It can be hard to hear feedback, and consequently, there’s often a disconnect between a feedback-giver and a feedback-receiver: When a person receives feedback, she feels it’s unfair or untrue. But when she gives feedback, she feels the other person isn’t properly listening or understanding it.
To reconcile this disconnect, organizations and self-help books often focus on teaching how to give feedback better. The key, though, is learning how to receive it better. After all, it is the receiver who controls whether or not feedback is understood, accepted, and adopted.
In Thanks For the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, two of the co-authors of the bestseller Difficult Conversations, walk us through how to be a better receiver of feedback, examining what feedback is and how it works, how we typically react (and why), and specific techniques to successfully discuss feedback and then incorporate it into our lives. (Shortform note: To learn how to master hard conversations at work and at home, read our summary of Difficult Conversations.)
Feedback tells you how other people see you. People who consistently take feedback better are more successful in their lives and work. Being open to feedback allows for learning and growth. Being resistant to it allows problems to fester and escalate, and can ultimately destroy relationships.
There are three types of feedback:
It’s important when seeking feedback that you are clear about what you’re looking for: evaluation, coaching, or appreciation. This will prevent confusion or frustration if you receive a different type of feedback than you’re expecting.
The primary difficulty when we receive feedback is that it triggers emotional responses that cloud our judgment and prevent us from properly comprehending the feedback. Understanding what sets you off and how your own particular wiring affects your reactions can help you get control over those reactions.
Your instinctive reaction to feedback involves three variables:
These three elements are heavily influenced by our emotions, which are often set off by certain triggers activated by feedback. Gaining control of your emotions involves fully understanding the triggers that produce them.
“Triggers” are instinctive and usually negative knee-jerk responses that cause us to dismiss feedback or get angry about it. Triggers fall into three general categories:
Let’s explore each trigger in more detail.
When our truth trigger is activated, we object to the content of feedback, labeling it wrong, unhelpful, or unfair. To counter this instinct, fully examine the feedback so that you can properly decipher the “truth” of it.
Feedback generally has two elements: an element that looks back (“Here’s what I noticed”) and an element that looks forward (“Here’s what you should do”). The “looking back” piece is made up of observations and interpretations of those observations—how a person feels about them. The “looking forward” piece of feedback is about next steps: advice, consequences, and expectations.
To find common ground, recognize that different people have different “truths”: Your views on another person are subjective, your interpretations are not necessarily more correct than other peoples’, and your judgment of how to correct problems might differ.
Understanding feedback involves examining not only the other person’s thoughts and feelings, but also your own. There are two key strategies: finding your blind spots and looking for differences instead of “wrongs.”
A “blind spot” is something we ignore or attribute little importance to but that other people see clearly. When people give us feedback about a trait we’re blind to, we dismiss it as untrue. Recognizing our blind spots can prevent this. There are different categories of blind spots:
To become aware of your blind spots:
Instead of asking yourself why the feedback is wrong (“That’s not relevant”; “It’s right for you but not for me”; “You’re not understanding the full context”), acknowledge that you and the other person see things differently and try to figure out why. By mastering “difference-spotting” in this way, you will be able to better understand the other person’s views and move from “No, that’s wrong” to “Tell me more.”
Finally, ask yourself what’s right about the other person’s feedback. Figure out what about the feedback makes sense, what might be worth trying, and how you can find some meaning that might be helpful.
Sometimes we react to feedback not because of the content of the feedback itself, but because of who gave it to us: It becomes about the who rather than the what. We can manage these relationship triggers by disentangling our reaction to the feedback from our reaction to the person giving it. There are two primary relationship triggers.
When receiving feedback, we’re often quick to look for something that disqualifies the person from giving it. These are commonly:
Our perception of how the other person treats us often determines whether or not we accept or ignore their feedback.
There are three general relationship elements that commonly affect us:
Often when we are relationship-triggered, we “switchtrack”: We respond to a piece of feedback with a reciprocal piece of feedback that is usually aimed at the person raising the issue rather than the issue itself. The conversation splits and starts following two entirely different tracks. For example, if your roommate tells you she’s tired of you not cleaning up the kitchen, and you respond, “Why are you always so critical of me?”, you’ve just switchtracked the conversation. When we don’t realize we are dealing with two separate topics, we end up talking over one another instead of resolving problems.
Control your relationship triggers by properly managing switchtracking and then stepping back to see the whole system.
The goal in controlling a relationship trigger is to recognize when you have two topics on the table, and address each properly. Follow these guidelines:
Sometimes, we’re too close to a situation to see it clearly. Viewing your conflict as part of a system can help you get a fuller understanding of how and why you might be clashing with someone else.
A “system” is a set of parts that operates as a complex whole. Each part influences the others. Taking some steps back can help you see how you fit into the whole.
Using a systems-focused lens will allow you to take control of the influences around you instead of being controlled by them.
Your identity is the story you tell yourself about yourself: what you’re good at, what you stand for, what you’re like. When feedback challenges this story, your sense of identity can start to collapse, and you’ve run into an identity trigger.
Get a handle on your identity triggers by adopting a growth mindset and approaching your emotional reactions thoughtfully.
A person with a growth mindset sees her traits as evolving. She views feedback as commentary on her actions rather than her identity (“Last week I nailed my sales pitch; this week I dropped the ball”). She sees setbacks as opportunities for learning. A person with a fixed mindset sees her abilities as stable and finished. She views feedback as a commentary on her person (“Last week I was great, this week I’m a failure”). She sees setbacks as permanent failures.
To adopt a growth mindset:
(Shortform note: To learn more about how to develop a growth mindset, read our summary of Grit.)
Follow five steps to counter your emotional reactions thoughtfully.
Now that you understand your triggers and how to control them, we’ll explore how to get the most out of a feedback conversation. Broadly speaking, feedback conversations have three parts making up an overall arc:
Get on the same page as your feedback-giver by asking yourself some questions:
This is the content part of the talk. Make sure to hit each of these points in this section:
When wrapping up your discussion, address:
At this point you’ve gotten a handle on how to understand feedback, how to respond to it, and how to have a feedback conversation. We’ll now look at the next step: what you do with that feedback, and how you can incorporate it into your life individually and in your organization.
There are five techniques that can help you find specific ways to incorporate feedback into your life:
We’ll now discuss how your organization can improve its feedback system by examining three perspectives: senior leadership and HR, team leaders and coaches, and receivers.
As the most visible players, a company’s leadership and HR are expected to spearhead performance management systems. There are some things you can do to help ensure success in that process.
Improve your team’s feedback skills by modeling your own system, emphasizing the tradeoff between short-term pain and long-term gain, and being aware of individual differences among your teammates that affect how each reacts to feedback.
The most important thing to remember is that as a receiver of feedback, you drive the process and control your own learning. Be proactive—seek out advice from those who can help you. Observe successful people and try to figure out what they’re doing differently. Be open, try out advice, and communicate clearly.
In the end, although learning is a shared experience, your own individual progress is up to you.
Feedback is any information you receive about yourself. It’s how you’re ranked, thanked, described, and advised. It can be formal or informal, direct or implicit: performance reviews or restaurant reviews, a second purchase from a new client, or the way a friend quietly doesn’t finish the appetizer you brought.
Feedback can be difficult to hear because it lives at the intersection of two basic human needs: our yearning for acceptance and our desire to learn. There’s a tension inherent between these two drives. We want to learn about ourselves so we can improve, but we also want to be accepted for who we are. Managing that tension well is the key to accepting feedback properly.
