Feedback from managers could be misinterpreted by team members. Here is one possible misinterpretation –
Imagine you had a feedback session with your manager. Your manager listed 5 items under “areas to focus on and improve”.
Since there were a bunch of things to work upon, you pick up 2 items from the list.
How do you pick up the items? Largely intuition
Intuition based on –
a) what you think you lack the most
b) what you think your role considered the most important.
You start working on those two items.
A month later you check in with the manager (luckily you did not wait for the next appraisal season). To your surprise, the manager felt disappointed with the lack of progress based on his/her feedback.
You point out the two “most important” things you have improved. Your manager acknowledges this but still didn’t feel convinced.
Why?
There are 2 possibilities that invariably occur together-
a) Your manager’s order of priority in the list is different from what you thought were the priorities
b) You thought that all the items carried equal weightage. But the manager’s thought process was different. For example, a couple of items were minor observations that the manager didn’t mostly care about and presented as more of a “nice to have”.
What should one do to avoid this situation?
During the feedback meetings, do the following –
a) Ask the manager to assign priorities to the feedback. Alternatively, you can share your order and ask him/her to validate the order.
b) Ask the manager to distribute 100 points across the action items that tells you the relative importance of each item
Follow this across your career and you would be surprised at how many times there are mismatches. These mismatches sometimes are great opportunities to recalibrate your role for better career growth.
For example, your manager might be prioritising it for your future career growth rather than for the current role.
If you are the manager, don’t wait until your team members ask for priority and relative importance 🙂
