Every review season is an emotional rollercoaster. Anxiety. Self assessments. Anticipation. Disappointment. As an IC, I felt like how much it impacted me was a personal failure. As a manager, I learned that review season trauma is pervasive.
The worst thing about all of it, I think, is how much people take it out on each other rather than seeing the system for what it is. The games. The performative work. People stepping on each other to get ahead. We’ve all known people who do this. We’ve all seen them get away with it. But they leave a trail of resentment and people who would be happy to see them fail behind them. Do you want to be that person? Before you buy into that as a way to get ahead, it’s worth asking yourself what timeframe do you want to live on? It’s easier to build something that lasts when people trust and want to work with you.
What performance reviews actually are
Performance reviews are the scorecard of capitalism. They measure your value to that specific organization at that specific moment. No more, no less.
It’s not a measure of your worth as a person. Not a measure of your talent or your potential. Just: what are you worth to this organization right now, given the current market conditions, the current priorities, and the current budget.
The goalposts move with market forces. It’s not (just) that the system is unfair – although it can be. It’s that capitalism changes the rules. When talent was a scarce resource, companies promoted in order to retain. Now companies are promoting fewer people not because they suddenly care more about excellence, but because the market shifted, and they can. In the era of mass layoffs, attrition is less likely to be seen as a problem; it’s an exit the company didn’t have to pay severance on.
Getting angry at your manager doesn’t change this. Often they’re the messenger, not the system. Most of them are doing the best they can within constraints they didn’t set and can’t change.
The conflation problem
Performance reviews exist for a reason, and it’s not a bad thing that people get some minimum amount of feedback at least once a year. The problem is that when growth feedback and position feedback come bundled together, it gets emotionally charged.
Growth feedback is useful. “Here’s what you could get better at” is information you can actually do something with. Position feedback is “you’re not deemed as valuable to the org as you would like to be” (or think you should be). That second part carries all the emotional weight. When both kinds of feedback arrive at the same time, people hear the second part louder.
If review season is the only time you hear feedback about your work, that’s a problem. That’s a process-driven minimum, not good management. (Better ongoing is a whole other conversation I won’t get into here.)
The real question: Are you actually growing?
Forget position for a moment. Forget the level, the title, the rating. Ask yourself:
What have you done this year you couldn’t do before?
What have you learned?
What feedback are you getting and are you able to action it?
What do people come to you for advice on?
What problems do you see coming that others don’t yet?
If there are deficits, you need to shore them up. If there are bright spots, consider how you can build on them or apply them more broadly.
The core mistake people make when looking for increased responsibility is thinking more about where they “should” be rather than what is actually being asked of them and what the organization really needs. They ask for the diff to get to where they want rather than focusing on impact. Approach these conversations from a place of genuine curiosity about growth and impact, and you’ll learn a lot more.
Outside the drama of review season, these can be great conversations to have with your manager. Just about growth. Not about position. Once your manager starts “managing your expectations” you’re getting a whole lot less information that could be useful to you.
The market goes up and down, and is well outside of your control. Your own capability and growth – that is within your control, and expending your energy on that has a bigger payoff longer term.
What you can actually control (and what to do about it)
You can control your work and how you approach it. That’s it. That’s what’s in your control.
If you feel undervalued in your current job, maybe it makes sense to check the market. Actually check it. Interview. Get an offer. Or choose not to pursue it because you realize it’s not worth the effort. Either way, you get data.
Sometimes the market validates you; it turns out you could get promoted or paid more elsewhere. Sometimes it shows you the state of things broadly is rough. Both are useful to know.
Own your growth
Caring too much about position in this market will make you miserable.
Companies are less interested than ever in fostering career development. So you need to fill that gap – and more. This means:
Building your own support system beyond your manager
Developing a clearer point of view on what you need to learn
Going toward it
The performance review is the scorecard of capitalism. When you can separate your strengths and career goals from that scorecard, you can step into your own growth—whether that aligns with what the organization wants, or it does not. Make this market the push to be the DRI of your own career. No one else is going to do it for you.
Want help figuring out what you actually want from your career and how to move toward it? Check out DRI Your Career, an 8-week course starting in April. Jean Hsu and I designed it for mid to senior-level engineers who are ready to take ownership of their growth with clarity, confidence, and intention.
One of my coaching clients and I developed this framework to help him think about the kind of impact he wanted to have as a Staff+ engineer, and since then I’ve taken it to other clients and direct reports in a way to think about engineering growth outside of any particular job ladder.
