Be Bulletproof by James Brooke & Simon Brooke

Author:James Brooke & Simon Brooke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780091939816
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2012-02-29T18:30:00+00:00

Evaluate the feedback objectively

Feedback is sometimes analogised with medicine: we don’t like it; it tastes nasty; but if we are to get better, we need to swallow it and move on. This is true up to a point, but there is a key difference. Medicine is tested rigorously in clinical trials before being put on the market and it is fair to assume that the person prescribing or administering it has attained a high level of professional training. Not so with feedback. Feedback in the workplace is of varying quality. Some of it will be useful and helpful, some of it will be harmless junk and some of it will be toxic junk. Other than in some very rare cases, to be willing to accept it all unquestioningly or to reject it outright are both thinking errors.

The first exercise is to think through what we can control and what we cannot control in our quest to get back on our feet. This is an important characteristic of feedback. You do not control the feedback you receive. The deliverer of the feedback is entirely responsible for that. But you do exercise control over the extent to which you categorise feedback into ‘helpful’ and ‘unhelpful’ (this does not necessarily prevent you from feeling hurt by it, but you are entirely free to choose how you evaluate it, what is kept and what is discarded).

We encouraged Mike to write down his evaluation of the feedback that he received, using a two-by-two grid. The axes were: (i) helpful versus unhelpful; and (ii) content as opposed to style. The process of writing down the feedback put Mike in control and allayed his instinct to defend. What happened to Didier’s feedback was now Mike’s choice.

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