As a founder, manager and creative, I crave feedback, from everywhere — from my customers, from my employees, from my investors. Feedback helps me to know what’s going well as well as what I need to work on.
So I’ve always been proactive about requesting it. I’d continuously tell my team about the importance of giving feedback and that they could come to me with any issues. I assumed that because it was easy for me to give feedback, it would be easy for them too.
But I was wrong. My team sat on their feedback and said nothing about issues that could have been nipped in the bud. In fact, I sat on my feedback too. It turns out that giving feedback is hard in all directions.
My words of encouragement weren’t enough to actually make feedback easier.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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