Giving and Receiving Feedback is Hard: Try to Think of It As a Gift
At a conference I attended in March, one of the presenters was talking about how challenging it is to give feedback to employees and said, “If anyone knows how to do it, let me know.” The audience laughed, but I thought about raising my hand.
I don’t think I am great at giving or receiving feedback. Yet. But I do know what we *should* do. And I know why we should do these things. I hope that by sharing them with you, you can practice these skills and keep working to develop the trust in others and trust in yourself that giving and receiving good feedback requires.
I did get a lot of practice receiving feedback throughout my education as a creative writer. As an undergraduate, I had a poetry professor who would critique the class’s poems each week, ripping them apart until one of us cried. Seriously, he did not stop tearing into our work (these were poems!) until someone was in tears. Often we would end up defending each other. Sometimes we would agree with the critique. What I learned most from that experience was that the professor cared a lot about good work and very little about students. He wanted to make us better writers, but he didn’t care how much he hurt us along the way. Several of the folks from that class have published books; two are well-known writers. The professor’s success rate is really quite high in turning people with talent into people with skill. But at what cost?
My master’s program took the opposite approach to critique. The professor’s said very little in class and encouraged us to critique each other. Frequently, this turned into us saying what we would have done with the poem. “I would have written this.” “I want it to end this way.” “I wouldn’t use this word.” Our critiques were self-centered, taking ownership (this is appropriation) of other’s work as a substitute for critique. We made the work entirely subjective: I want it this way. What I learned from this type of feedback was that my response to the feedback was the most valuable thing. People could tell me what they wanted to do with my writing, and I either agreed with them and took the note or disagreed with them, sometimes vehemently. The value of irate disagreement is that it confirmed my choices. If I didn’t like their feedback, then I knew that what I had decided to do was exactly right for me.
And in my PhD program, the approach to critique was again different. These professors didn’t want to make us cry, and my fellow students had matured enough to see my work as different from theirs. They didn’t want to tell me what they would do if they had written my poems because they would never have written my poems in the first place. Instead, we discussed outcomes, goals, what we were trying to achieve and whether the work had achieved it. The process was different in that people offered critique by stating what they observed, what they noticed, what the work inspired in them. “I liked this word.” “The poem made me think of a field of flowers.” “I wanted to tear down the world and build it up again.” Instead of telling me what to do, the feedback focused on their experience. Through this type of feedback, I was able to decide whether those were the things I wanted them to notice or experience. And I could make choices about those words or sentences or outcomes.
These experiences with criticism, fundamental to virtually all writers, give us a tough skin, an iron core, and an awareness that the best kind of feedback is that which states the observations of the feedback giver and allows the feedback receiver to make the judgment.
Doing this is easier than you would think.
Giving Feedback
When giving feedback, focus on the facts. What information or observations do you have that the receiver of feedback may not have access to? How can you present those observations in a neutral and unbiased way? Here’s what I saw or heard rather than here’s what I think you should do.
In addition, we can be specific about our language choices in ways that celebrate the person for accomplishments, keep them central to our observations, but remove them personally from problems. We do this through our choice of pronouns.
Neutral to Positive Feedback
The key here is that we should use the word “you” for neutral observations: You’ve attended 5 out of 6 department meetings this week. And we should definitely use “you” in positive acknowledgement: You gave such an awesome presentation!
Those uses of “you” should come pretty naturally to us, but we want to make sure we are doing them. When we say “That presentation was awesome!” the person doesn’t have the same response because it doesn’t feel personal. Make sure your compliments are personal!
Negative Feedback
When giving negative feedback, the idea is to take the “you” out of it so that the failure or mistake is not personal. Rather than blaming, shaming, or otherwise making them responsible, negative feedback should focus on the work: what is wrong with the work, why isn’t the work meeting expectations–even better: what are the expectations and what happened with the work? The more objective we can be about problems, the easier it will be for the person to hear the problem and participate in solving it. If you make the problem the person, they will be defensive, upset, emotional, and more often than not either argue with your feedback or refuse to respond to it.
Also, when giving negative feedback, try to focus on what could be different in the future rather than what went wrong now. Focusing on the future allows both the feedback giver and the feedback receiver to think about constructive ways to improve without dwelling on past errors. The past shows us where the areas to improve are. But it can’t be changed. So, together you can think about what to do next time.
Using these strategies will help the receiver be better able to process what you are saying. They will feel like they are getting credit for the good things, like they are seen on the neutral things, and that they are not miserable human beings because they made a mistake. The language we use has very real effects on the humans around us, and when we are trying to help people become better versions of themselves, we need to use the right language that will support them in that development.
Receiving Feedback
Giving feedback is hard, but receiving feedback is even harder. When we think about the communication model–that communication happens in the intersection of minds between a sender and a receiver–we can imagine that the central purpose of the communication is to help. The sender wants to provide feedback to help the receiver improve, grow, change, be more successful, make more money, get promoted, get the job, etc. The underlying goal is usually good.
And the receiver of feedback wants to achieve those outcomes. The challenge is that we as the receiver want all our good work to be acknowledged and often want to feel like we are doing well already. Feedback in and of itself suggests that we are not perfect, that we can be improved, and that is not comfortable for us to think about. However, the idea that we can always be better is essential for a successful and happy life. Humans are not perfect. We never will be. We can always change, grow, improve. And in most cases, we inside our own bodies, in our own heads, don’t have enough objectivity about ourselves–how we are perceived, what other people think of us–to be able to make good decisions about how we should or could change and grow.
We need the observations of other people to help us become our better selves.
But the observations of others will also tell us where we are lacking, which is uncomfortable.
Which is why giving and receiving good feedback first requires trust. We have to trust that the other person cares about us and genuinely wants us to succeed.
We also have to be open to receiving feedback. Not wanting to hear how our behaviors or actions could be more successful puts us in the fixed mindset: what I am doing now is good enough and I am not interested in change. Certainly, this is sometimes true. But as an overall life skill, the growth mindset has been shown to result in happier, more successful people.
We don’t know how other people perceive us. The fact that someone is willing to give us this information is a gift.
And the most important thing to remember about feedback is that you don’t have to take it. A person giving you their assessment of your behavior may not have all the information or background or context. They may not know *why* you have done something or said something. What they can tell you is what they have observed: you said this. You did this. Other people responded to what you said in this way. Other people responded to what you did in this way.
These are facts that you probably don’t have access to because they are coming from an objective (outside yourself) point of view.
When someone offers us feedback, we should remember that
They didn’t have to tell us.
Telling us shows they care about us.
They have a perspective we don’t have.
We are not perfect. We always have room to grow.
We don’t have to take their advice.
And in responding to feedback, we should thank them: Thank you for sharing that with me.
Sometimes that’s all we can handle because the feedback is difficult to hear. And that’s ok.
If you feel calm, you may want to ask for more information about what they observed or what led them to give you that feedback or what they see as the optimal outcome of the feedback. But only ask follow up questions if you feel ready to listen. If you feel defensive, which is ok–receiving feedback is hard–just thank them for it. You can always return to the conversation when you feel more curious about their perspective and can interact with it from a positive and supported perspective rather than a defensive and uncomfortable one.