“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the game”
-Randy Pausch
Hi Everyone,
Giving people feedback is one of the most important things we can do in our lives.
One of my favorite books is called The Last Lecture, written by Randy Pausch. As always I am happy to send you a copy if you’re interested. For those of you who don’t know the story, after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, Randy gives a lecture to his class which is a summary of his life lessons.
I want to share a quote from the book on the importance of feedback. The set up for the quote is that Randy had a very difficult coach and was recounting a conversation he had with an assistant coach…
“Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he?” he said. I could barely muster a “yeah.” “That’s a good thing,” the assistant told me, “when you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, it means they’ve given up on you.”
Shortly after I founded the company, we started the voice of the culture survey. It was and is an important way to give feedback to me and others within the company. We publish the positive comments every week in the Desk of Brad, so that peer recognition remains a pillar of our culture. I review the feedback every week as part of my standard routine.
Internally, we also have the thrive review process, monthly one on ones with your manager, Kudos alias, and the soon to be rolled out delivery lead feedback system. Externally, for customers and partners, we have the customer satisfaction survey however, most customers vote with their wallet and either the business is growing or declining.
If you care about your customer and you care about your employees, you’ll have a company worth caring about. As the first value of our company, this is the definition of success for me. If we do those two things well, the rest will take care of itself. I designed and implemented the feedback loops so I could understand how well we were doing toward our most important goal.
My feedback to you is that not enough people are participating in the voice of the culture survey. If you care about Tahzoo and you want to make the company a better place, then you’ll take the time to give feedback. Consistent and constructive feedback is one of the most important aspects of your job. The only way Tahzoo will be great is if each of us participates in making it great… so next time I say to let’s go be great, let me know what we need to do to get there.
Let’s go be great…
Brad