How to Survive a Critique: A Guide to Giving and Receiving Feedback
aiga.org
aiga.org
Sometimes this applies more or less depending on the particular company and culture / working relationship, but in general it's a good thing to understand. (This also tends to happen more / better in high-functioning environments, or work where it's project-based and you have choices about who to continue working with next.)
If someone has written you off, they won't go to the trouble of creating, thinking about, and giving feedback. Because good feedback takes effort. It's a obligation of the other person to put thought into it, so you should learn to appreciate it.
In addition to the other advice about delivering it properly, giving concrete examples, etc. etc.
Give feedback as a gift to others, and receive it in that way.
This mindset is basically trying to cast good intentions on the criticizer to reduce the sting of the critique.
I don't like these mindsets because they aren't reliably true.
While some managers or teammates will give you feedback with good intentions in mind, others will critique you out of frustration and negative emotions.
Instead of tricking yourself into thinking that everyone is acting with your best interests in mind, why not accept reality.
The path forward is to embrace the fact that you can't please everyone. Instead, have a deep understanding of what your goals and values are. And, act accordingly. How others react or judge your actions are only important insofar as they help you achieve your goals or align your actions with your values.
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> The path forward is to embrace the fact that you can't please everyone. Instead, have a deep understanding of what your goals and values are. And, act accordingly. How others react or judge your actions are only important insofar as they help you achieve your goals or align your actions with your values.
I think the "feedback is a gift" perspective works regardless of "manager genuinely trying to help you improve" or "manager who will just want to get rid of you in a HR-approved way if they don't like what you're doing." And similarly, regardless if your goals are "genuine self-improvement" or even just "don't get fired."
If you get negative feedback from someone who is viewing you negatively you're in a better position than not getting negative feedback from someone who views you negatively.
It might only be valuable as a warning, if you are working in a fairly inhumane bureaucracy, but it's still better than not knowing where you stand.
(It's important here to be able to tell "feedback" from "frustration," though. For instance, if you've got a manager who's grumpy towards everyone or about everything, you need to calibrate for that...)
In my life however, I've often met people who could and did harm others (meaning: me) using verbal communication only. And so, I don't share your assumption.
I don't feel responsible for processing it all. If I'm suspicious about the intent, I'll likely just cut it off and drop it on the floor like it never happened. If I see the intent is improvement and self-improvement, I'm ~100% invested right there; you can literally put me through hell and I'll be grateful.
My main concerns over the advice in the original comment are that:
- It suggests that people only give feedback to you if they care about you or have to work with you again, which isn't true.
- It implies that you should value whether people like you (or care about you). You're obviously free to choose whatever values you want, but external validation is a poor value imo because it's largely outside of your control. A more resilient mindset is to derive self-worth from intrinsic values e.g. hard work, self-improvement, kindness.
Some situations, yes, your feedback is being given to document your underperformance. I'm in general not talking about that kind of feedback. At that stage, my comment (and probably the entire article about how to give constructive feedback) is inapplicable.
For feedback that is at the level of (and people operating at the level of) "you're doing good work, here's how to improve", then I think my statements are true.
If you're getting put on a PIP, then you've got deeper problems, and sure, your feedback is not a gift. No subtle gift is going to help you at that point.
A manager's feedback may be directly oppositional to a teammate's feedback. Your manager's feedback may be directly oppositional to your Director's feedback. Sometimes someone that doesn't know what they're talking about offers feedback very aggressively for posterity. All feedback is not a gift. Lots of feedback is just noise.
I think it's important to receive feedback from people you respect or want to be more like. Identifying these people is very important, as they'll have tremendous impact on your work. Just because your manager was assigned to you does not mean you respect them or are interested in changing to accommodate their vision.
If you are a manager or someone in a position of "power" no, please don't. This has to be one of the most overrated and misused feedback methods.
The problem with giving sandwich/hamburguer whatever feedback, is that you are undervaluing positive feedback. After you do this a lot of times, every time you want to give positive feedback to the person, she will be expecting the negative part, she will grow weary of your feedback and wont value the positive feedback.
