Question: you’re working on something, really anything. What’s the best point to get feedback from the other relevant people on it? Once per day? Once per week? When you’re 1/4 done? When you’re half-way through? Or…?
Trick question! The answer is basically constantly.
When I graduated college, I thought that work was like school. You get an assignment or paper, you do it, you hand it in, and you get a grade. And then the next!
But work like that is very error-prone because you only get feedback at the last possible moment.
The challenge with getting feedback at the last possible moment is that it turns out, almost always, that what the boss or client wants is different than what he asked you to do. (Or perhaps it is different from what you understood, but this really makes no difference for our purposes. That’s a question of blame, but there’s no blame here, just forward-looking team-work.)
The rule of thumb is to get feedback as early as possible, and as often as possible. There are a few ways to do that:
- To get feedback every time there has been a non-trivial change. Use your judgment here. No need to get feedback if you just fix a typo, but if the gaps between feedback are too big, that introduces a lot of opportunities for confusion and misunderstandings.
- To build it in a completely open way so the boss or client can review the work at any point throughout the process. Google Docs happens to be great for this. That way, they can check on you any time they want.
My preferred strategy is to do both of those, together. Work openly so anyone on the team can see it whenever they want, and regularly proactively ask for feedback. Proactively asking is good because a lot of people—including bosses—are uncomfortable giving feedback without being asked, because they want to give you space and don’t want to step on your toes.
It’s an art to know that when they don’t want to step on your toes, but to remember that it might be good for your toes to be stepped on, so you can regularly ask them to come on in and step on your toes!
However often you think or feel you should be getting feedback, triple that rate, and that’s probably the level to go at.
The way to remember the importance of this is, for your boss, one of the most valuable things is your time. And all the time, due to misunderstandings and the fact that we’re all human, people just go off in different directions in work, and the boss or client needs to keep you reined in. If you voluntarily ask to be reined in, then it’s a much more comfortable situation for everyone than when the boss has to reign you in because there’s no other choice.
