Art of Taking Feedback

An extract from Marshall Goldsmith’s “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”.

Successful people are incredibly delusional about their achievements. Basically, we accept feedback that is consistent with our self-image and reject feedback that is inconsistent.

Four commitments of giving feedback

Let go of the past
Tell the truth
Be supportive and helpful — not cynical or negative
Pick something to improve yourself — so everyone is focused more on “improving” than “judging”

Make a list of the last dozen or so people with whom you’ve had professional contact. Then run the four commitments against each name. If any of them qualify on all four commitments, they’re as good a place to start getting feedback.

Important: Stop asking for feedback and then expressing your opinion. Treat every piece of advice as a gift or a compliment and simply say “Thank you.” If you learn to listen — and act on the advice that makes sense — the people around you may be thrilled.

SOLICITED FEEDBACK

“What do you feel about me?”
“What do you hate about me?”

These are actually irrelevant. In the workplace, you don’t have to like me; we don’t have to be buddies to work together.

In soliciting feedback for yourself, the only question that works — the only one! — must be phrased like this: “How can I do better?”

Semantic variations are permitted, such as, “What can I do to be a better partner at home?” or, “What can I do to be a better leader of this group?”

Pure unadulterated issue-free feedback that makes change possible has to (a) solicit advice rather than criticism, (b) be directed towards the future rather than obsessed with the negative past, and (c) be couched in a way that suggests you will act on it; that in fact you are trying to do better.

UNSOLICITED FEEDBACK

If we’re lucky, every once in a while something or someone comes along who opens our eyes to our faults — and helps us strip away a delusion or two about ourselves. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we should consider ourselves lucky and grateful.

Here is Johari Window, a schemata to explain us to ourselves.

The interesting stuff is the information that’s known to others but unknown to us. When that information is revealed to us, those are the moments that create dramatic change. These blindside moments are rare and precious gifts. They hurt, perhaps (the truth often does), but they also instruct.

We need these painful unsolicited feedback episodes, when others reveal how the world really sees us, in order to change for the better. Without the pain, we might not discover the motivation to change.

Two great lessons:

It is a whole lot easier to see our problems in others than it is to see them in ourselves.
Even though we may be able to deny our problems to ourselves, they may be very obvious to the people who are observing us.

This is the simple wisdom of the Johari window: What is unknown to us may be well-known to others. We can learn from that.

As human beings we almost always suffer from the disconnect between the self we think we are and the self that the rest of the world sees in us. This is the value of unsolicited feedback.

If we can stop, listen, and think about what others are seeing in us, we have a great opportunity. We can compare the self that we want to be with the self that we are presenting to the rest of the world. We can then begin to make the real changes that are needed to close the gap between our stated values and our actual behaviour.

OBSERVATIONAL FEEDBACK

Some of the best feedback comes from what you observe.

Every day, people are giving feedback, of a sort, with their eye contact, their body language, their response time. Interpreting this casual observational feedback can be tricky; learning that something’s not right is not the same as learning what’s wrong and how we can fix it.

The good news is that these feedback moments are plentiful and, with some simple drills, we can manipulate them so that patterns emerge to tell us everything we need to know to get started. Here are five ways you can get feedback by paying closer attention to the world around you.

# Make a list of people’s casual remarks about you
For one day, write down all the comments that you hear people make to you about you. That’s smart. You’re late. Are you listening to me? Any remark that, however remotely, concerns you or your behaviour, write it down. End of the day, review the list and rate each comment as positive or negative. If you look at the negatives, maybe some patterns will emerge. That’s the beginning of a feedback moment. You’re learning something about yourself without soliciting it — which means that the comment is agenda-free. It’s honest and true. Then do it again, the next day, and the next.

# Turn the sound off
Turn the sound off and observe how people physically deal with you. Do they lean toward you or away? Do they listen when you have the floor or are they drumming their fingers waiting for you to finish? Are they trying to impress you or are they barely aware of your presence? This won’t precisely tell you what your specific challenge may be, but if the indicators are more negative than positive, you’ll know you have some work to do.

# Complete the sentence
Pick one thing that you want to get better at. It could be anything that matters to you. Then list the positive benefits that will accrue to you and the world if you achieve your goal. As you get deeper into it the answers become less corporately correct and more personal. As the benefits you list become less expected and more more personal and meaningful to you, that’s when you know that you’ve given yourself some valuable feedback — that you’ve hit on an interpersonal skill that you really want and need to improve.

# Listen to your self-aggrandising remarks
Maybe I am no expert on inventory control …
I probably wasn’t paying attention …
I don’t have any ego invested in this …
These pseudo-self-deprecating remarks — the one’s we say about ourselves but don’t believe — are the rhetorical devices and debating tricks of everyday communication that allow us to get an edge on our rivals. Nothing wrong with that. To a student of intra-corporate warfare, such self-deprecation from others should put you on high alert. Whatever they say, you know they believe the opposite. The same could be said of each of us. We should be on high alert when we hear ourselves make self-deprecating remarks — because they might be giving us feedback about ourselves. When you say “I am not very good at thanking people,” it is quiet possible you don’t believe it. Self-deprecation can be one of those honest feedback moments that makes a signal sound in our brain. “Pay attention,” it tells us. “This might be something worth observing.”

# Look homeward
Your flaws at work don’t vanish when you walk through the front door at home. Anybody can change, but they have to want to change — and sometimes you can deliver that message by reaching people where they live, not where they work.

These five examples of observed feedback are stealth techniques to make you pay closer attention to the world around you.

When you make a list of people’s comments about you and rank them as positive or negative, you’re tuning in the world with two new weapons: judgement and purpose.

When you turn off the sound, you’re increasing your sensitivity to others by counterintuitively eliminating the precious sense of hearing.

When you try the sentence completion technique, you’re using retrograde analysis — that is, seeing the end result and then identifying the skill you’ll need to achieve it.

When you challenge the accuracy of your self-aggrandizing remarks, you’re flipping your world upside down — and seeing that you’re no different from anyone else.

Finally, when you check out how your behavior is working at home, you realize not only what you need to change but why it matters so much.

In Conclusion

Feedback tells us what to change, not how to do it. But when you know what to change, you’re ready to start changing yourself and how people perceive you.