In Thanks For the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, two of the co-authors of the bestseller Difficult Conversations, walk you through how to become a better receiver of feedback, examining what feedback is and how it works, how we typically react, triggers that cause us to react badly, and specific techniques you can use to successfully discuss feedback and then incorporate it into your life. (Shortform note: to learn how to master hard conversations at work and at home, read our summary of Difficult Conversations.)
Those who do well are rewarded well, and people do well only through conscious and purposeful effort. A person’s ability to succeed depends in large part on her ability to seek, understand, and incorporate feedback into her life. This is true on an individual level as well as an organizational level, and in both professional and personal life.
Professionally, individuals who actively seek out feedback have higher job satisfaction, performance ratings, and creativity, and are better able to adapt to new systems and roles. Organizations that foster a culture open to feedback develop talent better, have lower turnover and better morale, and are better able to coordinate their teams to solve problems.
On a personal level, people willing to closely examine their lives have happier, longer-lasting relationships. Conversely, being resistant to feedback has steep costs. If transaction costs involved in addressing even simple problems seem high, others are discouraged from being open and honest. Left unaddressed, problems fester and escalate. Other people start to avoid and ultimately isolate a person resistant to feedback.
“Push” is the process of giving feedback; “pull” is the process of receiving it, and very often there’s a disconnect between the two. When we receive feedback, we feel the giver isn’t good at giving it, or we feel the feedback is unfair or untrue. But when we give feedback, we feel the receiver isn’t good at taking it. We feel our honesty is rarely appreciated, and that the person we are trying to coach often reacts by getting upset or defensive.
When organizations try to improve their feedback systems to address this disconnect, they often invest in feedback training that focuses on how to give feedback more effectively: the push. A better approach is to focus on how to receive it better: the pull. In any feedback transaction, it is the receiver who controls whether or not any given piece of feedback is understood, accepted, and adopted. Therefore, focusing on the giver doesn’t get at the root of the problem. When we properly master pull, we can manage our resistance to feedback and find insight even in feedback that feels wrong, enhancing our ability to learn and improve ourselves.
Before you can become a better receiver of feedback, you need to understand the three types of feedback:
Evaluation is assessment. It accomplishes a number of things:
Coaching is advice. It is aimed at helping you improve, learn, grow, or change, either to meet new challenges or to correct an existing problem. It helps you focus your time and energy where it matters, maintain strong relationships, and keep your efforts productive.
Appreciation is recognition and thanks. It lets you know that your efforts are noticed, making you feel worthwhile. It taps into our primitive need for acceptance. It can be motivating; the anticipation of being appreciated can encourage a person to put in extra effort. It can also be very personal; some people will look for appreciation from a formal recognition program while others will feel more valued after a good word from a mentor.
Feedback is often more effective when each of the three strands is offered separately. Offered together, one type can drown out another. If you receive evaluation along with coaching, you might get caught up processing the assessment and are less able to properly digest the advice. If you receive appreciation, it can feel tempered if it is partnered with coaching.
In general, evaluation feedback should come before either coaching or appreciation. Before a person can accept coaching or appreciation feedback, she needs to know where she stands. Knowing where she stands puts all other feedback into context. In the absence of clear evaluation, we try to use signals from coaching feedback or appreciation to determine where we stand.
For example, if your manager is giving you a lot of coaching, you might assume your standing is weak, but that may not be the case. If she gives thanks for a recent project you may deduce that your standing is strong, but that may also not be the case overall. Or you might be thanked for this project, but not for that one, and may then infer that your standing has lessened.
When seeking feedback, be clear about whether you are looking for advice, assessment, or appreciation. This will prevent you from getting frustrated or discouraged if you receive the wrong type. Sometimes your emotional responses to feedback are a reaction to a mismatch between which type of feedback you are expecting and which type you actually receive.
For example, if you are looking for encouragement on a project, but instead you get a list of things you did wrong (coaching instead of appreciation), or you are looking for specific ways to improve a project, but you get a vague “Not quite there yet” (evaluation instead of coaching), you are unlikely to be either happy or clear on what to do next.
Regardless of which type of feedback you're receiving, and no matter how objective a giver of feedback tries to be, there is always, inherent in any feedback, an element of judgment and interpretation. But as much as we may value objectivity and strive for it when giving feedback, total objectivity is not actually the goal.
Proper judgments and interpretations are what moves us forward towards improvement. People who are skilled at giving feedback are valuable precisely because their judgments are sound.
The goal of understanding feedback is not to eliminate judgments but to understand them so that you can discuss them: Why is this more important, why was that excluded? Is coming in just above projections good, or should you have greatly exceeded it?
The primary difficulty in receiving feedback is that it tends to trigger emotional responses that cloud our judgment and prevent us from properly comprehending the feedback. Different people react to feedback with different degrees of sensitivity. Some people can take negative feedback, absorb it, be upset by it, and then bounce back to their typical sunny dispositions. Other people are floored by negative feedback and find it hard to bounce back at all.
Your individual reaction to feedback involves three variables:
The combination of these three variables together makes up your temperament.
Though you are emotionally affected by individual events, these emotional adjustments happen against a more stable backdrop of your general state of mind: your baseline. Once the initial rush of an event has passed—the thrill of landing your first job or the sadness you felt when your dog died—you return to your general baseline. Each person has her own individual baseline and these can vary enormously. One person might seem perpetually grumpy while another seems inexplicably upbeat.
Your baseline affects how you receive feedback. People with happier baselines respond to positive feedback more strongly than do people with less-rosy baselines. People with lower overall satisfaction respond more strongly to negative feedback than do their rosier counterparts.
Some people will swing farther from their baselines than others in response to feedback; some stay within a relatively narrow emotional band while others react more strongly in either direction—positive and negative.
But whether or not we are highly sensitive or fairly even-keeled, “bad” typically registers more strongly than “good.” We respond faster and stronger to threats than we do to pleasures. This explains why we often focus on the one negative remark that’s sandwiched between ten positive comments.
The final variable is the duration of your emotional swing is how long it takes you to return to your baseline. Again, there is a lot of individual variability. Some people recover quickly to even the most distressing feedback, while others might still be feeling the sting months later. Likewise, some people can maintain the glow of a positive review for the rest of the day, while for others, it fades within minutes.
Our recovery tendencies can affect the strength of our swings and vice versa, creating both virtuous and vicious cycles. Those who hold on to their positive feelings after a boost can find it easier to later ride out a bump. Those who have trouble recovering from a setback often have a weaker subsequent response to positive feedback.
Innate wiring has a significant influence on how a person reacts to feedback. MRIs and other imaging technologies reveal different brain responses when different people react to stresses. People who bounce back quickly often have more neurological pathways in their emotional-regulation areas. People who hang onto their positive feelings have stronger releases of dopamine, the brain chemical of pleasure.
However, we do not operate completely at the whims of our brain chemistry. How we think about and interpret feedback can have an equally strong influence on our reactions.
The stories we tell ourselves about feedback are how we interpret what it means: what it says about who we are, how others think about us, and what’s going to happen to us because of it. Our negative emotions can distort and exaggerate these stories: how we remember the past, think about the present, and imagine the future.
To counter these distortions you need to understand the triggers that produce the emotions behind them.