The four growth dimensions are:
Scope
Complexity
Output
Agenda
Scope
What it means: Scope is the size of the problem or responsibility and is relatively straightforward to quantify in LOC (Lines of Code) or people involved.
For ICs, this often goes bug -> small feature -> large feature -> multi-feature project -> …
For managers it’s often TLM (Tech Lead Manager) for small team -> manage team -> manage managers -> manage managers of managers …
Failure mode: The failure mode of growing in scope is often need to control. What is possible to control in a small team or project gets progressively harder over time. Everyone reaches some kind of limit there (admittedly some much later than others).
Inflection point: Figure out how to get the outcomes you are responsible for with different mechanisms than that of control (documentation, setting standards, coaching and mentoring, reporting, pro-active checkins etc).
Opportunity: As scope changes, think about how the way in which you work needs to change. Whilst we might fix a bug using a debugger, it’s much harder to develop a complex feature like that, and so that increase in scope is an opportunity to adapt and grow. This continues as you take on more responsibility; you cannot (effectively) manage managers the way you manage ICs. It’s worth noting that sometimes in our careers we might take a decrease in scope – for example when we change jobs and have to onboard through fixing jobs, or go from managing managers to managing ICs in a smaller organization. In these instances we will also have to adjust our approach to our renewed scope in order to be effective.
Complexity
What it means: Complexity is the difficulty of the problem, and more difficult to quantify – sometimes it takes some amount of domain knowledge to know what is challenging.
For ICs complexity is in the projects, the complexity of the feature, the problem space, or the code base.
For managers complexity is in what is being delivered and how. What is being delivered is the complexity of the product, managing a team building a CRUD app is less complex than managing a team building a more specialized/unique application with a greater variety of client side work. How it is being delivered is the way in which the tean works, for instance a team that has to manage more stakeholders (such as a platform team) may have higher complexity than a product team.
Failure mode: The failure mode of complexity is the continuous increase in complexity. Effective scaling (of an individual or a team) involves the transformation of complexity, where something that was complex is made simpler in such a way that it can be more sharded.
Inflection point: Complexity is often a point where engineers around senior get stuck. Having worked with continuously increasing complexity, they either make things more complex than they need to be, or persist a high level of complexity that needs to be simplified and sharded.
Opportunity: Take a holistic view of complexity – complexity is not just the code, but also the product and environment it exists within. Focus on outcomes to resolve and reduce complexity in such a way that it allows others to be successful.
Output
What it means: Getting things done, or causing things to get done.
For ICs this starts with an initial focus on raw individual output, and progressively shifts to enabling other people over time.
For managers this is the output of your team or org, over time. Over time is important, whilst you can create short term output at the expense of things (underlying work, attrition), you will typically pay for those in the form of lower output later. This means being able to balance an increasing amount of disparate work whilst maintaining a good rate of output consistently.
Failure mode: Short term thinking. Individuals who focus on their own effectiveness at the expense of the team, managers who push short term output at the expense of longer term team functioning.
Inflection point: Recognizing when output needs to happen through other people rather than individually. Balancing short term pressures with longer term impact.
Opportunity: Take a broader view of output, identify where you can overall increase output outside your own individual efforts (through other people, via processes, tooling, architecture etc).
Agenda
What it means: The driving force of what you’re trying to get done. As you progress through an organization you will have to balance a broader agenda, ultimately driving the agenda of the entire organization, and navigating conflicts between that and the agenda of individuals or teams.
ICs often focus on their own work or team, but at Staff and above typically need to hold a larger agenda around an area or domain.
Managers need to fit the agenda of the team within the overall agenda of an organization, tying it to work that impacts the business.
Failure mode: Taking too narrow an agenda that conflicts with bigger agendas. Such as the IC who pursues their own interest at the expense of the overall team, or a manager who is too focused on the team they manage versus taking a “first team” (peer) mindset.
Inflection point: Moments of conflict between an individual or team agenda and an organizational agenda.
Opportunity: Look for places where there is an opportunity to tap into a broader agenda, whether it’s focusing on the team’s needs rather than your individual needs, or the goals of an overall initiative rather than the pressures of the project.
