A Story About Taking Feedback

The results of the staff survey land in my inbox in the early afternoon. I close the door of my office on the second floor, fetch a tea from the little kitchen down the corridor and sit down. I like figures. Figures are orderly, and for eleven years I have run this department so that the figures add up.

Most of the bars are green. Leadership, collaboration, trust, all in good territory. I lean back, pleased with myself. Then I scroll to the free-text answers, and there is a sentence written by someone in my department: “Our head of department checks every step. She listens, but she doesn’t believe a word we say.”

I read the sentence twice. Then I feel my heart beating in my throat.

My first thought is a justification. I check because the files have to be clean. Because in the end my name is under the decision. Because I once had to answer for a mistake somebody else made. I count up my reasons inwardly, one after another, and each of them sounds sensible.

My second thought goes looking for the source. Who writes something like that? It must be Herr Vogt, who has been struggling with the new deadlines for months. Or the colleague from the permits team who came in late last week. Within seconds I have assembled a list of people I could imagine writing it, and with every name the sentence gets a little smaller. One of many. A bad mood on a bad day.

It does not help. The sentence does not get smaller. It has landed.

I think of Herr Brandt, my first head of department, where I started many years ago. A dry man who rarely praised anyone. Once I proudly presented him with a decision I had worked on the whole weekend. He read it, put it down and said: “Good. And now learn to hand it over.” Back then I smiled the sentence politely away and put it in a drawer. Today it stands in the room next to the other one.

I close the laptop and drive home. At dinner I am quiet; my daughter asks whether something is wrong, I just say it was a long day. At night I lie awake and hear the sentence again. “She doesn’t believe a word we say.”

The next morning I want to push it aside. I have a full week, three building applications, a council session, no room for hurt feelings. And still the sentence runs alongside. In the team meeting on Wednesday I hear myself. “Send me the draft before it goes out.” “Let me have another look at that.” “Wait, I’d better clear that up myself.” Three times in forty minutes. I have always taken those sentences for diligence. Today I hear how they land with the others.

On Thursday I do something that comes hard to me. I ask. I invite Frau Keller, my most experienced case officer, for a coffee. We have known each other for eight years; I trust her. “Be honest with me,” I say. “Do I check too closely?” She looks at me for a moment, then says quietly: “Yes. We notice that you never quite leave us the difficult cases. In the end you always keep a hand on them.” There it is, the core underneath the uncomfortable sentence.

I sit with my tea for a long time after Frau Keller has gone. The first impulse was defence. Now I am curious. Why do I keep a hand on things? The honest answer is not a pretty one: because I am afraid. Not of other people’s mistakes. Of the moment when I can no longer see everything myself. As long as I keep a hand on every case, I can tell myself that nothing gets past me. The price of that has been in the survey since yesterday, and my people pay it every day.

And then I see the gift that is inside the hard sentence. Somebody in my department dared to tell me something I could not see myself. They could have kept quiet. They could have checked out inwardly and done the bare minimum. Instead they wrote down a sentence that gives me the chance to change something. That is not an attack. That is trust in heavy packaging.

The following week I try something small. I hand a complicated appeal case entirely to Herr Vogt. No interim report for me, no sign-off before it goes out. My fingers itch, I want to ask, I leave it. He solves the case well. Differently from how I would have done it, and well nonetheless. The next morning a short email from him is on my screen. “Thank you for the trust.” Three words, and my heart is pounding again, this time for a different reason. I read the email twice, the way I read the sentence from the survey, and notice how easily the one hangs together with the other.

The sentence from the survey is now stuck to my monitor as a note. “She doesn’t believe a word we say.” It is not a nice sentence. It is the most useful one I have been given this year.

Since then, taking feedback no longer means nodding calmly and moving on to the next item. It means bearing the pounding heart, letting the first justifying sentence pass by, and waiting long enough for the truth beneath the hurt to become visible. Whoever pushes away the uncomfortable straight away stays who they are. Whoever bears it gets a step further.