323: Stop Asking “Got Any Feedback?” And Other Career-Saving Tips

When you reach mid-career, feedback often fades or gets frustratingly vague. You may hear you’re “doing great” or that you should “be more strategic,” but those comments rarely help you grow or move forward. 

In this episode, John Neral breaks down how to restart your feedback loop so your work stands out, your reputation strengthens, and decision-makers see you as promotion ready.

Drawing from real coaching experiences, John explores the two types of feedback that define your success: performance (what you deliver) and perception (how others experience working with you). 

You’ll learn how to separate emotion from information, reframe criticism as data, and use feedback as a powerful tool to sharpen your presence, build influence, and accelerate your advancement.

John also shares exact scripts and timing strategies for getting useful, specific input that helps you improve continuously, not just during annual reviews. Whether you’re managing a team or working toward your next role, this conversation will help you shift feedback from something you fear to something you seek.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to:

• Understand why feedback becomes less direct as your responsibilities increase
• Distinguish between performance and perception feedback
• Ask better questions that lead to actionable, specific insights
• Translate vague advice like “be more strategic” into measurable behaviors
• Time your feedback conversations for maximum impact
• Manage your emotions when feedback feels personal
• Use the “Keep, Clarify, or Let Go” framework to process and apply feedback effectively
• Build a culture where feedback is ongoing, honest, and productive

Key takeaway: Feedback isn’t meant to define you; it’s meant to refine you.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a colleague, follow The Mid-Career GPS Podcast, and leave a quick review to help more mid-career professionals find the guidance they need to move forward with clarity and confidence.

Visit johnneral.com/resources or check the show notes for links to join John’s ne

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Feedback Vanishes Mid‑Career
• 1:16 Newsletter Invite And Credibility
• 2:00 Feedback As Judgment And Emotion
• 4:21 Performance vs Perception Feedback
• 7:55 Ask Better Questions For Better Feedback
• 10:40 Normalize Timely Check‑Ins
• 12:16 Handling Reactions And Getting Specific
• 14:30 Clarity Over Labels Like “Strategic”
• 16:20 From Defensive To Directional Clarity
• 18:20 Build A Feedback Culture That Scales
• 20:09 Reflect, Keep, Clarify, Or Let Go