Making it Actionable
When working within a job ladder framework it can be a challenge to 1) separate out evaluative feedback from developmental feedback and 2) truly focus on growth rather than trying to check a box. As such, I hope this can be a neutral tool you can use to consider how you can grow, and what kind of growth would support your actual career goals. It’s fine to enjoy scope more than complexity (and vice versa), the main thing is not to allow something to hold you back by becoming a controlling weakness.
The first step is to identify one of these to actively work on, bring awareness to it, and execute on a plan to deliberately try to improve (whether through stretch assignments or deliberate practice).
The topic that got the most attention in my previous post about being the DRI of your career is the concept of rent versus buy when it comes to managing your career.
Distinguish what your employer rents versus what they buy. I find this particularly relevant when it comes to things like “personal brand”. My employer buys my time, they rent my personal brand. To that end, I’m conscious that whilst it’s part of the value I bring, I don’t want it devalued because ultimately it’s my asset for the long term. This concept also applies to expertise. My expertise is rented, and so I maintain my understanding of what it’s worth, and what is current on the open market. If your job does not match the market in a way that will make it hard for you to find another one, I hope your employer is paying a lot of rent – because they are destroying the market value. At times that might be worthwhile, but often it is not, and people realize that too late.
Here, I’ll expand a little more on how I think about that, but I’d also love your input on how you think about it and what examples you would place in each. Leave a comment, ping me on Twitter, or drop me a note.
Rent
When you “rent” something out, you retain ownership of it – the renter just gets the use of it. As the long term owner of the asset, it’s on you to be conscious of the value, and make sure the renter is not destroying the value long term.
Expertise
Expertise is a key example here. Your expertise is yours. It’s what will help you get your next job, negotiate your salary (oh hai “market value”). Because “professional development” is a core retention strategy in tech, too many people are complacent and outsource this responsibility to their current employer, instead of being strategic in how they consider their own development. This is why there’s discussion about “staying current ” as a developer. We used to hear the phrase “there are a lot of unemployed COBOL programmers”, and now it’s more like, there are a few COBOL programmers, they make a lot of money, largely from banks or the government.
This piece is often where the side project dialog goes off the rails. Should you need to do side projects to get a job? Are open source contributions a requirement? I am a hell no on both these points. However, being strategic about where you invest resources (time and money), and/or developing a habit of deliberate practice can help you develop your expertise and command a higher rent on the market. The extent of that investment is up to you.
I think developers, if they are lucky, can largely get away without thinking too critically about this, because professional development is a core retention strategy of most “good” tech companies. But at smaller companies, levels above senior developer, or in management, training is often limited and deficient, and if the individual doesn’t take control over their own growth they will hit a ceiling.
As a hiring manager, the biggest mistake that I see people making in this realm is the resume that shows “X years of experience” (where X>=6) but when you dig in you see the same 1-2 years of experience again and again. These people top out, stop getting recruiter pings and they don’t know why – but it’s because they didn’t consider how to grow their expertise as they switched (or didn’t switch) jobs.
Brand
There used to be a lot of discussion about “personal branding” and frankly it was nauseating. But, as an individual we all have a “brand” or a “profile”. At a minimum, it’s what’s on your resume, and how you build the narrative of your career. Some companies or roles are detrimental to that. If you work at a company that is materially contributing to (and profiting from) the collapse of society, that may reflect on you.
A common mistake I see is where people have a job title or custom role that does not match the market. Companies sometimes try to pay their “rent” in inflated job titles – I’m extremely skeptical about the value these have on the open market. For a good recruiter or hiring manager, a “VP” or a “Director” job title without an expected scope of responsibility opens more questions than it answers. It’s worth mapping your responsibilities to the expectations of the market periodically, and checking that you’re still generally employable – hybrid roles where people do A and B are particularly susceptible for not meeting the criteria of either A or B externally. An “and role” can be a plus when you do one thing particularly well but have additional skills – for example an engineering manager who does some product work, or a designer who also does some CSS. “And roles” where people do two+ jobs, poorly, do not set people up for success in their broader career.
But for those of us who have a bigger profile, some recognition in the community, the concept of brand goes beyond the resume. In a leadership role or DevRel, but to some extent elsewhere, your profile and ability to attract talent is part of your value to a company. It’s important to remember that you retain ownership of your profile, and that it’s for the long term. You don’t want to be seen as a shill for a company that later turns out to be problematic.
I saw a tweet lately that made me think about this; the company thought they were buying this person’s profile. But she was clear it wasn’t even available for rent.
