Asking someone for feedback typically goes one of two ways, says Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant.
You could get some helpful takeaways, or the other person may tread too carefully to tell you anything useful, scared of bruising your ego. The latter is more common than most people think, says Grant. The bestselling author’s simple workaround, which highly successful people tend to use, he says: “The best way to get people to coach you is, instead of asking for feedback, you seek advice.”
Asking for advice instead of feedback gives you a better chance of getting some helpful suggestions, says Grant. In 2019, Harvard University researchers asked 200 people to offer input on a job application letter for a tutoring position, written by one of their peers. Some participants were asked to provide this input in the form of feedback, resulting in “vague, generally praising comment,” the researchers wrote in a Harvard Business Review article that year.
“However, when asked to give advice on the same application letter, people offered more critical and actionable input,” the researchers wrote. “In fact, compared to those asked to give feedback, those asked to provide advice suggested 34% more areas of improvement and 56% more ways to improve.”
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Asking for feedback tends to have two potential results, Grant adds: People go into cheerleader mode, “raising the best version of you, which is very motivating but doesn’t always teach you something new,” or critic mode to “attack the worst version of you, which is educational but potentially demoralizing.”
Seeking advice instead could be especially helpful for the people who tend to get the least helpful feedback at work — high-performing employees and women, according to a 2024 analysis of more than 23,000 performance reviews across 250 U.S. workplaces, conducted by HR communications platform Textio.
Specifically, high-performing employees are more likely than other workers to only receive surface-level feedback, and women are more likely than men to be given feedback based more on personality than job performance, the analysis reported.
Asking for advice allows you to “keep learning, developing, growing and getting greater opportunities,” Textio co-founder Kieran Snyder told CNBC Make It last year. Make your request well in advance, giving your boss ample time to come up with some substantive critique, she added.
Say something like, “Next week in our one-on-one, I’d like to have a conversation where we can talk about some of the specific examples of work I’ve done and, if I were performing at the next level, what I might be doing a little differently,” said Snyder.
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