Mathias Meyer
Mathias Meyer

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When I ask my team for feedback, should I allow them to submit anonymously? Especially when asking for potentially critical feedback or hoping you’ll find out how teams and projects are doing, this is a tricky question.

But might people prefer anomymous feedback? It’s usually grounded in the company’s culture or in how the person receiving the feedback has responded in the past, if they have responded at all.

🏢 Company culture: Companies say they want transparency and candor, but there’s neither a process nor a habit to give meaningful, constructive, and open feedback. There probably aren’t any retrospectives, at least not ones where people can feel safe opening up and having a chance to provide input on what could change.

🤷‍♂️ Personal responses: Not everyone is open to hearing feedback that they don’t like or disagree with. It puts most of us on edge. Some ignore it entirely, putting the blame on the person who voiced the feedback. Especially when it’s flowing upwards, critical feedback can easily be outshone by the management halo, the certainty that, with the right experience and position, one can do no wrong.

🙅‍♂️ Nothing happens: There might also be a history of feedback that was given with best of intentions, but then nothing changed. The feedback may not even have been acknowledged. It’s like screaming into the void and conditions folks that their feedback efforts are for show.

When there’s a history of disregarding feedback, retribution, or of feedback not being given openly but only in private or behind someone’s back, there’s a good chance your team isn’t going to be open when you send them that next survey or request for feedback. It’s likely that any questions in this direction will meet dead silence and that retrospectives aren’t going well.

But what can you do to change that?

The most important thing is to actually listen to the feedback and bring about change to make things better. That includes personal behaviors, meaning the response from people receiving feedback, as well as ensuring that folks providing critical feedback are rewarded rather than punished.

A healthy response to feedback requires curiosity and the assumption that things probably aren’t working as well as you think. It also requires you to listen with patience rather than respond immediately. Our fight our flight responses are easily triggered by critical feedback. We’re keen to explain ourselves instead of just listening, asking more questions, and then reflecting on what we’ve heard.

Getting there may require that you, at least for a while, ask for feedback anonymosly. When folks see that their feedback has an effect, they may just start trusting you again and open up more directly.