The 3 Enemies of Feedback
Receiving critical feedback is one of the most difficult things about working with others. But why is it so dang hard? And how can we get better at both receiving feedback and learning from it?
One thing to keep in mind is that half the battle comes before a tough message is ever shared. Those who learn best from critical feedback have often made a life decision to learn from criticism and exhibit a growth mindset.
Individuals with a growth mindset believe talent is malleable. They believe intelligence and ability can be developed through effort and practice. A growth mindset is important because it forces us to acknowledge that we are a work in progress. We need input for growth.
There are three enemies preventing us from receiving feedback. Let’s call them the three P’s: the Person giving the message, Personal feelings, and the Packaging of the message.
1. The Person Giving the Message
Our brains are highly critical of who is sharing a message with us. We may discount a message that’s coming from a co-worker (especially one whom we think is “inexperienced,” “young,” “old,” “dumb,” “insert your own judgmental adjective here”), yet make an immediate behavior change when the same message comes from a boss or someone we respect.
We form snap judgments of people, and unfortunately those snap judgements linger in our heads much longer than they should. These impressions are often inaccurate — or incomplete, at the very least — but the opinions influence the way we process messages from that person.
We need to remember everyone offers a unique perspective that can shed light on how we are being perceived by others. We shouldn’t let our biases about someone get in the way of receiving a message we need to hear.
2. Personal Feelings
When we hear feedback, our brains often jump to a conclusion regarding what that feedback means about us as individuals. We assume the feedback speaks to our identity, when in fact it refers only to a specific action/inaction of ours that could have been handled better.
Here are a few examples of what this looks like:
See how easily this can happen? Our brains are skillful at crafting immediate, compelling narratives of who we are and how we should feel about ourselves based on just a few sentences from someone.
The problem is that as soon as we begin questioning our identity, our emotional barricades go up. We tend to miss out on the message and not learn the lesson we’re supposed to learn from that situation.
The key is to recognize that feedback almost always refers to a specific behavior rather than our personal identity. Once we make that important mental shift, we begin to truly hear what others are saying.
Another personal impediment to accepting feedback is our ego. Pride blocks our ability to process and fix mistakes.
Counterintuitively, the best people in any given field often recognize they have the most to learn. In the words of John Archibald Wheeler, “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” High performers often see feedback as valuable data to be marshaled into personal improvement and new behavior.
3. The Packaging of the Message
An old boss of mine named Harry had a remarkable ability to give feedback in a way that challenged me, but also reminded me he was my biggest fan and had complete confidence in my abilities.
Harry could give me the hardest, most challenging feedback, yet I would walk out of his office with a bounce in my step, knowing I could improve in that area with his help. He was on my side and we were fighting the battle together. I would have done anything for Harry.
Unfortunately, most people aren’t Harry. In fact, most of our learning will come from people who are terrible at giving feedback.
It would be easy to discount every message that is “packaged” poorly, but doing so would lead to stagnancy rather than growth. We cannot control the way others give us feedback, but we can absolutely control the way we respond to that feedback.
Maybe the person giving the feedback was shouting, crying, swearing, or misinformed. But what did they say? Was there a nugget of truth buried deep in the message?
Even if 90 percent of the message is off-base, almost every message contains a golden 10 percent we need to hear. As soon as we orient our minds to search for these nuggets of truth, our personal development skyrockets.
Learning from feedback demands we make a life decision to be continuous learners who prioritize the truth over fuzzy feelings and sugar-coated messages. Personal growth requires the ability to learn from everyone in every situation.
To learn, we must ward off the three P’s (Person, Personal, and Packaging) that cloud our judgment and prevent personal development.
You make some valid points, many of which I recognise as my own reaction to feedback. Its easy to see how unproductive this is when you can review it in a calm way disconnected from a real life example, however, in the moment, the emotional response is much harder to control and the mind immediately starts questioning self worth. A really interesting topic, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I totally agree. It’s way more difficult in the moment.
I still struggle with this a lot, but a few things have helped me out:
(1) Lately I’ve been trying to think of feedback as simply DATA. If one person says I did an awesome job leading a client meeting and someone else says they thought I performed horribly, I have two really useful pieces of data. At that point, it’s my job to make sense of that data and determine what is true. Thinking of feedback as data is useful because data doesn’t infringe upon my identity or change my view of who I am. It informs me as to one person’s perception about something I did.
(2) I think sometimes it’s easiest to tackle a challenge once you’ve “named it.” Personally, this mental model (the 3 P’s) of understanding why I resist feedback has been useful for me to mentally process why I’m getting frustrated. For me, more often than not, when I hear feedback and start to get emotional, it’s because I am taking something too personally (the 2nd “P”). My ego is getting in the way. Once I realize that, I think about how I don’t want to be the type of person who is driven by an animalistic ego.
(3) I’ve found that if I psych myself up to receive feedback in advance, I can accept it more easily. It’s basically a way of paving my mental path to receive feedback. This isn’t always possible (because sometimes we are given feedback by surprise), but I often know when I’m about to walk into a feedback situation. For instance, I gave a company training yesterday. I knew that immediately after the training concluded would probably be “feedback time,” because people are often inclined to share what they liked and didn’t like about a training. Mentally preparing for that in advance helped me minimize my emotional response.
(4) Similarly, I’ve noticed that I respond much better to feedback when I have asked for the feedback. Because of that, I often take the lead by asking for feedback before someone else would potentially give it. Examples: I ask for feedback in every 1-on-1 with my boss, I pass out feedback forms after I lead company trainings, and I ask co-workers what feedback they have for me after I finish leading a big meeting. Each of those proactive steps helps me get myself in a head space to receive feedback well because I have willingly asked for it. Plus, it has the upside of getting me more accustomed to hearing feedback. The more often I hear it, the easier it is to receive without responding emotionally.
Again, I definitely still struggle with all of this, and I think this is the type of thing that may be a lifelong struggle. However, I really think things like mental models, emotional preparation, and proactively asking for feedback help out a lot.