How do you get feedback, actual helpful feedback?

Good feedback is necessary for improvement, but hard to get. Here's a possible path forward.

There are certain parts of life that give you almost immediate feedback. When playing golf, you know in milliseconds how well you struck the ball (or not?)

But in huge portions of life, and a lot of careers, it is hard to get real feedback. I am not talking about the end of year performative, not performance, review that happens in a lot of places. Those reviews are long on process, short on substance, and limited in their applicability.

Real feedback is useful for making you better in serving your customer. We all have a customer, the person that receives our labor as a service. Sometimes that is your direct boss, but it could also be someone in a different department of your company or an actual external person or company.

We lack feedback for many reasons. Customers may receive your service and walk away, hopefully with a thank you, but most likely without providing the sort of details you may want. Or what if you only deliver a couple of large projects per year and so you just don’t have a lot of frequency to develop your skills?

We know from research about deliberate practice that feedback is critical to developing greater heights. But deliberate practice is contingent on knowing how you are doing.

So what do you do?

The key is to think smaller and orthogonally. Many skills you want to improve at are far too complicated to practice in their whole. Managing a large real estate development entails many things but may take years to complete.

Rather than practice the whole skill set, you need to break it down into its constituent parts. What are the building blocks that ultimately have to combine?

With those building blocks uncovered, you can begin to find other arenas to practice.

Consider a simple example - you want to get better at sales. The sales process consists of several key substeps: building rapport, needs assessment, solution development and closing. If you want to get better at sales, you can actually practice these sub-skills without actually having to close more deals.

For example - Building rapport. Whether at a child’s birthday party or in the aisle at church - can you explore different techniques to do this with casual interactions that naturally occur in your day to day?

Needs assessment - Ultimately you need to get very good at making someone to comfortable enough to share what is really going on? Then, you have to get good enough at asking questions to help unpack the real issue. Maybe you can practice this best in how you listen to a spouse or friend. Can you practice asking 3 questions before offering an opinion?

Solutions development - Where else can you regularly practice finding a solution to someone’s need. Maybe there are several other areas where you can build these skills further. Maybe on a non-profit board? Working with your existing clients?

Closing - Do you have trouble asking for the sale? Is it the risk of being told no? Jia Jiang wrote a great book about how he overcame his fear of rejection.

This is just an example of how you can take a larger, more opaque goal and find ways to deliberately practice the skills that will help you ultimately be successful.

Think about where you want to grow and improve, and begin to do the same.