sf transplant notes p2, giving feedback well
Anna's Newsletter Mar. '24
Hello friends,
I moved to SF in September, and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in years.
Life in New York moved at a fast clip, everything chopped into pieces. SF is far less urgent and I find that I am more often in a state of flow (wu-wei?), induced by:
Going on extremely long walks and runs. I go on 2-3 hour jaunts every weekend, bursts of running, walking, around Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, Crissy Field, Fort Point, and Land’s End. (Is there anywhere in New York that smells as lovely as the groves in GGP? California’s smells are underrated.)
Cooking and making food for people. I have loved to cook since I was young, but not in New York. We had no counter space, and an apartment too small for a dinner party. In SF, we have a lovely kitchen with an island and beautiful views of the rows of Victorians laddering up to Buena Vista Park, and I take a lot of pleasure in un-rushedly trying a new recipe on the weekend or cooking for my friends.
Spending time at home. In New York, my apartment was too tiny to feel comfortable lounging around, and there was a constant sense of FOMO. In California, there’s less rush to be out - nature will be here for hundreds of years, unlike a musical artist there for one weekend. Much less urgency.
Listening to the same music over and over again. I’ve been obsessed lately with fado music - the mournful Portuguese genre of women singing over guitar for their lost loves. I listen to the same 12 songs probably an hour a day; only the sad ones.
One challenging adjustment from NYC is dressing. My wardrobe is impractical; I don’t own a basic down jacket or good rain jacket. In NYC, I could nab an umbrella or rush from the subway to my office or to a restaurant if I was feeling cold. In SF, I’m unprepared. Please send recommendations my way.
Surely some of this is not just SF but also getting older, now that I’m in my late 20s. Too hard to sort out which is which.
Giving feedback well
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes for effective feedback at work. A few experiences recently struck me.
At Rippling, I manage a team. Recently I was left one of my direct reports an absurd number of comments on a document that needed a lot of work. Later, I thought back and felt bad about it. Remembering the most useful feedback I’d gotten when writing for the Review, it wasn’t endless comments, but a few paragraphs of distilled feedback at the top of the essay. Ashamed at my lazy reaction, I went back and wrote a synthesis. She told me it was very helpful.
I also had an experience that pissed me off to no end - this time, I was on the other side. A coworker went through a doc I’d spent a lot of time on - an update on an initiative for our CEO - and added over a hundred highly tactical comments - wording edits, asking for more details on random parts of it, etc. I was frustrated because the feedback, while looking comprehensive on the surface, included no reaction to the insights in the doc or how well the document accomplished the purpose it was intended to.
People do not arrive at your company, sadly, fully formed, and beyond choosing them well, so giving feedback seems like one of the most important things you could be good at. While it varies person to person, there are a few themes I’ve noticed as particularly effective:
Feels like storytelling
Mutually exploratory, not controlling
Sought out by the recipient
Storytelling: Like many things in life, much of giving effective feedback seems to come down to being good at storytelling. Maybe it’s just how my brain works - very deductive rather than inductive - but I’ve understood feedback much better when it fit into a story of my career or the business. How the way they ran that meeting is an example of a broader theme you are coaching them on. Why this topic matters to the business and what that implies about what should be included in a performance update. Therefore a synthesized summary is more helpful than a set of tactical comments.
Mutually exploratory. Feedback should be a mutual attempt to arrive at the “best” version of something, not one-sided shoving your interpretation of the world down the recipient’s throat. I read a speech recently by Carl Rogers, a therapist prominent in the 50s and 60s who originated much of the self-acceptance school of therapy. At a conference of teachers at Harvard, he gave an edgy speech essentially dismissing their profession. He said that “the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful,” and the only learning which actually influences behavior is “self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.”
When you synthesize your feedback into a narrative, you can state what you think is true, and invite discussion. Rogers has another quote that I like: “I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.” Feedback should spark reflection and discussion, which usually doesn’t happen when you’re mindlessly accepting a bunch of Google doc suggestions.
This is especially important in more subjective areas like developing your style as a manager or determining what projects to prioritize. But even when you’re trying to coach someone on the “substance” of a job, like writing better, you clearly speed up their development when you explain the “why” - “this is why I suggested you cut these words,” not just redlining.
It’s also just tough not to react badly to feedback that doesn’t invite discussion.
Must be sought out by the recipient. I think that top performers are intensely self-motivated, almost don’t need to be managed, and intensely seek out feedback. They are very self-aware. They have intuitions for where they’re uniquely strong and weak, they constantly notice opportunities to add value, and they almost “manage their managers” - setting the agenda for 1-1s, extracting value for themselves. For example, if they know they’re weak in an area, they’ll ask their manager for more frequent tactical feedback to improve, or if there’s an area they want to develop, they’ll ask for opportunities.
This implies that one of the worst mistakes you could ever make in hiring is to hire someone who doesn’t care about their own growth, and isn’t striving to be better.
What has made feedback effective for you? Please share with me!