This point on brand doesn’t apply to everyone, but where it does it’s worth considering carefully. My main point here is: boundaries. Think about how you want to use your profile, what options you want to be available to you, what boundaries you want to set around it. Make sure that you’re balancing between the rent and ongoing market value.
Attention / Context
Attention is also rented. What do I mean by that? Often you work in a particular domain, and you pick up things about it. Maybe you work in fintech and you acquire a bunch of knowledge about financial regulation. Maybe you work on web standards, and acquire a bunch of knowledge about governance. Maybe you work in Open Source and acquire a bunch of knowledge about licenses. Your attention is directed by your domain.
When you leave, you take with you that context and what you learned, and that can help you elsewhere. Personally, I’ve been working in Open Source and building remote teams for a long time – those things have had my attention, now I know a bunch of stuff about them, and that is one less thing anyone has to explain to me when I switch jobs. In another part of my life, I did a bunch of work on presentation software and picked up various things about file formats and rendering. At times, I use these bits of information. It’s like a shorthand; I can more quickly evaluate a resume, or the likely complexity of a project, because I have that domain knowledge.
The win of attention is a little additional curiosity can result in disproportionate amounts of learning given current context. Later, you have these bits of useful information that you can use to accelerate things. Being conscious of how you allocate that can make a difference and make more opportunities available – whether you go deep, or pick up complementary / adjacent contexts. The mistake of attention is when people think they know a domain, but really they know a company. I remember the interview where someone told me they were a “$domain guy” when their understanding seemed very limited to questionable business practices of one particular company which… okay yes, did have a product in that domain.
Buy
If some things are rented, what is bought?
Time
Time is the obvious one, typically part of the working agreement, officially around 40 hours per week. Some jobs are more than that for whatever reason, and should pay more as a result.
The time aspect is interesting, because research shows that in senior roles, they are more likely to be held by men, whose wives are less likely to work. Women in these roles have fewer children, and are more likely to be single (source: HBR, see also: “7 in 10 men who have enough income to put their households in the top 1% of earners have stay-at-home spouses” Qz, “Why promoted women are more likely to divorce” BBC).
What I take from this, is that the time commitment of certain roles is such that it’s extremely challenging for someone to have such a role and be a parent. Those roles are compensated highly because it’s essentially compensating for the time of two people, where one is the “worker” and the other is the person who makes that level of work possible. The US presidency is perhaps the biggest such example, and one of the interesting things about Dr Jill Biden continuing to work at her usual job as a Professor, is that the position of “FLOTUS” (the unpaid second position that comes with POTUS) has to be filled at least somewhat by people who are actually paid… themselves… to do the work.
Working in a distributed context for years, the biggest mistake people make with time is that they don’t manage it well. Some people cannot cope with the flexibility, they fail to give themselves the structure they need to be effective. The other failure mode is the opposite – people struggle to disconnect from work, overwork, and burn out (for more on this topic, see: Figuring out Remote Work is Figuring out Work).
Energy
I include energy as distinct from time, as I think it’s what explains the continual gap between the hours that people work, and the hours that people think they work (much more). My theory is that when people think about how much they work, they count the energy that they spent. When they track the time, it’s more concrete. So a long dinner with friends is definitely not counted as “work time”, but if you’ve had a shitty week and spend half of it emoting… it counts energetically.
Dysfunctional environments are an energy drain way beyond the time commitment, and typically way beyond what you are actually compensated for. Thinking about it this way is an encouragement to set boundaries, or – if they aren’t respected – draw lines (like turning the phone off, or ultimately look for another job).
Adherence
Adherence is the agreements we make as part of any employment contract. Some jobs don’t allow people to do any programming/writing/speaking externally, and this can be a lot to give up. Maybe you have to live in a certain place, work out of an office, etc. In distributed contexts, travel used to be one aspect of adherence. When hiring at my last job, we would be super clear: 49 weeks of the year, you are wherever you like. 3 weeks of the year, you need to make travel work. It wasn’t for everyone, but I think that is normal and expected; not everything is for everyone.
If your employer is buying adherence, then it needs to be reasonable. Perhaps no amount of money would make you go back to an office – totally get it, but if your employer thinks they have paid for that, you are going to have to figure a way out of that disagreement that may well involve finding a new place to work. Personally, I can’t imagine selling my ability to write and code for fun ever again, but earlier in my career I made that trade-off for a while, and paid for it later.
