How Feedback Can Help You Grow Beyond Self-Reflection:
I remain proud of the fact I have continued weekly and monthly reflections for over a year now as I believe it helps me re-calibrate every week or month. It is a way to hold myself accountable and better recall the little wins as well as learn from the mistakes. One drawback that I find is that the reflection is my own point of view and even as we strengthen our empathy skills, we cannot truly know how others think or feel about the same little wins or mistakes that happened in our own lives. How can we truly know what our staff or our team thinks?
To that end, I chose to create a feedback form to share with our instructional and support staff at the end of the school year. This was the first time in four years as the upper school principal that I requested feedback in a survey format. Planning the survey was a great lesson in and of itself while I contemplated the number of questions, scale v open ended, anonymous v non-anonymous. I spoke with staff members about the idea for the feedback form and thought deeply about their suggestions. I considered potential outcomes and goals. Why was I asking for the feedback? How did I intend to use it?
The idea for the survey was shared at a staff meeting along with articles from Medium on feedback and growth and Cult of Pedagogy, Are you brave enough to ask for feedback? We have been discussing the importance of reflection and practicing reflection throughout the year so personal growth is certainly not a new topic for our staff. I explained the survey would be done in non-anonymous format as I felt compelled to know which staff needed more support, which staff felt we were lacking a connection, or which staff wanted me in their classroom more.
The survey was emailed the following day and I thought my rationale for creating the survey and not making it anonymous was clear. That said, the feedback did not yield those results as nearly 70% completed the survey but that left 30% who did not. As I shared with a few individuals, the lack of trust (not wanting to complete it because it was not anonymous) is feedback for me to consider this summer. I like to believe we have a trusting, supportive environment but my perception is not accurate for some which goes back to why I needed to ask for feedback this year.
Themes clearly emerged as I poured through the data and read each response closely. As is my personality, I only focused (highlighted, made notes) on the areas where I need to improve, areas where staff asked me to consider alternative steps or options. I greatly appreciated the comments on what I did well this year but did not dig in as deeply in my first review.
In my second reading of the data, I did focus on the positives, using a different color highlighter. Too often we only focus on the growth areas which can result in us feeling worse about our performance than we did prior to the feedback. The other pitfall of ignoring the positives is the possibility the positives from one year become the negatives the following year because we ignored them (they were already positive, so why pay attention).
I have been fortunate enough to avoid this pitfall throughout the year with my weekly and monthly reflections. When you allow yourself to answer the question, “what went well?” you find an opportunity to build on the positive. A year plus worth of reflection and gratitude practice has helped establish the belief in me that we need to use the positives as a guide to continue providing support to our staff.This does not mean you ignore the growth areas, you simply find a balance. There is a dichotomy in nearly all that we do. Jocko Willink often talks about the dichotomy of leadership in his podcasts and recently published a book of the same name. When you receive seemingly opposite feedback such as “you communicate effectively” and “I wish you communicated more,” you have to dive deeper. Three rounds of data review and disaggregation have given me much to consider.
The “good” news is that based on the feedback, others are viewing my work similarly to me. Again, I fall back to my weekly and monthly reflections which I believe are directly tied to this connection between what I see/feel and what the staff is seeing/feeling. The even better news though is that my growth areas will directly meet the needs of our staff because they provided the feedback. I can be intentional in my goal setting and ensure I am meeting the needs of the staff that were shared with me as opposed to assuming or guessing what is needed. Deeper connections with more staff (recommendation from some staff) will provide more feedback and thus provide more support to our team.
If you already solicit feedback for your team, great job and continue with the practice. If like me, you have been hesitant or have another excuse for why you have not done it, go ahead and take the plunge. You will be better for it regardless of the feedback you get. The positive feedback reinforces the work you are doing and the negative feedback reminds you that there are areas to grow. If you want to be your best self and provide for your team, start soliciting feedback today.
