How to Make Negative Feedback a Positive Experience

I love a good fail. Whether I’m giving the feedback or receiving specific negative feedback, I’m all for it. There is so much to learn from a mistake and so many opportunities on the other side of it. How could you not love them? On the leader side of it, it is just a little more fun. It is amazing to work with people to navigate and grow from small mistakes to avoid bigger ones while developing the skills to handle those big ones when they do come up. I’ll be honest, for a long time I couldn’t understand why people didn’t want negative feedback.

To be honest, as anyone who has ever supervised me would tell you, I get terribly uncomfortable if I get feedback that is exclusively positive. I used to get overly emotional when I couldn’t find the constructive feedback in a review or a conversation. (We all have our own personal brand of crazy and this is mine.) Getting feedback that helps you grow is always positive. In my mind, it only becomes a negative experience when the feedback doesn’t help you to improve in some way.

I’ve received that kind of negative feedback once.

There has been exactly one time where I received negative feedback that wasn’t constructive and didn’t serve me. It was a devastating hour long assault on my character, motives, and ability to lead or even contribute. She gave no specifics as to where these assumptions about me or my abilities came from even when requested. The person repeatedly told me I wasn’t able to influence anyone, was immature, and power hungry. She said, people didn’t like me, even if they acted like they did. I needed to change but this would be something I’d just have to learn because “people can be mean” (That part was meant as a warning and I’m still not sure if they saw the irony in it.).

That is when it clicked

This is why people don’t like constructive feedback, even if this isn’t their actual experience, this is how it feels. They feel like they are being labeled as a whole based on generalities and assumptions. When you don’t get enough details its hard to understand how the feedback applies. You feel like the person giving the feedback doesn’t fully understand the specifics and that these things aren’t true to all instances. The delivery is So, I’ll take a note from Maya Angelou, when you know better you do better. Once I realized what the problem was in feedback and fully understood it I was sure I could do better in both my preparation for, and delivery of, feedback to the people in my life.

Preparing for negative feedback

Often when we give feedback, we provide it based on the emotion we’re having in that moment. That means, if it catches us off guard or if we’re having a completely unrelated hard time, we react differently.

Parenting gives unlimited examples of this

Case in point, my four-year-old spills a cup of water at the dinner table when I’m already stressed trying to get everyone all settled down and eating causes me to yell at him while I feverishly clean up all the water and demand his help (less than ideal reaction I would say).

Whereas if I’m playing a game with the same four-year-old and he accidently knocks over a cup of water on the carpeting I calmly say, “Oh no, a spill, what should we do quickly?” Then while cooperatively drying the carpet I explain this is why we keep drinks on the coffee table, so they don’t spill. Or another example from the homestead, I get home with all the dudes and our new chickens. As soon as my dog greets us he runs to a puddle and lays in it. As we carry each chick to the box in the garage he is excitedly running back and forth with us getting puddle water all over us. I’ll spare you the detail but let’s say my reaction to this was also less than ideal. My six-year-old reminded me that the dog didn’t mean to, he was excited, and we were all dirty from being outside and we needed showers anyway.

As we all know, there are way more accidents when we’re not expecting them, than when we are. This is why we need practice. Practice gets you out of reaction mode and focused on the intent, impact, and root cause. Practicing your feedback takes more work than reacting. Slowing down and choosing to act, rather than react, will be well worth it in the end. Since my little guy put a pretty good bow on my dog example, let me wrap up the water ones.

Intent, impact, and root cause create clarity.

There was no intent to make a mess in either situation. Water on the floor and table have minimal impact on anything and can very easily be dried. There is a difference in them though, that does require differentiation in response (not as drastic as it was originally). That is in the root cause. When playing on the floor he was too focused on what we were playing to notice a cup. When sitting at the dinner table he was flailing around trying to be the funny man instead of sitting quietly like he was asked.

Delivering negative feedback

Once you have prepared to give the feedback there are a few aspects to delivering it that are pivotal, first is timing. Provide feedback, whether it is positive or constructive, as soon as you can. If that means assessing a situation and preparing in the moment so that you can provide feedback immediately following the meeting, event, shift, etcetera, do that. If it means taking a night to process, remove emotion, and plan, and provide feedback the next day, do that.

