Ken Blanchard once said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

We couldn’t agree more.

In this article, we’re passing along some of our golden nuggets that may help you and your teams when asking for feedback.

To start, let’s hear from Stephanie. Stephanie is an account manager at her company. She reports to the VP of Sales. Her peers include titles like Director of Sales and Director of Solution Engineering. She works closely with other departments from all across the organization because of her close proximity to customers. Below is what Stephanie had to say about receiving feedback requests.

If I get a feedback request from someone in another department (or even in my same department) and there are five skills they want assessed, I immediately feel a bit defeated. I typically don't have experience with that colleague on ALL five skills.

I have probably REALLY seen that person in action on 1-2 of those five presented skills. And, as a personal preference, I would MUCH rather give more details on those 1-2 skills than try to also speak to the other 3-4 of which I don't have a ton of experience with that individual. 

More importantly, I'm more likely to complete the feedback because I’m not overwhelmed or paralyzed by the time investment.

We strongly encourage cross-departmental feedback, whether initiated by the employee, encouraged by the manager, or assigned directly by the manager. These requests are all about how employees are showing up across the organization and not just in their respective departments, which let's be honest, that's where A LOT of growth happens when colleagues can recognize how they are showing up for others who sit outside of their reporting lines.

The most efficient organizations have incredibly fluid communication and workflows that allow for minimal hurdles when information is transferred both horizontally and vertically. An employee is important to their company because of the responsibilities they achieve as part of their department; we believe that those same employees are even more important because of their ability to collaborate with others who are responsible for other areas of the business.

The learning here is about understanding audience. As a best practice, coach your employees on submitting one request to a few people in their department where those people have likely observed them in very specific ways (since they share the same or similar job roles and responsibilities).

Then, encourage that they submit secondary or tertiary requests based on cross-departmental work and observations of different skills.

In Bridge, the user can modify the name of the feedback request here:

Then, that user would be able to see all of their open and past requests here:

Example. If you work in product and get asked for feedback from a sales team member, you will likely not know what it means to be "good" at negotiating, but you can speak to a time when the two of you partnered with a customer or troubleshot a product request for a prospect.

The skill is not negotiating.

The skill is somewhere in the realm of collaboration, communication, ability to simplify, solution-oriented, etc. Again, empower managers and employees to ask for feedback on one or two skills. Then, hone in on at least five people who have seen that skill in action and can candidly attest to proficiency (or lack thereof) in that skill.

Now, let’s go get some feedback!

If you are an admin looking for ways to best set up your skills feedback settings, we recommend clicking here.