How to Receive Feedback (Part 1)

Published: August 24, 2021
Estimated reading time: 7.5 min

“嘿，我能给你一些反馈吗?”

你读到这个问题时有什么感觉?你有没有感觉到你的内脏绷紧，心跳加速?是你紧张吗?好奇吗?兴奋?

Also: Does it matter who’s saying it, how much power they have, and what your relationship is like?

If you imagined feeling a negative reaction, you’re not alone. Critical feedback can often elicit a subconscious feeling of fear (blame the amygdala!), as our brains read it as a potential threat to our need for social acceptance and group belonging. This can trigger a fight, flight, freeze, or appease response. Plus, it’s not all biological—who among ushasn’thad a negative experience with feedback?

The good news is that feedback doesn’t always have to feel this way. While our experience of feedback is greatly influenced by who’s delivering it and how it’s delivered, we always have control over how we respond to feedback. Theothergood news is that when we respond well to feedback, we strengthen relationships and trust, increase the likelihood that we’ll keep getting it, and contribute to a culture of growth, candor, and rigor within our teams. (The same goes fordelivering feedbackwell too!)

In this article, we share our best advice for receiving feedback well, focused on the parts thatyouhave control over.

Calm your brain…

对反馈做出良好反应的第一步是让你的杏仁核冷静足够长的时间来真正听到对方在说什么(而不仅仅是你认为他们在说什么)。当人们不花时间冷静自己的大脑和管理自己的情绪时，他们就不能积极倾听。这通常会导致你做出防御性的反应(想要讲述你自己的故事)，或者直接跳到解决问题和修复问题(这之前应该先欣赏和寻求更好地理解反馈)。对于管理者来说，做好积极倾听的准备——抵制辩解、解释或修正的冲动——是一项至关重要的技能。

…By calming your body

当发育性或纠正性反馈(或仅仅是暗示)唤起身体层面的威胁反应时，收听。注意你身体收紧的地方。把手放在那里。如果你感到自我防卫或解释，放松你的下巴和肩膀。深呼吸。让你的身体平静下来，这样你的焦虑就不会影响你。

…By adopting a feedback-friendly mindset

Offer your amygdala a giant, warm hug by bringing conscious awareness to how youthinkabout feedback. Remind yourself that feedback is…

一个勇敢的提供。通常什么都不说比说点什么更容易，尤其是在冲突回避的情况下。如果你曾经不得不向另一个人提供严厉的反馈，你知道需要注意到这个问题，决定说出来，考虑如何提供它，并最终分享它。珍惜这些时间和精力，并且要知道，如果你拥有更多的位置权力，他们的风险可能比他们对你的风险更高。
A relationship- and trust-building opportunity.Concrete, intentional feedback is an investment (in you as a person and in the relationship).
An opportunity to grow.Consider what a coach does for an athlete, or a spotter does for a weightlifter—it’s hard to grow without the support, attention, and advice from others, all of which we can get from a good feedback conversation.
一个数据点。Each piece of feedback is a data point. It is one person’s perspective about our behavior and its impact. When feedback is tough (in its substance or delivery), it doesn’t have to be about who you are or how much you’re worth.

Engage the feedback

Once you’ve prepared your brain and body, here’s how to engage with the feedback conversation.

Pause and appreciate.

Let the feedback settle (especially if it was hard to hear). You might say, “Thank you for this feedback. I’m just taking it in,” or “I appreciate you offering this. I’m sitting with it for a moment.” If you’re not in a good place to continue the conversation, it might be better to acknowledge this rather than to push through. You could say, “Thank you for that feedback. I need to sit with that. Can we schedule another time to connect on this?”

Ask questions.

试探性的问题可以帮助你变得清晰和一致。不同的人交流方式不同，最好不要以为你听到的就是对方的意思。如果提供的反馈是关于你造成的伤害或你对他人的负面影响，更多的信息可以帮助你更好地了解如何纠正或修复伤害。Here are some questions you might ask:

Can you share more about the impact of my behavior or actions?
你还想让我知道什么?
Can you share more about times when you’ve experienced me showing up this way?

Be careful about probing in a way that comes across as demanding evidence. This conversation isn’t about the other person providing proof, it’s about getting to better understanding.

如果反馈来自你的经理，你可能需要澄清你的意图，问:“这是关于如何成长(发展)的建议还是需要改变(课程修正)的建议?”

