In Good advice to get you started, I wrote down simple principles you can adopt on your own and without much preparation. All of them support effective communication. Alongside them, you can also practice an attitude that makes giving and receiving feedback easier.
Be open to feedback and don’t assume bad intentions
When someone gives us feedback, let’s try to listen. Let’s not assume bad intentions when someone points something out to us. Usually the intentions are good, but the execution can be worse.
Watch your reactions especially when:
- you take someone’s message personally
- you start getting upset
- you go on the defensive
- you deny or explain yourself without really thinking
When you notice this kind of behavior in yourself, it’s worth asking whether it’s justified. It also helps to take a step back and paraphrase the feedback in your own words, to make sure that what you heard is what the other person wanted to tell you.
Accept that we’re different
Whether we’re giving feedback or receiving it, we need to remember that we’re different. There are really a lot of things that make us different:
- food preferences
- political preferences
- cognitive preferences
- personality / character traits
- values
- knowledge and experience
- how we’re feeling
We’re only human, though, and who we are will always affect what we say and how we say it, as well as how we perceive others. However we differ, we should at least sometimes stop and think about those differences. That makes it easier to understand the other person.
Practice empathy: we don’t have to agree with feedback, but let’s try to understand the other person’s perspective
It’s worth remembering that we don’t always have to agree with feedback. Someone giving us feedback may not know many things that we know. But that person is only presenting their perspective, and they have a reason for it, even if it’s hard for us to understand.
Here, both people are trying to convince each other. Both think they’re right and the other side is wrong. I bet you also lean toward one of these two attitudes. In my view both are valuable, and both come from professionalism and the best of intentions. The difference may be that one person is more analytical and needs to think everything through, while the other is more impulsive and wants to act.
Once we accept that we’re different, it’s much easier to give up arguing and reach a compromise.
We can’t learn from mistakes we won’t admit
One important thing to finish with. We make mistakes every day. We notice some of them ourselves, and we can learn about others from feedback. There are also mistakes whose “author” is hard to find.
The truth is, there’s no point trying to answer the question put that way. Because any of them could have prevented the problem. When we find ourselves in a situation like this, I recommend three simple steps:
- What happened?
- Why didn’t I anticipate it?
- What can I do to avoid a situation like this in the future?
Remember that reaching an open, empathetic attitude is a process. It won’t appear overnight; rather, it builds up (like muscles at the gym) only if we practice regularly. The good news is that following the principles above (which aren’t hard to apply) is practice in itself.