people want to phrase it, you can also just try and start taking steps in a direction that would allow you to resolve this. So these are the three actual ones that I picked for myself. And so far so good. So now I've done all this, repeat. Not immediately, please don't have feedback sessions and then two weeks later have more feedback sessions with those same people. Their opinion will not have changed that much. Generally twice a year is really good, especially if you're doing a short format, you can also mix it up. Like, if you decided to do a deep dive version at the beginning of the year and you just want to do a little test in the waters, do the short interview, do the in the moments when things really matter. You can totally mix it up. But don't do one cycle and then say you're done. Because if you do one cycle for the whole year and say you're done, yes, you're in control, but you're still in that negative place that you're getting from the company side. You're only getting that feedback once a year. That means if something is wrong or if there's something that you're doing that's really good and they want more of, you're not knowing that for 11 more months. Like, that doesn't help you. So thank you, I don't know what time this. All right, right on time. Okay, 3.30, so thank you so much for coming. As an opportunity to gain more feedback, I do have another QR code here. This is to a feedback questionnaire for me. It's only six questions, it's very easy. But I would love to have your feedback on this, whether or not you have this as valuable. And then assuming that you've done that, I guess, do you have any questions? Like, is there anything I can elaborate on? Sure, sure. Okay, how would you get around the rule of people like just saying, oh, I have nothing bad to say? Like, especially coming from like, let's say you're this person's mentor, manager, and like they might have that fear of, oh no, I'm gonna get in trouble. I say something I don't like about you, or don't like that you're the kind of thing. I see, so you have a power dynamic in this situation where you are the more senior, powerful person. The long answer and the real one is that you would want to notice that when you have that first interaction and then you need to create a goal for yourself trying to build up the psychological safety with that team member so that the next time that you ask them, they'll give you the right answer. If you press them at the time, they might give you something, but it's not gonna be something that they're giving you for free. They're being backed into a corner and they've gotta come up with something. It's very common, it's very common when you have a power dynamic, regardless of which direction it is to have stuff like that. And then I would say like, in other interactions that aren't feedback related, share that you're open to their ideas, like deliberately go after them and be like, hey, what do you think? Like, that's what I think, but I may not be right. If you create other scenarios where you're showing that you're open to hearing their opinion, then when you do ask them for their opinion, they're gonna know that it's safe to do so because there's nothing retaliatory that's gonna come from that. But it just, it takes a long time. Or it can, it depends on the person. Awesome, thanks. How do you select the people to ask feedback? Is it only like, do you focus on one group or do you, I did one thing that was called the 360 feedback and it was like. Everybody? It was a lot of people. Yeah. And so that was just a survey. So it didn't take a lot of my time though. How do you choose the people to survey or to ask? Yeah, so I choose based off of what format that I've chosen, because that kind of precludes you into the pool. And if you're doing a deep dive, then you're really only talking to maybe three people total. So maybe someone that you manage as a good choice and then someone who manages you as a good choice as a co-worker. So kind of getting a broad spectrum of the people that you interact with. But I mean, if you do the short interview one and you can have a pool of eight to 10 people because you're only meeting with them for 10 minutes. So it's not that big of a time burden to them. And it's a time burden to you, but not as extreme. I would literally ask everybody I work with regularly, which is what I did. I asked the people who I'm responsible for making sure that their work happens on time, even though Palantir is a natural organization. It's not really a hierarchical one, but people on my team are like, who I can say, hey, is this done yet? Those folks, I talk to them. I talk to people who can come to me and say, hey, is this done yet? And I also talk to people who were not in my department, but who I work with on internal initiatives. So it really depends. This survey is also similar to that. You can send it to as many people as you want. And in the moment is obviously to whoever is in the room, virtually or in real life with you. Put it in the moment, feedback, this is great. Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, I really appreciate this. Yeah, it's one of those things that, like every now and then I solicit feedback, I'm usually just looking for nice things to put on my evaluation once a year, throughout those times. Yeah. But careful with the survey. We need lots of surveys. If you want people to not be mean, make sure to ask for their email before they start the survey. They will be nicer. Also, there are certainly people that do not want to ask me for my honest feedback. And I would probably just say something nice or I don't know if there's a video. Yeah, I guess, I mean, I guess in that context, I would challenge you a little bit to ask like why is it that people would not want your honest feedback? Not because it necessarily is anything, there's anything wrong with it, but we have all of these emotions and perceptions that's tied to feedback. And a lot of people, including myself, based off the scatter plot that I showed you, like have feedback trauma. They have a belief that if they ask for feedback or it's negative, that they're basically raising the flag to get themselves in trouble. That they're like the second that it gets mentioned, oh, now it's gonna be a big problem. If we want people to grow, which should be the purpose of doing this in the first place, then we want to give them the opportunity to be successful without getting shot down. It's not them saying that you're doing that. It's just that we create sometimes this system that those are essentially the only two outcomes. You're either shot down or it's like, oh, wait a minute, wait a go, Bob, here's more money on your bonus. Like, the more money on your bonus is great, but that's not really the goal. Also, my feedback from one year to like, might be being one, like in my head might be being one year, but on the next track, I might be realizing I was totally wrong, you know? That's the other thing, which is also why we don't, this isn't talking about how to give feedback because that's the problem, right? If we are asked for our feedback, let's say like someone didn't get their stuff in on time, I mean, it might be like, oh, this always happens. Like, they just don't care when I tell them that it's important and that's why they don't get it done. But what in reality is happening is this person is taking care of their mother who's having severe dementia issues. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you just don't know, you have no idea, so you have to be willing to be wrong. You also need to be willing to be wrong in this context. It's just that because you're driving the question, because you're driving the conversation, you get to decide where those areas are, like where people are gonna poke holes in your beliefs or like how you wanna describe your working style or whatever. Did I answer your question? Holy cow. I don't know if you even had a question. I might have just handed it to you. Sorry. It was beautiful. Oh, thanks. Do you have any other thoughts or advice on the types of things that we can do to help foster that sense of safety, like create a brave space within our department among our coworkers and individuals? You mentioned one thing before, which is sort of like creating situations where people learn that it's okay to share their opinions. Two other thoughts about things that are fairly easy to be meant for day to day. Yeah, be publicly wrong. Like, to be honest with you, like be publicly wrong. If you're, I'm a project manager, so it's difficult for me to talk about any kind of like technical thing, but like there have been times where I budget out a project and I think I know who is the right person to be on there and I make an assumption that they want to be on that project and so I just pull them in. And then they're like, okay, I didn't raise my hand for this. Like this is not something I wanted to do. I need to publicly acknowledge like, oh, I'm so sorry, that's my bad. I jumped to that, that's not on you. So you're taking responsibility for yourself, which gives other people the feeling that they can take responsibility for themselves. And then you're also saying like, we're all in, I made mistakes. The goal is not to be perfect. The goal is to be 1% better today than you were yesterday. It's incremental improvement. And then I would say, you know, everyone is gonna make a mistake, right? Like someone's gonna come to you with their feedback or their opinion and you're just gonna be like, no, that's not how we do it. It's wrong. If you in the moment, because you're stressed out and you not lash out but are like, not necessarily acknowledging that person fully. Like, hey, like I'm sorry. Like I shouldn't have done that. You know, I can see why that was a suggestion that you made and like, can we talk more about that? But why do you think that's a better solution than whatever I proposed? Like, you're never gonna be perfect, but every opportunity that you have to take accountability and responsibility for the things that you do signals to everyone else that you're a person who takes responsibility for the things that you do. And I don't know what's more powerful than just doing what you think is the right thing to do. Hi, the question. Yeah. So do you use your negative feedback that's not what you agreed to? Do you think that opportunity to gratify that with the person or do you just acknowledge that? To make sure I understand you're saying like if you receive critical feedback and you agree with what they say or you don't. If you do not agree. You do not agree. Clarifying questions. Like it's a little, that one, it depends on a lot of factors. Like it depends on your power position with that other person. It depends on what state you're in. It depends on what state they're in. But just because someone provides critical feedback to you, like I was saying before, that doesn't mean that they're correct. Especially if it's something that's, you disagree, I guess it was when it was ripping. So if you straightly disagree with it, I think it would be totally fine to be like, okay, well, why do you think that this part was a failure or this part didn't go the way that you think it should have? What would you have done in that circumstance? Or do I see how what you're saying, do you remember that I went to you and said A, B, or C and that we had a, like maybe you brushed me off, we didn't finish the conversation or something like that. If you disagree with it, it is okay to tell the person you disagree with it long story short. I just would be depending on your situation, careful about how exactly you do it. Because if you're doing it in this system where you went to them and you're like, this is my, I'm asking you for feedback and you don't agree, then you have a lot more agency than if you're in the other version where it's them coming to you and saying, we've decided that your yearly pay increases is only gonna be 2% because of these three reasons or whatever. That's a completely different scenario and may require you to be more political in how you respond to it. Also, I think it is good to ask for feedback not at the end of the project. I think it is important as we have demos or opportunities to ask for feedback at different times. So how often, I'm also going to come under it and I would say like, it helps a lot to don't wait until the end to ask for what they think. Because if you allow them to express what they feel in the process, they will be more aligned with your delivery and your expectations and their expectations will be better met. So don't wait until the end to ask for a round of feedback. Do a monthly demo, do you have to do a monthly demo or by way of the order that you come over to see a monthly demo? When you demo, ask for feedback. Yeah, that's legit. Like in the in the moment option, like if that's what you're trying to target, those would work really well. But if you're only in this like six months quarterly thing and maybe a little bit more difficult to tie it directly to like the actual timing of whatever happens. But you do the best that you can, right? Like they didn't tell you until you asked about it, right? So it's not a one-way street. It's not like you have a hundred percent responsibility over figuring out what people think, right? It's also their responsibility and good managers and good people who you work with, like they need to take accountability for providing feedback to others. It's not a one-way street. What do you feel about like some sort of a feedback model as a form of, I want to say conflict resolution, just your example. I was like, oh, that's happened to me as a developer. You know, I was heads down doing my work. And of course I'm not giving updates hour to hour and my project manager is stressed. And you're like, what are you doing? What are