“Triggers” are instinctive and usually negative knee-jerk emotional responses that cause us to dismiss feedback or get angry at it. Triggers make it hard to properly filter feedback, causing us to discard feedback that could help us, or conversely, incorporate feedback that is best ignored. Triggers fall into three general categories:
Understanding our triggers can help us locate the source of our resistance and better manage our reactions. We’ll explore these triggers in depth over the next chapters.
There are three kinds of feedback: evaluation (“Here’s where you stand”), coaching (“Here’s what you should do”), and appreciation (“Great job!”). These three types of feedback are best approached separately but are often not. Practice being aware of each and separating them yourself so you can better manage the conversation.
Think back to your last conflict with a friend, loved one, or colleague. What pieces of his or her feedback were evaluation?
What pieces of that conversation were coaching?
Did you have trouble distinguishing between the two? Did one drown out the other?
How could the threads of that conversation have been more effectively presented? (For example, would it have helped if the evaluation elements came before the coaching elements? Would it have been better if the feedback-giver gave only one type of feedback?)
How might your reactions and consequent behaviors be different in response to this more effective feedback?
Your temperament is a combination of your baseline emotional state, your typical emotional swing in response to events, and the speed of your return to your baseline.
Examine your own baseline. Are you generally upbeat or anxious? Is your mood overall positive or apprehensive?
Think back to the last time a stranger gave you a negative evaluation. This could be a driver who honked at you, a customer who complained about your service, or a person who passed you irritatedly on the sidewalk (perhaps even muttering something unmentionable under her breath). Examine your emotional response. How strongly did you swing off your baseline?
How was your recovery from that incident? Did you bounce back quickly or did the feeling stick with you? Did you brush it off or continue to think about it hours later?
When our truth trigger is activated, we object to the content of the feedback, labeling it wrong, unhelpful, or unfair.
To counter this instinct, you must fully examine the two elements of feedback—where the feedback is coming from and where it’s going—and identify unhelpful and vague labels that prevent you from properly comprehending it.
Feedback has two elements: an element that looks back (“Here’s what I noticed”) and an element that looks forward (“Here’s what you should do”). When the receiver of feedback does not properly understand exactly what experiences, values, and biases are producing the feedback, or what its explicit goal is, she tends to dismiss it as “untrue.”
The first part of feedback, the looking-back piece, is made up of a combination of data and interpretation of that data.
Feedback begins with data—observations that a person makes about you. Observations can be about anything, including your actions, statements, clothing, work habits, or even rumors about you. Though “data” sounds objective, observations are quite subjective. Different people pay attention to different data they come across because of variables in access, priorities, and biases.
Problems arise when two people approach feedback with two different sets of data. For example, a marketing team might object to the amount of push-back their legal counsel gives their marketing materials. The marketing team is looking at data from other companies, watching as their competitors put out messages faster and with less legal oversight. Their counsel, though, has access to different data. She sees litigation reports that show how costly it can be when a company gets caught up in legal problems its counsel could have anticipated.
Interpretations are the emotions, judgments, and values that people attach to their observations. Interpretations are also subjective, influenced by different rules, points of view, and (again) biases.
Conflicts happen not only when each party follows a different set of rules, values, and assumptions, but also when each believes hers are more correct than the other persons'. To find common ground, we must recognize that different people have different “truths”: Your views on another person are subjective and your data and interpretations are not necessarily more correct than other peoples’.
The second major element of feedback is the forward-looking piece. If the feedback is coaching, the forward-looking element is about advice (“You need less salt in this dish”). If the feedback is evaluation, the forward-looking piece is about consequences and expectations (“You aren’t allowed to cook for my parents again”).
You can’t properly understand feedback without understanding the labels through which it is typically delivered.
The process of moving from observation to interpretation happens fairly instantaneously and unconsciously; it’s how our brains work. Therefore, we are often unaware that it has happened. When we throw out an interpretation while thinking it’s an observation, we create a “label.”
Labels are shorthand for feedback. They are usually pithy phrases that sum up a person’s thoughts but are vague and open to interpretation (and misinterpretation). For example, “Be more assertive” is a label that can be interpreted in different ways.
Because labels are vague, we often supply our own interpretation to them, which can lead to problems if it doesn’t match what the person was actually trying to say. We may hear “be more assertive” and think it means “hound the customer better for a sale,” when in fact it means “act more energetic and engaging.” “Be more affectionate” might mean “hold hands in public,” but it could also mean “initiate sex more often.”
Labels are triggering because we read into them meanings that catch us emotionally. To prevent such a trigger, make a habit of identifying labels and resisting the urge to supply your own meaning. Instead of fixating on the label, try to figure out what’s behind it, and where the feedback is coming from.
Now that you’ve got a clearer idea of what’s behind a piece of feedback you’ve received—where it’s coming from, where it’s going, and how it’s being labeled—you are part of the way towards controlling your truth triggers. Next you must uncover your own blind spots so that you are aware of how your unconscious biases might be affecting the feedback you receive and your reactions to it. Then you must evaluate the feedback you’ve received by looking for differences instead of wrongs, and finally, looking for what’s right.
A “blind spot” is something we ignore or attribute little importance to, even though it seems obvious or feels important to other people. When we receive feedback that is related to something in one of our blind spots, we tend to dismiss it as untrue and wrong because it feels out of alignment with how we see ourselves. We need to be aware of these blind spots in order to control these truth triggers.
People have a few common blind spots that can cause them to misunderstand feedback:
Our emotional reaction to a situation usually seems much more intense to the person on the receiving end than it seems to us. When you feel your sister has done something inconsiderate, you may approach her with anger. In your view, your anger is a by-product, and somewhat beside the point. You’re paying attention to the inconsiderate act she did. In her view, though, your anger is central to your interaction. She can’t address the issue you’re raising without first addressing your anger.
When our emotional reactions become an issue in and of themselves, it becomes harder to manage the original issue.
A person often engages patterns of behavior that she herself is unaware of but others around her see clearly, revealing priorities and values she herself might not even be aware of. Much of the gap in perception here is due to point-of-view differences.
For example, when you are in a relationship, you are too close to the emotions to see it clearly. Your friends, though, can clearly see that you have followed the same pattern of deep infatuation ending in emotional withdrawal that you’ve followed in your last three relationships.
You need to accept that you could have missed these kinds of behavioral repetitions before you can be open to the feedback.
When we run into difficulty, we tend to attribute it to the circumstances around us, while other people tend to attribute it to our character. When you’re late to a meeting, you’ll say it’s because you were caught up unavoidably in another project (circumstance). Your manager might say it’s because you’re disorganized (character).
Acknowledge the gap between how others perceive your difficulties and how you yourself explain them. Once you’re aware of it you can respond to this kind of feedback more thoughtfully.
We judge ourselves by our intentions, but others judge us by how our actions impact them, as they can’t see inside our minds to know our intent. When you question a colleague, you might only be looking for clarity on a project detail (your intent), but she may feel you are micromanaging her (your impact).
You are likely to dismiss feedback in this blind spot when it doesn’t align with how you see your intentions.
In your everyday behavior, there is often a gap between the self you think you are presenting to the world and the self that others actually see. Just as in a poker game, we have “tells” that give away our true thoughts and feelings.
These tells live in our blind spots. They can influence how others see us and therefore how others craft their feedback to us. But because we’re often unaware of the signals we’re sending, when we receive feedback caused by them, it feels untrue, and we dismiss it. Sometimes our tells reveal our true thoughts and feelings; other times they project the wrong things. You might think you are being adequately polite, but people are actually seeing your impatience. Or, you might feel shy, but others see you as standoffish.
