Introducing CareerLark, a bot that facilitates GREAT micro-feedback
CareerLark helps you get micro-feedback from your coworkers so you can become your best professional self. Do you like spending copious amounts of time going through performance review processes that don’t help you become better? That’s what we thought, which is why we are building a continuous, lightweight, and delightful micro-feedback experience.
Our mission is to help you and your team thrive at work by facilitating a culture of micro-feedback.
Give & get micro-feedback entirely on Slack
Our first product is a Slack bot that enables you to get lightweight feedback from your managers and coworkers in a really simple way. After an initial setup that includes any relevant goals, feedback givers, and request cadence (i.e. every week Fri 10AM), we automatically collect feedback for you on Slack. Our micro-feedback sessions are intended to take 30-seconds or less, with an emoji reaction and short text snippet, therefore reducing the burden for the feedback giver.
Here are some ways that our users are using CareerLark today:
- an employee gets micro-feedback from their cross-functional leads on a professional focus area (i.e. work collaboratively with engineering) after product retros
- an employee gets bi-weekly micro-feedback from key stakeholders on OKR progress
- a manager gives open-ended performance-related micro-feedback to an employee on a weekly basis
Through CareerLark, you now get immediate guidance rather than waiting 5 months. Managers, you spend significantly less time on existing review processes by using CareerLark’s micro-feedback history, and also better motivate your team.
Why we care
The CareerLark team all have personal stories of why we are super-excited to invent the future of workplace feedback. Here is mine.
I had the amazing privilege of working at Google and learning firsthand the ingredients to a high-performing culture of authentic feedback. Excellent managers, such as Kim Scott of Radical Candor, modeled for us what continuous feedback looked like. One such senior manager (let’s call him “John”) pulled me aside one day and asked me if I wanted to get real-time feedback. John was a cross-functional manager that I worked with closely and I knew that I had a lot to learn from him. So not fully knowing what I was getting myself into, I said “yes”.
From that point, John pulled me aside and gave me quick feedback right after meetings and deliverables. The good, bad, and ugly, all delivered matter-of-fact. I’m not going to lie to you, this was quite jarring at first and took some adjusting in the initial weeks. But I realized over time that this feedback allowed me to learn and grow exponentially faster, and also made our working relationship stronger because I knew that the feedback was coming from a place of care. Soon, it evolved to a point where I looked forward to getting this micro-feedback.
I’ve been a big fan of continuous, real-time feedback since then and this is something that we look forward to bringing to your workplace!
Technology is only part of the solution: introducing GREAT feedback
After a lot of trial and error, we’ve realized that a comprehensive solution to micro-feedback sharing includes not just great technology, but establishing workplace norms. To help us with this endeavor, we’ve combined the best of feedback giving practices into our GREAT framework. Below is a preview and here is our post on G is for growth-oriented. We’ll be launching in-depth explorations of each topic in the coming weeks so join us if you want to learn with us as we kick-start these conversations!
G is for growth-oriented. As big fans of Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, we believe that great constructive feedback starts with an orientation towards growth; more specifically a belief that giving feedback is helping others grow, and getting feedback is helping yourself grow.
R is for real. Be real and don’t be fake. Kim Scott’s explanation of Ruinous Empathy vs. Radical Candor is a great read. Sugar-coating constructive feedback usually leads to the other person seeing through the fluff or not getting the message.
E is for empathetic. We might all want more constructive feedback, but viscerally it’s still hard. A simple exercise of putting yourself in the other person’s shoes will go a long way in making this a constructive and great experience.
A is for ask. End with a specific and concrete ask. We really like the idea of feedforward from Marshall Goldsmith in this regard. Even when giving the past context to inform the ask, the idea is that it’s best to focus on the ideal outcome that you want from your coworker in the future.
T is for timely. Feedback should be provided as close to the time that the specific behavior occurs. Study after study has shown that we learn best by being caught in action. Also this ensures that feedback happens frequently, making it less awkward.
This is just the beginning
We know that we have a lot to discover in creating products that facilitate this workplace transformation, and we need your help. We plan to work with you to build useful products and to share with you insights about the benefits and pitfalls of micro-feedback…Trainwreck Tuesdays (where we cover what *not* to do in giving feedback) anyone?
Join us and help us spread a culture of transparency and continuous feedback!
Sincerely,
