Even at this point in my career, I often find myself wishing there were a dashboard for my career.
Not a performance review. Not a five-point rating scale. An actual dashboard. Like the Canvas portal my daughter checked daily during undergrad.
| SUBJECT | GRADE |
| Respect from colleagues | 87 |
| Chances of receiving a meaningful raise this year | 64 |
| Confidence your manager has in your judgment | 91 |
| Likelihood you're ready for the next level | 73 |
| Probability you're worrying about the wrong thing | 98 |
My instinct says I’m not the only one who would love something like this. I mean, even if you don't like the scoring system or trust the judgement of the scorer (what do you mean I only have an 87 in respect…?), it’s something to work with.
Instead, we have feedback.
Has our asking for feedback become the workplace equivalent of a Swiss Army knife? We use it to solve so many different problems that it's not always clear what we mean when we ask for it.
The other day, I mentally catalogued my own requests for feedback over the last month. Some of them specifically used the word "feedback." Others sounded more like: How did that land? OrWhat did you think? Or Anything I should do differently?
As I looked back over those conversations, I started wondering what I was actually trying to learn. The questions I was asking weren’t the ones I really wanted to know. Those would have looked more like:
- Did I sound like I knew what I was talking about? (That one was aimed at my credibility.)
- If my boss had to hand out a gold star to just one direct report this month, would it be me? (That one was aimed at my ambition. Or maybe just my being a third child.)
- Was I funny? (That one was aimed at my ego.)
- Did I just waste everyone's time? (That one was aimed at my insecurity.)
Very few of those questions were actually about feedback in the traditional sense.
I wasn't looking only for advice on how to improve. I was looking for some clue about where I stood and how other people saw me.
And that may explain why feedback is so often unsatisfying.
Not because people are bad at giving it, though they may be. Not because people are bad at receiving it, even though they can be. But because the question being answered isn't always the question being asked. Sometimes we're just asking: Am I okay?
Given that work is weirdly unscored, we ask for feedback to substitute for a grade. And then it often disappoints us because it suggests ways to improve when what we were really looking for was certainty, validation, reassurance, and belonging — not just improvement.
The problem isn't that feedback doesn't tell us how to get better.
It's that we're often using it to find out where we stand.
