Be more strategic. Increase your visibility. Show more ownership. Work on your communication.
At some point you will get a piece of feedback like this, and it will bother you for weeks, because you cannot tell whether it is a serious problem or a phrase somebody reached for while filling in a form.
Vague feedback is not useless. It is unfinished. Somebody noticed something real and then compressed it into a category on the way out of their mouth, and you can usually get the real thing back if you ask well.
The question that works is not what do you mean. That invites another abstraction, and you will get be more strategic explained using the word strategic. Ask for a moment instead.
Can you think of a specific time recently where you would have wanted me to do that differently.
Now they have to go back to the actual memory, and what comes out is usable. It turns out be more strategic means you fixed the reporting bug three times without ever telling anyone the export design was the cause. It turns out communication means you go quiet for four days when a task gets hard. Those are things you can act on this week. The category was not.
Ask a second question if you get one example. Has that happened more than once, or is this mostly about that one week. The answer tells you whether you are looking at a habit or at a single bad Tuesday that lodged in someone's mind, and the response to those is not the same.
Then close the loop with what good would look like. If I had handled that better, what would I have done. You are asking them to describe the version they wanted, which is often the first time they have had to be that precise about it.
Sometimes you will do all this and discover there was no example. That is worth knowing too. It means somebody had an impression rather than an observation, and you can weigh it accordingly instead of rebuilding yourself around a phrase.
Give the same courtesy when you are the one giving it. Bring the example with you.
– Asael Shinder
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