做复述。

重复一遍检查理解情况。You might say:

I want to make sure I understand what you’re telling me. Can I say this back to you? (After saying it back, you can ask, “what did I miss?”)
I’d like to repeat this back to you to make sure we’re on the same page about what you’re sharing. Let me know if any of this doesn’t align with what you shared.

The repeat-back is even more important if the person sharing feedback is your manager or someone with more positional power, andespeciallyif it’s corrective feedback.

Decide what to do (and learn from it)

反馈信息。你的目标是从中吸取教训，然后选择如何利用它。我们知道事情并不总是那么简单，尤其是当涉及到权力线和差异的时候。你拥有的权力越少，你就越不觉得自己属于这里，或者你越觉得自己被边缘化，在决定你的回应时，你需要权衡的因素就越多。

Typically, you have a few options:

Make a plan to change your behavior.

有时反馈是直接的，并附带一个具体的要求。“嘿，在我们上次的会议上，我们最后都非常匆忙，因为没有人遵守时间。下次你能指定一个计时员吗?”在这种情况下，前进的道路可能只是制定一个计划来改变你的行为。即使前进的道路并不简单，如果反馈是你同意的或者以前收到过的反馈，考虑一下你能做些什么改变。想想你可以请求谁来支持你或帮助你保持责任感。

进一步接触。

这种触发身体收紧反应的反馈通常不是那么简单。如果您发现反馈令人惊讶或令人困惑，或者问题很复杂，您可能需要花更多的时间来探索和整理。这可能包括寻求他人的观点，与反馈者进行更多的对话，或进行更深层次的自我反思。You might need to check for an iceberg andget beneath the surface before responding.

什么都不做(把它归档以备以后使用)。

If you don’t agree with the feedback or if you simply don’t have the capacity to act on it immediately, you always have the option to do nothing and file it away for later. Even when there’s a specific ask or directive, you have the power to choose the path forward. Be mindful that this choice could negatively impact your relationship, especially if sharing the feedback with you required significant courage and labor on the part of the other person. If the feedback came from someone with more power than you, not implementing the feedback could have negative consequences to the level of losing your job. That said, you still have the choice not to implement. We recommend being intentional about choosing this option and communicating about it. You could say, “Thank you for your feedback. I’m not ready to act on it right now, but I want you to know that I heard you.”

如果反馈有偏见怎么办?尽管我们喜欢反馈，但我们知道它并不总是有益的——充满偏见和刻板印象的反馈是完全有害的。If you’re on the receiving end of biased feedback, your options are similar to what we laid out above (thoughwe do not recommendthat you change your behavior to accommodate someone else’s bias). You can choose to engage further by speaking up and giving feedback on the feedback or by talking to someone else at your organization (a manager, someone in HR, or another trusted person with positional power) to share the situation and your concerns. You could also choose to do nothing. In any case, take it as another data point about the person and remember that when the feedback is biased, it’s not you—it’s them.

Ask for it

在你接受反馈并决定如何处理它之后，继续通过寻求反馈来建立你们的关系。你甚至可以针对对方的反馈特别跟进:“还记得我们关于XYZ的对话吗?你有什么其他的想法或反馈吗?”

良好地接受反馈不仅仅是关于你个人的学习和成长——它是关于创造和贡献一种反馈文化，在这种文化中，团队成员可以倾听、参与和一起学习，以一种建立关系和获得更好结果的方式。One way to up your feedback-getting game is to up youraskinggame. Increase the chance that you’ll get timely, meaningful, and real-talk feedback by moving beyond the “level one” invitation:

1. Invite feedback.

“你有什么反馈给我吗?”

2. Invite feedback with specificity (assume it’s there and normalize these requests).

“对于我如何促成这次会议，你有什么反馈?”我特别感兴趣的是你关于我如何更好地管理参与者参与度的想法。”

3. Invite feedback with specificity and self-reflection.

“I’d love your perspective on what worked and didn’t work. I think the activities were helpful, but I don’t think I gave enough time for people to process. What would you have done differently?”

When you ask for feedback directly, it removes one of the things that makes constructive feedback potentially scary in the first place: the element of surprise. It also lowers the stakes for your teammates to share feedback that might otherwise feel risky and contributes to a feedback culture (especially if you have positional power).

In addition to asking for specific feedback, get the input you need by making it a normal, expected part of how you engage with your colleagues, by building it into yourcheck-in agendas, sharing regular slices of your work, and calendaring time todebrief projects.

Dive deeper into receiving feedback by readingPart 2: How to Receive Feedback About Power, Difference, and Inequity.

Check out our other resources aboutfeedback:

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