Tells can reveal our inner thoughts in various non-verbal ways:
Becoming aware of your blind spots will help quell that knee-jerk reaction that says, “That can’t be true,” but you can’t count on other people to fill you in on them. People tend to withhold honest assessments of each other—no one likes to hurt other peoples’ feelings. They may also assume you know these things about yourself already or that someone else will tell you.
Therefore, you need to discover your own blind spots:
Too often, when faced with feedback, we instinctively look for reasons why it’s wrong, which encourages us to dismiss the entire feedback outright. To properly understand feedback in a way that allows us to get anything useful from it, we must interrupt this instinct and replace it with a process of looking for differences. This is called difference-spotting, as opposed to wrong-spotting, and it allows us to get meaning out of feedback even if we don’t agree with it.
Wrong-spotting is a defensive reaction to the “truth” of feedback and is an easy trap to fall into. It happens when we believe that our experiences, values, and assumptions are more “right” than the other persons’.
There are many ways that we can find reasons for feedback to be wrong. We can tell ourselves it’s unrealistic (“No one actually gets offended at that joke”), it’s not currently relevant (“Sure, my marketing plan wouldn’t have worked in your day, but things are different now”), or it doesn’t apply to us specifically (“Hats look great on you, but not on me”). When we engage in wrong-spotting and dismiss feedback outright, we miss an opportunity to learn.
Difference-spotting is a process of acknowledging that you see things differently than the other person and working to figure out why. It is based on the assumption not that your interpretation is correct and theirs is wrong, but that both interpretations come from somewhere legitimate, and both need to be fully understood in the context of underlying assumptions, values, and priorities.
The key is to not dismiss the giver’s views while also not dismissing your own. Recognize that you each view feedback through the lens of your own experiences, assumptions, and values. By mastering difference-spotting, you’ll be able to move from “No, that’s wrong” to “Tell me more.”
After you’ve resisted the urge to wrong-spot, and you’ve identified reasons for your differences, ask yourself what’s right about the other person’s feedback.
This is not an exercise in labeling. You are not looking to simply label some elements “right” and others “wrong.” This can lead back to wrong-spotting. Instead, figure out what about the feedback makes sense, what might be worth trying, and how you can read into the feedback to find some meaning that might be helpful, even if it’s not the meaning that the giver intended outright. For example, if someone tells you to insert a chase scene into your screenplay in Act 2, you may not agree but you may realize that the manuscript does need a bit more action there.
Each of us approaches life with an assumption of a basic set of rules—a set of standards and operating principles that govern our behavior. We may think of these as “the” rules but in reality they are really only “our” rules.
Think of the last time you felt “wronged” by feedback (maybe your boss told you you were too passive or your partner told you you weren’t considerate). What set of rules—values, assumptions, and habits of behavior—did he or she base this feedback on?
What rules of your own did this feedback refer to? (For example, what habits of behavior did it object to? What priorities or assumptions of value did it speak of?—Do you believe if your partner’s family is coming over, it’s her job to prepare the house?)
Examine the two sets of rules between you. Instead of seeing how the other person is wrong, ask yourself why she abides by those particular rules or values. Look for why you two are different, instead of why you are right.
Now think through how you might have responded differently than you did during that conversation. How could you have made her aware of your differing assumptions underpinning her feedback? How could you have used that as a stepping stone to a resolution?
Labels are shorthand for feedback. They are usually pithy phrases that sum up a person’s thoughts but are vague and open to interpretation (and misinterpretation): “Be a team player”; “Act your age”; “You’re not his mother.”
Think back to your last performance evaluation or feedback conversation. What labels were used to convey that feedback?
When you heard that label, you made an assumption about what it meant. How did you interpret it?
What are some other meanings it could have had?
Now that you have a better understanding of truth triggers, we’ll examine relationship triggers, which have to do more with the person giving the feedback than the feedback itself.
Sometimes we react to feedback not because of the content of the feedback itself, but because of who gave it to us. The way to manage relationship triggers is to disentangle the feedback from the person giving it and examine each separately. Relationship triggers are typically caused by one of two dynamics: how we feel about the other person, and how we are treated by them.
If we receive feedback from a person we admire greatly, we tend to accept her insight without reservation. When receiving feedback from most people, though, we are quick to look for something that disqualifies them from giving it. These are commonly:
If a person gives feedback in an inappropriate way, at an inappropriate time, or in an inappropriate place (the how, the when, and the where), it shows a lack of skill and judgment, and you are likely to ignore the feedback because of it. (“How dare she bring this up in front of a client?”; “She waited until after we presented to raise this?”)
While your reaction may be justified, it leaves the original feedback unaddressed. When you find yourself reacting to the “how, when, or where” of a person’s feedback, keep in mind that the “what” is separate, and may be worth exploring regardless of the method of delivery.
We are similarly likely to ignore feedback from someone if she lacks experience or expertise in the area in question, or if she doesn’t share our values. (“She’s never lived abroad, how would she know?”; “She’s an aggressive manager, I don’t want to take her advice.”)
When we dismiss this feedback, though, we risk missing out on important new perspectives. Outsiders and newcomers can offer insights that people close to a situation miss because they are used to doing things in a certain way. In business, new and revolutionary ideas often come from people who are free to think outside the box because they don’t know where the boundaries of that box are. Even “naive” questions can be revealing, pointing out something the “experts” missed because they’re too well-acquainted with a project. Outsiders can also see interpersonal dynamics that might have become invisible to two people directly involved in a relationship.
This is not to say that credibility and experience are unimportant; they should always be considered as you put feedback into context. But don’t use lack of credibility as a reason to automatically reject it.
We mistrust people when we question their intentions, and when we feel:
The problem is, we can’t ever really know a person’s intentions. If we try too hard to determine them, we might end up assuming motivations that don’t really exist.
Furthermore, intentions are irrelevant to the feedback itself. Maybe she does intend to hurt you by telling you your project is unfocused. But she may be right. Conversely, your friend might have your best interests in mind when she tells you to wear flip flops to that wedding. But that may not be an appropriate wardrobe choice.
Even if you don’t feel you can trust the person giving you feedback, treat the question of her intentions as separate from the content of her feedback. Examine her feedback on its own merits, and don’t let your suspicion of her intentions cloud the advice itself.
Our perception of how the other person treats us often determines whether or not we accept or ignore her feedback. There are three relationship elements that often affect us:
If we feel we’ve gone to great efforts in some way, and those efforts are not acknowledged, we often react emotionally to that snub rather than listen to the other person’s feedback. It’s a perception of imbalance: even if her comments are accurate, we feel they’re inappropriate given your efforts.
Say you've been picking up your colleague’s responsibilities on a project because she’s swamped with an unexpected setback on a different project. If she comes to you and asks why you sent her client these materials instead of those, you may get triggered. Instead of thinking, “Thank you, I see now how those materials are more relevant,” you might think, “Do you not see all the effort I’m putting in for you?”
We have an innate sense of who is allowed to tell us what to do in different situations. When we feel someone is telling us what to do but does not have the authority to do so, we get triggered. We feel indignant that the other person misunderstands her role. If your manager asks to review your weekly updates to your sales team before you send them out, you may react with resentment: “It’s not her place to micromanage my emails.”
Our emotional reaction to this trigger might cause us to reject the advice itself. We might find ourselves dismissing her advice on messaging because we’ve decided she doesn’t have the right to advise us on it.
