Sararah is the toast of the town. When you browse the timeline on any social media, you can see the screenshots from this app. As everyone is celebrating the anonymous messages, I found this app very useful. Having said that, I confess that I have not joined the bandwagon yet. I am sitting this one out. Around the time Sararah became popular, I had undergone training where the emphasis was on unlearning the old ways and learning new ways. One of the key questions asked during this training was simple yet profound. Can you handle feedback in public? The trainer did not phrase the question in the same words as I expressed. I have summarized the question for better comprehension.
We are unable to handle praise or criticism in public. Examine yourself, and you will find lacking in one of the places. Either you can handle praise very well or criticism but not both. It might come as a surprise to you that people find it difficult to handle praise in public. How do you go from one extreme to the other? How can you transform yourself to be able from shying away from criticism to embracing it in public? Luckily, the training was able to help. First, get feedback in private. Then, publish feedback in public. The journey from the first step to the next might be a long and tedious one. If you can successfully overcome your inhibitions and get to the second stage, you have reached a stage where you can invite more people to give you feedback. If you work in close collaboration with a group, then giving feedback in the open encourages transparency and trust. All these traits only make the team work most efficiently and productively.
Where does Sararah fit into this picture? It is a good app to request anonymous feedback. If you are confident, then go ahead and publish the comments in a public forum. This move will enable the feedback loop. You make changes to your behavior which again invites feedback. The emphasis here is to make changes. The author of the feedback is irrelevant. Let the author come forward of free will and not by soliciting. When you solicit, your intention is not clear. But when you make changes by accepting the feedback, you are treated a trustworthy person.
Photo Courtesy: Humberto Chalate
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