Gold, Glitter, and Garbage

Have you ever received feedback and felt like, “Thanks, I don’t know what to do with that.” You’re told feedback is a gift, but sometimes it feels like you’re at a White Elephant Party.

Not all feedback is created equal, and your time is best spent on focusing on what’s actionable or seeking to understand what you can do about it. We can’t always change how people give us feedback, but we are in control of how we react to it and what we do with it. I typically find feedback falls into three categories that I refer to as gold, glitter, and garbage.

Gold

Let’s just review what the good stuff looks like. Gold Feedback is Specific, Actionable, Timely, Kind. This is the kind of feedback that is actually helpful and that we want to both give and receive. It helps make us all better, even when it might be tough to hear.

For each of these, see if you can identify what’s specific, actionable, timely, and kind.

• Brock could have more impact by sharing how he executed on his latest project with the broader site so that others doing similar projects can reuse his findings.
• Blair could consider the presentation’s audience better. In a recent leadership strategy review, there was too much focus on the technical implementation. Leaders were looking for a higher level update such as how much risk we’ve been able to reduce over the last quarter.
• Misty should create a succession plan for the leadership bench to make sure we have sufficient coverage if someone needs to be out sick, go on leave, or move to a new role.
• Blaine should stop intervening on pages when they’re not oncall and instead ask if their help is needed first. Though I know being helpful is part of Blaine’s core nature, it can take away learning opportunities from new oncallers or cause confusion for the incident commander.
• Erika is great at increasing the test coverage across the team, resulting in 20% fewer bad releases making it to production this quarter. Erika should continue dedicating her time to this work as it increases the entire team’s development velocity.
• Gary needs to be more aware of the effect of his words on people. I know he meant that last comment in the meeting as a joke, but it missed the mark and alienated some of his coworkers. He should apologize and let them know it won’t happen again.

This is all actually useful! You can follow-up with your manager on the steps you’re taking to implement this feedback. You can ask for coaching or training in a particular area if you understand what you’re supposed to do but don’t know how.

Glitter

Other times you get feedback that might have potential, but it’s not quite actionable. Glitter can be pretty, but it can also be frustrating. Glittery feedback is unlikely to help you make progress. To turn glitter into gold, dig into it. Start asking questions and come from a place of seeking to understand the feedback. Otherwise, it’s just a mess all over your carpet.

Glitter:

• Keep doing what you’re doing!

  • “Can you help me understand what exactly I’m currently doing that you believe makes me the most impactful so I can do more of it?”

  • Gold: Keep doing what you’re doing! Your ability to ask the right questions on design reviews and hold team boundaries on prioritization is really making a difference in our ability to execute as a team, which your last project made clear.

• People enjoy working with you. (Kind, Non-actionable, unspecific)

  • “While that’s always nice to hear, how do you see that showing up in my work?”

  • Gold: People enjoy working with you. Your ability to rally folks during high stress times and keep them focused on the task at hand is a gift. After the incident yesterday, multiple people let me know your leadership made them feel confident in an uncertain situation. We’d love for you to start teaching others how to do that.

• This feature is broken. Here is a bug report. (Your team doesn’t own or control this.) (Specific, Timely, Not Unkind, but also Unactionable)

  • “Thanks! I think you’ve reached the wrong team. I recommend you contact $OtherTeam.”

  • Gold: Silence, because they’re off talking to the correct people.

Garbage

Garbage feedback is feedback that’s rooted in bias or aims to hurt rather than help. Feedback aimed to hurt often comes from those who are hurt, but that doesn’t mean you have to absorb the abuse. For folks who had good intent, but maybe let their emotions get the best of them, they should be able to own up to that and explain or improve their feedback. For folks who didn’t, there are other people that can help you address that. So “good intent” doesn’t make it not harmful, but it should change whether the feedback giver grows from it. Either way, it’s on them, not on you, to do that.

• I’m not sure you’re that technical, but you’re really great at taking notes and being a traffic cop in meetings.

  • This is often reclassifying some core technical skills as something else in order to discount other work, particularly when weaponized against minoritized groups. When we talk about folks who have impostor syndrome, it’s usually from comments like this making them doubt themselves. Toss it.

• It’s okay that you can’t hack it here. Not everyone can be one of the guys.

  • This is patronizing and backhanded, and meant to remind the person of their place relevant to the feedback giver. Pay these goons no attention.

• Your team seems to have really low standards. You have no idea what you’re doing.

  • It’s easy to criticize from the outside without understanding the constraints that got a team into a situation. This is someone frustrated and lashing out.

(Those are all true stories, by the way, just not necessarily my stories.)

Hey, at first some of this might look like glitter. What if it’s about something you’re good at? But none of the above are helpful. If you run into feedback like this, there are a few things you can do.

• Ask them to explain it. Often this immediately triggers a few seconds of reflection on their words.
• Ally up. Ask someone you trust to confront the person. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few people like this for me.
• Talk to your manager about making sure the garbage gets taken out. I’ve seen managers pass on all feedback they receive, but not everything needs passed on (more on that later this month).

Don’t carry around garbage. Do whatever you need to shake it off: I personally opt for a hot cup of tea, a walk, or a few minutes playing with my dog.

Focusing on your garbage just pulls any of your energy or focus that could be spent working on your gold.

Thank you for reading shippo careers. This post is public so feel free to share it.