It’s important to, once again, separate the content of the feedback from the trigger. Then, raise the issue with the other person. An open conversation might reveal that her views of her authority over you in this matter are situational, temporary, and justified. For example, if you explain that running all of your communications by her will add unreasonable time constraints to your projects, she might explain that since you’ve only recently taken on the weekly updates, she wants to be sure your messages align with the company’s standards.
The relationship trigger of acceptance comes from the contradiction inherent in feedback: We find it hard to take feedback—advice on change—from a person who doesn’t accept us as we are now.
This dynamic is sometimes triggered when the two people in the conversation have a different understanding of each person’s standards for acceptance. While the giver may intend a piece of feedback to mean a small change, the receiver may interpret it as a rejection of her entire person. For example, your colleague may advise you to dress better if you wish to get noticed. She may see this as a small change you can do that will pay big dividends. You, however, may see it as an affront on your person: You plan to advance based on merit, not superficial standards.
Sometimes our reaction to an acceptance trigger reveals a desire to resist change entirely. When we feel ourselves reacting to feedback by saying things like, “That’s just who I am!” or “That’s just me being me,” we need to ask ourselves if what we are truly after is an excuse to not change, or rather, to make other people change their expectations to accommodate our actions.
Often when we are relationship-triggered, we “switchtrack”: We respond to a piece of feedback with a reciprocal piece of feedback that is usually aimed at the person raising the issue rather than the issue itself. It changes the subject from the feedback itself to the relationship; from the “what” to the “who.” For example, if your roommate tells you she’s tired of you not cleaning up the kitchen, and you respond, “Why are you always so critical of me?”, you’ve just switchtracked the conversation.
In switchtracking, a conversation splits and starts following two entirely different tracks. Problems then arise when we don’t realize we are dealing with two separate topics, resulting in two people talking over one another. When Charlie brings home caramels for Sue, he expects a warm “thank you.” Sue, however, reminds him that she’s mentioned several times that she doesn’t like caramels. Charlie accuses Sue of never appreciating his affectionate efforts. Sue accuses Charlie of not listening to her. They are no longer talking about caramels but may not realize the two new topics on the table: her appreciation and his attention.
Control your relationship triggers by properly managing switchtracking and then stepping back to see the whole system.
Manage switchtracking by acknowledging the two topics and giving each its own conversation track.
You can’t disentangle two topics from each other until you are first aware of each. Spotting switchtracking takes practice. Be alert for conversations where one person raises an issue and the second person responds with a statement or question that focuses on the other person herself, instead of the content of the issue. That’s a clue that switchtracking is taking place.
For example, a manager approaches her salesperson about her lagging sales numbers this month, and the salesperson responds, “You’re bringing this up at 4:00 on a Friday?” Topic one is the performance of the salesperson. Topic two is the judgment of the manager in bringing it up at the wrong time.
Once you’ve identified switchtracking happening, you can break the dynamic so you end up with a productive give-and-take discussion.
Give each topic its own track: As soon as you realize that you and the other person are talking about two different things, say so. Acknowledge the two topics: “I see two related but separate topics that we need to discuss.”
Acknowledge that they’re both important: “We need to talk about both.”
Outline a way forward: “Let’s address the first topic fully and then, separately, we’ll discuss the second.” Being hyper explicit like this is not how people normally talk, but that’s what makes it so effective: It breaks the flow of the conversation, and interrupts the chain of reactions that can derail it.
All things being equal, you should discuss the topic that was first raised. You wouldn’t be having the conversation if not for the first person’s original suggestion, so it makes sense to start there.
However, if the relationship trigger is so strong that it hampers your ability to address the original issue, say so and suggest that that topic gets discussed first. Clearing the air of the emotional trigger will allow you both to ultimately better address the original issue, which is what the other person wants as well. For example, if a husband reacts with anger when his wife brings up a problem with their taxes, she may need to discuss his reaction before she feels comfortable talking about the accounting error.
Watch for additional triggers as you discuss: Even after you’ve distinguished between two separate topics, you can still misunderstand exactly what those topics are. Look for meaning behind the words that indicate relationship-focused concerns. If the other person tells you, “Work is stressing you out,” and you respond, “Not at all; if I’m not keeping busy, I get restless,” you may feel that you’ve addressed her concern. But if her real point was, “I miss you because you work too many hours,” then you’ve missed the real problem.
Finally, to fully understand all the dynamics that can influence a relationship, you must understand your relationship as a part of a larger system. Often, conflicts are a result of the system not working properly more so than because of the specific characteristics of the two people involved in the dispute. Look at the system to get a truly clear picture.
A “system” is a set of parts that operates as a complex whole. Each part influences the others. A team, a company, and a relationship are all examples of systems.
When something goes wrong in a system, each player will see a small piece of the system that caused the issue. Typically, each regards the other person, not themselves, as the source of the problem. Your manager might see that you missed the deadline, while you might see that she gives unrealistic deadlines.
To properly understand the system and how it’s affecting the performance of everyone operating within it, you need to step back and look at it as a whole, rather than from your own specific vantage point that only allows you to see certain aspects.
Although feedback is usually presented as “This is how you are causing a problem,” the real issue is typically “This is how our differences are clashing.” These clashes are “intersections” where differences in opinion, values, and habits cause friction and feed a larger system of conflict. Your need to sleep in on the weekends is only a problem in relation to how it affects his plans to spend time with you and the kids.
The real problems begin when each of these individual conflicts starts creating additional conflicts, becoming a system of cause and effect that feeds on itself. When he insists you rise early on Saturdays to spend a full day with the family, you feel cheated of some much-needed down-time. He, though, misses you during the week because you’re working so much. When you start making excuses to find alone time on the weekends, he feels even more neglected and tries harder to capture your attention, which pushes you further away, and on and on.
From inside the system, we can only see the pieces we are immediately responding to. Taking “one step back” means looking at the pieces that the other person is responding to. Only then can you begin to spot patterns and intersections you were previously blind to.
Taking a second step back allows you to look not just at the way your habits intersect with the other person, but also reveals the roles you each play in the relationship.
Roles exist only in relationship to other roles. You are not a wife until you have a husband. You are not a mentor until you have a mentee.
Roles have an effect on behavior. If she is the cop and you are the driver who just ran a red light, your interaction is likely to play out in a fairly predictable way.
Roles can create adversity between two people who otherwise would not conflict. Harried teachers and demanding parents, human resources reps and disgruntled employees, and ex-husbands and the new boyfriend are all examples of people who have been put into roles that encourage adversity towards other people not because of their particular personalities, but because of the parts they play in the system.
Taking three steps back, we look at an overview of the whole system. The big picture includes other players, policies, processes, and the wider environment that influence peoples’ behavior and decisions, how they view each other, and the feedback they give each other.
For example, when investigating a workplace safety incident, it’s important to focus not just on the behavior of the worker involved (Was she following protocol? Was she drinking?) but also on the entire landscape. Was the worker fatigued, and if so, why? Was she working a double shift? Who watches out for fatigue when workers pull double shifts? Who repaired this equipment, and who knew that refurbished parts were used? Have there been cuts in safety training? How does the incentive system encourage or discourage safe behavior?
Once you have taken a look at the intersections of the individual parts in the system, the roles each part plays and the adversity that those roles can unintentionally create, and the wider landscape of other factors involved in creating the system, you can look again back at yourself and your own situation.