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

When was the last time someone gave you honest feedback that actually helped you grow? You know, something more than, hey, you're doing great. Just keep up the great work. If it's been a while, you're not alone. See, many mid-career professionals feel like feedback disappears once they hit a certain level. Managers assume that you already know what to do, or they're not equipped to have the hard, difficult, and more importantly, intentional conversations to give you the feedback you need to grow. See, without feedback, our growth slows. And so does our visibility for new opportunities. Today, I'll walk you through how to restart that feedback loop, how to ask for and use feedback effectively, and how to turn that feedback into your most powerful leadership and career accelerator. Are you ready? Let's get started. I help mid-career professionals like you find a career they love or love the one they have using my proven four-step formula. If you're looking for something more than this podcast, I want to invite you to join the MidCareer GPS newsletter. It's my free weekly newsletter email community. You can come in and get leadership and career guidance and information, tactics, strategies, anything you want. It's all free. It's available on my website at johnner.com forward slash resources. This episode is very important to me because throughout my entire career, feedback has been the thing that has driven and propelled my growth. Now, I didn't always get the greatest feedback, nor did I always give the best feedback either. But as I grew and as I got better and I led more effectively, using feedback is that thing that truly is a tremendous catalyst for change. Now, I want to offer right here at the top, if you have never read the book, How to Say Anything to Anyone by Sherry Harley, S-H-A-R-I. Harley is H-A-R-L-E-Y. It is a fantastic book. I want to say it was published around 2012. I remember reading her book on a flight across the country. I was headed toward a work meeting and I got off that plane and I thought, I need to implement this with my team immediately. So if you're ever looking for some strategies and tactics on how to deliver feedback clearly and cleanly, Sherry's book, How to Say Anything to Anyone, is a tremendous resource. I invite you to go get that book. When we give feedback, and this comes out of Sherry's book, she says that we give feedback for two reasons. It is either to maintain behavior or to shift behavior. But when we give feedback, feedback can be emotional. Feedback can often trigger emotion because it somehow hits that thing in us that we either didn't do a great job or we did an outstanding job. See, feedback is judgment. Feedback is someone's judgment or evaluation on something we did. And in the workplace, especially when that feedback is coming from somebody who has the authority to impact or influence whether we get promoted or how much of a raise or bonus we get, feedback can sting. It can sting because it can feel like judgment and it challenges how we see ourselves. It is far easier said than done to find a way to depersonalize that feedback and turn it into information we can use. But it's difficult to not think in that moment that someone's attacking us or criticizing us. But what I want you to consider here is that as a mid-career professional who is looking to move from that manager level, maybe you're at a senior director level and you're eyeing more senior leadership or executive level positions, feedback can be like a mirror. And it's that opportunity for us to reflect on something to help us see what's going to be next. Feedback is all about intention. So when we get feedback, our brain wants to take us through all these things like they don't like us, they hate our work, they're out to get us. We got to quiet our brain down. And we quiet our brain down in a moment to sit there and reflect upon that feedback and ask ourselves this question. What might be true about it? Because when we ask ourselves what might be true about that particular feedback we got, it allows us to stop reacting and to start thinking about that feedback objectively to where it can help us grow. So there's different types of feedback, okay? There is performance-based feedback. What you did, how well you did your job. That kind of feedback is measurable, it is outcome-oriented, it is task-focused. But there's also perception feedback. That perception feedback is about how you're seen. It is relational, it is based on how others experience you. Now, throughout my career, throughout my instructional coaching career, but also my corporate coaching career, when we go to give feedback, we want to make sure we ground that in evidence. I've seen, I've heard, I've witnessed, I saw, I observed, versus I feel, I think. We want to make sure we present that feedback from a very evident-centric position. For you at the mid-career level, if as you're moving up your leadership ranks here, most often mid-career leaders only focus on the performance type feedback. But let's not forget that promotions also depend on perception. How you are perceived, your brand, your reputation. It all goes into asking the question that those leaders are going to be asking of themselves and evaluating you, which is, can we see you in this next role? Are you the best person to move to this next level? You might be a mid-career professional who never misses a deadline. They trust you to deliver those things on time. But if you are perceived as someone who is overly cautious or takes a lot of time in doing things, maybe even hard to approach, that perception may impact certain opportunities you may have down the road. So how can you learn about what your perception is based on how others experience you at work? Well, here's the key. If you're multitasking, come back to me here for a moment. Because the key here is to ask for better feedback. Now, in an ideal world, I feel like I'm getting ready to do a movie thing. In a perfect world. No. In an ideal situation, you're going to have a leader that's going to give you incredible, robust, rich feedback. Well, that just doesn't happen with everybody. So you have to own where you are, and you're going to show up and you're going to ask better questions that are going to help get you better information. So one of the things that I remember people on my team, especially some of the junior people on my team, would come and they would say, Do you have any feedback for me? And I would go, oh. And they go, What? And I go, Oh, I hate that question. And they're like, Oh, you don't like giving feedback? I'm like, no, I don't know what to give you. Like, what kind of feedback do you want? Don't give me some vague question about do you have any feedback for me? Tell me specifically what you want to know. It's asking questions like, on this last project, what's one thing I could do differently that would make a better impact? When have I been at my best on this project? When could I have improved? Or what's one way I could make your job easier or for us to collaborate better? Asking questions that are specific and situational lead to much more actionable answers and provide you with better feedback. As always, feedback should be timely. So if you've wrapped up a project, you want to make sure you get someone's feedback as soon as possible as that as that project has closed. Rather than waiting three, six, nine months afterward, you come up on a performance review and be like, hey, I'd love to know your thoughts about how I did on that on that project. It's too far away. They're not going to remember. Right. So this is where you, as the employee, right? As the as the subordinate, if you will, that's reporting to somebody, this is