JANUARY, 2024
[Charlie Smethurst](<https://somber-swordtail-860.notion.site/Charlie-Smethurst-1ba2629f9f284a4d94030cb1beaa59a3>)
I had always heard the saying “feedback is a gift”, but I never really understood what that meant. In most of the companies I worked for previously, I worked with well-meaning colleagues who never really gave me constructive feedback. I was a high-performer and no one worried about what I was doing, so why bother giving me feedback?
At Hotjar, this all changed and jeez it felt uncomfortable at first. I remember the first policy I created at Hotjar, I worked on it for days, reading and rereading it before I sent it to two colleagues, one a peer and one I reported into. This is awful to admit “out loud” but I expected my usual feedback - “good work Charlie, no comments”. Instead, I opened the Google doc to see a lot of comments and questions. I want to be clear, none of the feedback was harsh at all, it was all very constructive and made the policy 10x’s better - so why did it feel so bad?!
Now was the time to be less like The Hives in their song, Untutored Youth, and consider how this feedback could help me!
I asked questions, I amended my document and shared it with the wider team - and it was a success!
The best part of this whole experience, was that I learnt - with every document I shared, there were less and less comments and questions, while I continued to learn and grow.
Win win for all of us!
I extend my middle right hand digit and say: Hey would you like lemon or lime with that piece of advice mister - Untutored Youth lyrics
I quickly realised, it felt so bad because I wasn’t used to it - I’m not a gym girly (💁🏻♀️) but I now see giving and receiving feedback like a muscle you need to keep flexing and exercising, if you don’t, then it becomes stiff and uncomfortable.
A by-product of this, was that I now felt confident to share difficult feedback too, and not only with my the team reporting into me, but also with my peers and manager. This created a work environment where we were all keen to learn and grow- and it feels great, it feels like you‘re always levelling up and improving.
My final part of the story, before I give you useful tips to give and receive feedback… I have always been a people pleaser, I hate to say “no” and feel like I have let people down. This has led me down the path of near-burnout and sometimes, trying to do too much at once and not doing my best work.
My Lead, the previous COO at Hotjar gave me the best bit of feedback I have ever received, we had our 1:1 and after weeks of feeling like I couldn’t handle my workload I said “I’m really struggling, I feel like the team and I have too much to do, and too little time”. The response I got was not what I expected; “I didn’t realise, talk me through your priorities and we’ll figure out what you can drop or push back”. He then added “to progress and become and a better leader, you need to advocate for yourself and your team, and prioritise ruthlessly, not just say yes and try to get everything done”. It then dawned on me, I was trusted to do my work, no one checked what we were doing that closely, they saw things were getting done and assumed we were handling our workload - and why wouldn’t they?
From that moment on, I really did prioritise ruthlessly, and created ways to share what we were working on and advocate for myself and my team - don’t worry, they’ll be another blog about this 😉.
To summarise, without the continuous feedback I received at Hotjar, I would have grown and improved, but at a much slower pace. Embracing feedback has been instrumental to my learning and supported my promotion to Director.
In my case, feedback really has been a gift 💝.