Once you understand how problems don’t arise in a vacuum but instead come from an interconnected web of influences, you will be well prepared to better handle issues as they come up. Keep an eye on the big picture and your own role in it. Watch for your own switchtracking, look for feedback patterns, and take responsibility for your part in problems.
Additionally, ask for the other person’s help to resolve the issue. Rather than try to force her to admit responsibility, let her know what she could do to help change your behavior. “I know I overreact about your spending habits, but I worry that if you’re buying expensive coffee I don’t know what else you might be splurging on. If you can be up-front with me about what small luxuries you need every now and then, we can budget for them together.”
And finally, change elements of the system to try to make the pieces work together more smoothly. Often a problem can be resolved by shifting roles, policies, or the wider landscape. Maybe putting someone in charge of a budget would change her perspective on casual spending. Maybe cleaning up the kitchen in the morning instead of at night when everyone’s run out of steam will resolve the issue.
Using a systems-focused lens will allow you to take control of the influences around you instead of being controlled by them.
Looking at your situation through a system lens allows you to:
In switchtracking, a conversation splits and starts following two entirely different tracks. One person offers feedback and the other person responds with reciprocal feedback, usually more aimed at the other person personally rather than the issue. The conversation then follows two paths and the people involved often don’t realize it.
Think back to your last argument. Try to remember any switchtracking that went on. Did you respond to the other person’s input with a different topic? Did that person do it to you?
What happened after it split into two tracks? Did you realize consciously that you were discussing two different topics? How did you address them each, or not?
How did you resolve the issue that had originally been brought up? If you didn’t resolve it, why not?
Intersections are where differences in opinions, values, and habits clash, when they were not a problem on their own. Roles can create adversity between two people who otherwise would not conflict, simply because of the responsibilities that come along with that role. Examine both intersections and roles to see the bigger picture of a conflict.
Think of a time when your habits, opinions, or values suddenly became a problem when you started interacting with someone new, when none of those things had been problems on their own. What differences caused these conflicts?
Were you able to find common ground with the other person despite these differences? How?
Think back to a recent conflict that resulted in an exchange of feedback. Was this person from another department? Was she a family member? How did the different roles you each played affect how you reacted to each other?
When feedback is threatening because it challenges who you feel you are, you’ve run into an identity trigger.
Your identity is the story you tell yourself about yourself: what you’re good at, what you stand for, what you’re like. (“I am a fair parent”; “I am level-headed”; “I work hard.”)
When feedback challenges this story, your sense of identity can start to collapse. This can happen through feedback both large and small. Something large might be not making tenure and then questioning if you’re the smart, popular professor you thought you were; something small may be no one eating your quiche, making you question how good a cook you are. You can even be triggered by feedback that isn’t directly about you, but is instead about someone close to you. Because your identity is formed in part by comparison to others, the success of your peers—a childhood friend being elected to Congress or a high-school ex taking over a large company—can reflect on your own.
Your ability to absorb difficult feedback is controlled by the identity story you tell yourself: who you are and where you are headed. To create an identity story that is robust and resilient rather than brittle, you must:
Labels, as we discussed earlier, are simplified versions of feedback. They can also be simplified versions of identity traits: “I’m competent” or “I’m committed.” Identity labels can help us navigate the choices we run into in daily life: “Should I eat this brownie in the break room? I want to, but I’m not a ‘snacker.’ That’s not who I am.”
However, these types of labels can hurt us because they are “all or nothing” propositions, and an all-or-nothing identity can be destroyed by feedback that challenges the “all” piece of it. All-or-nothing identities leave us with a choice to either abandon our sense of identity or deny the feedback entirely. We might also jump between deciding we are complete failures to deciding the other person is instead. For example, if your identity label says, “I am an excellent storyteller” but your novel doesn’t resonate with your critique partner, you might vacillate between thinking you’re a terrible writer to thinking your partner missed your genius.
When you abandon the simplicity of labels, you recognize that isolated incidents are not necessarily representative of your greater whole. This makes it possible to accept negative feedback as being true while still maintaining your sense of who you are: “My novel is mediocre. I am still, overall, a good writer.”
There are three truths you need to accept about yourself that will make it easier to accept feedback:
Accepting each of these truths can feel like a relief, removing some pressure to preserve a veneer of perfection.
Now that you’ve abandoned simple identity labels and accepted your own complexities, let’s discuss how adopting a “growth mindset” can help you bounce back from setbacks.
There are two types of mindsets: “fixed” and “growth.” Which type you have has profound implications for how you view yourself, how you listen to feedback, and how you then respond.
Adopting a growth mindset is about embracing the learning opportunities inherent in negative feedback. Try to think of your goal as not merely success (the outcome), but instead, the learning you gain, with success being a by-product (process). To move yourself further from a fixed mindset and closer to a growth mindset:
Your identity is triggered by evaluation but is far less threatened by coaching. Coaching doesn’t hint at who you are; it relates to what you do, so it’s easier to take.
It can be hard to differentiate the threads sometimes. We sometimes misinterpret coaching as evaluation even if it was intended as coaching: When your friend describes a faster way to the coffee shop, you might hear it as a judgment on your knowledge of the city.
Additionally, coaching and evaluation sometimes come hand-in-hand: When your daughter tells you she was hurt by your emotional absence when she was a child, she is giving you evaluation as well as coaching—she wants to both clear the air and strengthen your relationship moving forward.
Try to focus on the aspect of feedback that aims to change your behavior, not to judge your character. This will help you to get beyond your identity trigger and hear what ultimate take-away from the feedback.
Evaluation feedback can have three elements:
Often when you examine your reaction for these three influences, you see that what’s truly upsetting you is the other person’s judgment: her disappointment or her irritation. Recognizing this allows you to then discuss with her exactly what’s bothering you: Maybe you accept the ranking and the results, but don’t feel her attitude about it is appropriate.
When you receive painful evaluation, rate yourself on how well you handle it. In this way, even if you fail your evaluation from the other person, you can still get something positive out of the experience. For example, after a divorce (a negative evaluation from your spouse), you might note that you are doing very well in dealing with that feedback—you’re staying sober, continuing to exercise, and continuing to make gains at work.
Recognizing how you handle bad feedback helps you gain control of those reactions and help you see that the initial evaluation is not the end of your story. The more important story might be the learning you take away from the experience (again, bolstering a growth mentality).
(Shortform note: To learn more about how to develop a growth mindset, read our summary of Grit.)
You can further counter your emotional reactions by approaching them thoughtfully. Follow five steps:
Examine your behavioral patterns and habits so that you’re prepared for feedback when you receive it.
Name your feelings explicitly so that you can judge how they are affecting your interpretation of the feedback. Ask yourself three questions:
It’s possible that the negative details you’ve added to the story are correct. But it’s also possible they’re not. Be clear about what you’ve added and you’ll better see what the real threats are, not the ones your emotions are inventing.
When we are in a negative frame of mind, we can lose perspective and imagine the worst of every piece of feedback we receive. Sometimes it helps us see things in perspective if we actually see them, visually. Take a piece of paper and make two columns: one for what the feedback is about, and one for what it is not about. Compare the two. Or, take a piece of paper and draw smiley faces for every piece of good feedback you’ve received, and frowny faces for the bad. You may be surprised at the sea of smiles.