Trade offs
Thinking about career decisions this way, you can consider different tradeoffs and options that work best for you at any given time. As an employee, it’s typical to allocate more time, more energy, and in return typically receive higher levels of investment in expertise – this helps people grow more, and ultimately earn more over time. The benefit of different working relationships, like contracting, is often to set stricter boundaries around time and energy, which can free people up for other things (or just maximize short term income). I can’t emphasize enough that all choices are valid and that people operate from wildly different constraints, many of which perpetuate systematic inequity. My question is: are you making those choices mindfully? And do they work for the life and career you want?
Slides and commentary for a talk I gave (internally) to Qz in Q4 20202.
When I think about growth, I think about drowning rats and boiling frogs. Because this is what growth often feels like – or looks like – especially when it’s hard and not going particularly well. The rat drowning school of growth is to throw someone in the deep end and let them figure it out. If they do, they’ll be a good swimmer. The frog boiling school of growth is to gradually turn the heat up so the frog doesn’t notice, and if they survive they’ll be heat resistant…
This metaphor sounds violent, and yeah, it’s less than ideal. But what I like about it is that hard periods of growth feel difficult. These metaphors capture the feeling of “can I do this?” and “can I sustain this?”
For all I like to write about – and practice – what good management looks like, the reality is that most managers aren’t that good, and even good managers, operating under their own set of pressures, aren’t good for everyone all of the time. Very few people get everything they need to be successful, when they need it. Everyone has their moments where they are struggling. If we’re lucky, these are the moments where we learn most of all. If we’re not, they are moments where the best thing we can say about them is “I survived”.
The question is – particularly right now, when almost everyone is finding life harder than it used to be – how do make it more likely that we learn and grow as much as possible? What resources can we draw on?
Professionally, whether we are growing or stagnating is the gap between our Capability vs what is required of us.
Capability smaller than requirements = hard growth
Capability bigger than requirements = stagnation
Requirements a bit bigger, but with help = sweet spot
Hard to find the sweet spot of growth, let alone sustain it. Can also go between periods of hard growth and recharging periods closer to our comfort zone. Don’t necessarily see real growth even month on month, but year on year. Also, might be growing in different ways – e.g. in depth rather than breadth.
Growing through necessity – stretching. Adding necessary capability to succeed at what we’re currently doing.
Growing from comfort zone – courses, side projects. Growing in the ways that interest us, laying groundwork for what’s next.
There’s a great book by Marcus Buckingham, called Now, Discover Your Strengths (Amazon). In it, it has the concepts of strengths and controlling weaknesses. The idea is that everyone has weaknesses, and often those weaknesses are the flipside of people’s strengths. They are only a problem if they are limiting factors for someone’s growth, a “controlling weakness”.
Great managers: focus on developing strengths, and when they work on weaknesses it’s just to build them up so they are no longer controlling.
Coming back to growth is being out of your comfort zone with help, what kinds of help are available?
Mentoring – teach to swim (maybe in swimming pool)
Active help – give a life raft
Coaching – view from the bridge – what can you see? What can you find? What can you make? (Get to small rock, build a makeshift boat, sail off to sea)
Therapy – in a puddle but think you’re drowning
Management, go between all of these (except for therapy!)
The problem people have when they start with coaching is that it requires patience, and seems inefficient.
Why don’t you tell me what to do?
Why don’t you help?
Co-active model of coaching says: client is capable, whole, and resourceful.
I can’t tell you what to do – you know better.
I can’t help – I’m not there.
At the start of any coaching relationship, we talk about “designing the alliance” – setting the parameters of the relationship. This comes up, along with confidentiality, and how to work with someone effectively. Designing the alliance is a really powerful concept in coaching that personally I use to define a lot of my professional relationships. It’s the agreement for how you plan to operate together.
The first step of being more coachable is being open to the process. Someone is trying to help you figure out how to be your best self. It’s not about helping you, but about growing your capability. This is inherently uncomfortable. Sometimes the people who are the best at coaching others are the hardest to coach. They understand the process well enough to evade it. The best book I’ve read about this is Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) – it’s about doing this in therapy, but similar things apply.
In terms of approaching growth, coachability is made up of two factors: receptiveness to feedback, and how highly actionable you are (what you do with it).
What makes someone highly receptive to feedback? We can easily identify people who aren’t receptive to feedback. They:
Respond defensively.
