Together with Carlos Sosa.
During a trip I took a few months ago, I spent a lot of time reflecting on myself, especially regarding work, because I had been feeling stuck lately. What could I do to change this? From this question, other much more interesting ones arose, such as: How do people see me? How do I see myself? To answer these, I asked myself one final question: How do I want others to see me?
I got to work and created a completely anonymous and optional survey for my colleagues to see if they perceived me the same way I saw myself. In the survey, besides directly addressing the points I was interested in, I added an initial question to measure how well they knew me, using a numeric value between 0 and 5. With this, I could verify that regardless of whether the respondent knew me well or not, the results were quite similar to what I expected. The lowest-rated points matched the areas I most wanted to focus on. The only surprise was that even colleagues who barely knew me perceived me similarly to those who knew me well.
Now, the results turned out as I expected, but why did I seek feedback on my own? On one hand, I sought it because I wanted to set new goals that my own colleagues probably hadn’t even imagined. On the other hand, the feedback I had received before was more superficial. I’m not saying anyone lied to me or anything like that, but we tend to only highlight the positive aspects to reinforce them, and we feel a bit afraid to mention the less positive aspects to avoid hurting the other person. That’s what I mean by superficial feedback.
Over the past few months, my colleague Carlos Sosa and I have been working to give each other deeper feedback. This has helped us grow together, realize things we were doing wrong, things we weren’t doing as well as we thought, and even things we hadn’t noticed at all... Always with the best intentions, it’s important to learn to give constructive feedback as well as to know how to receive it.
In conclusion, feedback is necessary. Get used to giving it in order to receive it, and go in depth with the person to grow together. Can’t go deep? Focus on what you want to know about yourself, on the things you think you do well, and on the things you think you do poorly, and ask your colleagues directly. You will never be able to grow if you only trust your own word.
So… how do you see yourself and how do you want others to see you?
The original version was written in Spanish. This version has been translated using AI, so please keep in mind that coherence may be lost or there may be some unusual phrasing. Thank you very much for your understanding.