New Year, New Chance to Get Good at Feedback

1. Start with an introspection. When we know ourselves better, we fall more deeply into a space where no matter what feedback we receive, we are able to use the information as a challenge, not as a personal affront. 
   
   
   1. Take 15 minutes, grab a hot beverage of your choice, and find a space where you can think. 
   2. Write down your superpowers. What are those unique traits that you bring to the world that many others can’t? How do you see things differently? What has made you successful in your career so far? What have you found to be something you can do without thinking that others find hard to do?
   3. Now write down some of the things that tend to drive anger or irritation? What are your pet peeves? And then walk through why you think those are pet peeves. 
   4. Lastly, write down some ways that you may be doing harm to others that you can work on. None of us are perfect. The more we are able to identify what may be holding us back, the sooner we can elevate ourselves and those around us. 
      
      
2. Work through the last conversations you had around feedback. Take a look at the information given in those conversations. Was there something helpful in there, even if the conversation was tense? Think through what went well, and what could have gone better. Whether you were the one delivering feedback or the one receiving feedback, the way to get better at feedback is working on both sides of that equation. When we are good with where we are within ourselves, we tend to allow feedback to come to us as learning opportunities and less like personal attacks. (Now, there is a caveat here in that there are some managers that are horrible at giving feedback, and those could actually be personal attacks. More on that later.) Use the information given to you in feedback conversations as grains of wisdom guiding you on what to work on.
    
3. Feedback should be more focused on a two-way conversation than one person telling another what they did wrong. Feedback is a form of communication, yet we tend not to treat it as such. We get bogged down in the formalities of the workplace and the balance of power internally, and then we spiral in our own heads about what the feedback could hold. We tend to think the worst. We wait for the other shoe to drop. Mostly because we’ve grown up in corporate environments where the feedback sandwich (positive feedback then negative feedback then positive feedback) has been the way that feedback has been given over and over again. If we think about feedback as a conversation between two people, both looking toward bettering one another, then the feedback can be more of a conversation. Ideally, you are discussing what you are working on with your manager, and your manager is looking toward how to better deliver and give you feedback more often so they are also looking for feedback on their own delivery of the feedback. We are able to embark on feedback in our personal lives all the time, with friends and family members, even complete strangers. But when it comes to colleagues or giving or receiving feedback in a workplace setting, we tend to make it weird and anxiety-ridden. What if we decided it was just another conversation 
   
   
4. Make sure that when you are giving feedback to others, you are giving actionable information that is relevant to their success and doesn’t align with continuing harm. There are a lot of managers out there that will give feedback like, “you need more of an executive presence,” or “you seem too nice”. Those bits of information are not actionable. And they tend to add to the already-biased workplace situations people encounter where one specific demographic gets to exhibit certain behaviors and they are celebrated while others are penalized for them. Or where the expectations set in the organization lean to benefit one demographic or a subset of a demographic more than others. When we give feedback, we should be giving actionable items because feedback is a learning mechanism. When we learn more, we can do more. And as a learning mechanism, feedback can also be a development tool. We should use feedback as a way to sprinkle bits of information on the pathway to the next role for that person. 
   
   
5. 🔥 Hot take: You don’t have to absorb all feedback. In fact, unless the person giving you the feedback deeply understands your role, your skillset, your goals, and who you are as a person, then you really shouldn’t be giving much weight to the information they are giving you. Bystanders and spectators will offer advice and feedback because in some way they are thinking that it is helpful; however, it may not be pertinent to what you are looking to achieve. Or their feedback could be outright wrong. Use your judgement as to whether the person delivering feedback has enough information about you in order for you to trust the information coming from them. At the end of the day, if you’ve done the introspection you need to do, and you’ve talked about your career goals with people who know you, your work, and that you trust, then you understand what’s best for your path. Your intuition can be a powerful tool. Don’t forget to use it

💻 For more tips like these, be sure to check out my Free Textio U Course: Feedback: The Art of Giving and Receiving

- Anessa Fike