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

by Douglas Stone

AMPLIFIER 2: SITUATION VERSUS CHARACTER Emotional math is really a subset of a larger dynamic. When something goes wrong and I am part of it, I will tend to attribute my actions to the situation; you will tend to attribute my actions to my character.

When I take the last piece of cake at the party, you say it’s because I’m selfish (character). I say it’s because no one else wanted it (situation). When I hop on a conference call five minutes late, you say I’m scatterbrained (character). I say I was juggling five things at once (situation). When I take another personal day, you say I’m unreliable (character). I explain that I had to arrange transportation for my ailing aunt Adelaide (situation). The difference here is not just a matter of cutting ourselves a break. It’s really an alternate way of telling the story.

AMPLIFIER 3: IMPACT VERSUS INTENT The third amplifier has already been hinted at on the Gap Map: We judge ourselves by our intentions (arrow 2), while others judge us by our impacts (arrow 4). Given that even good intentions can result in negative impacts, this contributes to the gap in the story you tell about me versus the story I know is “true.”

for those around us, our impact drives their story. Despite my best intentions, I may have a negative impact on you; you feel bossed around and micromanaged. You then assume that I’m acting purposefully,

The “fix” is to separate intentions from impacts when feedback is discussed.

Feedback givers also confuse impacts and intentions. Their feedback is packed with assumed intentions. Instead of saying, “You try to steal credit for other people’s ideas” (which includes a description of intentions), they should share the impact the behavior had on them: “I was upset and confused when you said it was your idea. I felt I deserved the credit for that idea.”

THE RESULT: OUR (GENERALLY POSITIVE) SELF All of these amplifiers—our tendency to subtract certain emotions from our self-description, to see missteps as situational rather than personality-driven, and to focus on our good intentions rather than our impact on others—add up.

And so we get statistics like this: 37 percent of Americans report being victims of workplace bullies, but fewer than 1 percent report being bullies. It’s true that one bully can have many victims, but it’s unlikely that each averages thirty-seven.

WE COLLUDE TO KEEP EACH OTHER IN THE DARK This begs the question: Why don’t people tell us?

When we’re on the giving side, we often withhold critical feedback because we don’t want to hurt others’ feelings or start a fight. We figure they must already know, or that it’s someone else’s job to tell them, or that if they really wanted to hear about it, they’d ask.

WHAT HELPS US SEE OUR BLIND SPOTS? Let’s start with what doesn’t help. You can’t see yourself more clearly just by looking harder. Here’s why: When you do take a good hard look, what you’ll see is that you don’t have any blind spots and that the feedback is wrong. You will wonder about the cause of this wrong feedback, and your mind will slide into an explanation about the ulterior motives or personality disorders of those who gave you the feedback. We have the same Gap Map reaction to them as they do to us, just in reverse. We know that we are upset by wrong feedback and assume that others are giving it to us intentionally. Which means they must have an agenda or that something is seriously wrong with them.

USE YOUR REACTION AS A BLIND-SPOT ALERT Thoughts like the above are so systematic that you can actually put them to good use. Instead of dismissing the feedback or the person giving it to you, use these thoughts as a blind-spot alert. When you notice yourself wondering What was their agenda? and What’s wrong with them?, make sure your next thought is I wonder if this feedback is sitting in my blind spot.

ASK: HOW DO I GET IN MY OWN WAY? To find out, we have to get specific. The feedback we ask for is usually too general, or others assume that what we are really inviting is appreciation (and sometimes they’re right)...

Instead, ask (the feedback giver, not your nine-year-old): “What do you see me doing, or failing to do, that is getting in my own way?” This question is more specific about the honesty you desire as well as your interest in the impact you have on others. It’s also a narrower and easier question for others to answer.

LOOK FOR PATTERNS Our usual response to upsetting feedback is to reach for other feedback that contradicts it, in order to protect ourselves. You say I’m self-absorbed? Then how come I won the community service award last year?

How I See Me How You See Me Shy Aloof Upbeat Phony Spontaneous Flaky Truth Teller Nasty Passionate Emotional Smart Arrogant High Standards Hypercritical Outgoing Overbearing Quirky Annoying

Here’s a second way to look for consistencies: Ask yourself, Where have I heard this before?