Changing your perspective on a situation can shed new light on it and snap you out of a dark story. A few techniques can help you do this:
As humans, we’re wired to care deeply about what others think about us. We can sometimes fall into a trap of trying to make others view us in a particular way. Accept that this is not something you have control over. Maybe you get the feeling that your colleague doesn’t like you. You’re not going to turn her around by bringing her sweets and peppering her with jokes. You might never turn her around, but that’s her decision, not yours.
The sooner you accept that you can’t control what others think and feel about you, the sooner you’ll be able to control your emotional reaction to their feedback.
Ask for Help When You Need It
There are times when no matter how hard we try, and how many of these techniques we attempt, we still can’t get control over our emotional responses to feedback. Although emotional distress can be helpful when it forces us to re-evaluate ourselves and face our problems, distress that lingers can be devastating, turning into long-term anxiety, causing depression, lowering our abilities to function, and in the worst cases, leading to suicidal thoughts.
When you find you just can’t contain your emotional responses to feedback, it may be time to seek outside help. Ask for support from friends, family, your community, or religion. Seek professional help through therapy, medication, or even hospitalization if needed.
When we are in a negative frame of mind, we can lose perspective and imagine the worst of every piece of feedback we receive, linking it to every similar incident from the past and exaggerating and distorting any possible consequences.
What’s a negative piece of feedback that you’ve received—maybe an employee evaluation or an overheard comment from a friend—that made you exaggerate the enormity of the situation? Did it make you remember every similar incident from the past? Did it make you think everyone felt this way about you?
How did you recover from that emotional setback? Did the passage of time put it into perspective? Or were you able to talk yourself off the proverbial ledge and realize that your exaggeration was misplaced?
Think of a time you imagined horrible consequences but later laughed at the incident. What triggered you to initially respond with such strong emotion? How could you have found the humor in the situation earlier?
We’ve discussed many techniques and concepts related to receiving feedback in general. We’ll now look at specifics of how to have a feedback conversation: the general arc of the conversation and major elements you need to touch upon to be successful. Broadly speaking, feedback conversations have three parts:
Each plays an important part in properly connecting the speaker to the listener and vice versa. We’ve discussed many of these points in more detail already, so here we’re just going to touch on them once again briefly in the context of how and when you can use these techniques in your discussions.
When you receive feedback, whether it’s a formal evaluation or a more off-hand comment, open your discussion with the other person by getting aligned.
The opening is where you’ll get aligned with the other person as to the purpose and tone of the conversation. Ask yourself some questions to get on the same page as your feedback-giver:
Set the tone of the conversation close to the start of it. Research shows that the first few minutes of a conversation are crucial to setting the tone for the rest of it, and that productive outcomes depend in great part on the receiver’s ability to course-correct a negative conversation. If a person comes at you with a negative start, resist the urge to react instinctively. Pause and ask questions to ground the conversation: “Can we take a step back? Let’s make sure we’re on the same page here.”
Course-correcting is not about addressing the content of the feedback; it’s about clarifying the goal of the conversation. Staying aligned with the other person on how you have the conversation will allow the what of the conversation to be better addressed.
The body of the conversation is where the bulk of the discussion will happen. This is the content part of the talk. As you navigate this phase, focus on:
Each of these is integral to the process of understanding. We’ll go through these one by one, but since conversations are rarely ordered, don’t worry about staying in order during your discussion. It’s okay to jump around between these elements as you go, just as long as you hit each one.
Listen to your internal voice. Pay attention to the running commentary of your thoughts and feelings and watch out for triggers and questions that come up. Your internal voice can drown out the other person’s actual words if you get caught up in your reactions to something she said. She may be talking about point number two, but you miss it because you're still thinking about point number one: “Wait, what was that? How can she think that?” Ask your inner voice what it’s really after and what it’s afraid of so that you can address those issues properly and remain open and curious to the other person’s feedback.
Let the other person know you hear her. Ask focused questions to let your feedback-giver know that you are taking her input seriously. Allowing her to feel heard validates her efforts and makes her more likely to turn around and listen to you when it’s your turn to talk, and far more likely to accept whatever decision you make.
Don’t let your questions get hot, though. Focus on seeking information and keep implied judgments out of your words and tone. “Are you stupid?” and “How could you think that?” are both framed as questions but are actually accusations. Avoid sarcasm (“I love hearing what I’m doing wrong. What else do you have?”) or cross-examination (“Well okay, then, how do you explain…?”) Instead, replace these with questions ruled by thoughtfulness instead of emotion: “What you’re saying now seems inconsistent with what you suggested last week. This isn’t clear to me.”
Circle back to be sure you’re properly understanding: “Are there any aspects I’m not seeing?”
If feedback is going to be useful in any way, you need to understand what the giver is telling you in specific detail. When you receive coaching, have her clarify her advice. Ask yourself if you’d know how to follow her advice if you wanted to. A statement like “Give a great speech,” is too vague to be helpful. Ask her for specifics: “What makes a speech great? Can you give me some examples, and what you liked about them? Or speeches that fell flat?”
When you receive evaluation, ask her to clarify the consequences and her expectations. It’s easy to get caught up reacting to an evaluation and forget to probe it for more meaning. Ask how it will affect you, what the next step is, and what you need to do specifically to meet expectations.
As you receive feedback, it’s important that you complete the picture the other person is painting by submitting your own inputs for inclusion: your observations, interpretations, and feelings. This is not about persuading her that you’re right. It’s about completing the picture so all the pieces are on the table and you can effectively solve the puzzle together.
As you offer your own insights, be mindful of trigger traps that can color your discussion. Don’t defensively wrong-spot; don’t switchtrack; don’t exaggerate your points.
People who are excellent feedback navigators have the ability to manage the conversation as they are in it. To become one of these people yourself, try to diagnose and describe communication problems as they come up during the conversation so that you can propose solutions in real time. Being hyper-aware of how you are having the discussion helps you avoid triggers.
For example: “We’re talking about two issues here (diagnose). You’re telling me you have a problem with what I did, and I’m telling you that your anger was an unreasonable response (describe). We need to talk about what I did, but we also need to talk about the way you bring up problems because your reaction becomes a problem in itself. Which do you want to talk about first (propose)?”
These statements can sound awkward and unusual, which, again, is precisely why they are effective: They stop the flow of the reaction-to-reaction dynamic of a typical conversation.
Most conversations skip the step of closing properly, assuming that both parties know what the other person expects them to do. This can lead to problems later when each becomes disappointed in a lack of progress or discouraged by unrealistic expectations.
When closing, be explicit about the next steps and the expectations moving forward. This does not necessarily mean agreeing to changes. It can mean simply committing to reflection and setting up another time to talk: “I’m going to give this some thought. Let’s touch base again tomorrow.”
When wrapping up, address:
At times you may fully understand a person's feedback, where it comes from and what advice they’re suggesting, and yet you’ll still disagree with it. There’s nothing wrong with that: Knowing exactly why you disagree can, in and of itself, be helpful. To move forward when you still disagree, simply acknowledge the feedback and how it affects you.
The most important thing in closing, and in fact, in every step, is to make sure both you and the other person are crystal clear about what each is trying to say and what each expects to happen next.
Although the main focus of this book is how to be more open to feedback, this doesn’t mean you always have to be open to it. There are times when it’s okay to set limits as to when or even if you accept feedback. In fact, being able to say “no” is an important part of receiving feedback—if you always say “yes,” then you are not meaningfully interpreting it, but instead are merely allowing someone else to make your decisions for you.
