Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone provide six steps to help recipients from neglecting to take valuable feedback to heart or — just as damaging, they say — accepting and acting on comments that they would be better off disregarding. They present their advice to receivers, but understanding the challenges of receiving feedback helps the giver to be more effective too.
Know your tendencies. Do you defend yourself on the facts (“This is plain wrong”), argue about the method of delivery (“You’re really doing this by e-mail?”), or strike back (“You, of all people?”)? Do you smile on the outside but seethe on the inside? And what role does the passage of time play? Do you tend to reject feedback in the moment and then step back and consider it over time? Do you accept it all immediately but later decide it’s not valid? Do you agree with it intellectually but have trouble changing your behavior?
Disentangle the “what” from the “who”. If the feedback is on target and the advice is wise, it shouldn’t matter who delivers it. But it does. Entwining the content of comments with your feelings about the giver (or about how, when or where she delivered the comments), short-circuits the learning. To keep that from happening, you have to work to separate the message from the messenger and then consider both.
Sort toward coaching. Some feedback is evaluative (“Your rating is a 4”); some is coaching (“Here’s how you can improve”). Everyone needs both. Evaluations tell you where you stand, what to expect, and what is expected of you. Coaching allows you to learn and improve and helps you play at a higher level.
Unpack the feedback. Often it’s not immediately clear whether feedback is valid and useful. So before you accept or reject it, do some analysis to better understand it. When you set aside snap judgments and take time to explore where feedback is coming from and where it’s going, you can enter into a rich, informative conversation about perceived best practices — whether you decide to take the advice or not.
Ask for just one thing. Feedback is less likely to set off emotional triggers if you request it and direct it. So don’t wait until your annual performance review. Find opportunities to get bite-size pieces of coaching from a variety of people throughout the year.
Engage in small experiments. After you have worked to solicit and understand feedback, it may still be hard to discern which bits of advice will help you and which ones won’t. Heen and Stone suggest designing small experiments to find out. Even though you may doubt that a suggestion will be useful, if the downside risk is small and the upside potential is large, it’s worth a try.
