Feedback is NOT a Gift
The very first time I took over two teams and merged them I gathered everyone in a conference room and asked them to go around the table one by one and say 1) how they like to give feedback and 2) how they like to receive feedback. It was an effort to get us to communicate better.
As humans we all have best ways in which we consume and disseminate feedback. For some it is written or verbal, and some prefer the sandwich method (something good + something bad + something good) — fwiw, I am not a fan of the sandwich method because the clarity of your message often gets lost in the feedback.
The group all went around and answered honestly and then it came to me. I summarized what I heard from all of them, which was every person said: they like to receive direct feedback, most preferred it verbally, some written.
Then I called bullshit on all of them.
The hard truths
Everyone said they wanted direct feedback but the majority of people cannot handle direct feedback the way it is delivered by most. It’s all in the packaging.
No one likes to be told they are wrong, their idea was not good, or told an alternative of what to do. The human brain is not programmed for rejection. It’s universal we all seek connection with others. To say we are wrong, not good, or tell us something different than what we believe makes us feel like we’re losing that connection.
As Brené Brown says, “to be clear is to be kind and to be unclear is unkind.” It is possible for you to be clear, direct, and kind, but it’s hard to do. It takes effort. Most people are just not good at it.
Further, as humans we tend to attach so much of our self-worth to our work, we take things far too personally. This is where it gets tricky. Because you want to be conscientious enough to do a good job, but you also need to not take it too personally when someone rejects your idea/work.
“Feedback is a gift”
I hate this saying because most feedback is unsolicited. Also, sometimes the feedback is not good or it’s wrong. Someone once said to me after I was steaming about feedback left in a public Slack channel that was inaccurate, “but Tracy, they were coming from a place of good intentions when they said that.” And all I could retort was, “Yes but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” 😈
Unsolicited feedback, especially at work
Unsolicited feedback is the worst. No one wants to hear it. It’s why most people dread performance reviews. Some psychologists say they (performance reviews) remind us of being criticized as children. Performance reviews also threaten people’s sense of confidence and they can trigger anxiety. For example, never say, “Can I give you some feedback?” because that question automatically makes the recipient brace themselves for something negative. No matter how you say it, it won’t be received well.
It really matters how it’s packaged.
How you say it matters
If you give someone feedback in a kind tone of voice it almost always tends to be better received.
But if you use that tone of voice all the time, it can be confusing to the recipient.
Tone & Words
I once worked for a manager who was a kind human. Even their feedback was kind. You could get laid off or fired and not even understand why because they were so kind.
I worked for a different manager who told me multiple times daily, “Good job, Tracy” and after a while the words kind of lost their luster. Was everything I did, good? I actually had to ask them for constructive feedback on areas I could improve so I could figure out how to get promoted.
Yet, I’ve worked for others who are kind, and when they packaged critical feedback they had just a slight change in tone, like a disappointed parent. You knew you screwed up and even felt a little guilty about disappointing them. You could do better. (FWIW, I’m not a fan of this method either).
My method
I’m a fan of telling you straight up, you messed up. But I also ask questions - as in, how did it happen, walk me through it, what was your thought process? I genuinely seek to understand how people mess up so I can help them learn from their mistakes, learn myself, and hopefully neither of us will repeat that mistake in the future.
I might say something like, “Well, this isn’t the outcome we were hoping for, what exactly happened?”
Remember, if you’re sugar coating hard conversations to make someone not feel bad about screwing up, they are missing out on the clarity of your message and your message is open for misinterpretation.
How to handle feedback
I can’t really write a post about feedback and not talk about how to handle it. So here’s my two cents on how to handle unsolicited feedback, especially at work (although you can apply this to anything in life).
When we receive feedback that hurts or stings, we can either ignore it or reframe it.
I often ask myself, is there any truth to it? Can I take this feedback and apply it to improve? I consider the source. Do they have all of the context? Do they mean well or sound pejorative?
If you reframe the feedback so it can be helpful to you, and it helps you move forward in some way, then it could turn out to be a valuable tool.
But if it’s not and you hold onto it and let the words hold space in your brain and dwell on it rather than just ignore it, then you’ve given your power to their words and they don’t deserve it.
And finally, I’ll leave you with this graphic:
