My question is: in order to grow professionally, is feedback 'really' an importance factor in our growth? Is there another effective way to get it? Anonymous or known? Is this problem fixable because usually employees don't really pay attention to it feedback obtained through such process
Annual performance reviews aren't a good feedback tool. They are much too slow, and usually also too big and generalized. What you really need is fast specific feedback (within a week, focused on one event, action-focused).
With that said, if you want to grow, don't ignore your annual review. It may be the only feedback you get from some people, so analyze it and extract whatever information you can to help yourself grow.
If you're a manager and your organization requires performance reviews, it's probably not worth the effort to fight them. Instead, work on giving your team feedback fast, specific throughout the year to help them grow. And do a good job on the annual reviews for their other purpose, which is recording performance for salary and promotion decisions.
So i think somehow feedback has to be actionable and gives a plan of action to user in such a manner that he effortlessly tries to improve those things in his daily routine be it reading related articles or what. But users generally tend to be lazy which is why feedback in the end seems to be useless for them.
You're right that it's hard to get others to learn from feedback if they don't actively work at it. You can make your feedback easier to understand and more action-oriented. But if they're lazy or even just focused differently, your feedback to them won't be very effective.
As a manager, I think it's still worthwhile to give as much feedback as I can. Some of it might be heard and acted on, which will help the receiver grow.
If you have to do X, Y and Z in n amount of time and you fail then a quick chat about why failed is very useful whilst the issues are fresh in peoples minds.
If you have to wait a few months for your next review then no one really remembers the intricacies of the event, so you aren't really able to flesh out what went wrong or what can be improved.
The friendliness part is vital too. Reviews can easily turn too formal and intimidating, putting the employee on the defensive. Most employees don't want to under performs so don't treat them like they are being accused of something bad.
And I cannot under estimate the fairness part. Only review based on established criteria. Be objective, not subjective. If you let other employees offer feedback then force them to provide evidence and don't just accept their opinion as provided. I was once told by manager that he was family friendly and he was flexible about arrival times, so long as I put the hours in and got the work done. When I took advantage of this for just one week I was given a beating in my review for poor punctuality. When I challenged my manager about his claim to be Okay with this his response was "Do you have that in writing?". I resigned a week later. They begged me stay I refused.
Well said. I assume that by "friendly", you imply "constructive".
Also: "How to Offer Constructive Feedback & Recognition" [0] and "How to Give Effective Feedback" [1].
[0] http://www.usc.edu/programs/cwfl/assets/pdf/constructive_fee...
[1] http://www.unh.edu/hr/sites/unh.edu.hr/files/pdfs/tool-2.pdf
So, instead of "I'm really unhappy that you are missing targets." say "I notice you're having a bit of an issue with targets, is there anything I can help you with?"
To start, doing a performance review once a year leaves huge gaps in feedback. Feedback needs to be immediate. Telling someone that they did something great or sub-optimal 11 months ago is useless.
Second, everyone needs feedback. Feedback should not only flow from managers to employees. I would argue that managers need feedback even more than employees. Managers needs to know what is going on in their organization. The are usually well aware of the core topics (sales if you're sales manager, state of code if you're managing developers). However, good feedback should be about everything, including how people feel, what else is going well or not too well, if there is anything that they could suggest for improvement, or if anything is blocking their progress.
Thirdly, feedback should not only be a one way process. All good feedback should be a start of a conversation. People will listen to feedback better if it is presented as part of a two-way communication process.
I am currently working with 15Five.com to build a better feedback platform and to address the shortcomings of annual feedback systems.
That said, you should definitely work on your self-consciousness so you can start being more objective about yourself, but that can be a loooong journey.
It's also important to know the context of the feedbacks you're getting. If you pissed off someone once and that person gives you a negative feedback just because of one situation, know that it might not be unbiased. Also ask for specific examples when getting feedback. It should be a live, active communication rather some abstracted-out isolated way of communicating. If you don't understand something or you see something you don't agree with just talk to the person, ask for clarification, examples.
Generally speaking, I've found that people have a preconceived notion of an answer when they solicit feedback for something. Then they go shopping around for the person who will answer with the feedback that they expect. When you give unsolicited feedback the effect is even stronger -- people simply do not want to believe that their expectations do not mesh with the real world.
The end result is that if you give good feedback and are saying things that the person knows already, it's not very effective because they already know it. If you give feedback and the person is surprised by it, they will disregard it unless forced to confront it. Forcing people to confront their incorrect understanding sometimes works, but rarely (Think... how many students shape up after failing a test? Some do, but the vast majority simply fall into a pattern of failure).
