Many of my coaching conversations cover the topic of career progression, often we’re exploring what those two words actually mean for the individual and once that’s established what action to take.
An essential part of progressing your career is to understand where you need to develop.
For instance what skills are you missing to enable you to take on a more complex project or run a bigger team. In an ideal world we’d all have great managers who regularly had deep, insightful career conversations with us, helping us to understand which skills to work on and what was required in the role we wanted to move into.
In my personal experience, and in the experience of most of my clients this doesn’t happen very often. This is why we need to take control of our own careers and be proactive in developing them. One crucial part of this is seeking feedback to help you develop.
When it comes to development feedback gender bias rears it’s ugly head again. Numerous studies have shown that women receive more vague, personal and unhelpful feedback than men. This prevents us from getting clear information about our performance that would help push us to learn, grow, improve and take on more senior roles.
So if you want to continue to learn and develop yourself you’re going to need to be proactive and start having those conversations.
Here are some practical ways for women in leadership roles to get helpful feedback so that you can develop your skills more effectively.
Firstly identify your sources of feedback. Your manager, peers, team members, who else do you work with that could help you understand how others perceive you?
Remember though every piece of feedback you get is subjective – it’s the other persons opinion, there is no absolute truth. That’s why it’s important to gather feedback from lots of different people.
Next, you need to ask. Be specific and provide context. For instance, ‘please could you tell me three things that you feel I did well on Project X and three things that you feel I could have done better’. You may want to set the scene for asking with a conversation first then a follow up email request so they have time to think about it. Then you could have another conversation to receive their feedback and explore it more. Another example might be asking for 3 pieces of feedback where colleagues see you at your best and 3 where they might suggest you work on in order to develop your career further.
Now you’re in a conversation with your boss, who’s giving you the feedback you asked for on Project X. This is the time to practice those listening and questioning skills. Really listen to what is being said and ask questions to clarify what they are telling you, ask them to be specific. This might produce an emotional reaction in you, it can be hard to listen to feedback on what we need to improve, so for now just listen and clarify, take notes so you can reflect later.
Once you’ve collected all the feedback you can review it, what themes are coming out for you? Is it clear what you need to do as a result of the feedback? At this stage we’re likely to focus on the ‘what could I have done better’ feedback but don’t forget about the positive feedback you have received – this is you at your best, these are your strengths and you can leverage them. It’s also a good idea to keep all that positive feedback together in a place where you can easily reference it. So it can pick you up on the bad days by re-reading it and you can use it as part of performance review/appraisal conversations.
Finally, having identified themes now is the time to put some action plans into place. How can I leverage my strengths? What might these tell me about future career plans? What can I do to work on the development areas? Make a plan, break it down into small steps, little tasks that you can fit in and around your daily work.
Ask yourself, what support do I need to help me achieve my plan? Your manager is an obvious choice, but who else, a mentor? Does your organisation offer coaching support, if so access that. If not ask to work with a coach, many organisations have the budget for this and if you don’t ask you don’t get!
I hope you’ve found this useful. You can read more of my practical tips and musings on women and our self-development by clicking here and I’m always happy to chat with anyone about the work I do to help more women become senior leaders, so do get in touch.