Blame others, and are reluctant to take any responsibility (everything is someone else’s fault).
Discount the value of the input or person giving it.
In contrast, people with high receptiveness to feedback:
Listen and work through what the feedback is.
Are self-aware and prepared. They can fit the feedback into their mental model and adjust it accordingly.
Believe they can learn from everyone.
Similarly, we know exactly what people not acting on feedback looks like. People who are low actionable in response to feedback:
Make minimal changes or adjustments.
Make any changes they do make slowly.
Are very literal (apply same feedback to other situations without nuance).
But what does highly actionable look like? People who are highly actionable in response to feedback:
Experiment, iterate, and change behavior (both in response to explicit feedback, and implicit feedback, and also because they are continually looking to try things and improve).
Return to those interested with things they are trying / have tried and solicit input on how it’s working.
Seek out other perspectives and information to learn more.
You can think of these two dimensions as a quadrant.
It’s worth noting that we should be in different quadrants with different people high-trust-high-respect relationships will be further up and to the right and low-trust-low-respect relationships will be down on the left. This is understandable, and to a certain extent healthy. Whilst we can always learn from feedback, even that given in bad faith or with an agenda, we need to consider some input (from low trust sources) more carefully than we do from people who we know care about us and want us to be successful.
Let’s talk about coaching in each quadrant of how people take feedback.
Highly actionable && highly receptiveness: This might seem like the ideal, and on some level it is, but taken too far these things can lead to someone over-indexing on what everyone else is thinking, which can make them too reactive and appear a bit chaotic or inauthentic. This is the quadrant with least friction, so giving feedback in this quadrant should feel – and be – really minor and contain a lot of affirming or validating feedback that what the person is doing is working. Take a curious mindset and encourage self reflection, support them in thinking critically about what feedback means and what they want to do with it.
If you’re the person in this quadrant everything feels very clear. It’s easy to fit feedback into your mental model, and adjustments feel natural and build on what you’re currently working on. This comes from having a good idea yourself about what is happening and how you think you can improve.
Highly actionable && low receptiveness: You have to really work to get this person to take feedback, but when you do they do so much with it that it makes it worthwhile. Work on understanding why this is – are they scarred by too much bad feedback in the past? Do they struggle to trust your opinion (or that you have their best interests at heart?) – work on building that trust with them. Try asking for their opinion and show you value it, in return.
In this quadrant it can feel like the feedback doesn’t fit into your mental model, often your self-identity. If it did, you’d act on it, but it conflicts with the other information you have. The first step to moving forward is to reconcile that conflict.
Low actionable && highly receptiveness: This can be frustrating – it seems like they’ve taken the feedback well, but then… nothing happens. Dig into why that is. Are they overwhelmed? Do they not know what to do? Make sure you set time to follow up post feedback and agree on concrete steps, and follow up on them regularly.
If you’re in this quadrant you feel a bit stuck. The feedback you’re getting makes sense and feels clear but… you you can’t act on it for whatever reason. The first step is figuring out what’s stopping you.
Low actionability && low receptiveness: Coaching people in this quadrant is like banging your head against a brick wall. Generally it’s a place where I try not to spend my time. In this quadrant, you need to be very direct and concrete in what you want to see. Focus on getting a single concrete change, and accept that you may never do more than that.
This quadrant is a miserable place to be. How does someone get there? The two ways I’ve seen (nice, capable) people end up in this quadrant are:
Being completely over their head, maybe because they are so lacking in capability for whatever situation they’re in
Or they’ve been bullied.
If you recognize you’re in this quadrant, and I really hope none of you are, then it’s time to consider how that is situational – and how to change the situation.
If you’re being coached, consider how you’re likely to hold yourself back and what you can ask for to get the most out of the relationship. If you think the feedback is fair, but don’t know what to do with it, ask for concrete suggestions and hold yourself accountable to them. If you’re struggling with the feedback, consider if you can take that struggle elsewhere, or be open about why that is.
There’s a great book called Thanks for the Feedback (Amazon) that I really recommend, and one of the things there is that it talks about your first score – the feedback – and then your second score – what you do with that. People who do well at the second score, will get better and better over time. This is the core of the growth mindset.
Like everything else, we can work on becoming more coachable. This is a really powerful catalyst for individual growth, with really strong long-lasting effects—because coachable people are easier and more rewarding to help, they get more help and do more with it.
So how do we do that? Five ideas.
