Ask for feedback one domain at a time

Replace "How am I doing?" with one specific question per capacity, asked of the people who see that capacity most.

Perché funziona

A global question invites a global answer, and global answers average your strong and weak lines into something polite and useless. Self-assessment is weak on its own, and different observers know different things: friends judge evaluative, visible traits better than the self does, while the self knows its inner states better. Asking about one domain, of the person best placed to see it, gives each line its own evidence instead of letting a strong line hide a weak one.

Come farlo

1. Choose the capacity you most want to see clearly, for example how you handle disagreement, or how well you listen when stressed.
2. Pick the person who sees that capacity most often — a colleague for disagreement at work, a partner or friend for listening at home.
3. Ask one concrete question: "The last time we disagreed, what did I do that made it harder?" rather than "Any feedback for me?"
4. Listen and write down the example without defending. Ask one follow-up: "What would better have looked like?"
5. Repeat with a different capacity and a different person next month, so you build a line-by-line picture rather than one overall verdict.

Prove scientifiche

Dunning, Heath and Suls (2004) review evidence that self-assessments of skill relate only modestly to actual performance, that people overrate themselves, and that in the workplace employees’ overestimates make meaningful feedback difficult. Vazire (2010) found friends were better judges than the self of intellect-related traits, while the self was the best judge of neuroticism-related traits. The domain-by-domain feedback method is an application of these findings and has not been tested as such. (observational)

Observers have their own biases and limited views; one person’s answer about one domain is a data point to check against others, not a verdict.

Fonti

• Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. M. (2004). Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education, and the Workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(3), 69–106.
• Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 281–300.

Errore comune

Asking the same trusted person about everything. Someone who only sees you at work cannot tell you much about how you are at home, and their answer on that line will be a guess.