Further, sometimes refusing feedback is part of the process of accepting it: declining it may give you a needed pause during which you can do your own reflection and come up with your own insights.
There are three levels of boundaries you can set when you have decided that for one reason or another, you are not open to receiving feedback at this time. These span the spectrum from soft denials to hard ultimatums.
It can be difficult to determine when it’s okay to refuse feedback. How do we know when declining feedback is appropriate, or when it’s just an excuse to shut down legitimate and helpful advice? There’s no hard-and-fast formula for determining this, but there are a number of questions you can ask yourself to figure out if a boundary is needed in a particular context or relationship.
If you do decide to turn away feedback, be clear and firm about it.
The opening of the conversation is where you’ll get aligned with the other person on the purpose and tone of the conversation. The body is where you’ll discuss the content of the feedback. The closing is where you’ll clarify next steps and expectations.
Think of the last time you were approached with feedback by someone in either your professional or personal life. Come up with two or three questions that you could have asked yourself or the other person that would have helped you both align your expectations for the discussion.
In the body of that conversation, did you hit all of the steps to thoroughly discuss feedback? (Did you listen in a focused way and ask emotion-free questions? Did you ask for clarification on anything vague? Did you offer your own interpretations and let her know your reasoning behind your choices?) Which steps could have been better implemented, and how?
Did you leave the conversation with a clear understanding of what she expected next from you? Did she leave with a clear understanding of your takeaways?
What can you do differently next time you speak with this person about this or another issue?
At this point, you’ve gotten a handle on how to understand feedback, respond to it, and have a feedback conversation. We’ll now look at the next steps: what you do with that feedback and how you can incorporate it into your life individually and your organization.
There are five techniques that can help you incorporate feedback into your life:
Sometimes feedback has several strands and encompasses a wide area. Often it is vague. Get a handle on it by approaching just one specific aspect of it first.
Once you’ve successfully understood the feedback you’re presented with and you’ve decided to incorporate it into your life, you must figure out exactly how to do that. Make sure you understand the giver’s true interests, then look for options that address them.
Positions are what people say they want; interests are what they actually want. A person might say “I want you to be on time,” but what they really mean is “I want you to care.” Look for options that address their underlying concern. If a doctor is getting complaints that she’s regularly late for appointments, hanging a sign in the waiting room explaining that patients are never rushed through appointments and therefore appointments can sometimes run late lets her patients know that the issue is not that she doesn't care about them, but that she cares a lot.
At times, even when you know you need to change, it can be hard to let go of habits that are comfortable and predictable. At other times, you’re not sure if changing is the right way to go. And sometimes, you’re not sure if you want to bother changing, even if you know the feedback you’ve received is spot-on. This is especially true if the problem hasn’t impacted your life in a huge way—yet. Maybe you know you are always late to things, but in general, other than missing a few opening acts and having to apologize to friends left waiting, it hasn’t resulted in any huge problems.
Whether you’re not sure how to get started, not sure if you should, or not sure whether to bother, running small experiments is a great way to put that metaphorical toe in the water. Testing out advice on a small level lowers the stakes and the potential costs of committing to a big change. It also shows the other person that you are taking their insights seriously, which can have relationship advantages that reach beyond this specific issue.
You can increase the likelihood that you’ll stick with a new behavioral regime by increasing the immediate, tangible benefits of change.
Be aware that things often get harder before they get easier when you start on a new program of change. We are often less efficient, comfortable, or happy when we begin to work on new skills. This is typically the point at which most people abandon the program. To prevent this, commit to pursuing your new course of action for a specifically designated period of time so your program has the time it needs to start working. This might be three days, two weeks, or a year, depending on the specifics of your project.
Allowing the feedback-giver to help you can transform your relationship. The fact that you are trusting of her and confident enough to ask for her help makes her feel appreciated and respected. Being open to her advice also allows her to feel open to your advice later. If there’s something you want to talk to another person about, but she seems resistant, try opening yourself up to advice from her first on something else. It may spark the connection she needed to allow her to listen to your feedback.
In the end, feedback isn’t just about the quality of the advice—it’s about the quality of the relationship between you.
There’s no such thing as a perfect feedback system for any given organization. Every system will have tradeoffs. It will work well for some, be adequate for others, and be poorly suited to still others. There are some things you can do, though, to give your chosen system the best shot at success. We’ll examine these techniques through three perspectives: senior leadership and HR; team leaders and coaches; and receivers.
As the most visible players, a company’s leadership and HR are expected to spearhead performance management systems. Promoting a culture of learning can lay the groundwork and being honest about a system’s benefits and tradeoffs can help smooth a rollout.
As discussed earlier, people who view feedback as an opportunity to learn respond to it better and improve themselves from it more. There are specific things you can do to encourage a culture of learning:
Often when rolling out a new performance evaluation system, senior leadership and HR extol its benefits in an effort to get the rest of the company behind it. This is an understandable impulse but can have unintended consequences. Employees are quick to pick up on something that sounds too good to be true. If lower-level employees sense their seniors are trying to manipulate their reactions through unrealistic optimism, they’ll react by balancing it with extra skepticism. The company becomes divided into cheerleaders (leadership and HR) and “sneerleaders” (everyone else).
A better approach is one that feels more honest. Promote benefits but also address shortcomings. This will allow employees to be better prepared for how to manage the program and what to expect from it. In particular, address:
If senior leadership models the feedback-receiving experience, the system will be much more readily accepted across all levels of the organization. It can also be an illuminating exercise for that leadership.
Typically when we ask for feedback, we seek people who are somewhat at the same level of expertise and experience as we are, or ideally, who are ahead of us. Sometimes, though, it’s useful to seek the opinions of those behind us in experience or expertise. Some of the best forms of coaching can actually come from your subordinates, who can see your blind spots and how they affect people at all levels around you. They are hyper-aware of any inconsistencies in your messaging and anything that creates extra work for them.
Actively seek out input from those below you. Establish concrete ways in which people can approach you with insight. Consider establishing “reverse mentorships” with one or more people in several levels of the organization, who you trust to alert you to concerns from different departments or offices of the company. Your goal when seeking feedback as the boss is to discover how your priorities are and aren’t affecting all parts of the organization, and to look out for unintended effects of initiatives.
A company is a collection of subcultures. Team leaders can have a significant impact on the productivity and satisfaction of their particular corner of the organization. Establish healthy feedback systems on your team by modeling your own system, knowing the difference between short-term pain and long-term gain, and being aware of individual differences among your teammates.
The most important thing to remember is that as a receiver of feedback, you drive the process and control your own learning. Be proactive—seek out advice from those who can help you. Observe successful people and try to figure out what they’re doing differently. Be open, try out advice, and communicate clearly.
In the end, although learning is a shared experience, your own individual progress is up to you.
When faced with the need to make changes, you may not be sure how to get started. Running small experiments is a great way to try out advice before making a full commitment.
What’s a piece of advice that you’ve received that felt too big to take on? Write down a few small ways you might test it out instead, before taking the plunge into a full commitment.
When rolling out a new performance evaluation system, you should promote its benefits but also address its tradeoffs. Address five points:
Examine the five points listed above and think through how you might explain your particular system to your employees. What are the goals of your system?
Why was this system chosen over others?
What are the system’s benefits? What are its potential drawbacks?
What happens if employees don’t fully engage with the system?
How can employees reach out to you with feedback or suggestions? What are your policies regarding this? How quickly will you respond?