We have been using Rah Feedback for a while now and by way of feedback… I’m not liking it.

Rah is a lightweight feedback tool that your colleagues can use to evaluate you on a number of dimensions. This is, IMO, the problem… it’s lightweight, which means it is entirely measuring how someone feels about you rather than measuring aspects of your performance relative to personal and shared objectives.

For example, someone wrote about me:

“Jeff often steamrolls people with his ideas, whether they are good or bad.”

Damn right.

The problem with this review is that it focused on feedback that is entirely personal and not tied to a defined business objective. If my MBO is to execute on a portfolio of projects in an efficient manner with little latency and with positive outcomes… then irrespective of the color commentary above, I may have succeeded. If my MBO is to do so in a manner that makes people feel fill-in-the-blank emotion, then maybe I did not succeed. In either case it’s hard to know, there is no context on the above statement.

Another problem with Rah is that feedback of this nature is entirely in the moment, as in people’s responses about how they feel about you are entirely based on recent experiences. As everyone intuitively knows, not every interaction with a colleague will result in sunshine and rainbows, and as such it is both unfair and unproductive to measure someone on their most recent interactions with you.

Rah’s attempt to provide a lightweight non-process oriented solution to a requirement that is neither lightweight nor ad-hoc is precisely why the solution doesn’t work for me. I also accept that part of the problem for me is that I’m not preoccupied with how people feel about me at this level, what I strive for is respect for my capabilities and ability to affect positive outcomes for the company, which then will benefit the entire team.

[Cross-posted at Venture Chronicles]