Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

by Douglas Stone

when you receive coaching, a question to ask yourself is this: Is this about helping me grow and improve, or is this the giver’s way of raising an important relationship issue that has been upsetting them?

sometimes even the giver doesn’t realize that their coaching comes primarily from their own anxiety or frustration.

We can be triggered by who is giving us the feedback. What we think about the giver: Are they credible? Do we trust them? Did they deliver our feedback with good judgment and skill? How we feel treated by the

giver: Do we feel accepted? Appreciated? Like our autonomy is respected?

Relationship triggers create switchtrack conversations, where we have two topics on the table and talk past each other. Spot the tw...

Surprise players in the feedback game: Strangers People we find difficult People we find difficult see us at our worst and may be especially well placed to be honest mirrors ...

Listen for relationship issues lurking be...

Feedback is often expressed as “This is how you are, and that’s the problem.” But in relationships, “This is how you are” really means “This is how you are in relationship to how I am.”

Intersections—differences in preferences, tendencies, and traits that cause us to bump into each other—account for a significant proportion of the friction and feedback in both personal and professional relationships.

Marriage researcher John Gottman reports that 69 percent of the fights married couples currently have are about the same subjects they were arguing about five years ago.1

Instead of focusing on what the other person is doing wrong, notice what you are each doing in reaction to the other. As you do, you’ll begin to spot the larger patterns.

Accidental adversaries are created by two things: role confusion and role clarity.

How are our roles contributing to how we see each other, and to the feedback we give each other?

Conflicts between two people can profoundly

affect the work patterns and relationships of others around them. Understanding what’s going on often necessitates looking at the broader team, department, or cross-functional dynamics.

The physical environment can affect how we work together. Open office space can encourage collaboration or chill candid discussion. Functions that need to work well together can end up in different buildings or different hemispheres.

Differences in structure and timing of decision making can create problems between individuals or groups. Some may need to consult widely and get buy-in from others, while others can make decisions independently.

Centralizing processes creates efficiencies but makes it more difficult to respond to local needs.

Players develop coping strategies for working with others that they find challenging. The effects will show up in the second and third rounds—so-called lag effects.

Seeing Feedback in the System One Step Back: In what ways does

the feedback reflect differences in preferences, assumptions, styles, or implicit rules between us? Two Steps Back: Do our roles make it more or less likely that we might bump into each other? Three Steps Back: What other players influence our behavior and choices? Are physical setups, processes, or structures also contributing to the problem? Circling Back to Me: What am I doing (or failing to do) that is contributing to the dynamic between us?

We are less likely to make that leap from description to damnation if we see the conflict as a simple intersection, perhaps compounded by clashing roles, inside a larger system.

The first common feedback profile is the blame absorber. When things go wrong,

you point the finger at yourself, now and forever.

Carrying all the weight of fixing relationships and projects by yourself may feel noble, but it obstructs learning just as surely as rejecting responsibility altogether.

Another challenge for absorbers is that resentment can build over time.

Blame Shifters: It’s Not Me The other feedback profile includes people who are chronically immune to acknowledging their role in problems.

once we identify the contours of a system, we can often make useful changes that don’t require that people change their personalities.

To understand the feedback you get, take three steps back: One Step Back: You + Me intersections. Are differences between us creating the friction? Two Steps Back: Role clashes. Is this partly a result of the roles we play in the organization or the family? Three Steps Back: Big picture. Are processes, policies, physical environment, or other players reinforcing the problem?

Looking at systems: Reduces judgment Enhances accountability Uncovers root causes

One of the brain’s primary survival functions is to manage approach and withdrawal: We tend to move toward things that are pleasurable and away from things that are painful.

Like sex, drugs, food, and exercise, feedback is one of these areas that boggle the brain and muck up the approach-withdrawal system. Doing what feels good now (finding a way to make negative feedback stop) may be costly in the long run (you are left, fired, or simply stagnate). And what is healthy in the long run (understanding and acting on useful feedback) may feel painful now.

your “reaction” to feedback can be thought of as containing three key variables: Baseline, Swing, and Sustain or Recovery.

“Baseline” refers to the default state of well-being or contentment toward which you gravitate in the wake of good or bad events in your life.

“Swing” refers to how far up or down you move from your baseline when...

“Sustain and Recovery” refers to duration, how long your ups and downs last. Ideally, we want to sustain a boost from positive feedback and recover quickly from a negative emotional dip.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt elaborates: “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.”

What do I feel? What’s the story I’m telling (and inside that story, what’s the threat)? What’s the actual feedback?

Filling out a Feedback Containment Chart helps you to see the feedback (so you don’t deny it), while at the same time helping you to contain it (so you don’t exaggerate it). Asking, what is this feedback not about? gives you a structured way of staying balanced.

Daniel Gilbert notes in Stumbling on Happiness,

when we think about the consequences of feedback, the goal is not to dismiss them or pretend they don’t matter. The goal is to right-size them, to develop a realistic and healthy sense of what might happen and respond in line with these reasonable possibilities.

Humor forces your brain to shift into a different emotional state. It taps that positive left side of your prefrontal cortex, where amusement lives.

Before we can decide what we think of the feedback we get, we need to remove the distortions:

Be prepared, be mindful — recognize your feedback footprint. Separate the strands — of feeling / story / feedback. Contain the story — what is this about and what isn’t it about? Change your vantage point — to another, to the future, to the comedy. Accept that you can’t control how others see you.

imprint.

Our ability to metabolize challenging feedback is driven by the particular way we tell our identity story.

We need to: (1) Give up simple identity labels and cultivate complexity; and (2) Move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

While identity is easily triggered by evaluation, it is far less threatened by coaching.

We snatch defensiveness from the jaws of learning.

Assessment ranks you. It tells you where you stand.