How to find [inconvenient] truth about youself?

It's copy-book truth that the easiest way to find who you are is to ask the people around you. For somebody who develops leadership qualities and grows his professionalism it's vital to be realistic about how others perceive him. If you're frankly interested how you look in your colleagues' eyes - ask them.

But it's not always easy: neither for you nor for them. Expressing genuine truth requires trustful relationships and demands certain boldness and confidence from the one providing feedback. Your bosses, your subordinate, and your peers may not be ready to tell you the truth openly in a face-to-face conversation.

To easy their situation consider an online questionnaire. There are many sites offering wizards and analyzers for building polls and aggregating results. I recently did it first time and want to share with you my observations.

1. Do a very short questionnaire. A dozen of questions - the most. You're asking a favor from the people to help you to identify weak areas - don't steal more than 3 minutes of their time.
2. Ask anonymously, don't request any details from the answering. The idea of the online questionnaire is to find the [inconvenient] truth about you, not to collect compliments.
3. Ask applicable questions only. Don't send a questionnaire to superiors asking how good you are as a coach or to subordinates asking how good you complete the tasks. The quiz'es target is to collect reliable information.
4. Send the request only to people that know you and can provide reliable feedback (former and current bosses, first-tier peers, folks reporting to you).
5. Ask questions leading you to action, use the questions wisely (don't ask if the fact that you know 4 languages helps the team or if the fact you're too young or too old disturbs them - you can't do anything with neither of them).
6. Try to avoid free-form answers as options. Ask specific questions and rank possible answers from 1 to 5. Shorter or larger ranges will confuse the audience.
7. Send the request via a BCC list. Keep the anonymity between the recipients too.
8. In the request ask to answer the quiz by specific date. Even small tasks people tend to put off and eventually forget.
9. Build a representative list of respondents. If you send your request to 12 people and 6 of them answer the result set can be too small to reflect reality about you. Think about recipients before sending the request.
10. Treat the results seriously and act on them. People expect you to change when they reveal you the areas requiring additional development.

I did my first experiment yesterday. Built a quiz of 10 questions at zapsurvey (free up to 10 questions), sent it to 30 people, got 10 responses today. Nothing shocking in the answers but surely some interesting finding.

Good luck you in your discovering:-)

Update: I published the questions here

Technorati tags: personal relationships, self improvement, Q&A

Comments

[Max cascone]

Can you post a suggested survey? I don't want to give my email address to a survey company that will surely reap me endless spam. Thanks!

[Toby Lucich]

Feedback is critical to helping people truly understand how well they are executing, and how their work product is resonating with their "customers" (internal managers, peers, others).

We (Rick Turoczy and I) view feedback as one of the most critical elements to transforming a wage-slave into a passionate contributor. Thanks for a confirming datapoint on our upcoming kumquat release.

[Philippe]

I like your idea ..and would love to see at least some sample of questions you asked. Could you also tell us what you learn from this experience ?

[Roman Rytov]

Max and Philippe, I published the questions here

[Will]

Great post, Roman and a terrific idea. Of course, you never want to be steered too much by those around you - why abdicate individualism, right - but, as you say, it's important to know so that you can take those opinions into account.

Keep up the good work.