Tips and Techniques [1402.17]

How to Receive Feedback

There has been some recent buzz about a book that will be published in early March: "Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well" by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. I'm interested to see it when it comes out, though I'm a little apprehensive. Too often books like these are either filled with fluff, state things that are obvious to a ten-year-old (at least to me when I was ten), or both (I'm looking at you, Outliers!).

After looking around on the internet quite a bit, I found some material on the book, including the following:

• A conversation with the authors
  • "[How] we receive feedback is actually more important than how feedback is given... If you’re going to take charge of your own learning, you’ve got to get good at ... [drawing] value out of any feedback, even off-base, poorly timed, or poorly delivered feedback."
  • "[The] tendency is to either reject feedback as "wrong," or to get totally knocked over by just how right it is... I’m [now] better at understanding why the feedback makes sense, even if it’s not 100% right, and I’m also better at keeping very stressful feedback in perspective."
  • "When you’re really struggling with feedback that seems fundamentally 'off,' divide a sheet of paper into two columns and make two lists. On the left, list all the things that are wrong with the feedback. What they are saying isn’t true, it’s unfair, they’re one to talk, when they gave it was inappropriate, how they gave it was pathetically unskilled, why they gave it is suspect. Now on the right make a list of things that might be right about the feedback. Too often we use all that is wrong with the feedback we get to cancel out the possibility that there is anything right about it. Your feedback might be 99% wrong, but that 1% that’s right might be just the insight you need."
• How You Can Turn A Performance Review Into A Great Learning Experience (from bakadesuyo.com)
  • "So what's the biggest mistake we all make when it comes to feedback? [The authors] call it 'wrong spotting'... You just want to show they’re wrong about something so you can ignore everything they say.
  • "To know when feedback is valid, [the authors] recommend you listen for themes. If you keep hearing the same thing over and over, it’s probably true and probably something you should act on."
• Find the Coaching in Criticism (a Harvard Business Review article by the authors)
  • "[The following six steps] will keep you from throwing valuable feedback onto the discard pile or, just as damaging, accepting and acting on comments that you would be better off disregarding.
    1. Know your tendencies
    2. Disentangle the 'what' from the 'who'
    3. Sort toward coaching
    4. Unpack the feedback
    5. Ask for just one thing
    6. Engage in small experiments"
  • "Criticism is never easy to take. Even when you know that it’s essential to your development and you trust that the person delivering it wants you to succeed, it can activate psychological triggers. You might feel misjudged, ill-used, and sometimes threatened to your very core. Your growth depends on your ability to pull value from criticism in spite of your natural responses and on your willingness to seek out even more advice and coaching from bosses, peers, and subordinates. They may be good or bad at providing it, or they may have little time for it, but you are the most important factor in your own development. If you’re determined to learn from whatever feedback you get, no one can stop you."

Perhaps the obviousness of the above points is due to my many years of learning kendo, a traditional Japanese martial art. Because we are taught to respect the sensei, we are taught to be grateful for any feedback given (including getting hit on the head!). However, since I am pretty competitive, I soon figured out that in order to improve, as well as continue to be given advice, I sometimes needed to work out on my own how to make sense of the advice.

Having said that, I do see some kenshi who have a difficult time receiving advice. You can see them mentally formulating a denial to the advice while the sensei is still in the middle of giving it (the authors' "wrong spotting" in action), and some may actually voice their denial, sometimes as soon as the sensei pauses in the middle of the advice.

Maybe the art of receiving feedback is not so obvious after all.

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