No Feedback is Good Feedback?
Whether positive or negative, feedback is almost always a good thing. It tells people what they are doing well and what they need to work on. So what happens when a person is not given feedback? I was placed in this situation this past summer when my boss never gave me any indication of how well I was doing until my last day. As a result, I was only able to guess what my boss thought of my work. While I realized that a monkey could have done my job, I needed feedback to make sure everything really was fine. For all I knew my job could have seemed so easy because I was oversimplifying it. If this were the case, I could have been making mistakes without even knowing it. Normally, this situation would definitely lead to feedback, but I was not even sure my boss was examining my work because I imagined that if he was, he would have said something. At the same time, I remembered the saying “no news is good news” and wondered if this could apply to feedback as well. It was a very confusing situation, and I do not think it was a good situation.
Comments
Posted by: Beau
Posted on: December 13, 2006 12:02 AM
I thought the same thing during my summer job that "no news is good news" and I never liked to ask for feedback either. Later I found out by one of my co-workers that I was doing something totally wrong. After that situation of feeling pretty stupid, I decided just to ask for the feedback instead of waiting for it. If an employer doesn't help you with feedback, you really just have to take the initiative to ask for the feedback and help yourself.