Ask Explicitly for Criticism

Positive feedback is nice and important but I find criticism or constructive feedback is even more important. Criticism can help you with all of the following:

• Things you know. There are things that you know you can improve, but with criticism, you will better prioritize what's more urgent to be improved than others given the amount of time it is mentioned to you.
• Things you know you don't know. There are things you know that you need to improve but you don't know how. A person who is willing to tell you what to improve will likely be also willing to tell you how to improve it.
• Things you don't know that you don't know. The most insightful outcome of constructive feedback is when someone mentions something you need to improve but you weren't aware of it (e.g. "I noticed that you repeated the word X a lot through the presentation and that decreased my focus, I even found myself counting them unconsciously").

In this short article, I will mention some tips that can help you receive more constructive feedback from others.

1. Ask Explicitly for it

Sometimes it is not enough to ask for "feedback". More people will tend to give give you constructive feedback if you ask explicitly for it because then they will know that you are willing to accept it. For example, say "What do you think I could have done better in X?" rather than saying "What do you think of my work in X?".

2. Make it safe to be Criticized

When you really want constructive feedback, make it clear that you are willing to hear it because you really want to develop. Some people would choose to not spend energy arguing with you about something you could have done better without any benefit that they will receive. But when they feel that you are willing to hear and that you will not consume their energy while arguing, they will be more open to giving you feedback.?

3. Be Specific

There are some genius people who you can benefit from but they are not good at generating constructive feedback. It helps them a lot when you are specific about what you want to get feedback on.

For example, instead of saying: "Please tell me what could I have done better in project X?", say: "Please tell me how different would you have implemented the project if you were to implement it from scratch?" or say: "Please tell me how would you have designed this component of the system?", or say: "Please tell me what do you think I can do for better communication in the code review process (e.g. being more responsive, acting more to feedback)?".

4. Give Time for Preparation

Some people are not good at generating feedback in real-time. For those people, if you give them a hint that you will be asking about things you can improve in the next meeting or if you ask them offline, they will give you more pieces of advice.

5. Get it from the Ones Who Don't Like You

Not everyone who doesn't like you is envying you or is hating success for you, although some people are.

Some of the ones who don't like you have reasons related to things that you could have done better. So if you get those people to speak, they will tell you some hidden gems about some improvements you can make.

Even if the feedback you got wasn't useful, this interaction will release some of the stress between you.

6. Ask for it Regularly

People forget; especially when it's not related to themselves. So if person P knew that you could have done something better today, they will probably forget about it after a month. This also decreases the chance of someone whom you care about how they see your work, suddenly overwhelming you with tons of things you could have done better. These are times in which we say "If only they told us earlier, we could have improved it before it's too late."

7. Don't Get Defensive

If you are sure that the feedback is inaccurate, then no need to justify yourself or to argue. It's beneficial to drop arguing here in the trade of making it more likely in the future to get feedback from the same person because otherwise, they may think twice next time before giving you feedback.

Ask clarifying questions if there's something that you really want to understand (i.e. not something that you are not convinced with).

An important note: In my opinion, it's fine that with some specific people of some specific personalities in some situations, we'd be asking for criticism not primarily for the sake of improvement but for the sake of regularly making sure that our expectations are aligned because otherwise, we know that these people will use such feedback against us if we don't justify ourselves. In such cases, it's more beneficial to argue and explain ourselves if we think that the feedback is inaccurate.