How I Got Here: Are you getting the right feedback at work?
Veronica and Bryan's advice on feedback
Every other Wednesday, we’ll send you honest career stories paired with some top-notch articles and research on navigating your own career
In my first few months at BCG, I was terrified by the feedback conversations I was scheduled to have with my manager every other week:
How should I respond when I get critical feedback? What if I haven’t corrected the feedback he gave me two weeks ago? If he asks me for constructive feedback about him what am I supposed to say that’s helpful, but that doesn’t jeopardize my relationship with him?
Overtime I grew to crave those feedback conversations. Not only did they point out specific ways I could do my job better (instead of leaving me to guess), but they also showed me that my managers cared about me. They pushed me to do things — like speak up at the table and plan my work weeks (not days) ahead — that they knew I’d need to succeed in my career, even after our work together was over.
Our latest podcast guest, Veronica Armstrong, takes feedback to a new level.
Veronica not only keeps and regularly re-visits every single performance evaluation she’s ever gotten, but she also lets her direct reports read them too! Even though she’s not reporting to anybody in her current role as CEO, she uses what she’s learned from her past performance evaluations to hold herself accountable to not repeating the same mistakes, like her habit of agreeing to take on too much work and eroding trust when she can’t complete it all.
Listen to Veronica’s episode here.
Here’s a quick run-down of the episode:
Our guest: Veronica Armstrong, CEO and Co-Founder, Isle de Nature
Career highlights: Legislative Aide; Creator of a successful parenting blog; Marketing Manager at Hoffmaster; Head of Customer Happiness and General Manager at Love Pop; CEO of Isle de Nature
What this episode has got us thinking about: How to turn sacrifices into victories. Veronica often made concessions related to her career to accommodate those closest to her. For example, she supported her husband when he got into and embarked on his journey to receive an MBA from Cornell, the business school that she had dreamed of attending herself. However, Veronica didn’t let any of the concessions she made hold her back. When she, her husband, and their kids moved into their 600 square foot apartment in Ithaca, Veronica altered her ambition and definition of success to her circumstances. While taking care of her kids, she created and grew a highly successful parenting blog, that was featured on CNN and on a national commercial.
You won’t always be in an environment where you receive frequent feedback from your managers or detailed evaluations of your performance. In those cases, mentors may be able to fill the gap by providing direction and feedback on your choices. In this week’s blog post, Bryan Cortes, share his advice on how to find and nurture mentor relationships.
“Whether it was while considering a new role, my business school application process or going over the pros and cons of different internships, mentors have always been an important part of all my major career decisions. However, finding and nurturing mentor relationships is not always an easy task.”
Read about Bryan’s four tips for finding and nurturing mentor relationships.
Bryan is a consultant at The Bridgespan Group and is passionate about economic justice and financial inclusion. Originally from Los Angeles, California he's the middle child of five siblings and is an avid reader of U.S. presidential memoirs and biographies. He's a first-generation college graduate with a B.S. in Economics from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and earned his MBA/MPP from MIT Sloan and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. You can reach him at bcortes@alum.mit.edu or follow him on twitter @bortes_
If you’re curious for more, check out these pieces on related topics:
Are women getting the short-end of the stick when it comes to feedback? An article from Chief discusses the research that suggests that women are less likely to get critical feedback, which thwarts their career development and progression.
“Millennials want mentors, not managers,” says Sonali Verghese in her piece on why feedback at fixed intervals, like in performance evaluations, doesn’t cut it for millennials, and three ways that leaders can embrace the “new era of mentoring.”
Reverse mentorship. Should executives be mentored by entry-level employees? This article from Chief suggests yes.
Thanks for reading and please continue to reach out to let us know what you think!
- Lara
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