Using feedback to succeed in your current job… or to get your next one
Hopefully you will have a long and happy tenure in the role, department, or organization where you are currently working. If that’s the case look for tools to solicit and learning from feedback from colleagues that can make you more successful in your current job. However, if for whatever reason things don’t work out, feedback from others in your current role may help you get your next role.
In Five Must-Ask Interview Questions, my recent Wall Street Journal Online article, I suggested that interviewers should skip asking candidates the standard and expected “what are your weaknesses?” question, and instead ask the following five:
- In what ways will this role help you stretch your professional capabilities?
- What have been your greatest areas of improvement in your career?
- What’s the toughest feedback you’ve ever received and how did you learn from it?
- What are people likely to misunderstand about you?
- If you were giving your new staff a “user’s manual” to you, to accelerate their “getting to know you” process, what would you include in it?
These questions are intended to assess a candidate’s self awareness, and openness to, or demonstrated past solicitation of, feedback. To answer these questions in a convincing and compelling manner, it’s necessary to have actually solicited and learned from feedback on many occasions and in many contexts.
To help prepare for this kind of inquiry, you can and should ask for meaningful and specific feedback on an ongoing basis. Some of the questions you should ask your current colleagues, manager, and mentors:
- What are my capabilities and how might I grow them?
- What should my areas of improvement have been and what should they be in the future?
- Ask for candid and even tough feedback at the end of a presentation, project or after any other milestone has, or hasn’t, been met.
- If you’re a manager, ask your team what they wished they had known about you when they first began to work with you or for you.
By asking co-workers about how you are performing and perceived, you can begin to formulate an understanding of when and why the messages you are endeavoring to send get misunderstood, and you can then begin to clarify what you mean to convey. Try to ask for this feedback in a forum where people will feel safe disclosing their honest opinions (tools like Rypple can help here).
If you are committed to continuous professional improvement, you’ll need continuous feedback. This feedback can help you do a better job at the tasks you’re currently performing, and can also help you work more effectively and efficiently, and in a more constructive and collaborative manner. Not only will this learning be beneficial in and of itself, but because it will help you answer interview questions like the ones described above, feedback in your current job will also help you get your next job whenever the time comes for you to move onward or upward in your career.
Photos by tanakawho and nDevilTV. Licensed under CC.
