By Stefan Auvache
“True words are often unpleasant; pleasant words are often untrue.” - Lao Tzu
For better or for worse, you get to choose who you listen to and who you ignore. Parents, friends at school, the YouTube comments section—these are sources of feedback, and there is a lot of noise out there. If you do anything at all, someone will have something to say about it.
Not all sources of feedback are created equal. Some sources are reliable, others aren’t. Some sources give quality, candid feedback while others sugar-coat everything to the point of uselessness. There are several qualities that make or break the reliability of a feedback source. Here are a handful of the most important.
As a young musician, Bruce Springsteen relied on the people at his shows for feedback on how the band sounded. As it turned out, a live concert doesn’t give you great feedback for how your songs sound on the radio. When he finally heard his songs played back to him on tape, he realized that a live show and a studio recording are two very different things.
Sources need to be specific to what you want to improve. You can’t just play to the void and expect useful feedback to come knocking on your door. Define what you want to improve and who you want to improve it for, then find a source that matches those criteria. Find specific, relevant sources.
Be careful with how you define expertise. A consultant with an MBA and a business license might be more qualified to give you feedback on your business model than one of your customers, but a long-time customer is probably more qualified to give you feedback on your customer service than an outside consultant.
Expertise has more to do with experience than credentials. While credentials indicate some level of expertise, they don’t guarantee it. Experience comes in different ways, and it is experience that makes a feedback source useful. Make sure that your sources are qualified to give you feedback.
Did you ever play the game telephone as a kid? You whisper something in your friend’s ear, then they whisper it in someone else’s ear, and eight whispers later the message is totally different than how it started (let the giggling commence). It is a funny game with silly results. Unfortunately, it is also the basis of customer support for many businesses.
Imagine you have to click the login button four or five times to access your bank account. It is frustrating enough that you send a message to customer support and request that they fix the problem. Customer support thanks you for bringing it up, then relays the message to a technical team to investigate the issue. That team escalates the issue and sends it to engineering, who sends it to marketing, who sends it to design, who sends it back to engineering. Three weeks after you filed your complaint, the button is a different color and has been moved to the other side of the page, but you still have to click it five times for anything to happen.
Feedback becomes a little less specific and a little less accurate every time it changes hands. If you want a useful source of feedback, get close to it. The shorter the chain between you and your source, the better.
Related to the distance between you and your source is feedback rate—how fast the source can give you feedback. Some sources of feedback take their sweet time even if you have a direct connection to them. A boss who waits for a yearly performance review to give employees feedback will not have the same impact as a boss who offers correction and praise when the opportunity organically arises. Fast feedback informs decision-making and action, which leads to more feedback.
Lao Tzu once said, “True words are often unpleasant; pleasant words are often untrue.” If the sources you choose give you sugar-coated, makes-you-feel-good feedback without pointing out the things you need to fix, they will actively stifle your improvement. Find sources that will give you honest, candid feedback. Incentivize honesty and objectivity. Avoid conflicts of interest.
A feedback loop is only as good as its source.
Where do you go for feedback?
Get timeless principles for modern life, once a week, directly to your inbox.
Subscribe to Food For Thought today.