Putting Feedback to Work

I was recently asked, "How do create a glidepath to grow on your target areas after receiving feedback?" Below are some key questions/concepts I asked myself in 2022 as I worked to position myself as a more vocal, visible leader:

1. Does the Feedback make sense? Does it matter?

In the past, I have received feedback to work on things that either a) aren’t a strength of mine, and I don’t envision ever being anything other than adequate in them or b) demonstrated a stakeholder perspective which is at-odds with my team’s strategy or vision. This feedback is still valuable and you may find it reinforces the growth goals you are interested in pursuing. As it relates to me, instances where I received this type of feedback reinforced the need for me to be more vocal about my team’s scope and strategy, as my customers and stakeholders didn’t see my team’s value in the same way.

Within my current role between 2020-2021, I had multiple interactions that ended with “I had no idea your team existed, but am so glad I found you”. I have seen teams make multiple attempts to work around our processes which indicated a lack of training and buy-in, coupled with a need for help with pressing issues. My takeaway was that we could improve customer experience if I focused on growing in the manner my feedback reflected.

2. How will you quantify the qualifiable?

“Everything is quantifiable” has been a consistent theme since I joined AMZL in 2020. For personal growth goals, it can be a daunting task to quantify your improvement within what is seemingly a personality trait. My strategy has been to envision what my lag metrics (i.e. efficiency, safety, cost) would look like if things were “good” or “easy”.

My team has an impact on cost management while being able to improve customer experience by reducing time to serve. There are multiple ways to quantify those buckets, but this methodology made quantification possible. Numbers 3 and 4 below will be a minor segway into actions we took in 2022, but will help demonstrate how all of these pieces built into personal development.

3. How do you set a difficult goal and make it socially accountable?

I’ve used the Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) approach (from The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey) in both my personal and professional life over the past decade. It’s a tremendously simple framework, and I can’t recommend it enough based on the efficacy I’ve seen demonstrated across broad use cases.

During our goalsetting in early 2022, I gave my team a brief training and we worked to set three challenging team goals for the year. We also pulled many of the ‘disciplines’ into our weekly one-on-one meetings (cadence of accountability, act on the lead measures) where we committed to achievable, bite-sized goals (no more than three, often only one or two on a weekly basis).

4. How do you create goals which stack and scale?

Amazonians love their Flywheels (Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins), but it can be challenging to translate Amazon’s corporate flywheel into what is admittedly a very tiny microcosm of the organization. However, at a base level, the flywheel framework highlights that within resource constrained environments (which all of us often operate from), it is important to create goals which, if resources or focus are deployed to one, all will see benefit.

Our team is ultimately a seven-person customer service organization, challenged with processing nearly 2,000 requests with varying cost and complexity across nearly 3-dozen teams and thousands of operations partners in a timely and professional manner. Our success is measured differently depending on perspective, but, after multiple internal debates, we believed number of requests and time to resolve as our most impactful levers. These metrics provided an opportunity to positively impact one another while remaining logical and quantifiable outputs of our team’s efforts. Additionally, we are bandwidth constrained due to the sheer scale and breadth of issues which come our way, but also attempts to work around systems as mentioned above further burns up resources.

We ultimately landed on three goals: Increase number of requests, decrease time to resolution, and created/distribute process-related training. Impacting any of the three items above would positively correlate with an improvement in another, as an improved customer experience would draw better utilization/accolades, creating more reps through the system to improve.

5. How do I get more consistent and timely feedback?

Personally, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received has been to “Develop an ‘Executive Counsel’”. I heard this term while at Nike and shamelessly stole it. Basically, who is going to give you unfiltered feedback? In Amazon terms, this is relying on your Earn Trust to find the individuals with enough perspective on your goals to give meaningful feedback while choosing the individuals who will call you out when you need it. 

As it relates to our 2022 goals, we leaned heavily into ‘creating a compelling scoreboard’, or at least as compelling as one can get with a monthly flash. Publish. Your. Metrics. Make them wildly available. Champion your successes, and be vocally self-critical when you’re not meeting your own high bar. Folks will infrequently congratulate you on the positive trends and enthusiastically question your approach or metrics that don’t make sense, creating an opportunity to learn and adjust.