What People Say Isn’t Always What They Mean

Beware taking feedback too literally.

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Feedback is a gift, or at least that is something people say. I agree that genuine, honest feedback is always valuable. Unfortunately, in my experience, it’s in short supply.

For example, a common kind of feedback is an exit interview. When an employee is leaving a company, someone (usually HR) sits down with them to get feedback on the company and their experience. This feedback is collected and provided back to the team.

Now, you might think that this kind of feedback is enormously valuable! Knowing why someone left might help you know how to keep other employees from leaving in the future. Unfortunately, in my experience, that is rarely true. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and once someone has made the decision to leave that becomes the filter through which they see the world. Exit interviews over-emphasize problems and downplay strengths. The person giving the exit interview has decided to leave so to them, it’s clear everyone should do the same. You do not get clear, honest feedback in these cases, you get a distorted and biased view of the world.

This is a common problem across almost all kinds of feedback! Sometimes the bias is positive, and sometimes it’s negative and sometimes it’s both. If you ask someone for feedback on a new product, their initial reaction is to try not to insult you and downplay their negative opinions. Or, they will compare your product to something unrelated and be nothing but negative. Either way, you aren’t getting an honest assessment.

Still, feedback is critical! Without it, it’s hard to understand how others are thinking and understanding the world around us. So how do we make use of feedback if so much of it is warped and distorted?

Here’s my simple game plan:

• Get a lot of feedback. Never trust a single piece of feedback, but you can trust common themes from mountains of feedback. When we are developing new products, I look for ~100 interview sessions to gather feedback. I don’t trust any one of those conversations, but from the entire corpus we can extract insights. Similarly, don’t trust a single exit interview but look for trends if you have dozens of them. You need significantly more feedback than you think to get any insights.

• Look for what is not being said. While people rarely understand their own bias, you can see it in the things they don’t share. If someone has nothing good to say, their bias is negative. If someone has only good things to say, well you get the idea. For example, if an employee fails to take any responsibility for their own failure then you aren’t getting a true perspective.

• Gather a diverse set of viewpoints. When gathering feedback, you want to gather it from many different people with different perspectives. Don’t just gather feedback from employees that are leaving, ask for it from current employees and potential hires during the recruiting process. If you have enough different perspectives, the bias in any one of them will become clear.

It sounds like a lot of work to gather mountains of feedback and spend the time to extract the signal from the noise. That’s because it is! Gathering feedback is not something you do causally, it’s a difficult job that requires focus and effort. If you aren’t putting in the work, you aren’t really getting feedback.

So, is feedback a gift? Only if you put in the work to make use of it! Make feedback gathering a habit, not something that happens to you. If you do, then the insights you extract really can be a gift.

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For more on Company Culture, see:

• The Downside of Optimism

• Where do Corporate Politics Come From?

• Transparency is Hard to Do Well

• When Perceptions Become Reality

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