Work feedback makes me feel trapped

[lior]

How do you deal with this?

I started in a new job. I got asked to interview a customer to find out about their experience as customer research. I was briefed in it being an open interview with no real set questions, just a suggestion list.

This was the 30th interview that my team has done. They have found out a lot of information, but it's all in video form, so I haven't seen it. They have also not sat me down and explained how things work in the organisation, or what they have found out so far.

I am a confident interviewer because I have interviewed many people for research purposes before. This is the first time I've interviewed in this job.

My manager said it was a good first interview, but I was asking questions to fill my own knowledge gap, as a constructive criticism. She said I should adjust my attitude halfway through the interview to ask other questions.

This makes me feel trapped. I don't know how things work in the organisation, so I asked the customer about specific documents that they have to fill out. I can't ask questions about detail when I don't know the basics.

I haven't been given a way to find out the basics. I don't have a laptop. I haven't been properly inducted. So what can I do?

I asked my manager to sit me down and talk me through stuff that I really need to know, or for her to get someone else to, or places for me to look for information. I asked for a list, because I don't know what I don't know.

I feel trapped because I've been criticised for something I genuinely couldn't have done differently - if I had asked detailed questions, I wouldn't have understood the basics so I wouldn't have understood what on earth the customer was talking about.

I told my manager this (apart from the feeling trapped bit). How can I build on information that I didn't know was there? It's like trying to write the next bar of music when you haven't heard the rest of the song.

She said that I'll just have to accept that I won't know about certain things but I'll have to work with them anyway. But if I don't have a basic understanding of functions, then how can I work with them? I can't do much with what I don't understand the beginning of.

I need more help with understanding what is happening. I am standing up for myself well and dealing with my manager well. However, I still feel trapped and upset about that. I need her to give me information I need to work, and if she doesn't, she shouldn't criticise ME for not doing well, she should have taken it as a realisation that she needs to fill me in better.

I think later when I see her, I will reiterate that I need more information about stuff she thinks is basic, or it will be like be writing the next bar of music when I haven't heard the rest of the song. Then hopefully she will see that she needs to show me the music so I can work with her - not just assume that I'll be able to imagine it.

Has anyone else had this experience?

---------- Post added at 15:15 ---------- Previous post was at 14:18 ----------

I feel sick... I want to leave my job already! I don't care much about the content of it... I want to work on mental health issues... I want to write a book, and do illustrations... I don't want to get upset over this. I've just had self harm thoughts and I haven't had them for a while :(

[MyNameIsTerry]

Hey lior :hugs:

This sounds like a very amatuerish way to perform research of customer experience. In fact, I would say it sounds closer to an assessment of the employees as the seem to want to see how you perform more than they want to understand the customers requirements.

They may not feed back to you on what has been found across all 30 interviews. They may need time to collate it all anyway and to be honest, someone or a team would need to then analyse the interviews to determine key issues and come up with improvements. For this reason, an open format is always a bad idea anyway as it makes it much harder to understand the data as people will have asked different questions. Its like a company telling its managers to do their job interviews without setting a list of questions that are standard, the result is simply inconsistency.

I agree with you. You should know what you are supposed to be asking about other than then dumping it onto you and then you having to determine what they want to know. For them then to say you were conducting it to determine how to improve your work is simply the reason why yet again no one would normally make it so open unless they expected everyone to have a consistent style, which is usually unlikely.

So, they set everyone up to fail there really. Its their job to direct things and they need to ensure that the data they get back is in a way they expect it so they can analyse it or they could end up with a load of different information with no ability to identify trends. You can't build or improve any product or service on that!

I don't understand your managers response, its almost like they are anti training. The whole purpose of staff training is to not only ensure they can do the work but to ensure you have consistency.

Are they planning on building some form of customer requirements survey out of this? Is that why they made it so open format? If not, its an example of a poor way to research your market (thats no criticism of you or your colleagues, its just not a good way to do it from a management perspective).

Can you indentify what you need to know about the business and processes to enable you to do your work properly? They should be doing this in staff training but that is always basic and you spend time afterwards learning how things really work in a business.

For your manager to say you need to accept that you can't know things but then have to assume about them is ludicrous. If someone has to work with them, then someone also understands them (presuming they are not a new start up and are still learning themselves in which case it could take a long time in certain businesses/industries, I've been through this one myself and spent years learning).

She shouldn't criticise YOU for things that are HER failing. She should have prepared you for the role the best she can and where she expects you will learn the rest, she should make it a constructive criticism i.e. pointers for filling in knowledge, but its not your fault for that as you can't be expected to do it.

Try to work out what you need to know and ask her again with this information. If she can't answer it then she may be in the same situation that you are. In a new company this can happen as they can take years to understand the industry they entered. I've worked in these types of environments a few times and in the large complicated industry I was in, 10 years on and there were still massive gaps. People ended up having to forge ahead on their own to get the job done and the business wasn't always happy to keep up so people just apply for better jobs, leave, and then the cycle restarts. This is an example of a poor business.

