How to Transform Negative Feedback: Put On Your Rubber Suit
The Ideal World
In an ideal world everyone is able to deliver potentially difficult feedback with grace and respect. Managers and leaders are able to:
- Start with the positives to establish trust and build confidence.
- Offer suggestions that improve future performance.
Benefits of Investing in a Quality Rubber Suit
There may be times when you receive feedback that makes you feel crummy. It feels like:
- It erases all the things you did that were good.
- No one appreciates the hard work or sees the positive results.
- The only focus is on the past and what went wrong!
Given that no one is perfect (not the employee or the giver of feedback), it’s important to have perspective. We’ve all heard the saying that the best way to change something is to start with yourself.
Here are some tips you can try when receiving difficult feedback.
- Self-assess your performance.
- Celebrate the positives.
- Accept the feedback as a fact to consider.
- Acknowledge the time invested to give you feedback as a gift.
- Choose one improvement item that you feel you can work on, and communicate this.
- Don’t let well-intentioned suggestions for improvement erase your accomplishment.
Put on the rubber suit and choose how to use feedback! It’s important to let some feedback bounce right off. This will help you avoid internalizing events that makes you feel unworthy and creates self-doubt. Hold on a minute! I am not saying to dismiss ALL feedback because “without feedback we are flying blind” (great quote by Joseph R. Folkman author of “The Power of Feedback”). The benefit of investing in a quality rubber suit: it helps you accept all feedback objectively to be able to identify the feedback you can USE.
An Example
Your boss asks you to go into his office. You expect rave reviews on your latest report. You worked hard and your colleagues commented on how great your work was. You were not prepared for what happened next. Your manager lists all the things you could have done better. He even says he doesn’t understand why these things weren’t done to begin with and that you should have known better.
When you don’t put on your rubber suit first, here’s what could happen:
You respect your boss’s opinion and accept that your work was unacceptable.
- You feel completely demoralized and unappreciated.
- You think you may need to find a different job because you can’t possibly put in more hours to produce the perfect results your boss expects.
- You have no idea where to start to make things right.
With your rubber suit on, things happen differently:
You respect your boss’s opinion and can objectively see the gaps he is sharing with you.
- You take notes on what he feels you should have done and listen to his feedback.
- With the rubber suit on, you are able to keep the discussion professional and not personal.
- Your boss has taken time out of his busy day to share his thoughts so it must mean that he cares.
- You share the things that you feel you did right and ask him if he agrees. Starting a dialogue here will strengthen your relationship.
- When he is done, you review his feedback and identify the 1 or 2 items that you feel you can work on.
- Communicating this shows that you respect his time. It also shows that you can identify the actions that you can impact the most and how you will proceed.
Join the Discussion
- As a manager, would it be helpful to encourage your people to invest in quality rubber suits?
- What experiences have you had in receiving difficult feedback? How did you feel afterwards?
- How can putting on a rubber suit help you going forward?
- How have you transformed a difficult conversation into positive outcomes?