My most successful pattern of "feedback" is to simply provide support. If someone requires feedback, I rather ask them what they think of the situation. If it matches my opinion, then I encourage them to continue. If it doesn't, I do nothing until the situation reaches a head -- then I offer my assistance to help. Usually if the person is desperate they will also be open to new ideas.
Allowing people to fail is the best way to help them learn. Sometimes it can be costly, though. If the cost gets to be too high, you might have to intervene, but that's not a "regular feedback" kind of thing.
Just to clarify, though, most people require a different kind of feedback -- "You are a nice person. I enjoy working with you. I like it when you do X." It makes them feel comfortable and able to do their work. That kind of encouragement is often lacking in the workplace (and in schools, unfortunately). It helps to make a point of saying nice things whenever you notice them. At school I literally made a chart with all my students on it and I checked off whenever I noticed something they did right (and commented on it). If someone was missing ticks I would dedicate myself to watching them all day to catch them doing something right (try not to be creepy about it ;-) )
Edit: If you are wanting to write software, I would love a chart that I could put all my colleagues on where I could write nice things when I saw them. It would be awesome if it had alarms to tell me when I wasn't encouraging certain people, etc. I'd pay money for that.
Feedback too often falls into the "I need to say something not great/bad, so we keep improving", instead of listening when someone asks for support.
People performs better when confident their contribution is important and are confortable asking for help when needed.
It's true that some people are really excellent at listening to people and incorporating feedback. I don't really know if those people find that they lack opportunities for feedback.
Just to quote you:
> whosoever wants to improve themselves they listen to the feedback given to them and who so doesn't its useless to them. So if someone really needs it there has to be a mechanism to be given to it.
If you start with this assumption, then there is no need to ask your question ("Do we really need performance feedback?"), because you have assumed your answer. I think you know that :-) Forgive me for what will seem like going off on a tangent, but let me tell you a quick story about when I was teaching.
I taught English as a foreign language to Japanese high school students. Their text book was terrible and I avoided it, but one section was not too bad. I asked the students to bring in their text book the next day. I spoke English, but it was simple English that they all knew and everyone seemed to understand.
The next day, not a single person brought their text book. I asked them if they remembered me asking about it. Out of 30 people, not one person remembered me saying anything at all. Luckily, another teacher was in the room when I had asked, so I could verify that it wasn't just me going crazy. I had asked them, and not one of the students remembered the event at all.
You might think (as I did) that at the very least the students might remember me saying something that they didn't understand at the end of class. As it turns out, that's not the way memory works. If you don't understand something, or if your reject it in some way, you are likely not to remember that the event happened at all!
In the same way, many people complain that they never get feedback. They feel that this is the reason that they can not improve. If only someone would give them feedback! However, I think it is likely that when people are poor at receiving feedback, their brains filter out the events leading them to believe that the fault lies with others. To be honest, I believe that this happens with many other things as well ;-)
My personal suspicion is that by providing another feedback mechanism, you may be serving a small audience which is already well served by traditional means. Those people who react well to feedback do not seem to have trouble cultivating it, in my experience. People who reject feedback think that it is rare because they don't internalise it. They are probably the much bigger market, but they are not a market that will benefit from more feedback. If it were me, I think I might try to turn my mind to trying to find out what these people need.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
> For example: when a candidate mentions "references" on his resume, they are always meant to give positive feedback about them which is why again its broken.
Many jobs don't give any feedback at all. The purpose is to prove that you did, in fact, work there with that title for that duration.
General question: are un-vetted reviews about someone by completely unknown people a reliable indicator of future performance?
If places don't give reliably truthful reviews, why would you expect that the 360 feedback wouldn't turn into exactly the same thing?
We have a day-to-day manager (a person on the project team managing your sprint goals, day to day decisions, etc) and a "line" manager - a manager who is more HR and keeps an eye on your performance, project staffing, professional development, goals, etc. You get feedback from both, but the line manager is the person who handles the formal performance review process, reviews peer feedback, handles the promotion process, etc. This is the person you meet with at least once a month to talk about your general progress, how you're feeling in the role, how effective you are, tensions in relationships with others on the team, etc.
You can pick who you ask for your feedback (so you are free to pick people you get along with, although I tend to pick people from different disciplines who I think could provide useful information). The line manager then also speaks to your day to day manager and other people they feel are relevant but whom you may not have picked. All of this, I feel, builds a fairly good picture of your performance coupled with the line manager's knowledge of the project, company, team members involved. The line manager then interprets all of this to the best of their ability and communicates it to you.
