Marisa Murray is a leadership expert and executive coach with three Amazon best-sellers: Work Smart, Iterate!, and Blind Spots. She is the CEO of Leaderley International and a TEDx speaker dedicated to helping individuals and teams achieve superior performance.
When I was working on my most recent book, Blind Spots, the writing process was far more collaborative than the common misconceptions of writing a book. I wasn’t holed up in a secluded cabin or a bohemian hideaway, isolated from input. Instead, I was surrounded (albeit virtually) by a team helping me poor over my manuscript to find the blind spots in the book itself.
First, I would walk through the content with my book coach. Our dialogue together would reveal holes that needed to be filled and details which needed to be shared to shape the stories into practical learning.
Then the manuscript had to go through an editorial review. The editor found even more holes that needed to be filled in, issues I hadn’t noticed before during the lengthy writing process.
Then a copy editor came in to find more problems and fix them. And then a proofreader followed this up with an eye for detail to address every stray comma or misplaced apostrophe that had slipped by everyone else.
Each of these publishing professionals came to the book with their own individual feedback and perspectives to help me craft a more complete book than what I could have done on my own. If I hadn’t received this level of detailed, 360-degree feedback, who knows what would have happened? Maybe I would’ve never even finished the book at all!
By the time the book was released, it got my brain churning I had advocated so much about the importance of collecting feedback to identify blind spots, but how could I go further to equip readers to actually start this process?
Certainly, this is a big part of my job as an executive coach, helping leaders collect, analyze, and act upon stakeholder feedback, which I refer to as “impact statements.” These are what I use to identify their strengths, their areas for improvement, and bring blind spots into the light.
But in the age of AI, I wondered if there was a way for me to automate at least part of this process. After all, there is only one of me—how could I empower leaders to collect feedback faster for more immediate action?
And that’s how Feedback Friend was born.
The power of feedback
Great leaders see feedback as a friend, not foe. They recognize it as a powerful tool for growth—a way to find and fix problems, a path to uncover hidden potential.
This is a great shift happening in the workplace now. Millennials and Zoomers crave feedback on their performance more than Gen X before them. Gallup’s 2016 report “How Millennials Want to Work and Live” foretold this trend by finding Millennials did not want annual reviews—they wanted to receive ongoing feedback from leaders. ¹
After all, if leaders wait an entire year to gain feedback on what’s working and what’s not working…it’s often too late. Or if it’s not too late, it’s much more difficult to repair the damage.
Feedback Friend is designed to give leaders a tool they can access at any time, invite anyone on their team to participate, and generate a fuller picture of themselves, their team, and the organization. The best part? They can get the results in a matter of days rather than having to convince anyone else or wait until their annual review or survey process.
To help make Feedback Friend even more user “friendly,” respondents can choose to provide feedback through a traditional survey or to the interactive Feedback Friend Chatbot.
For those who have used it thus far (and provided us with feedback) what they liked about the chatbot was how it would gently nudge them to go into more detail than what they would typically do for a traditional survey. It would prompt them for more specific examples, all to generate a greater body of data for the analysis phase.
The “back end” of Feedback Friend leverages ChatGPT to analyze the stakeholder’s responses. Leaders are then prompted to receive a free version of the analysis or there is a more detailed, paid version.
Both the free and paid versions are an anonymous aggregate, providing you with a high-level overview of key actionable suggestions. The optional paid version provides more specific insights from each question. It also makes some predictive hypotheses about which blind spots you might have. And includes a section which analyzes the data to pinpoint which career mindset the leader is displaying: Leading Self, Leading Others, or Leading Change.
For instance, when I asked for feedback from an early user—Susan—her feedback showed she needed to delegate more and elevate members of her team. When she saw this information, it gave her the impetus to restructure and add people to her team. She had previously considered more delegation but had been held back by an assumptive fear that she would overwhelm her team with work. Now that she saw with clear data that they wanted more responsibility, it gave her the confidence to move forward.
That’s the power of feedback!
Moving forward
The key in all of this is to make the unknown known—to diagnose any weak areas in your leadership so that healing can take place. Just like undergoing an operation or therapy, this process can sometimes hurt, but it’s necessary. A “hear no evil, see no evil” mindset blocks growth. Once people see their blind spot, there’s a spark of desire to do something about it.
In fact, one user reported just how contagious Feedback Friend was for her company. They brought the report to a leadership meeting to show what insights had been gained—and then each leader went out and had all their teams go through it too!
It was humbling to hear this because I often talk with leaders about just how important it is for transparent feedback to become a part of a company’s culture. To see it actually happening through a tool we created was deeply satisfying.
While Feedback Friend was initially designed as a giveaway to go along with my book, you can still use it even if you haven’t read Blind Spots. Granted, the book will give further context to the analysis, but even on its own merits, you can gain a ton of insight and take action.
It’s fair to ask, “But why should I use this tool when our HR team already does employee surveys?”
1. Because when your HR department does a survey, you don’t own any of the resulting data—the company does. With Feedback Friend, you own the data. You get to self-enable your own development on your schedule, not theirs.
Which brings us to…
2. Immediacy. You don’t have to ask permission you just plug in the email addresses of your stakeholders and go. By understanding how people are feeling right now, you gain a real-time picture of your impact and generate an urgency to act. Too often, corporate surveys only deliver an “info dump” of what was said, filtering out much of the urgency. Not to mention they are not very real-time in today’s millisecond world.
3. It’s fast and flexible. Not only can it be used to diagnose your own blind spots, but it can be used to identify problem areas within teams. You can choose to use it to determine how a specific project team is feeling or even use it with customers to create a clearer picture of their needs. I even tested it out with family members on a personal level to get some feedback they’d never share openly at a dinner table!
4. And finally…it’s easy and free to start. Just click here, and follow the simple steps to add the stakeholders whom you would like feedback from. Your stakeholders will be notified via email to provide their thoughts, and before you know it, you’ll have the free summary report available to start working with and if you want even more – the option to pay for the detailed report.
Don’t wander in the dark, confused about why your next break though seems out of reach. With a little bit of courage, the invisible barriers in your life and work can be revealed. With FeedbackFriend and the power of AI, you can close the gap between your intentions and impact, uncover your blind spots, and unleash your performance.
P.S. Want to learn about the 7 Blind Spots that hold leaders back make sure to check out my book Blind Spots: How Great Leaders Uncover Problems and Unleash Performance.
Marisa Murray, CEO of Leaderley, Chief Executive Coach
Marisa Murray is a leadership expert and executive coach with three Amazon best-sellers: Work Smart, Iterate!, and Blind Spots. She is the CEO of Leaderley International and a TEDx speaker dedicated to helping individuals and teams achieve superior performance. Her epiphany that "Blind Spots are the Key to Breakthroughs" inspired the creation of FeedbackFriend.ai, an AI-powered tool democratizing feedback access. Recognized by Manage HR magazine in the Top 10 Emerging Executive Coaching Companies for 2023, Leaderley serves clientele from the upper echelons of Fortune 500 companies. Through Marisa's writing, coaching, speaking, or 360s—her mission is to cultivate leaders that accelerate positive change.
Reference:
[1] Gallup, “How Millennials Want to Work and Live,” (Washington DC: Gallup, Inc., 2016), p. 4.