you doing? What's happening here? What are you working on? And so they think that I'm not working. And I think that they're like constantly slowing me down by making me push my code every five minutes. And we weren't talking about it. And I found out that this was a big issue after the project launched in my manager's feedback and directly, way after I could do anything about it. And so how do you feel when there already is some conflict there and you feel it but you don't understand it and you need to talk about it? Is there a way that you can modify something like this to get feedback when that happens? I will say that that is an area that I have experience in but not experience to be prescriptive and getting anybody an answer on how to deal with that because conflict and feedback are not the same thing. And conflict resolution is primarily helped by communication-basic like nonviolent communication which is not really what feedback is trying to do. It's not possible. It's not really possible. And I'm blanking on her name but she wrote radical candor. It's not really possible to create a system that is the 100% best thing for more than one process. Like you can create the best feedback process where the only goal of it is to give you feedback and you can create the best conflict resolution process but that's the only thing that it can do. The second thing you start to add in like multiple things you're gonna weaken the overall effectiveness of whatever it is that you're using. So in that case, and it happens to everybody like the guy who told me to talk to him less like the only answer there is to use nonviolent communication and if it gets to a point where you have to involve someone else, your company's like HR person or however you guys function. And then again on the side it would be people who give feedback and if you operate in a hierarchical institution managers have a responsibility to provide timely feedback to the people that they manage period end of sentence. So if you are in this room and you are a manager you have that innate responsibility and even though you're uncomfortable it does not relieve you of that responsibility. So putting you in that situation is not fair to you and it's never gonna give that person the actual thing that they want which is whatever behavior change that they would prefer to have. That's what you have a one on one with your manager every week and if he doesn't have time for that In theory, yeah, but I'm asking for the one on one and if you don't do it, what can you do it by week because he needs to bring to your attention that someone else in the team is complaining about that they don't have in those push-ins regularities. So he's the one who needs to go either swiftly they need to do and if he's not doing it he's not doing it like, go to you. I agree, yes, and all assumes that there's a structure for a healthy managerial feedback in place that is being followed. So, no it wasn't and that was a big part. Yeah and it requires psychological safety and like that again is also a two way street. You are not solely responsible for maintaining or establishing that and neither are they. But it's, I think I read a statistic that was like 95 or 97% of managers are never given any formal management training. So, okay, how do you expect somebody who could be anyone in this room and then is immediately promoted to manager now they're supposed to deliver effective feedback? How, like who told them how to do it? Nobody, like nobody did. That's not to excuse a manager who doesn't do that because it's innately in their responsibilities. Probably it's written in their list of responsibilities but like we're all people too, right? They're gonna make the same mistakes, if not worse because they have impact over other people. But it's also totally acceptable to not call people out but like be like, hey, Bob, you know, like we don't have regular feedback sessions and I can tell from the last project you were disappointed in this behavior. Let's talk about that. Like, I'm a dev, I should be able to go heads down for three hours and it not be a big problem. Like, don't be that combative. I'm a little bit annoyed on your behalf but like, I'm just saying like, you know, you are also okay, it's also okay to have that conversation but if you're not comfortable because you don't have the emotional security with that person, that's legitimate. And then I would just, you know, do this like I did but the guy told me to talk to him last. Like, you just gotta have to be like little steps. Like, how, what are these little ways that we can maybe kind of resolve this because ultimately we still work together. I can't just be like, fine, it doesn't work that way. Yeah, it doesn't work that way, so yeah. So the ones that you pointed out that you were like, this is their bias and this is my bias, how do you figure that out? Because I can imagine myself having the same reaction to both of those statements that I feel like Vila's chatty, me and Hela, I can imagine myself to both of them being like, wow, that's stupid. Yeah, for sure. It's really easy. It's really easy to be like defensive of yourself because we, and I do it too, even though I'm telling you not to do it, like we're trying, right? Is the feedback you receive is not a comment about you as a person. It has nothing to do with you, your identity or anything like that. However, there are lots of people who are not self-aware, who say things and do things, not aware of how they're coming across to other people. Like misogyny, racism, transphobia, all that stuff. Like when you receive a comment from someone who has behavior like that, like you, that's a little bit easier to identify. You can say like, oh, this is obviously a racist comment and I don't care. Or this is obviously a sexist comment. But like, when it comes to yourself, I think the only way that you can realistically say, am I just responding to this out of like, how dare they or whatever, is to think about why you're responding that bit way and what emotional state are you in when you read it. Like when I read the VLS chat, I heard it because it was in person. But like when I heard that, I was like, are you kidding me? Like everyone is quiet, no one will talk on virtual calls. Like I'm a project manager and an extrovert. Like am I being chatty or is it that no one else is talking to me and I am uncomfortable with silence. So, you know, like that kind of thing is a thing that you have to be aware of for yourself. You know, the more you do it and the more you're aware of your emotional state when you read or hear something like that, the easier it is to be like, oh, is that a trigger for me? Is that a thing that I have a problem with? And the only way to deal with that is like therapy, right? So, which hopefully everyone is in it just when you're after COVID. Like we've all gone to therapy, right? So, yeah, just experience. Anything else?