In other words you have some level of certainty that the in-house manager doing your performance review will most of the time have a good idea of the environment and the context in which reviews are given. You can usually trust their interpretation of the feedback and overall situation (or have a discussion about why you might disagree with a certain point).
An outside hiring manager presented with a pile of historical feedback probably won't be able to interpret it very effectively - they won't know what was happening in the project, who the other people are or what their biases may be, etc. This can easily result in a totally inaccurate impression of the candidate.
Plus who would sign up to enable others to have anonymous feedback about them? If you are really good you would get hired without it, so it would be a sign that, at most, the person is a solid B-player and likely a C player. Would you hire such a person?
The problem with 360s in my company is that when you give ideas for improvement you can't know if the manager will make this a negative. This happened to me once: I put a well-intended point of improvement into the review of somebody I really like and respect. The manager made this (I was told later) the main point of the yearly review and it impacted the coworker negatively. Since then I have kept my 360s pretty bland and not really saying anything.
Review systems can/could be extremely valuable but it's hard to implement them in way that they really work. They work probably best where management is genuinely interested in the growth of employees.
Perhaps for people that want to grow their roles in organisations, it's important. As a freelancer, I am happy to live without this ritual. In the past, before I became freelancer, I dreaded these reviews, as I suspected often these performance reviews could be politically charged and not necessarily deal with my performance (for example a manager might tell me I need to improve some aspects for a raise - I might have to suck up to some manager to get more chance for a big raise, when a limited budget is available for a group of employees).
As a freelancer I am free to decide on the aspects I want to improve on and as such I don't need a manager to help me with this. This makes me much happier.
This is something that is just missing when you are working by yourself as a freelancer. I could be a good coder, but crappy co-worker and I'd never know that if I just work by-my-self. Personally, I'm an OK programmer. But I used to be crap at teaching people. I freelanced for almost 7 years before I joined my first programming gig, and this is one of the first things I learned. Without feedback from my colleagues, I would never even have found out about it, unless I had gone out of my way to get myself involved in teaching.
And the way I look at it, feedback from your co-workers doesn't just improve you as an employee, it usually helps you grow as a person as well, and fix some error of your personality or character. For me, improving the way I try to teach things to my peers made me a better programmer, and [plug]helped me a lot while I was writing my book (https://www.amazon.com/Django-Project-Blueprints-Jibran-Ahme....
But perhaps not (or not only) on the annual review level, but rather solicit feedback from peers and superiors on a per-project level (or if you work in a Scrum team, per epos or something).
If you get such feedback maybe every two or three months, and then you get a bad annual performance review, you might even use the feedback you collected privately to influence the annual performance review.
1. Feedback is great, it helps employees develop and improve themselves. 2. The way feedback is obtained in organizations is broken and somehow it acts as a tool by managers to penalize the employees during their performance appraisals meetings.
3. Feedback has to be given in a very constructive manner so that the receiver actually tries to improve it without feeling bad about themselves.
4. Feedback has to be continuous and we cannot except feedback to be delivered only on yearly or bi-annual basis. Real time, contextual feedback is needed.
5. Feedback not only on tech capabilities is needed but also on interpersonal relationships, management/leadership style, professionalism and much more.
6. Most important of all, feedback is a personal thing. It should be requested by the user himself if the idea is to improve themselves and to improve their performance and in no way it should be related to appraisals.
All this feedback is definitely used for improvement and growth and to make yourself a better professional. I had similar thoughts in my mind when i posted this question. Because my latest project that I posted here(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142878) and here (https://medium.com/@aliibrahim_36896/story-of-pleasantfish-a...) exactly tries to tackle the discussed problems. This is as we know a not simple problem (and also not easily understandable in the first go) so therefore my solution i believe is far from perfect but to start I have separated feedback from organization level to individual level just for personal growth purposes.
Also, to allow users to grow, i recommend articles/stories to improve those skills.
I would like to thank you all as I have gained valuable feedback information from this thread tech professionals and for growth feedback was a necessary ingredient.
A good article about skill feedback. Don’t add your 2 cents https://t.co/TVo6TQ7SQU
Very few great tennis players do it without a coach. Same with piano. And chess. Why should programming or leadership be so different?
This doesn't mean feedback is easy to give or receive, or that everyone listens.
Formal, 360 type, feedback in my experience almost never reflects reality and is often very much counter productive. Demming made it one of his 7 deadly diseases for a reason.
Same thing.
