Getting back and reflecting on the future

Giving feedback to your boss, life rollercoasters and new beginnings

My last post was in November last year asking for readers’ questions which I never had the chance to respond. Reality is that I have been entagled in a mixture of parenting rollercoaster, house move, and also a lot of new things happening professionally. My apologies. My New Year's resolution is to make at least 12 posts in this sub this year, as part of my Giving Back activities, which I will write more about in another opportunity.

The reader question I wanted to answer was about how to give feedback to your boss. In my opinion, there's no great answer to this question, as managers hold a position of power and authority over their team and unfortunately, a lot of managers do not handle feedback well just as a lot of people do not handle feedback well.

So my tips here is to start the conversation from the start: asking your manager how they like receiving feedback the best, and then following a few best practices on giving quality feedback to people.

If when you ask that first question you get a blank canvas, or a surprise face from your boss, it is likely they haven't gotten that question many times, or perhaps (I hope not) that they haven't thought about the subject very much which would be a yellow flag. You can help them, offering some options:

Some people prefer to receive feedback on the spot, others like to have a meeting just to discuss feedback and improvement points. Some people prefer to get a written note before hand, others do not. Give them choise and see how your boss react to your attempt.

Then, once that door is open, you can also share with your manager how you like receiving feedback — I hope they ask you back, but if they do not, you can always share as this is the subject of the conversation, or even use their answers to add on saying things like “oh yes, I also prefer to get feedback on the spot” and they might remember it later on.

Rule number one of good feedback: praise is public, feedback is always private. Do not give feedback to people in front of others.

Then the other rules have no particular order, here are they:

• Be timely. Do not wait 5 months until you raise something. I would say one week is the max time for expiration of your example.

• Have examples and be factual about what happen, and personal about how you perceived: “in that meeting you said x, y, z” (this is a fact) and then continue “the way I felt was like…blablabla”. A blast from my past: “in the meeting we had with person x, you raised your voice several times. When you do that, I feel like the environment is too aggressive and my opinion isn't welcome, and I stop interacting”.

• Even if you have a long list of things you'd like to discuss, focus on one or two things only. Having a laundry list doesn't help as people won't manage to digest it all and can change everything at once. In addition, there might be some underlying causes for all the issues in your laundry list, so take time to think about the feedback you're giving, and the situations you're experiencing, and try to get to the root cause, not the symptom. Seeking for patterns is helpful.

• Be forward looking. What happens next? As an example, if this is about a behavior in a meeting, can you agree what you will both do when it happen next time? Can you message them right after and have a chat? Should you intervene in some way that only the two of you know what's happening?

• Stay open minded because, as an ex boss of mine used to say: “perception is reality in the eyes of the beholder”

Professional outlook

If you know me, you know that I love learning. This is at the core of what brings me joy in most things in life and work is no different. I also love helping people.

When I left my executive role at VTEX in the end of last year, I wasn't sure what I would do next. A few months later, I have an idea, and have started a small project with a couple of friends.

This project is my first full time attempt at entrepeneurship, and is called Alfredo. It is a subscription service for personal and executive assistance, to make everyday help acessible to companies and people in need. We live busier and busier lives these days, and being able to offload some tasks to someone else is something I wish I could do many times a day as a working mom.

After some research, it was clear that there were not many offers of this kind in Brazil, and I have always enjoyed helping people, so I thought this could be a great match for something that is natural to me. This is also an opportunity to use my tech skills to build an operating system for administrative and executive assistants so we can put all the fancy technology available these days to serve as many people and small businesses as possible. I will write in more detail about Alfredo in a separate post in the near future.

My plan is to focus on this project and see where it takes me and what it teaches me. If you want to chat about entrepreneurship, what technologies can do to help humans these days, or just catch up, get in touch!