Feedbacks – A Lesson Learnt

Recently, I had an opportunity to sit with the customer and take the customer satisfaction feedback. During this meeting, I had a good lesson learnt which is the reason for this post.

Usually Customer Satisfaction Review (CSR) is conducted quarterly. In a collaborative project where customer is also part of the project CSR means feedback by customer about the Project Manager, Project Team and the Organization on different aspects.

We both (I and my customer contact) sat together in a silent room and started the discussion. He explained about all the good achievements that we had made and all other concerns that he had. These are all usual stuff. The interesting part was, he said it is easier for me to say that you have not done this and need to improve on this and so on. But, for me as a manager to you, all these feedbacks raise question “How did you help to the team to achieve this?”.

Instantly, my thoughts went back thinking about “How I have helped my team members for whom I have commented saying you have not done this, you need to improve on that and so on..” 

This looks very basic but an impressive question that many of us as managers never think about. This kind of retrospective is very important for  both of us ‘managers’ and 'receiver of the feedback’.

Further, I thought about reaction of a manager to a question by a reportie saying, I agree to you that I could not do this (some task or goal …) but “How did you help me to achieve this?”  Most of the managers would feel uncomfortable to these questions.

This is good lesson learnt for me. After some thinking around this, I have decided to implement this every time I need to give a feedback.

Let me know if you have different thoughts or comments.

Regards,

LN