Squiggly Skill Sprint Day 1 : Feedback

I started the Squiggly Careers Skill Sprint with @amazingif today. One bite-sized podcast a day for August.

The kickoff topic was feedback, and of course there was a callout to Kim Scott and her book Radical Candor. It’s a great book, and I’d recommend the version delivered by Kim herself on LitVideoBooks. It also contains one of my favourite lines on what should happen when companies become too obsessed with data “If we have the data about what works, let’s look at the data, but if all we have are opinions, let’s use yours.”

From the podcast, something that jumped out at me was the idea of Strength Spotting, and being specific about why someone did something well. People can often see your strengths that you can’t, and often your superpowers are things that you don’t realise are specific to you.

One of my team once said to me that they didn’t understand how I was able to hear a summary of challenges with a customer ticket, and be able to identify exactly who it was coming from. That’s something that came with a decade of experience being in & out of tickets, and not something I ever would have thought about. Even just having all those names in my head was something I never considered.

Overall, a good start to the sprint, which got my creative juices flowing. The bite-sized format is not something I’ve seen before, and looking forward to the next one.