020. When did you last ask for feedback?
Every issue of Moment comes with a question designed to gently nudge you towards working well: making your mental health part of your self-employed business plan.
020. When did you last ask for feedback?
Understanding whether we’re doing a good job is so important - not only for our professional success, but also our personal satisfaction and motivation.
Yet, when you’re self employed, feedback can be a rare beast, unless we specifically ask for it.
Without asking for feedback: it’s easy to worry that we’ve missed the mark on something whilst our client is perfect happy with what we did; it’s easy to not realise a client was expecting something different to what you delivered; it’s easy to focus on things that you think you’re less strong on, whilst there might be other areas which could be more valuable to develop.
It can be hard to ask for feedback, but developing a standardised way of asking can help, and rolling it into your project closedown process is a great way of remembering to do it, such as when you invoice, when the payment gets made, or on a regular moment in time like at the end of each calendar month.
Find a handful of questions you consistently ask. The three I use are:
Where within this project did I help the most?
If we do this project again, what would we do differently?
What things did we do that weren’t as useful?
It’s a twist on the “start/stop/continue” idea used in many organisations for feedback, and for me, it helps me refine my understanding of how others find my work helpful.
Yours might be different, but structuring it into a handful of simple open questions helps your client to answer to specifics, rather than a very broad “please can we have some feedback”.
Take a moment to either think about the questions you might want to consistently use, how you might find a way of adding feedback as a habit in your process, or even send a quick note to your most recent client and ask them for some feedback today.
Leave a comment below to share your reflections,
or visit Leapers to discuss the question further.
Things we read this week:
11 ways to get feedback - Radical Candor
How the pandemic got us addicted to longing - The Guardian
Lockdown was not a sabbatical - Vox
Women Ask for Raises as Often as Men, but Are Less Likely to Get Them - HBR
Contracting: helping to eliminate ageism and the gender pay gap - Freelance Informer
Being honest about what you have the time to do - Creative Independent