Responding to Criticism and Negative Feedback

 
Whatever their professions, positions, age or experience, around 95% of the people I've worked with over many years as a trainer, coach and mentor, acknowledge significant difficulty with this fundamental relationship management skill. They tend, at least at times, to react to criticism and negative feedback with a range of defensive, hostile or avoiding tactics.

Sometimes they agree with criticism received before it is clarified and no matter how poorly it is given. At other times they retreat hurt, wounded, distressed or distraught, believing themselves to be victims of unfairness.

Criticism is feedback. It often contains others' negative perceptions of ourselves and is frequently given in ways that are hard to listen to but it is still and only feedback - about someone's problem with aspects of our own behaviour or to do with their unawarely projecting on to us a judgement that is more honestly about their own unresolved personality or circumstances.

Someone's critical comment of us is an indication of their problem, not ours. Although we may have a responsibility to listen to it, to help them clarify it and to understand and even to act on it, receiving criticism is really a matter of helping someone clarify their own problem and (possibly) assisting them to give good quality feedback.

So in order to respond constructively to criticism, it's useful to possess or develop a number of skill-sets:

• The ability to quickly and correctly assign Problem Ownership to the person first expressing the problem.
• A facility with a methodical Problem Clarification process.
• Skill and confidence with a number of listening practices designed to draw out and reflect back an accurate understanding of both the emotional and logical content of the speaker's needs and intentions.
• Awareness of our thought processes and the ability to simultaneously modify them, in order to limit or neutralise tendencies to Fight or Flight reactions. This, roughly speaking, is metacognition - the ability to reason about our own thinking and emotional processes, especially as they occur.

Basic Choices and Consequences

When given criticism, negative feedback or performance-correctional comments, we have two basic choices of perception: (i) I am under attack; or (ii) the other person is calling for my understanding (help, empathy, support, expertise, wisdom, kindness or sympathy). Whichever we choose to see, we will get. Each event is neutral until we colour it with our view of it by projecting our thinking on to the situation. It's not an attack until we defend ourselves.

If we choose to see that we are under attack we are less likely to respond maturely, and more likely to react with Fight or Flight by, for example -

Accepting without clarification, criticism expressed as labels, generalities and global judgements.

Engaging in hostility, sarcasm, retaliation, retribution, reprisal, accusation, fault-finding or other form of attack.

Self-justification, defence or explanation.

Rejecting the complaints outright, without clarifying them.

Unwarranted deflection or re-direction of the feedback on to others.

Fault-finding, nit-picking and blame.

Focusing on our own emotional needs and choosing to become upset, morose, self-pitying or vicitimised.

Finding and pointing to the logical flaw in the other's argument.

Blocking the other's communication: ignoring, downplaying or dismissing its emotional content; interrupting, switching-off and tuning-out, breaking eye-contact; using sarcasm, or displaying indirect aggression (such as heavy sighing, eye-rolling, grinning, finger-drumming).

Q: Why should we listen to negative feedback or criticism when we don't have to? Why should we put up with people saying that we are the problem? A: We never have to listen to it. However, there may be times when our responsibilities to our relationships suggest we'd be wise to. Responding constructively can resolve relationship difficulties and strengthen the parties' ability to deal with differences (between them and elsewhere), especially by pre-empting the unhealthy build-up of further negativity.

Fight or Flight reactions are based on vulnerability and self-preservation urges originating in the unhelpful idea that our integrity or honour depends on what others think of and judge us; they do little to enhance relationships.

Other, more constructive options are likely to elude us until we recover our equilibrium and maturity.

When we choose instead to see others as calling for understanding, we're more likely to have access to the necessary skill-sets - but only if we have habituated them. Skill means practised ability. Expect your own knee-jerk reactions if you are not sufficiently skilled. Don't kid yourself that you can behave differently from your normal behaviour if and when required.

What we do when it is important is what we do every day. Habits are like links in a chain. Every day we add links to strengthen them until in the end, they become hard to break.

The keys to breaking our Fight or Flight and other non-listening habits are very simple, though not necessarily easy - it depends on how ingrained are the habits and how willing we are to change ourselves in order to improve our relationships with others.

Why might you want to consider beginning with yourself? There are at least two sides to every interpersonal communication challenge but we have the power to control only one; we cannot make other people change. Our best shot at making the differences that matter comes from enhancing our own practical and attitudinal responses to communication opportunities.

This approach increases the possibility of positively influencing others with our behaviour-modelling and different responses. Whether or not others do change, we strengthen our own confidence and repertoire of mature, stress-free responses to difficult, awkward, tiresome, alarming or otherwise challenging interactions.

These are amongst the vital matters addressed by Hear and Be Heard, our comprehensive programme in interpersonal communication and relationships-management practices. Hear and Be Heard is available in both online and in-person options.

© Copyright 2002 - 2008 Tom Watkins Group. All rights reserved.

EncourageMentors services include consulting, coaching, mentoring, personal tuition, facilitation, guidebooks, appraisal and feedback tools, free initial assessments: in person or online.

Contact Tom Watkins if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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