It makes sense that we stress when we don’t know where we stand with our colleagues and students. Our livelihoods and our families depend on our jobs. Our jobs often depend on us being well thought-of by those we work with and teach. 

This creates a challenge because we can’t control what others think of us. We may do a thousand things right, but the one instance where we make a mistake can become someone else’s whole story about us. We may not even realize that we made a mistake, much less that this mistake is coloring someone’s entire view of us. We often rely on body language and offhand comments to know where we stand, while having a sense that neither are very reliable. 

The stress of not knowing where we stand can be intense.1 For this reason, regular opportunities to ask for and receive feedback from our supervisors, mentors, and students can create a meaningful sense of stability. Frequent check-ins can take a lot of the fear out of dreaded end-of-year or end-of-semester evaluation. Yet, they are only truly helpful if the feedback is of a high quality. If all you hear every week is “You’re doing fine,” that may remove some anxiety, but you might also wonder what the person is really thinking. 

Feedback that gives us a sense of certainty about where we stand and how we can grow—truly high-quality feedback—depends on a lot of factors. For me, though, the most important thing is our relationship with the feedback-giver(s); I believe this matters more than the words that are said. If you hear a frequent “You’re doing fine” from someone you trust, that’s likely enough to let you know things are going well. If someone we don’t trust gives us kind, thoughtful, and direct feedback, it’s difficult to take what they say at face value. We’re likely to wonder what advantage the other person is trying to gain by saying what they said. 

Because the quality of our relationships plays such a meaningful role in high quality feedback, my suggestions for asking for critical feedback won’t begin with suggestions about how to ask for feedback. We’ll get to that. But, first, I want to point to how we can work on our relationships with people whose feedback matters. Elia Paz offers us a helpful image: Relationships are like bridges. Giving and receiving feedback is like driving a vehicle over the bridge. The more important the feedback, the heavier the vehicle. The heavier the vehicle, the more strain it puts on the bridge, the more it tests its integrity. 

The first question is: What strengthens the bridge? Trust tends to be the thing that gives our bridges the capacity to hold weight. How that trust is built depends on the people and their context. We can get to trust by working backwards from the goal of high-quality feedback. 

Here are some examples: If we want honest feedback about how our class is going, we can build trust with our students by showing them that student feedback changes how we operate in the classroom. That could come from telling students at the start of the semester how previous feedback has shifted our teaching. If we want honest feedback from a supervisor, we can build trust by building a relationship of support. This could be expressions of genuine concern about a situation that they are facing outside of work or appreciation when things go well. It could be a meeting where we ask about one another’s professional goals and think about how to support one another to achieve them.

The specifics may not work for your situation, but the details aren’t what’s most important. What’s most important is finding ways to tend the bridge regularly. That might be telling students every two weeks about the shifts you’re making in your teaching in response to their feedback. It could be a practice of appreciating something your colleague does. It could be checking in on your colleague’s relative who is ill. If you’re stumped as to what could make the bridge stronger (or how to mend a damaged bridge or rebuild a collapsed bridge), the Ombuds Office is here to think this through with you. 

Look out for the next installment of the Art of Asking for Feedback coming out soon!

 

1 It’s important to have tools to help you to know your own value, but that doesn’t override the fact that we rely on one another to maintain our (and our family’s) livelihood.