GET A SECOND OPINION If important feedback doesn’t resonate, take the whole set of questions to a friend. Don’t say, “This can’t be true, can it?” Instead, lay out the problem explicitly: “Here’s feedback I just got. It seems wrong. My first reaction is to reject it. But I wonder if this is feedback in a blind spot? Do you see me doing this sometimes, and if so, when? What impact do you see it having?” You have to let your friend know that you want honesty, and here’s why.

Honest Mirrors Versus Supportive Mirrors Offering feedback is often called “holding up a mirror” to help someone see themselves. But not all such mirrors are identical in what they reflect. When it comes to feedback, there are two kinds of mirrors—Supportive Mirrors and Honest Mirrors.

A supportive mirror shows us our best self, well rested and under flattering light. We go to a supportive mirror for reassurance. Yes, how we acted in that moment was not a pretty picture, but it’s not how we really look. It’s not a big deal. It’s a bad picture of you. Throw it away. You’re a good person. An honest mirror shows us what we look like right now, when we’re not at our best and our bedhead is bad. It’s a true reflection of what others saw today, when we were stressed and distracted and leaking our frustration. “Yes, you really di...

Reassurance and support are vital, and our friends and loved ones are uniquely able to offer it. But this role can put them in a bind: People we rely on for support are often hesitant to share critical, honest feedback with us. And that feedback might be helpful:

When someone has been a supportive mirror, we can feel betrayed and blindsided if they suddenly become an honest one.

RECORD YOURSELF For many of us, watching ourselves on video or hearing ourselves on audio is unpleasant at best. But it can be enormously illuminating, enabling us to hear our own tone and see our own behavior in ways that are normally invisible to us.

FOCUS ON CHANGE FROM THE INSIDE OUT

HAVE A PURPOSE This chapter is subtitled “Discover How You Come Across.” We should be clear that we mean that in the context of someone having feedback for you.

In most circumstances, knowing that someone has a generally favorable view of us is all we need to know. If not the whole story, it’s true enough, and it serves us well to feel that other people think well of us. It helps us feel comfortable, confident, and happy. That reasoning breaks down, though, when someone is trying to give us feedback. That’s when it’s important to work to learn more about how they see you on this front, either because it will help them or because it will help you.

That’s when illuminating your blind spots makes a difference.

Summary: SOME KEY IDEAS We all have blind spots because we: can’t see our own leaky faces can’t hear our tone of voice are unaware of even big patterns of behavior Blind spots are amplified by: Emotional Math: We discount our emotions, while others count them double. Attribution: We attribute our failure to the situation, while others attribute it to our character. Impact-Intent Gap: We judge ourselves by our intentions, while others judge us by our impact on them. To see ourselves and our blind spots we nee...

RELATIONSHIP TRIGGERS and the challenge of WE

Relationship Triggers (and the Challenge of WE) In the prior section, we looked at truth triggers and the challenge to see the feedback clearly. In this section we examine relationship triggers. Here, our reactions are caused not by the feedback itself, but by our relationship with the person giving us the feedback. This is the challenge of we.

The question of who is offering us feedback doesn’t seem like it should matter. Regardless of the source, the advice is either wise or foolish, the ideas worthwhile or worthless. But it does matter. We are often more triggered by the person giving us feedback than by the feedback itself. In fact, re...

Feedback is often prompted by differences, incompatibilities, or friction between you and the giver. The giver is suggesting that if you would change (“Be on time!” or “Quit being so controlling!”), the problem would be solved. We often react by asserting that we are not the real problem, they are. The problem is not that we are five minutes late; it’s that they are so uptight. And we wouldn’t need to be so controlling if they would get off their backside and take some initiative. So they think we are the problem and we think they are the problem. We’ll show you why feedback in relationships is rarely about you or me. It’s usually about you and me and our relationship system. Understanding relationship systems helps you move past blame and into joint accountability, and talk productively about these challenging topics, even when the other person thinks this feedback party is all about you.

Don’t Switchtrack Disentangle What from Who

Argument: 1. Romantic Weekend: 0. What happened? The surface story is clear enough: Louie gives Kim roses, Kim gives Louie feedback, and then they have a fight. Of course, their reactions suggest that this conversation is about something deeper: It’s not about the roses, it’s about the relationship.