The second portion of this is clarity. If you aren’t clear on what you want to either praise or correct with your feedback it will at best have no impact and at worst have a negative impact with a very long tail. People want honest feedback and being vague is only doing them a disservice and won’t get the results you’re driving toward. Finally, it is important to extend grace to the person and I mean this both for positive and constructive feedback. People need to understand that they are bigger than one event, be that success or failure (A word to those of us accepting the feedback you are bigger than that one event.

Establishing my feedback process

When I first began formally managing a team in a professional setting (and I do mean about 3-4 weeks on the job) I had an employee come into my office with tears in her eyes, close the door, and say, “I haven’t done my work for several weeks. I am so behind and I don’t know how to get out of it. I’m sorry this is terrible and I need help.” I asked a few more questions and learned that for 6 weeks she’d done just enough work to look busy. She created a huge gap in our reporting. That is a pretty big impact but it wasn’t malicious. She just couldn’t focus in the office due to concerns outside of work. She had been doing the job for years, so she had the ability to complete it to quality standard.

Maybe it was because she brought the problem to me honestly and asked for help or because this was the first big leader/team member problem I got to solve. Maybe it was simply that I was so fresh in the role that I didn’t know the HR and performance policies, but I didn’t write her up for this. I explained the importance of the work and reminded her of the timeliness expectations for each aspect of her work that was undone. We made a list of what needed to be completed and applied it to a calendar that would allow her to get back on track. This was all in the same meeting. Then, I asked her to go back to her desk and set up weekly check-ins for us to review her progress. Before she left I said, “We’ll figure this out, I know you can do this.”

The results just weren’t there

After a few more months she made significant headway but never completely caught back up and eventually left the role. Years later, her undone work still put me at a disadvantage. That being said, I wouldn’t change how I handled the process or situation. Someone came to me for help in complete transparency of their mistakes. I provided clear expectations around the role immediately. We worked together to create a go forward plan. She walked away knowing I was in her corner but that she was responsible for getting the work done.

The next time you have feedback for anyone in your life keep in mind there are two sides to supplying it effectively. You need both the preparation to understand what happened, and the quality delivery. In preparation, consider the impact, the intent, and the root cause of those specific circumstances. Then, when actually delivering it, speak to each of those aspects with clarity, as soon as possible, while extending grace. Then, empower them to make a change.

Things I’m reminding myself of

Set them up for success

Setting someone up for success is a pretty important last step regardless of the overall impact. For some reason we seem to be much better at empowering people to succeed or improve when the stakes are higher. I will set up a corrective action plan for a team that needs help in a certain area but forget to ask my kid where he thinks the cup should sit so it doesn’t get bumped again. We need that empowerment, tools for success, or whatever you want to call it at each level and regardless of personal or professional. Doing this, especially on small things, teaches people to create their own solutions and action plans when they recognize a problem.

Compartmentalize to understand, relate to grow

First compartmentalize the feedback, and then relate what you’ve learned to other areas. People are either complimenting or asking for more or better work specific to a time and instance that you’re working in. They are typically not, though it may feel that way, attacking, or complimenting, you or your work on the whole. Compartmentalizing has been a game changer for me and how I hear and apply feedback.

Once you master this, then try to apply what you’ve learned more broadly. For example, imagine you get feedback that your emails are too demanding and need to be softened. That doesn’t mean you are demanding, or all your emails are bad. Ask more questions to better understand. Once you understand the specifics, apply what you learned about softening emails to the ones you send your team or boss. Then consider how this might relate to other communication. How do your verbal requests come across? Does your body language imply you’re demanding?

The negative feedback golden rule

What is the golden rule when receiving feedback? Receive it the way you would want someone to receive yours. Did the person giving the feedback prepare? Are they responding based on the intent, impact, and root cause of your actions? Are they delivering timely feedback, with clarity, and grace? If not, as the recipient you can help.

With all of the patience you can muster, ask the questions. Take the kernel you can find to learn from, accept it (even if you disagree), and ask for more. When trying to have them look at intent, “From your perspective, what did it appear my intentions were on that call?” If you’re understanding impact, “I agree I could have handled that meeting more professionally. Can you help me understand how much of an impact that one instance might have?” For clarity, “I understand I didn’t document that well, can you provide some examples of how you would have liked to see it differently?” If you’re not receiving grace, I would straight out encourage you to not bother with asking questions on this one. Serve as an example. Give yourself grace and show it to those around you.