You've been having difficulty adjusting and this is going to add on top of it. Don't make any decisions right now, see how it is resolved first.

[lior]

Terry - it's so interesting that you say all those things.

We are in a 'start up' within government - we are using approaches that start ups use to foster innovation in government. So it's a massive organisation - but nobody really has a hold on the big picture. So that's part of what we're trying to do.

One of the new methods we are trying is this open style of interviewing, which leads to interesting anecdotes and ways that customers get round the system that we couldn't have foreseen - we let them tell us what they want to say, rather than giving them strict boundaries. Them getting round the system shows us where the system has failed, and ideas how we might improve it.

I've practiced this style before, but I agree that I should have been briefed better about what's already gone before. Yes it takes time to analyse, but part of doing it in this open style means that they should have analysed as they went along so they could incrementally improve their approach.

I feel better about it now. She apologised - and filled me in with why they hadn't analysed the previous interviews the way I would have done. She showed me a report that they'd done with the first 30 interviews, and said there were 20 more interviews of insights to add in to that report. So now I'll be able to read the report, and hopefully that will help me for the future.

I really did feel like leaving yesterday - in passing she said they would extend my contract beyond a year if I wanted, though, after she apologised.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Thats good news, lior.

I guess it depends on the industry. That approach would yield a load of surplus stuff in some I've worked in but I can see how it would work as long as it is managed properly. Its sort of an Agile approach to customer experience research.

I'm all for Agile. The governments PRINCE methods were cumbersome and many PM's just used elements of them.

So, I take it then that the refinement from analysis is of the system/product but the interviews are left open so that they can see the change and notice how customers feedback starts to narrow? That makes a lot of sense. You could never do that in some industries where there is a lot of external interaction between multiple parties (takes ages to change anything!) but if its mostly or completely controlled within your dept/company, then you certainly could with a dedicated team...kind of a live Scrum!

I'm really pleased she has changed her thinking. Its not true that a startup is flying blind, teams can get together to research, analyse, talk to their target and brainstorm things back and forth to create something. Six Sigma takes that approach and I used to do it in new workstreams in new companies or where the industry had changed due to privatisation which ahd introduced new national data communication processes. Its always then going to change as you roll it out as testing can pass and then real world struggles. But I don't think you would see that as a problem at all as you are a flexible person in that respect and you seem to like working in creative environments where you get to find out the issues and sort them. So, she could easily have given you what you needed and you would be well away from there. Part of me wonders whether its her own knowledge gaps that led to that and perhaps you exposed this and maybe she felt a bit poor because of it but she shouldn't have blamed you for trying to make something better when they don't brief you properly!

I'm glad you feel better and I hope that continues. What I would say, something I know I've had problems with, is to also look at your own reaction to such things because you want to ensure you don't feel like this eventually. Its going to be harder for you because you are having to adapt to a new way of working within an organisation but you can do it as you've achieved loads already. Try to look for how things like this can be a trigger and see if you can retrain your reactions to it so that it minimises the emotional impact because in any company you could come across it and some managers can dig their heals in and you feel dejected. Try to minimise the impact on yourself from the actions of others.

I hope that makes sense? I can remember how I used to react to things and now I've learned to be calmer and take a step back, I can see how my reactions affected others and made my own life harder. I was used to working in management structures but somewhere along the way my thinking became negative and the result was that when people made bad decisions, I took it too hard and obsessed over it. I never needed to do that because bad decisions happen all the time in corporations, we have to learn how to deal with them so we can still be happy or they do make you want to leave when in reality, you might have focussed too much on it and forgotten the good stuff.

[lior]

You've got the right sort of idea with scrum and the benefits of this interview style... I've heard of Six Stigma but should learn more about that.

You're totally right about looking at my own reactions. I was aware that I was over reacting and obsessing. I cried after the phone call where she gave me feedback. I was in a depressed slump for two hours. I thought about leaving and I had self harm thoughts. I also had self harm thoughts today, even though it was a good day today, full of achievement and satisfaction from achievement.

Overall I don't think I'm negative about the situation. I do see the good stuff in general. I think a problem in the past has been that because I've looked at the best side of the situation, I've failed to get angry when I should have been, and set people straight when they did things that hurt me. This time, I stood up for myself calmly and rationally, I didn't get upset on the phone, and I think I reacted in the right way to my manager. But without her knowing, while I was alone, I reacted very badly. I'm being overly sensitive. This has triggered off depressed feelings. I knew it at the time, but I didn't know how to get myself out of it. I tried to focus on do-able work to take my mind off it. That probably helped me act reasonably when I actually saw her a few hours later. I guess I did all the right things - I took the right actions to deal with my emotions - but how can I stop myself feeling awful in the first place?

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yeah, you've got it sorted in front of others which some people do struggle with so thats one less thing to tackle.

I think it comes back to the CBT we learn. Watching out for negative thinking and challenging it when we see it, learn to accept things are out of our control, etc. Distract ourselves from obsessive thinking and learn to be more non judgemental so we can just let it go.