Unwrapping the Gift of Constructive Feedback

The best way to receive feedback is graciously. Take some time to reflect on what you’ve heard, solicit other viewpoints and develop a plan of action.

Categorizing feedback makes what to do next less daunting. Most feedback falls into one of five buckets: attitude, work ethic, productivity, soft skills and hard, or technical, skills.

Here’s a look at each one with some ideas to get you started. In the absence of official feedback, an honest self-appraisal of these five areas may catch issues before they escalate.

Take Steps to Boost Skills

If the issue is technical ability or people skills, take heart. Addressing these areas may pinch a bit but they are perhaps the easiest to tackle.

Hard Skills: These encompass understanding, comfort and eventual mastery of technical skills needed for a job or profession. Building hard skills is perhaps the easiest (assuming you have the aptitude) category of feedback to address. Some ideas:

• Ask about on-the-job training
• Seek out a mentor
• Take an online course
• Explore community interest groups (MeetUp.com is a great resource)
• Do side small projects to refine your skill. Practice makes perfect.

Soft Skills: These include interpersonal skills, communication, teamwork and collaboration and improving them can be trickier, particularly if you’ve worked alone and you are now part of a team. Yet the importance of teamwork and collaboration in the 21st Century workplace cannot be overstated. Ask a few trusted colleagues for their input. Pose questions that call for open-ended answers:

• What behaviors of mine come across as isolating or off-putting?
• How can I be a more integral part of the team?
• What are my strengths and weaknesses?
• How can we keep the lines of communication open?
• Is my communication style or content effective?

Make an Objective, Honest Assessment

Less than glowing feedback about attitude, work ethic or productivity is both more difficult to hear and more difficult to address than criticism of a lacking skill.

If skills (both hard and soft) are about what we do, these other three important “buckets” are about how we do it. And how we do something treads closely to our conceptions of who we are.

Addressing feedback in these areas takes a willingness to be vulnerable and the ability to be honest with yourself. None of it is easy but the potential payoffs are huge.

Work Ethic: This covers the energy you expend, attention to detail, taking pride in your work, team work, what you do and when you do it. How work gets done is as important as what work gets done. If your work ethic needs attention, ask yourself:

• Do I follow through when asked and communicate timely with supervisors and peers?
• Do I take pride in my work or turn in work I know is substandard?
• Am I honest about the time I devote to the job?
• Do I meet deadlines or make excuses for why something isn’t done when expected?

Output: If work ethic is about approach, or input, output is about results, or productivity. It takes on greater importance to managers, who are responsible for output of a team or department. If output is an issue, consider these steps:

• Ask about benchmarks and goals for individuals, teams or departments so you have a better view of how your contributions matter.
• Log your time for a week. How much is spent on task and how much disappears in friendly chats on Slack and checking personal social media profiles?
• What percentage of tasks move the ball forward versus “busy work”?
• Schedule time blocks of up to 2 hours for specific tasks and fight distractions.
• If you need training on a skill to keep up with your team, speak up. Honestly is always the best course.

Attitude: This includes verbal and nonverbal responses toward work, change, peers, supervisors, customers and direct reports. Hiding a bad attitude is nearly impossible so if you get called on it, chances are you won’t be surprised. Still, changing your attitude is probably the single most difficult feedback to address. Start with small steps:

• It sounds corny, but smile more. You’ll feel better and so will your peers, managers and customers.
• Remember everything is as big or small as you make it to be. Do you have a positive outlook or a negative one?
• Pause before snapping. If you are irritated, take a breath and evaluate whether what you plan to say is helpful and respectful. If it’s not, don’t say it.
• Find the source. Did something change at work or home? Are you sleep-deprived and/or overstressed? Knowing why makes adjusting a bad attitude easier.
• Make an exit plan. If the job is a bad fit and you are miserable, explore options within the organization or work on getting a new position elsewhere.

Keep Feedback in Context

Identifying the type or types of feedback you’ve received allows you to better evaluate, prioritize and act on what you’ve heard. The suggestions above will spark other options that fit your specific circumstances.

Keep it in context - feedback is about your performance, not you as a person; it is intended to offer guidance for self-improvement; it is part of a bigger picture that includes many players in an organization where needs and priorities evolve. Remember the Big Goal: Feedback helps us become the best version of ourselves.

Feedback is a gift. Some of the most meaningful gifts aren’t what we expect, and we rarely get to select the packaging.

Sameer Bhargava has led and turned around IT organizations in multi-billion dollar companies and created world-class R&D teams at startups. He is CIO of Onlife Health and founder of Callibrain, a cloud-based software platform that drives higher performance by strengthening alignment, communication, collaboration and employee engagement across an organization. The views, opinions and positions expressed are the author’s alone and should not be attributed to Onlife Health or anyone within the organization.

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