Criticism
After last week’s issue on Customers & Politics, here’s an inspiring quote from Teddy Roosevelt, plus a few thoughts on how to offer and ask for criticism.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
I don’t want to talk about the man in the arena. The man in the arena is pretty much the focus of Teddy Roosevelt’s entire speech, “Citizenship in a Republic”. I included that quote for two reasons:
First, I think the quote is great and I think it’s inspiring, so my including it is, in part, gratuitous. You should click the link above and read the whole speech end to end. Pocket suggests it’ll take 40 minutes. I think it’ll lift you up and give you hope amidst what has undoubtedly been (and continues to be) a tumultuous election season.
Second—and this is the focus of this newsletter—I want to talk about the critic. It’s tempting to pick on the critic, the one who points out “where the doer of deeds could have done them better.” Who wants to be that dude when you can be the one in the arena? But criticism has its place. Helpful feedback builds us up in an “iron sharpens iron” sort of way¹. And for those of us in customer-facing work, getting better at constructive feedback—both in how we offer it and how we ask for it—will ultimately produce a better experience for customers.
Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash
Ask for Permission
While I haven’t written about “ask for permission” as one of my aphorisms (1, 2), this is a great technique for finding common ground in a difficult conversation with a customer. I give an example of this in my Killing the Myth of Soft Skills video, but the main takeaway goes something like this: if you need to explain something to a customer that they might find difficult to swallow, try asking for permission first. Hard news goes down a lot easier when there’s buy-in up front.
The same thing applies when offering criticism to coworkers. Rather than just jumping straight into offering feedback about their work, ask for permission first. This gives them the opportunity to accept the feedback—they’ll know it’s coming—before they receive it, putting them in a much better place to actually process the criticism and act on it, vs the icky feeling of just being criticized.
Imagine getting an email with this as the opening line:
“The overall tone of the newsletter felt a bit dry and the lede was buried in the final paragraph. Consider using stories to liven things up a bit and put your lede up front, somewhere in the opening paragraphs. That way the reader will know what’s coming.”
My gut reaction to that might be, “I’m sorry, but who asked you?” Contrast with an exchange that looks like this:
“Would you be open to a bit of feedback on your latest newsletter?”
“Sure thing. What’s up?”
“The overall tone of the newsletter felt a bit dry and the lede was buried in the final paragraph. Consider using stories to liven things up a bit and put your lede up front, somewhere in the opening paragraphs. That way the reader will know what’s coming.”
The first one feels blunt and uninvited. The second one has the exact same words, but it’s easier to receive since you gave permission first. When it comes to offering feedback, the simple act of asking for permission can make all the difference.
Asking for feedback (the wrong way)
There was a brief minute in my career at Fog Creek and Trello where I thought I wanted to be a videographer. I had hosted a few webinars and even got pretty good at recording educational screencasts, complete with a (semi-) professional AV setup. My sweet spot was definitely educational content for the knowledge base, but I really wanted to try my hand on videos that could be used in marketing. My muse was Wistia and I literally just tried to copy what they did.
When we were getting ready to launch Trello Business Class in early 2013, I worked on creating a “launch video”. It was my most ambitious video project yet, involving multiple coworkers as “on screen talent”, lighting, sound, background music, etc. I even came in on a weekend to complete the edit before the launch, teaching myself Adobe Premier and After Effects as I went.
The day before the launch, everything was going as planned. The video looked great. It had gone through multiple iterations based on feedback from coworkers. I was proud of my work. Then my manager asked me to meet with him in his office, where he shared we wouldn’t be using my video in the product launch (here’s the blog post, sans video). It was like a punch in the gut. And he had been one of the people to review my video! The problem was that when one of the cofounders (my boss’s boss) reviewed the video, they didn’t think the quality matched what they wanted from the Trello brand. So they cut it.
Where did I go wrong?
I thought I had covered my bases by asking for feedback throughout the editing process, but what was I really asking for? Undoubtedly, when I think back on it, I was asking for praise, not criticism. This was my first real marketing video and I wanted my coworkers to like it. I wanted to like it. And that sentiment was embedded in my requests for feedback, so instead of getting truly constructive criticism, they pulled punches and softened the blow a bit. So in the end, I didn’t see what our audience ultimately would have seen: the video just wasn’t that great.
Asking for criticism
After the video was cut, I reached out to Chris Savage, the CEO at Wistia, in part because I was sad and wanted someone to hear my story—he was very kind to hear me out—but also because I genuinely wanted to get criticism of my video from real videographers. He was kind enough to pass around my video internally and ask Wistia employees to share their candid feedback about the video. The feedback they gave was great. It was harsh at times, but it was great, and it absolutely would have made for a better final product if I had known to ask for that kind of criticism.
If you want constructive feedback that will actually make your work better, be crystal clear that you’re looking for criticism, not just praise or feedback. This gives your audience explicit permission to take the gloves off and give you their unabashed opinion of your work. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you’re going to incorporate their criticism into your revised work, but you won’t know unless you explicitly ask for it. It might look something like this:
Would love to know your thoughts on my latest newsletter. Praise is great, if you have it, but what I really want is criticism. What’s awful? Where am I missing the mark? What could be better? Feel free to beat it up with your thoughts. I want my work to get better and your candid feedback will help me get there.
(Yes, consider this to be permission to respond with criticism about this latest newsletter).
Asking for criticism on your creative work is hard (watch this short video featuring Ira Glass on creative work). If you truly love what you’re doing, you can’t help but fall in love with your work. It feels good. The last thing you want is for someone to call your baby ugly.
But if want your work to get better, if you want to be able to truly level up, you have to be able to ask for the kind of criticism that might hurt, for words that might sting more than a little. It’s not just you that benefits from your work getting better. It’s your customers, your end users, your audience—getting better at offering and asking for criticism means you care about the people you’re serving.
Footnotes:
In a previous newsletter about avoiding zombie values, I touched on a process we used in customer support to “operationalize the watchwords” via manager feedback and peer review. This is basically a system that creates opportunities for feedback and criticism on a regular basis. It truly has an “iron sharpens iron” sort of effect on the team.