Accepting and making effective use of feedback

The importance of feedback in personal and professional development

Feedback is critical to personal growth, development and success. If you aren’t open to evaluating how you are performing, then you are limiting yourself to your current performance levels, which are likely to degrade further as the environment changes and other people around you learn and grow.?

To maintain performance, achieve goals and outcomes and develop yourself, your effectiveness and impact, learning how to identify, process and act on feedback is a critical skill to develop. Open yourself to doing this, learn how to do it well and you massively increase your chances of success. If you are reluctant to ask for, notice, or learn from feedback, you are doing your future self a disservice.

Recognising feedback

People tend to think of feedback as only being the awkward personal feedback elicited formally as part of an annual performance review process, but there is a much wider range of feedback than this. Just as metrics and measurements provide insights and feedback to processes, there are a plethora of measurements out there you can use as feedback on your own performance. Just looking at one action: a communication you send for a specific purpose, the frequency of response, timing of response, involvement and engagement from others, tone of responses and range of responses are all valuable aspects of feedback you could take insight from. Just be aware that the insights you take are likely to be skewed by your perception, and may need further action to verify. This applies to almost everything you do.

All feedback can be useful

All feedback can be useful (ironically the obvious formal annual feedback tends to be the least useful feedback available). You may challenge this, but keep an open mind. All feedback is useful; if you process it effectively and respond in an appropriate way. The Feedback Insights Venn diagram below helps to describe this.

You may fundamentally disagree with a specific piece of feedback. It could be from a very skewed perspective, be more about them than about you, and you may also be able to prove it incorrect using objective evidence, but it still tells you something about their perspective and how they are thinking.

You may not understand how someone could think, see or perceive something in the way they have to create this feedback. That’s ok; it’s still useful to know that they think it, and the more important they are in your current and future success, the more useful it tends to be.

You may decide to take direct action based on the feedback (whether you agree with it, or understand it, or not). You may choose to take a different action, still based on the feedback but not directly in line with the feedback direction. Or you may choose not to act at all, even if so, it can still be very useful to know they think that way.?

There are aspects of feedback, if you are confident and open enough, that you don’t agree with, understand, or take action on, but are still useful to know.

If you can’t see how feedback can be useful, you may not be ready to learn for it yet. It may never be useful to you but if you feel it might be, write it down in case it is useful for the future.?

Work on yourself, and how you take feedback. The aim is to widen the ‘I can learn from this’ circle to fill the Venn diagram as much as possible.

How to take positive feedback

You may be surprised how many people struggle with this. Taking positive feedback can be hard to do effectively, particularly by people who value humility or those who are less confident (who actually need it more). Be open to positive feedback, and take it with grace and dignity:

1. Listen actively. Be open to hearing it, don’t distract yourself with self-talk which tries to mitigate or undermine the impact that the positive feedback can have. Relish positive feedback, don’t be shy about it. Be grateful for their perspective and their action in sharing it with you. If your self-talk tells you it might be forced or inauthentic, set this aside. You can still choose to assume the best from the gesture while still being open to the possibility that they may be saying it for another reason.
2. Thank them. Demonstrate gratitude for them giving you this feedback, thank them personally and don’t try and explain it. If you do you will likely undermine the feedback to them. They recognised it and they chose to tell you about it; thank them honestly and openly, and this is likely to encourage them to give you more (positive and constructive) feedback in the future, and also make them more open to hearing it from you.
3. Record and learn from it. Write it down, put it in your journal, email it to yourself, add it to your notes. Over time we tend to forget the good stuff and remember the bad. Compensate for this self-limiting bias by recording positive feedback in a place you can access it and remind yourself of it when you need it. You can learn from positive feedback too - particularly if it is in your Johari Window blind spot. If you weren’t aware of the positive impact you are having, reflect on this and learn what insights you can take and how you might act to use this in the future.

How to take negative feedback

You may not be surprised that even more people struggle with this. It is particularly hard if the feedback is badly delivered, poorly timed, about a sensitive topic or unnecessarily personalised, and this is magnified if you are under confident. Practise this simple approach whenever you can to get better at receiving and using constructive feedback effectively:

1. Listen actively. Be open to hearing it. Remember that all feedback can be useful and is a chance to learn. If you aren’t open to hearing it and processing it objectively, you may be missing out on a very important learning experience. Listen actively (or read with an open mind if not delivered in person. Do not respond to challenge the feedback or explain the reason for this feedback. The only responses you should make while actively listening to the feedback should be questions to increase your understanding of how they perceive this, and the impact this has. Be very careful doing this as it is easy to slip back into challenging or explaining through your questions until you really internalise this approach.
2. Thank them. Once they have delivered the feedback and you understand it sufficiently, thank them. If they are giving the feedback with a direct expectation of hearing how you intend to act on it, then you can choose to respond after thanking them if you want to, but it is often better to articulate that you need time to process and reflect before outlining how you intend to act, and then doing so. Most of the time people giving feedback do not expect a response like this, so save doing this (if at all) until after step 3.??
3. Decide how to learn and act on it. Consider where the feedback sits in the Venn diagram figure above. Do you agree with it? Do you understand their perspective? Then consider what you can learn from it, and after that, how you will act upon it, if at all. You may choose to act in accordance with the feedback, you may choose to act in a different way as a result of the insights, or you may choose not to act. Once you’ve decided this, decide if you will communicate to the feedback provider how you are acting or not, and if so, how.?

Anti-patterns in receiving feedback

The most frequent mistake made when it comes to receiving feedback is not accepting it, dismissing it or devaluing it, usually because the recipient doesn’t agree with it. You do not have to agree with something for it to be valuable or useful, in fact the value of feedback you were not previously aware of far exceeds feedback you already knew about, and this often applies to the insights you agree with and the insights you disagree with.

The next most frequent mistake tends to be in how people choose to act in feedback. Specifically either feeling they have to act in accordance with the feedback, or seeing that as the only way to act and refusing to act. The feedback is useful insight; how you choose to react is a separate response, owned by you, and should be decided on with the full context of your views, other information and opinion you can gather, and your future growth intentions.

Tips for receiving feedback effectively

• Recognise feedback more widely; you can gain insights from many sources
• All feedback is useful, learn how to take value from feedback you do and don’t agree with
• Take positive feedback effectively, and cherish it
• Learn and gain insights from negative feedback; then choose if you wish to act, and if so, how
• If you reject or dismiss feedback you are denying yourself a learning opportunity
• The perspectives that create feedback are theirs; the actions you choose to take from feedback insights are yours, and independent of the feedback

How open are you to feedback at the moment, and how well do you accept and learn from it?

The process is simple, but not necessarily easy. You can develop this skill through consistent practice, self reflection and adaptation, and your skills in this area can grow symbiotically as you develop your confidence too.

This is the first in a series of three articles on effective feedback. If you would like to try the Leadership Self Awareness and Leadership 360 products we are creating, contact me.