What you do when the warm glow of positive feedback fades?

It seems like a paradox. We enjoy positive feedback more than negative feedback. Who doesn’t like being told that they’re great? And who likes being told all the ways that they could do better? Yet, we typically let negative feedback stay with us, while, after a brief glow of satisfaction, we let positive feedback fade fast. If you are anything like me, then you are probably brooding on that little bit of negativity (What did they mean? And how could they have got it so wrong? And here’s what I should have told them!) long after the warmth of praise has cooled.

?I think that we owe it to ourselves to do more with positive feedback, not just because it’s good to feel good about ourselves, but because it helps us get better. I offered some suggestions last week about how we can be more receptive to difficult feedback: lowering our shields, avoiding excuses, reflecting before jumping to solutions, and thanking the messenger. I’m going to try this week to offer some suggestions for how we can make the most of positive feedback. These come in the form of questions we can ask ourselves and others. I can’t say that I remember to ask all of these questions all of the time: for some reason it seems harder to act on positive feedback than on difficult feedback. But I try to try. Here are the questions:

Can I have some more? Difficult feedback is most useful when it comes with detail, with context and examples. That goes for positive feedback too, but positive feedback is often remarkably terse: ‘good job!’ doesn’t tell us much other than that somebody thinks that we did a good job. It might feels awkward to ask for more, as if we are responding to praise by fishing for more praise. But I think that it is worth overcoming this awkwardness and asking what it was that we did that made it a good job. If we preface the ask with something like, ‘thanks, can you help me understand what I did so that I can do it again?’ then we might turn a ‘good job!’ into useful guidance.

What could have been better? At a previous company I worked for, we were taught to frame feedback with an ‘even better if . . .’ This was often regarded as a way to soften difficult feedback, but can also be a way to make positive feedback useful. Even when we do something really well, there is room for improvement, and it is often those things that we excel at that we can push to even higher performance. If positive feedback doesn’t come with an ‘even better if’, it is worth asking for one.

What did I actually do? Sometimes positive feedback doesn’t seem deserved. Sometimes it feels as if we are simply being praised for surviving a difficult task, meeting or project. Sometimes it feels as if we just got lucky. Sometimes it feels as if we were simply doing our job. Yet, when we reflect, we often find that we did do something special. We survived that tough task through tenacity, persistence and patience. We got lucky, but we made the conditions for that luck to be helpful. We were doing our job, but we were doing it particularly well. If we think through what we actually did, rather than shrugging off the feedback as undeserved, then we will usually find something that is worth building on.

Is this new news? Sometimes positive feedback takes us by surprise because we are just doing something that comes naturally to us, exercising one of our strengths. But one of the odd features of strengths is that we often don’t realise that we have them, or that they are unusual. For example, I once had the privilege of working with a team member who was exceptionally good at explaining complex ideas in person and leading people to conclusions: if you could get decision makers in a room with her, then you could be sure of a reasoned, well informed decision. But, until one of her team members complimented her on this ability, she did not realise how unusual or powerful it was: with that feedback, coupled with reflection, she was able to use this superpower even more effectively.

All feedback is an opportunity to learn and grow. Positive feedback may feel better than negative feedback, and we should enjoy that good feeling. But we should also do the work it tells us to do.

(Views in this article are my own.)