Better learn how to give effective feedback ( https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/giving-effective-feedb... highly recommended) whether it is positive or negative. And teach your collaborators to receive the feedback as what it is: just feedback.
Feedback is improved by saying what you liked about someone's approach - by giving positive reinforcement to the parts that you liked and distinguishing the parts that would benefit from improvement.
Maybe closer to my rule of thumb would be:
1. give genuine positive feedback whenever it is possible to do so, and negative feedback whenever it is necessary.
2. all negative feedback/criticism should be constructive. It should regard only how things could be improved when related situations comes up in the future (and in an achievable way).
3. on the receiving end, I also think you should demand that negative feedback is constructive - rather than wallowing in the negativity, you can normally train people to give you more useful and productive feedback. If the problem is something you can't do anything about, it's useful to identify that and reflect it back.
People are much more receptive to constructive negative feedback if they know that you're recognising their positive efforts and have understood a more complete context.
I've observed that people who say they dislike the hamburger method will still respond positively to it, compared to bluntly negative feedback.
So instead of:
1. You make a great cheese dip at office parties.
2. You gotta stop flaming people in code reviews.
3. Great presentation last week.
Make it more like:
1. You're clearly committed to the project's success.
2. But the conversation on ticket #347 was too hostile, please don't call anyone an ignoramus again.
3. The way you handled #252 helped us settle a disagreement and reach a good compromise quickly.
Showing the first step and general direction back to success is good.
The next part is when it's over, it's over and not to hold grudges or play favorites, and hopefully get people to trust that you won't.
Being around someone where every interaction is going to be intense, regardless of whether it's a positive or negative interaction, is just exhausting.
Personally if I get negative feedback I would rather hear what I can do to make it better than hearing an arbitrary good thing to make up for the bad thing.
1. Express appreciation for effort already investment, to show that the effort was well-spent.
2. Critique the work.
3. Express encouragement for future effort, to show that the recipient can solve these problems and succeed.
Spamming 3 unrelated forced comments in a weird order just confused the recipient, making them not understand which of the comments is more important.
That's only superficially like "positive comment, negative comment, positive comment", but below the surface similarity is where the important difference is.
It's really only useful to give negative feedback if it's something that SHOULD NOT happen. Otherwise, learning to accept people where they are in life goes a long way.
The article isn’t about surviving a critique with feelings intact. The article is about how to run an effective design critique, which is a peer review method common in creative professions.
Many engineering conversations are design conversations. Yet, as engineers, we are given relatively little training in how to critique & evaluate product/architecture design decisions.
This is key. I had a manager one whose document review comments inevitably descended into snark, and often included a "this is wrong, do it again". This was frustrating and sometimes insulting. I am actually quite good at report writing, and I hate to think what their reviews would have been like if I was a junior, still learning or not a native English speaker.
Another good way of doing reviews is to have a formal checklist supported by an agreed style guide. My last company had good, usable templates (e.g. for bid and document reviews), with an objective scoring system based on a red-amber-green traffic-light system. The size / complexity of the checklist obviously varied depending on the size of the project or deliverable. Using these largely depersonalised the review, and also helped avoid reviewers projecting their own personal preferences.
It was also recommended to get a peer review before submitting a doc for formal review. This was put in place because some authors didn't do any checking at all before submitting and those of us who did formal reviews were swamped by trivial errors. Often just before a doc was due to be submitted.
In cases where work includes an element of novelty, the reviewer should be involved as early as possible (almost as soon as bidding starts, ideally) so that the types of review (and their costs) can be factored into project costs. There is nothing worse for a project than a reviewer who arbitrarily changes the review goal posts after a project has started.
Ideally, the reviewer shouldn't be the person who formally authorises an artefact for release. They instead present a recommendation for release and / or rework to management, who then decide what to actually do. This allows the reviewers to maintain independence and leaves the blame with management if a risk that was predicted by the reviewer but discounted by management actually manifests. This of course requires a suitable corporate culture.
AIGA (professional association for design) has a number of other search results for “critique”.