“It greatly improved my working relationships with colleagues, as well as helping me focus on the things that I needed to in order to meet delivery targets and establish greater confidence for our team’s ability to meet outstanding commitments to others.” Mike Jones Marketing Officer, Enterprise Division

Mike Jones, Marketing Officer in the Enterprise Division shares his thoughts on the value of ‘respect’ as an underlying principle of delivering and receiving feedback successfully.   

Mike holds a wide-ranging role in the division, which encompasses content creation, data analysis, website content management and working with specialists to help them better-sell the opportunities of industry-academia partnerships and innovation.  

He enjoys opportunities for collaboration and networking: “I really like working across different functions within Enterprise, as well as being able to share my technical expertise and experiences with other communications and marketing professionals at Imperial. Learning about how we all play a role in creating impact from innovation, and seeing how others have tackled different challenges, enables us to approach some of our work differently, and I get to meet loads of new people all the time as well.” 

Feedback, Mike believes, is crucial to development, even when it’s not 100% positive. In his first line management position he received some difficult feedback suggesting he needed to be more trusting of those he worked with.  

He initially disagreed, but with reflection, decided to change his approach: “It greatly improved my working relationships with colleagues, as well as helping me focus on the things that I needed to in order to meet delivery targets and establish greater confidence for our team’s ability to meet outstanding commitments to others.” 

The key to successful feedback, he says, is learning how to deliver and receive it with respect – one of the university’s main Values. It can be easier said than done, though, as one person’s idea of respect doesn’t necessarily match another’s. Is it better to offer feedback with clarity and assertiveness, or sugar-coated with kindness? This was a topic that came up in his recent Annual Review Conversation (ARC). 

He explains: “My manager and I often see things similarly in terms of culture at Imperial, so it was a chance to discuss where we saw the values in action and, more pointedly, where we haven’t seen them being applied. However, it didn’t feel like there is a process by which our experiences here could be reported back to inform a wider understanding of how the Values are or aren’t being actioned effectively. We do share this within our team, but there isn’t a mechanism currently where we can take it further.” 

In the spirit of constructive feedback, Mike shares how he would like to see the ARC process develop. Top of his list would be a more structured way to keep tabs on progress beyond an annual conversation, as well as a way of formally logging and sharing information from an ARC with the team. Both of these, he says, would create better accountability and transparency. 

“Encouraging innovation through celebrating failure is also an important concept to consider,” he says. “I do this in my job regularly, as a lot of the time some of our experiments with content production don’t bear fruit. But when they do, and when it’s because we learned what not to do, then I think of these as much more valuable than when we do something we always have done in the same way and it gets the same results. Embrace failure as the path to success, and rebrand ‘failure’ as a chance to celebrate learning and discovery.”