The Science of Receiving Feedback: Mentor Workshop Introduction | Big Think

I don't know anybody who thinks that feedback conversations work. Whether that's in your family or with your friends or in your organization, whether you have it to give or unsolicited advice or criticism or offhand comments or your performance review are being aimed at you, the feedback conversations are dreaded and often dismissed.

And so what's interesting is that the usual response is to teach givers how to give more effectively, so organizations send all their managers to teach them how to give more skillfully and more persistently. As individuals, we wait around for that perfect giver to show up who we trust, who has the credibility and experience to actually be helpful to us, whose opinion we actually want rather than all of those who offer them to us unsolicited.

And it occurred to us that actually we've been going about this backwards. Focusing on teaching givers how to give is a push model of learning, right? I figure out what you need to learn and I push you to learn it. And it occurred to us that actually it's the receiver who's in charge of what they take in, what sense they make of it, and whether and how they choose to change.

It doesn't really matter how authoritative or powerful or even skillful the giver is. The real leverage here is in teaching all of us, particularly those of us who are in leadership or who are parenting or in a relationship with other people, that core human challenge to try to see yourself and to take other people's input to learn how you impact those around you.

I think we have a really conflicted relationship with feedback. In other words, most of us have had the experience of having a mentor or a coach for someone who taught us something really valuable and we saw ourselves getting better at something quickly, and that is exhilarating. We're so grateful, and yet all of us also have the experience of getting painful, cutting, unfair, off-base, poorly delivered feedback that not only wasn't helpful to us but was actually damaging.

And I think that that conflictual relationship really reflects the fact that feedback sits at the junction of two core human needs. Human beings are wired to learn and grow. If you look at any of the studies on happiness, getting better at something is a key piece of what makes life satisfying. It's why we take up hobbies in retirement and why otherwise normal people stick with the game of golf, right? Because that occasional good round fools us into thinking that we're getting better.

But alongside that lies this second core human need, which is the need to be accepted and respected and loved just the way we are now. And the very fact of the feedback suggests that how we are now is not quite a-okay. And I don't think that tension is going to go away, but understanding that that's why we sometimes love it and sometimes really hate it helps us understand why it's part of the condition of being human.

Getting better at receiving feedback is a skill. And it actually gives you traction in all of the important areas of your life. So at work, what the research shows is that people who solicit negative feedback, and in the literature what that means is that they're not just fishing for compliments, they're actually asking what could I improve. Those people adapt more quickly to new roles, they report higher satisfaction, and they get higher performance reviews.

So not only do they actually accelerate their own learning, but they also change the way other people see them. If you look at the marriage research, John Gottman up in Seattle who studies marriage has found that a spouse's willingness to take input or coaching from their partner is a key indicator for happy, stable marriages.

Now that's true even though most of us find our spouse's chronic complaints about our character flaws, you know, we don't think of them as feedback, we think about them as them being annoying, but our willingness to actually hear that is key to the stability of the marriage. And, you know, when I think about how I parent my kids, the most important thing I can do is actually show them how I respond to setbacks at work or the criticism from my mother-in-law.

That's going to do more for how they respond to a bad grade or a bad call in the baseball game than all my lectures combined.