Let's talk about feedback, one of the absolute most powerful forms of self improvement for all of us. It's also going to help us avoid mistakes, it's going to help us make better decisions, feedback is like the secret source, the more feedback you get, the better. And I want to talk to you a little bit about that, but it really starts with culture, right? Because that's the theme of our module. What is the culture? What is the are the penalties for for telling the truth for being honest? Are people really walking the talk? To what extent are we really as leaders or as individual contributors ourselves, working with other people, to what extent are we walking the talk and asking for and expecting degree of feedback? A two way street on the feedback. There's a famous guy named Ray Dalio, maybe some of you heard of him. Ray Dalio, he's one of the founders and chairman of Bridgewater,which is a hedge fund in Connecticut and one of the world's most successful hedge funds. They make gazillions of dollars and he's extremely well off and he's written a bunch, in the last maybe 10 years, written a couple of books. One of them is called radical transparency and it's an amazing idea and I'm going to say right, maybe as a disclaimer before I tell you this story, this anecdote, it's really extreme, but sometimes when you go to the extreme, it helps you go back and say, okay, what's the right thing for me? So this idea of radical transparency is that every single interaction has to be open. They do some things that I'm not going to advocate at all in that company, but it's part of their culture. For example, they videotape every meeting and they have files of everyone in the meetings and then they go back over it to see were you being honest, when you're talking about what you really felt? It's kind of kind of extreme, but there's an important lesson here, Ray Dalio, and he shares this himself, he was doing a town hall at head office and there's, I don't know, 100, 150 people there, and for whatever reason, he was a little bit flat that day and he finishes, he thought he did a fine job, very dynamic leader. And he gets back to his office and he hops onto his email and he gets an email from someone who was there in the town hall who is, a couple of levels, maybe even three or four levels below him, so much younger and less experienced and a much, much smaller job, not one of his direct reports or anything like that. And this person sends a sends this email that he wrote as soon as he got back to his office after the town hall and he says, Ray, you really dialed it in. I was disappointed in how led that town hall and I really thought, I really thought I would get more from you. Now, think about that for a minute. You're telling the CEO of the company, you didn't do such a good job in a town hall and you're just some guys that's there? It's unbelievable. But here's what happened. Ray Dalio reads it and he goes to this guy's office right away not to punish him, but to thank him, to encourage him to put him up on a pedestal to say this is the type of open feedback, this is what it's all about, this what radical transparency really is. And Dalio even says, the next time we do a town hall, I want to set up a time with you to talk ahead of time just to get your feedback and to make sure that I'm dialing this into the place that it needs to be. Can you imagine that? It's such a crazy example for the CEO to be admonished by somebody multiple levels below, and for the CEO to thank that person, and to even give that person a chance to have a bigger role. That's radical transparency for you. So how do we translate that into something maybe more, I'm going to say even more realistic for the vast majority of us where that might be going a touch far or really too far? Well look for, and this we all can do look for opportunities for feedback. Look for as many opportunities to receive feedback as you possibly can. How? Well, I have a complicated method. Ask, just ask somebody, for example, let's say you're in a meeting and you said something in that meeting or you lead the meeting, and you're walking out back to your office and you're talking to somebody next to you and you say, so any thoughts about, what what do you think about how, was I able to get my point across? Do you think that people understood what I was trying to do? And in the space of, it could be 30 seconds, could be a minute, could be five minutes, you're getting some quick feedback and you can call this micro feedback because they're small data points, one after another, after another. And when you ask someone in this example of walking back from the office and asking, you don't ask the question so do you think I did a good job or did I do okay in the meeting? Most people are going to say, yeah, most people are not kind of the Ray Dalio radical transparency world, they're going to say, yeah, you did fine. So that's the question to ask If you don't want any feedback, the question asked if you really do want feedback is could you, could you suggest one or two things I could have done differently or better during that meeting to get my point across? And right away you're changing the game right? Because you're you're giving permission for somebody else to actually say what they're thinking to actually give you that feedback. Now, every single time you get a little bit of feedback it doesn't mean that, you have to change everything about yourself, you have to change the world. These are just data points and like all good thinkers, you want as many data points as you reasonably can process without getting information overload. If you start to see a pattern across some of these data points, when you're asking different people at different times, requesting, asking for feedback about something, you start to see a bit of a pattern, well then there's something to talk about, right? If somebody says something that maybe they think you could have done better, no one else ever says anything like that, well you can decide is that meaningful enough. So really you're collecting data, the main thing is to ask people for permission. You know I I even had this myself not that long ago and actually it didn't take that long for me to notice a pattern in group meetings. Sometimes I I tend to be quiet, I listen which is good, you should be listening and I would offer my own view occasionally, sometimes even even rarely an it turns out that people in these group meetings they wanted to know what I thought and when I wasn't forthcoming, they were left to wonder why. Well is it that he doesn't really care that much about what was going on in the meeting or what was being discussed? And that's the last thing I wanted anybody to believe. I did care a lot, it's just that was that was my style and I realized that I needed to make an adjustment because I started to see that pattern. What that adjustment might mean for you could be completely different than than my anecdote or my example, but you wouldn't know unless you're asking for feedback. So ask for feedback regularly. You can do this in this random way that I described, this micro feedback opportunities. You also could do this a little bit more structured for example, if there's someone that you really trust and she trusts you or he trusts you as well, you could have a regular meeting every, it could be every couple of weeks could be every month even where you you check in with each other and you present or talk about some of the things you're up to and ask for honest direct feedback and you return the favor with each other. So that's something you you can do. And and there are a lot of techniques that you can do to try to accomplish that even by determining a set of questions you want to ask each other. If you yourself want to give feedback to somebody else, there's another little technique and this is the last thing I'm going to say about feedback. You could say for example, let's say I want to give feedback to you even though you're on the other side of your laptop. I might say, do you mind if I shared some feedback to you about how you're doing this course or more realistically if we're in the same meeting or the same location, do you mind if I shared some feedback in other words, you're asking for permission? I have a friend who does this regularly and I learned from him and he has said to me for example, permission to give you feedback professor? Is what he said and he says in a joking way. And yeah, I do want the feedback because right away you're disarming people, right? They could say no, but if they're going to give you permission to give feedback, you can provide that feedback. And that's a way of helping people around you get better as well. So feedback an absolute secret source, not that secret, but it's not used enough. And it's something that you have as a tool, that will help you learn from mistakes more effectively, it help you build the culture that you want in an organization. And most importantly, it will help you become a more effective person and leader on the job and off.
