The art of asking for feedback - Ep. 4

Anonymous feedback: the road to honesty

Author

Ale Gnoli
April 18, 2024

When you really want to get honest feedback you gotta let people be anonymous.

Here is the thing.

Not everybody is willing to tell you the truth. In fact, most people will not tell you the truth when you ask them for feedback. This is especially true if they believe telling you what they believe to be the truth will hurt you or make you unhappy. Most people don’t like delivering bad news.

As Cate Hall points out in her excellent “How to Be More Agentic”:

[…] the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously. Anything else creates friction by layering on social dynamics. To get honest feedback, you’ll want to make it as comfortable as possible for people to give it. You also want to make it easy to find—I have a link to my feedback form in my Twitter bio, and get a few comments a week through it.

I’ve seen this concept applied also at Google. Many people (me included) have a link on their internal page for anyone to leave anonymous feedback.

Another example? As assiduous readers of this newsletter, you surely noticed my daily attempts to solicit anonymous feedback. 😀 

❝

If you really want people to be honest with you, you gotta give them a way to send you anonymous feedback.

This was the fourth post in a series dedicated to requesting feedback when you really want it. Read to the first, second, and third posts.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.