One of the things I’ve been dreading the most happened this week – I missed the mark. I submitted some work, and it wasn’t right. I’ve never been great at dealing with negative feedback. I have a tendency to take it personally and then spend a lot of time overthinking it. It was a danger I recognised going into freelancing, because any feedback is yours and yours alone. You’re not working as part of a team, there’s unlikely to be wider processes/procedures/politics at play, you’re likely to be delivering your own work and there’s very little to hide behind. The reality was as tough as I expected but my bounceback was something I’m proud of.
That’s a No
One of the things I’ve been working on lately is a new event, putting lived experience experts in the driving seat of exploring an issue, generating ideas to tackle the problem and building these out into innovative ideas for policy, services and campaigns. It’s really interesting and exciting work. The client is new to me, with an extra challenge for me that their area of focus isn’t one I’ve worked in before. While I was working with someone within the charity, I led the event outline and after presenting it, we immediately got the feedback it wasn’t right. We signed off the meeting agreeing to pick it back up in the new year as the Christmas break for everyone was looming.
Spiralling
It was hard to hear, particularly as it was direct and immediate, even though it was kindly done. My brain short-circuited, and I knew straight away I couldn’t leave it until the new year. I started spiralling into overthinking about the contract as a whole and my competence alongside it. Delivering something sub-par in employment is tough enough but on a contracted day-rate, I feel the stakes are higher. Somewhere I recognised I needed to break the cycle, and managed to turn off the laptop, step back into family life with dinner and levering kids to bed and to turn my brain down a few notches. An event outline may not sound much but it was one of the first bits of work for this new client and they work at an extremely high level. Falling short of their expectation was painful.
How to Put It Right
I recognised the feedback, as uncomfortable as it was. But the sick feeling of under-delivering prompted me into action. While it was kind to suggest we revisit after the break, it didn’t sit right. The best way to make back any reputational damage in my mind was to deliver to the expectation (if not beyond). So I logged back on that evening, spent no small amount of time revisiting all the background work, sketching out new ideas and putting together a brand-new outline to send to the internal colleague for review. And it was undoubtedly better, because of the forced rethink, for the challenge that I needed a new angle on it and the expectation I had put on myself to come up with something that made up for the original miss. I also recognised the need to contextualise and introduce it better to the senior manager, to clarify the rationale behind each part of the event, to specify all of the hows and whys that would make it exponentially better than the first. And undoubtedly my enthusiasm came across.
I also decided to apologise. I wondered if it would make more of it than was needed but I felt I needed to. So an email went to the senior manager, acknowledging and apologising for not meeting the expectation, and that a new outline was with a member of the team for review. From an integrity point of view, it felt necessary. And both those actions made a huge difference – recognising and rectifying and then acknowledging and apologising. Whatever the outcome from the senior manager, I felt I’d done the best I could.
How to Give Feedback
My biggest lesson was from the organisation itself. While it was hard to hear, the feedback was clear. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t emotive. It was constructive. It was evidenced. It was concise. It was kindly delivered. It was a lot of things I’ve struggled with not having in previous jobs, and the beauty of how well it was done is that I was clear what needed fixing and I wanted to fix it.
In retrospect I wonder if I was incredibly lucky to have it as my first experience. It could have been a lot worse – both in terms of how badly off the work was, or the experience of receiving the feedback. There is a huge benefit, however daunting it can feel, of having a client with really clear focus and expectations, because you know exactly where you stand. Receiving feedback can be tough, but so can giving it. And it was a great learning experience to go through and one where I was able to demonstrate my personal value set in the speed of the turnaround of new work and ability to hold my hands up that it wasn’t right.
And yes, I was completely overthinking it and it’s completely fine. We’re also going with the second iteration, and I’m really excited to see this project come to fruition.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash