Fearless Feedback
When I first began working for Apple a decade ago, we worked in a culture of Fearless Feedback. In fact, there is little else I remember from my original core training apart from this concept. It helped me out tremendously in both my personal and professional life, as I learned to first seek permission to give feedback and then deliver that feedback, good or bad.
A lot changes in a decade, and while Apple—specifically, Apple Retail—would like to fool itself that we are still a culture that thrives on feedback, we have perverted the nature of the term, and spoiled the output of what otherwise might be good and actionable information.
More often then not, when I’m being given feedback, it has to do with something I have very little if any control over. It still comes on the same way: “Can I offer you some feedback?”
And what am I going to say, no? It’s leadership asking the question. Refusing feedback now will go into the narrative of deeds, good and bad, against which I’ll be weighed a year from now when I go through the Egyptian afterlife-esque process that is an Apple Retail performance review. Anubis forbid I should be denied another less than 3% raise!
No, there is no saying “no” to offered feedback. But I think that feedback would be more actionable if I was told to focus on my ability to kiss ass, do other people’s jobs for them, and generally be able to teleport at the unspoken whims of others. To get EEs, I’m going to need to master my sixth sense and annex over into a seventh sense, altogether.
At some point, we got too big for our breeches. A decade ago, we operated comfortably with less than 10% of our current Family Room and Forum staff. Since then, the proliferation of iPhone owners, satisfied and otherwise ensure that our processes will continue to grow ever more unwieldy, ever more unscalable to the ever increasing demand for our services. How long can Apple continue to offer—for free!—a dedicated technician either in person or over the phone, to the zombie apocalypse of disenfranchised customers who are having problems with this or that. Even if we could strip the educational opportunities out of it, we live in a consumerist culture that does just that: Consumes. The only people I know who put any real sense of value on their Apple products are people who work for Apple. (Incidentally, they’re also the people I see struggling most to afford those products.) That is a whole other blog post in itself, but a customer who does not value his or her product enough to not smash the glass or drop it in the toilet is not going to put much value on the service they receive to get it fixed or replaced. They already ignore the dozens of people flooding the grove as though they’re the first person in history to crack a screen, and anyway are much more important than these pieces of human furniture that arrived ahead of them.
I was talking about feedback. Fearless feedback. And I think I’ve given it. Apple Retail is no longer a fit tool for the task it has taken on. Pretending to be, and adhering to old systems both of communication and—I hate myself for using this word, but—facilitation (shudder) is only going to result in employees that are just as disenfranchised as the thousands of confused and angry customers we see everyday, as both are set free in a system of which they have no understanding.
So, what’s the fix? Perhaps the Genius Grove should have its own store. Maybe we could help bail out the struggling United States Postal Service and resort to exclusive over the phone and through the mail technical support and repair. And maybe we could flex our understanding and examine the circumstances surrounding the infractions that turn into needless and often frustrating feedback sessions. If Apple is secretly trying to up the attrition rate of veteran employees in favor of sparkle eyed noobs who will chain themselves to our stainless steel slave ships for less, then maybe they should just hold the course. I don’t know. I just work there.