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 the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
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