Growing through Feedback

Asking for feedback from others is akin to assessing their needs.   For example, your boss may ask you to complete an evaluation survey to find out how they can better serve you as their employee.  Or, you may prompt your clients to reflect through a few written questions in order to figure out next steps for working together.  I like to think of feedback as the information given (back) as a result of an experience (which was designed to feed someone’s mind).  

Generally, the goal in seeking feedback is to either assess a current situation, or improve a future one.   Whether you gather feedback through questioning, surveys or another assessment format, it’s important to be clear on the purpose and intention of the information you gather.  

The purpose can be thought of as a long term end goal.  The intention is like an objective, and is often very specific.  Your purpose for obtaining feedback will generally align with the mission of your company or organization.  Your feedback prompts and questions will generally reflect your intent.  For example, you may aspire to improve delivery by showing an increase in participant ratings from a 3 to 4.  In this case, improving delivery is your purpose and higher ratings are the intent.

Another factor to take into consideration is where you are personally with processing feedback. Your perspective will influence your intention, and also how you receive feedback.

Here are three examples of how my perspective of feedback has shifted over the past decade, growing from a desire to be a better educator, to aspiring to impact greater change.  

1. Other People’s Opinions / Understanding the Self: My career has formally spanned 13 years.  In the first 3-4 years I used feedback from students and adult learners to help me hone my craft as an educator.  During this time I had an insatiable desire for feedback because I wanted to become better, and the feedback guided changes I made in my practice.  I became better by learning more about who I was as a facilitator, and that reflection was given to me through feedback.  
2. Other People’s Experience / Understanding Others:  During the middle of my career, feedback helped me learn more about my client.  I reached a level of confidence in my craft that allowed me to shift the focus onto those people impacted by my work.  I sought to understand how people experienced learning and also what motivated them through learning.
3. The Shared Experience / Serving Others: The past few years, my interest in the work has shifted to a more global perspective, as I seek to discover ways to impact educators on a broader scale through professional development.  As you can imagine, the feedback I seek at this point is focused on ascertaining a greater need of not only clients, but the environments that shape their experiences in the industry, and the elements within that space that contribute to the client’s growth.  The feedback I design at this stage comes more from informal assessments of the client’s experience, rather than direct and concrete feedback prompts.

As my career and personal mission grew, so did my relationship with feedback.  You can say that my taste buds matured as the information I wanted fed back to me developed.

​What are your people feeding you back?  Your gathering of data needs to be purposeful and designed with intention in order to help you and your grow.