At work and in life, we unavoidably have to deal with negative or, using a more professional euphemism, “constructive” feedback. Growing up with the expectation of perfect test scores, I have prided myself on going above and beyond expectation at work. As a result, receiving advice on areas needing improvement can catch me off guard. While everyone has different strategies to handle unflattering feedback, two of the toughest scenarios to navigate are what I refer to as “hit and run” (hasty direct feedback) and “being thrown under the bus” (indirect feedback).
Hit and run: feedback without substance and justification
“You’re not strategic enough” was a remark during my performance review this year, and it came from an absentee manager who barely remembered what he had asked me to do in the week before. I see where he was coming from — having only been on a newly-formed team since the company reorg, I found myself mostly in firefighting mode either explaining what I had been working on or making sure nothing had fallen through the cracks during the recent reshuffling. But I am not exactly sure how “strategy” — the crown jewel of top performers’ traits in almost every business setting — can manifest in a dynamic work situation. So, I asked clarifying questions hoping to get more details.
“What do you mean by ‘strategy’?”
“Earlier this week I shared the product strategy deck, outlining our opportunities, risks, and potential solutions. What are your thoughts on those? What am I missing?”
All I got was crickets. But what is strategy? Even though I could have easily referenced strategy frameworks from experts like Shreyas Doshi and Nikhyl Singhal, I couldn’t get a version of my own team at the end of that meeting. Suffice it to say, the feedback shackled me with more confusion than answer.
Being thrown under the bus: feedback on you that you heard from someone else
“So and so told me that you didn’t do X … and that caused a lot of inconvenience for so and so.” It is not uncommon that people choose to go directly to another person who should hear about the feedback to indirectly offer their advice. Whether the feedback giver is well intended or not, or just blowing off steam, being on the receiving end when the constructive feedback finally makes its way around really and truly blows. Why does this happen? It could be our own negligence, being ingrained in the day-to-day and the usual course of things. Sometimes we overlook aspects that seem obvious to others. Or it could be that in our pride, shadowed by our own blind spots, we fail to consider others might have different opinions on how things should be done.
Maneuvering and recovering from these two scenarios takes a bit of time, courage, and humbleness. Finding an equilibrium through constructive feedback is critical to career success and our own sanity. There are plenty of resources out there, but most fail to recognize the dynamics of individual situations — nothing is black and white. How we receive, decode, and process negative feedback, in my opinion, boils down into two essential tenets: self-confidence and trust of the other person (those who give the feedback).
Let’s start with self-confidence. You would think it grows proportionally with experience. As our resume grows longer, so does that sense of assurance. Not quite. If anything, I find career progression reveals more uncertainty that is outside of our control. Therefore, I believe that at some point our self-confidence plateaus, or has to be compensated by acceptance, knowingly relinquishes the desire to acquire more information just so that we have more control. There are, of course, highly successful outliers like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Oprah Winfrey, but I am sure behind their seemingly natural radiance of confidence lies years of hard work and extreme circumstances. The rate of how everyone’s self-confidence correlates to years of experience is, therefore, hard to measure and highly dependent on introspection. There is a paradoxical mismatch between how much we actually know and how much we think we know, which leads highly knowledgeable people to have greater doubts due to better recognizing what they do not know.
The same applies to how much trust we build with the other person (i.e. feedback giver). On the surface, how trust-worthy or credible someone is to us depends on whether she does what she said she is going to do consistently. But we all know it’s not that simple: those who have more senior titles, longer tenures, or more dominant personalities tend to project more credibility. In addition, situations when trust is tested can be very different. Reflecting on the following situations, I argue that most of us would not rate the trust factor the same because they each have various intensities. Most importantly, how every situation triggers us at the very moment is also different.
Situation 1: You expect a certain level of rigorous feedback on the work you put your heart and soul into but receive very little useful feedback.
Situation 2: You have been working towards a promotion several cycles now but the decision has been put off again.
Situation 3: You deliver a result thinking you have “mind-meld” with your manager or collaborators but find out that is not the case after spending countless meetings brainstorming together.
If self-confidence is an internal compass, then trust magnifies how the criticism lands. We often hear cursory remarks like “take the feedback with a grain of salt” or “don’t take it personally,” when in reality it depends on how we see ourselves and how much we trust others. This is easier said than done, of course, because negative feedback will always stick more than positive feedback, even from untrustworthy sources . Without overly prescribing certain actions, here are a few alternatives or thought exercise I find helpful when dealing with negative feedback:
Low Confidence, Low Trust:
Rarely do people willingly admit that they have low self-confidence. Hence this is by far the trickiest to navigate because the feedback can feel ungrounded. Both the feedback giver and receiver haven’t had the baseline of what good feedback looks like. (Perhaps the feedback giver does, but it doesn’t matter because you do not yet have a rapport with the person). It is also likely that the receiver would end up taking the feedback at its face value rather than with a grain of salt. In this situation, having a trusted advisor or someone close to the situation could be extremely helpful to fact check. When I find myself in similar situations, I usually bounce the situation with my coach or board of directors, and we go through reflections such as:
- What do you think happened?
- How did the feedback land? How did it affect me?
- What are the reactions I have? Are they directly related to the feedback? Or are they triggered by something else?
- How confident am I to do something different based on the feedback?
- What more information do I need?
- How confident am I to get the support and adequate information to change?
The list goes on. But the principle is to separate our own reflection of ourselves (sometimes distorted) from the seemingly compounding criticism projected externally.
The full article is originally posted on Medium. Check it out and reach out if you have similar experiences!