where you can use your check-in meanings more strategically. Hey, can I get a quick read from you on this? See, the goal here is for both you and your leader, your supervisor, your manager, whoever that is. The goal here is for you to collectively make feedback a normal part of your regular check-in conversations. When you do that, it stops feeling like it's a performance review. And it starts feeling like you are being professionally curious and wanting to move toward that next step. Now, feedback is not always easy. It is not always easy to give, nor is it always easy to hear. And one of the great things about Sherry's book, How to Say Anything to Anyone, is she'll talk about how when people emote from getting feedback, they're just breathing, they're just reacting. So people could be happy, they could be sad, they could be angry, they could cry. They're just emoting, they are breathing. That is all it is. Okay. So we want to acknowledge that for whoever receiving the feedback, they may have a reaction to it. That's okay. And if it's a reaction where you don't necessarily want to talk about it at that given time, make an appointment 24 hours later and circle back to that conversation. But if you're in a leadership role, if you are directly responsible for leading talent within your organization, please do your team members a favor and don't say things like, We need you to be more strategic. Okay. What you need to do is be more specific about what that strategy looks like. Now, if you're on the receiving end of it and your leader says to you, hey, you need to be more strategic, say, great. Can you share an example of what that would look like given the last project or given my current workload? Okay. Negative feedback is not fatal. It is not going to kill you. That feedback, as Sherry says, feedback that is designed to change behavior, is like that leader sharing or showing a spotlight for where you need to go. Okay. It is also understandable you may feel defensive when you receive that feedback. I didn't do that. I don't believe that's true. You're getting feedback for a reason. If you believe that feedback is coming from a good place, it is coming from someone you trust. You have an opportunity to think about that feedback and dissect which part of that is valuable, what part of that needs some clarification. What can you let go? I want you to walk away from that feedback conversation with the clarity about what you need to do moving forward. It's not just like your supervisor dumps off some feedback to you, and you go, okay, I'll incorporate that. You are allowed to have a conversation around it. There should be a dialogue about it. Okay. I have I have worked with people, I've worked with clients who have received feedback about them being too abrupt or aggressive. Or one time the word was gruff in how they handled a meeting. And they were like, I'm just trying to get things done. I don't understand it. And I and I would coach them and I would be like, okay, so where's the disconnect? Why aren't you getting the clarity in terms of exactly what that person means when they deliver that feedback? And they're like, Well, I don't know. I can't remember the exact part in the meeting. And they just say, that's just my overall tone. Okay, so what is it about your tone? What can we get clarity around about how you're delivering that information in a meeting that some people may be thinking you're being a little aggressive or gruff or unapproachable? My wish for you is you leave that feedback conversation with the clarity you need about what it means for you to move forward. That's where feedback is helpful, right? It allows for us to take that into consideration and to decide what it is we want to do with it. Now, whether it be on your team that you're leading or a team that you're a part of, look at the feedback culture within that team. This is a clear indication of where your organizational culture is regarding that feedback, and, and this is important, and where you may choose to shift or change that feedback culture because of your particular goals. Getting to a place where we can normalize feedback, feedback, as Sherry Harley says, about maintaining behavior or shifting behavior. Creates a culture where people are able to talk to each other from a very trustworthy and giving place. That feedback ultimately then allows you to grow. Oftentimes we think the feedback is something like, why didn't I get promoted? That's not feedback, that's an answer based on a question you provided. Where did I not meet the competencies necessary for this level? Where did I fall short in my performance review? If I were to focus on one or two things in the next 12 months to improve my visibility within this organization, what feedback can you give me to help me be more ready or more prepared to elevate to the next level? Those are much better questions to ask that hopefully you will get much better answers in terms of the feedback that you are looking for. So as we wrap up this episode, all right, what I want you to think about is this. What is a piece of feedback you have received within the last three, six, twelve months that you've resisted that might actually help you grow? Where have you received a piece of feedback that you've been reluctant to incorporate? I want you to think about that feedback. And then I want you to decide what part of that feedback do you want to keep, which part, if any, of that feedback do you want to clarify? And which part of that feedback do you need to let go? Right? Feedback is not meant to define you. Feedback is meant to refine you, to help you become the better leader and mid-career professional you are, and the more you practice receiving it, the faster you'll grow, and the clearer you become as a professional and a leader. But even more importantly, my friends, the more you practice it in a timely manner that is clear and clean, that is intended to maintain or shift behavior, that, as Sherry Harley says, does not include any personal agenda, that is designed with the best intentions to improve that employee's performance. You have to practice giving and receiving feedback and making it something that is just part of who you are and how you lead and how you do things. So, feedback isn't personal, it's data. Performance and perception feedback both matter. And I want to invite you to be curious about the feedback you get. Ask clarifying questions so you are certain about what is being asked of you and how you can perform. So, if this episode resonated with you, do me a favor. Text the link of this podcast to someone, invite them to join, follow, subscribe, listen to this podcast, come part of this podcast that continues to grow every single week because of people like you. I thank you for listening. And if you want to come in and join and be a part of my newsletter community, all you got to do, johnnarrell.com forward slash resources, or check the show notes or my LinkedIn profile for a link to join the newsletter community. So until next time, my friends, remember this. You will build your mid-career GPS one mile or one step at a time, and how you show up matters. Make it a great rest of your day. Thank you for listening to the Mid Career GPS Podcast. Make sure to follow on your favorite listening platform. And if you have a moment, I'd love to hear your comments on Apple Podcasts. Visit johnnarrell.com for more information about how I can help you build your Mid-Career GPS, or how I can help you and your organization with your next workshop or public speaking event. Don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn and follow me on social at John Darrell Coaching. I look forward to being back with you next week. Until then, take care. And remember, how we show up matters.