I don't know anybody who thinks that feedback conversations work. Whether that's in your
family or with your friends or in your organization, whether you have it to give or unsolicited
advice or criticism or offhand comments or your performance review are being aimed at
you, the feedback conversations are dreaded and often dismissed. And so what's interesting
is that the usual response is to teach givers how to give more effectively, so organizations
send all their managers to teach them how to give more skillfully and more persistently.
As individuals we wait around for that perfect giver to show up who we trust, who has the
credibility and experience to actually be helpful to us, whose opinion we actually want
rather than all of those who offer them to us unsolicited.
And it occurred to us that actually we've been going about this backwards. Focusing
on teaching givers how to give is a push model of learning, right? I figure out what you
need to learn and I push you to learn it. And it occurred to us that actually it's the
receiver who's in charge of what they take in, what sense they make of it and whether
and how they choose to change. It doesn't really matter how authoritative or powerful
or even skillful the giver is. The real leverage here is in teaching all of us, particularly
those of us who are in leadership or who are parenting or in a relationship with other
people, that core human challenge to try to see yourself and to take other people's input
to learn how you impact those around you.
I think we have a really conflicted relationship with feedback. In other words most of us of
have had the experience of having a mentor or a coach for someone who taught us something
really valuable and we saw our self getting better at something quickly and that is exhilarating.
We're so grateful and yet all of us also have the experience of getting painful cutting
unfair off base poorly delivered feedback that not only wasn't helpful to us but was
actually damaging. And I think that that conflictual relationship really reflects the fact that
feedback sits at the junction of two core human needs. Human beings are wired to learn
and grow. If you look at any of the studies on happiness, getting better at something
is a key piece of what makes life satisfying. It's why we take up hobbies in retirement
and why otherwise normal people stick with the game of golf, right, because that occasional
good round fools us into thinking that we're getting better.
But alongside that lies this second core human need, which is the need to be accepted and
respected and loved just the way we are now. And the very fact of the feedback suggests
that how we are now is not quite a-okay. And I don't think that tension is going to go
away, but understanding that that's why we sometimes love it and sometimes really hate
it helps us understand why it's part of the condition of being human.
Getting better at receiving feedback is a skill. And it actually gives you traction
in all of the important areas of your life. So at work, what the research shows is that
people who solicit negative feedback, and in the literature what that means is that
they're not just fishing for compliments, they're actually asking what could I improve.
Those people adapt more quickly to new roles, they report higher satisfaction and they get
higher performance reviews. So not only do they actually accelerate their own learning,
they also change the way other people see them. If you look at the marriage research,
John Gottman up in Seattle who studies marriage has found that a spouse's willingness to take
input or coaching from their partner is a key indicator for happy stable marriages.
Now that's true even though most of us find our spouses chronic complaints about our character
flaws, you know, we don't think of them as feedback, we think about them as them being
annoying, but our willingness to actually hear that is key to the stability of the marriage.
And, you know, when I think about how I parent my kids, the most important thing I can do
is actually show them how I respond to setbacks at work or the criticism from my mother-in-law.
That's going to do more for how they respond to a bad grade or a bad call in the baseball
game then all my lectures combined.