RELATIONSHIP TRIGGERS CREATE SWITCHTRACK CONVERSATIONS Kim’s feedback trips a relationship trigger for

Later in the episode Kim explains: When I tell you things and you don’t listen, it’s a huge insult to me. It makes me feel like I don’t matter. How does Louie respond to Kim’s feedback? He changes the subject, entirely and completely. But wait—Kim is talking about red roses, and Louie is talking about red roses. Same topic, right? But it’s not. Kim is using the red roses to raise how she feels unseen and unheard. Louie walks right past the topic of how Kim feels and talks instead about his own topic: how he feels unappreciated. There’s nothing wrong with that reaction or that topic, but it has zero overlap with Kim’s topic. Now we have two people giving feedback and no one receiving it. The dynamic that Louie and Kim have fallen into is so common that we’ve given it a name: a switchtrack conversation. Their conversation gets smoothly shifted, as if by railroad switch, from one topic to two.

Soon they are each heading in their own direction, moving farther and farther apart.

key part of the dynamic here is that the person receiving the original feedback is unaware that they are changing the subject. Louie does not switch topics to avoid Kim’s feedback. He switches topics because he feels triggered. When Kim s...

SWITCHTRACKING DEFEATS FEEDBACK Switchtracking has two potential impacts, one good and one bad. The potentially positive impact is that the second topic being put on the table may be important—sometimes more important than the feedback that triggered it.

The negative impact is that because we now have two topics, the conversation gets tangled. Dealing with two topics is not a problem in itself—we can address two, twelve, or twenty in a single sitting. But with switchtrack conversations, we don’t realize there are two separate topics, and so both get lost as we each hear the other person through the filter of our own topic.

What do Kim and Louie learn in this feedback conversation? They each “learn” what they already know:

SILENT SWITCHTRACKING CAN BE WORSE Sometimes the second track in a switchtrack isn’t out in the open, but runs underground. Our reactions remain locked in our heads, silently shouting objections while we resentfully endure the criticism from our stepdaughter or department head. We’ve long since switched to our own topic: Wow, you’re telling me to calm down? You’re the most tightly wound person I’ve ever met in my life. And I guess I now have to add un–self-aware. We then walk away and vent our frustrations to others. (“Is Jenna the most neurotic person on the planet, or just this hemisphere? I can’t decide.”) We triangulate the conflict and short-circuit learning in all directions.

TWO RELATIONSHIP TRIGGERS So the switchtrack dynamic has four steps: we get feedback; we experience a relationship trigger; we change the topic to how we feel; and, step four, we talk past each other. To get better at managing our impulse to switchtrack, we have to get better at understanding the relationship triggers that create these impulses. Below, we look at two key kinds of relationship triggers: (1) what we think about the giver, and (2) how we feel treated by the giver.

WHAT WE THINK ABOUT THEM There are people we admire so much that their actions and advice take on a golden glow. Our default assumption is that their input is wise, thoughtful, deep—just the thing we need to hear. We hang on their every wo...

Then there’s everybody else. Feedback from these others may not be predisqualified, but we are on higher alert. We can disqualify the giver on any number of grounds—the most common involving trust, credibility, and the (lack of) skill or judgment with which they deliver their feedback. And once we disqualify the giver, we reject the substance of the feedback without a second thought. Based on the who, we discard the what.

Skill or Judgment: How, When, or Where They Gave the Feedback The first and easiest target is how, when, and where the feedback is offered (all of which reflect directly on the who). The giver fails to handle the giving with appropriate care; how they give it shows a lack of skill; when and where they give it shows a lack of judgment.

We are (often justifiably) outraged by where, when, and how, and a classic switchtrack ensues. We engage in a heated exchange about how inappropriate it was that our anger management problem was raised in front of a client, but never circle back to discuss the actual anger management problem. I’m on my track, you’re on yours, and we soon lose sight of each other.

Credibility: They Don’t Know What They’re Talking About We can also react to the giver’s lack of expertise, background, and experience. He’s never started a business; she’s never coached organized soccer.

we can often benefit from the insight of newcomers or outsiders unencumbered by knowledge of “the way things are done.” They might ask just the right “naïve” question, or offer a unique perspective. It’s

New ideas often come from those without traditional credibility, who are freer to think outside the box precisely because they don’t know there is a box.