"The key to a good life is ... giving a f*ck about only what is true and immediate and important." – Mark Manson
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If you are certain that constantly soliciting, encouraging, enabling, receiving, and incorporating feedback is a useful methodology for achieving success, then you are certainly a fool.
If you are certain that collecting feedback is the optimal means of validating your product, or your mission, or your performance, or the performance of others, or your existence, stop. It's time to abort, now, before you do any more damage to your self, your working relationships, or your goals.
Feedback can be useful, with emphasis on can, however...
The continuous pursuit of feedback as some kind of golden path to improvement and enlightenment is a fad, a gimmick. It has roots in Ray Dalio's cultish notions about "radical transparency" and similar self-improvement and self-help nonsense.
Like most gimmicks, "radical transparency" – exposing yourself to brutal, candid feedback in the workplace, and suffering it gladly – can be manipulated to serve other, unforeseen ends, like feeding Ray Dalio's ego.
But because Dalio is a hedge fund billionaire, his oddball theories on perpetual feedback are perceived as highly sane, and praise-worthy. Why? Because to be immensely wealthy and influential is to be righteous: such is the coda of the sycophant who, lacking confidence in his or her convictions, craves only praise validation (J.T. O'Donnell's article published in Inc. magazine).
Here's some feedback on pursuing performance feedback: Here’s some feedback on pursuing performance feedback: At best, it’s unhelpful. At worst, it’s bad religion and you shouldn’t rely on it to motivate yourself, prioritize your work, shape your interactions, or chart your future.
Marshall Buckingham and Ashley Goodall write, in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, that while individual instruction tends to accelerate learning and make people better at their jobs, feedback – telling people what we think of their performance – "doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning."
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I had a boss who insisted that his directs should follow up each meeting or interaction, especially with senior leadership, with an earnest request for feedback. Is there anything I could have done better? Did I come off as engaged? Was my tone respectful? Are my contributions meaningful? Lacking confidence in himself, he also lacked confidence in his employees.
Constant requests for feedback can convey a lack of confidence and purpose. In other words it can be annoying. Ask yourself this, if constantly collecting feedback on your performance is a constructive pursuit, why do people look away when they see you approaching in the hallway? Is it because they are afraid you will ask them for feedback on your performance in that last meeting, in that last email, in that last Slack message? Oh god, here comes the cloying feedback guy – ok, just keep moving – please, please don't talk to me!
Some additional feedback: you may be spending too much time beachcombing the office for feedback and not enough time getting stuff done.
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If what I'm saying here resonates with you, then you are likely familiar with a corporate culture preoccupied with employees "feedbacking" on each other. What Buckingham and Goodall expose in their HBR article may help you suffer through this trend-du-jour:
"Humans are unreliable raters of other humans," so human feedback "is more distortion than truth." This is especially true when performance feedback is provided anonymously, and the feedback giver can shape the feedback to benefit their own agenda.
Perpetual feedback obsession incorrectly assumes that human "feedback contains useful information, and that this information is the magic ingredient that will accelerate someone’s learning." Which is bull. Learning is a highly individualistic pursuit. Each one of us goes about it differently. But we don't learn and achieve success through external criticism; we learn and achieve success via incremental course corrections -- i.e., adjusting to failure. "Focusing people on their shortcomings doesn’t enable learning; it impairs it."
Feedback should be provided judiciously. Take opportunities to reinforce positive behavior and problem solving that paves a way to excellence. It's how and when feedback is provided, not the frequency of it, or the depth and breadth of it (e.g., 360 reviews) that matters. "... you see one of your people do something that worked for you, that rocked your world just a little, stop for a minute and highlight it. By helping your team member recognize what excellence looks like for her—by saying, 'That! Yes, that!' —you’re offering her the chance to gain an insight; you’re highlighting a pattern that is already there within her so that she can recognize it, anchor it, re-create it, and refine it. That is learning."
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The point here is simple: don't ask for performance feedback because you feel obligated to do so. Even if the feedback is sincere, it doesn't mean it's valuable. If you find yourself caught up in a perpetual performance feedback loop of someone else's making, ask yourself what the subjugation of your individuality and the manipulation of your insecurities in the pursuit of praise validation is doing to your soul.
There is an antidote to this madness, and it lies in the work quoted at the top of this article. Done with the feedback doom loop? Good. You're ready to immerse yourself in Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach To Living a Good Life. Consider it a detox tank for the feedback obsessed.