How do we receive critical feedback?
To become more effective and achieve meaning in our work, it's necessary to understand the impact we have on other people and the degree to which we actually achieve goals in our work relationships. The most effective way to achieve this is through direct interpersonal feedback, which means being clear, direct and specific in your communication.
Feedback is an integral part of many things in our daily lives: speedometers, exams, meetings, smiles, the second date... all give us feedback on where we stand. We find that feedback lowers our stress levels as it gives us direction to avoid "shooting in the dark".
So far so good, right?
Here comes the hard part; being open to receiving feedback - especially critical feedback - is not as easy as it sounds.
We tend to fill our networks with only those colleagues who see our positive qualities. In fact, as Francesca Gino and Paul Green from Harvard Business School and Brad Staats from the University of North Carolina found in their recent research (2017), many of us push away the people who give us feedback with a more negative or critical focus. We do this because "invalidating" feedback is perceived as a threat to our self-image. This study shows that employees are 44% more likely to drop relationships with colleagues who give them corrective feedback.
After all, why should we keep people in our lives who drag us down?
Here's a good reason; the same study showed that cutting those people out actually leads to a decrease in performance in the long run. It seems we have a hard time evaluating our own performance.
Falling in love with our own ideas is perfectly human. The problem is that it shields us from reality: connecting to our own ideas can ultimately blind us to the feedback that tries to inform us of our true performance.
As Forbes states, criticism helps you grow and improve yourself and can be the key to success. However, many of us take it as a personal attack and get defensive, instead of looking at it through a lens of personal accountability.
According to Alexander Kjerulf, author and speaker on happiness in the workplace, the best way to receive negative feedback is to actually listen to what is being said, be proactive in describing what you have learned and what you will do differently tomorrow. As opposed to making excuses and creating a barrier to the feedback giver.
Not only can you experience better task performance by receiving critical feedback, but it also helps you build more productive relationships with your colleagues.
Read more about: authentic leadership
Engaged employees secure the win
The last thing companies want is to have disengaged employees - trust me.
"Why?"; you ask.
Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the US economy up to $500 billion in lost productivity every year! They waste the company's time and, more importantly, their own. Think of it this way; if a team has injured players, they can't perform at their peak.
One way to prevent damage (i.e. low engagement) is by giving employees feedback in a continuous stream, as according to Officevibe's survey, 4 out of 10 employees say they feel disengaged if they receive little or no feedback. On the other end of the spectrum, the same survey found that 43% of highly engaged employees receive feedback at least once a week, compared to only 18% of low-engaged employees. Sometimes you get what you give.
So, we can see that adopting an engaging culture characterized by continuous feedback and high levels of involvement can improve company-wide performance. According to Forbes, companies that implement these cultures experience 26% lower employee turnover, 15% higher employee productivity and 30% higher customer satisfaction.
Even large companies are doing away with annual reviews
As you can read in the New Yorker, several large companies such as Microsoft, Gap and Adobe have ditched annual performance reviews and replaced them with more frequent reviews. They found that annual reviews were costly and ineffective, especially because they only took into account recent developments and not the whole year, while also dwelling too much on the past and not looking at how the employee should act in the future. All in all, if it's hard to remember what we had for dinner last night, how can we remember what happened in a presentation 6 months ago?
Instead, we find that frequent feedback creates a more forward-thinking work environment. Building and maintaining an open dialog where both "positive" and "negative" feedback is brought to light increases your employees' engagement and ultimately your company's success.
Conclusion
So, the conclusionmust be: If someone gives you critical feedback, it's a sign that they care about your development and career, perhaps even more than those who praise you. While feedback may be uncomfortable and push you out of your comfort zone, try to see it as a positive learning opportunity rather than a personal attack. The moral is: Live it, learn it, embrace it.
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