1. Build your self-awareness
The most exhausting people to give feedback to are those who are so invested in some image of themselves that you can never really talk to them—only their ego. The easiest people to give feedback to are those with few self-illusions, and a level of self-worth such that they don’t find it threatening to know what they can improve.
In short, the more self-aware you are, the more people can connect with you and not the story you need to tell about yourself. Self-awareness is often hard won, but professional coaching can help, as can therapy and good friends who are willing to call you on your bullshit.
2. Broaden your perspective
Broadening your perspective helps you see things in different ways, to be more open to possibilities outside your world view. Three good ways to help with this:
Read a broad array of fiction. Reading fiction makes people more empathetic, especially if it involves a broad variety, written by people who are not like you. Memoirs can also be good for this (two I read recently and loved: Becoming by Michelle Obama and How to Be Alone by Lane Moore – both links Amazon).
Cultivate a broader network of people. Start by expanding the choices of voices you listen to on social media; over time, try and broaden your friendship circle. It’s worth noting you probably have to make more effort to become friends with people who are less like you, and do more of the emotional labor.
In other times I suggest travelling outside your comfort zone, but maybe that’s just life in 2020 now.
3. Shed your defensiveness
As a rule, I try to never defend myself when someone gives me feedback. Defensiveness either shuts the conversation down or makes it about your feelings rather than what the person is trying to tell you. Try and accept that anyone who cares enough to try and give you feedback is not setting out to upset you; offer context they might be missing, yes, but remember that too much context is just a nice way to defend yourself. You will learn a lot more from the conversation if you ask questions and “get curious” instead.
Importantly, you don’t have to respond in the moment. You can take time to process—maybe work through your defensiveness with someone else—and come back to the person to continue the discussion. Removing pressure to respond in the moment can help you avoid being defensive, and give you space to decide what part of the feedback is useful to take. Remember, the second score is the most important one.
4. Own up
If you can admit what you’re bad at, the conversation starts with what you want to get better at, rather than forcing the feedback provider to convince you this is a thing you need to work on. When you start with a self-assessment that demonstrates self-awareness, a lack of defensiveness, and empathy for how your actions and stress fall on others, people are much more inclined to believe that their feedback will be heard and acted on constructively.
5. Ask for advice
Often people are afraid to give feedback for fear of upsetting us, and are particularly unwilling to risk this if they think we are doing well overall. Their assumption can also be that they have nothing to add, or that they are missing too much context to be useful.)
For most people, it’s easier to give advice than feedback, so try asking for that instead. This can be as simple as, “what would you try?”
This is a great topic for this timeline, if we come back to drowning rats, the water is rising, there are fewer life rafts around. There may be nothing we can do about the practical realities – we’re still working from a place unsuited to it, with various distractions and a deep underlying current of existential dread. The purpose of coaching or mentorship is not to ignore these things, but to expand our capacity even as we carry those weights.
I want to end this talk with a story, about someone I know, he’s a software engineer at Apple now.
He moved to the US from Jamaica, and he taught himself to code. As he was looking for entry level developer jobs, he saw something I tweeted about calls with under-indexed folk in mobile, and he booked one with me. He asked me for help on technical interviews, and I did a couple of things. Firstly, I bought him a book. Secondly, I did a couple of practice interviews with him and gave him feedback. Thirdly, I made an introduction to Glowforge, the company where I’m an advisor, and got him an interview.
I gave him practical help – a life raft. Because that’s really what most under-indexed people need when they try to break into this industry. But here’s the thing – I did a lot of those calls, and he’s the only person I heard from again after the first one. The only person who ever came back around and followed up. So each time he came back, I gave him a little more, and each time he multiplied it. He went to work at Glowforge, learned a ton there, and now he works at Apple. I really could not be prouder of him and everything he’s done.
He makes a point to tell me that I changed his life, which is, of course, really cool. But he is the person who showed me what it looks like to maximize what you get out of every such interaction, how to do the most with the life raft, the swimming lesson, and the view from the bridge. When I think about who I want to spend my time on, I look for people like him who will multiply whatever I give them and really make the most of it, and that’s the kind of person I try to be in turn.
I covered a lot of things today, the framework of coachability, the different things we can do to improve. Here’s the one thing I want you to take from this time together: as you go into any mentoring, coaching situation, your next 1:1 with your manager, consider, how can you get the most value out of these interaction? What do you need to ask for? And how can you get out of your own way?
