How to absorb Critical Feedback. Critical feedback is essential for your…
By: Muhammad Awaid
Tags: Career Development, Career Advice, Feedback

Critical feedback is essential for your career growth because it can improve your skillset exponentially. You should always surround yourself with people who can give critical feedback. Consider it a blessing and remember it is for your benefit only. Who could have summarized it better than Bill Gates himself:

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”

Personally speaking, I used to get agitated when receiving feedback in early stages of my career. I have become humble over the years. Thanks to people around me for providing continuous feedback. Let me lay out of a few tips that helped me:

Analyse before you react:

Always avoid responding when you feel agitated about a particular feedback point. The right words never come out in such a situation. You should always take a day or two to analyze the feedback given and then get back to your manager with tangible action items. You will be in a much better state of mind to have a meaningful discussion by following this approach.

Understand the feedback in spirit:

It takes years for people to understand what does it mean to execute tasks in “spirit” where the focus should be on learning and improving.

Let’s take a simple example here. You write two blogs as per the objective set by your manager. However, you get the feedback that both blogs need to be re-written because they are not up to the mark.

Now, here is the important point. You need to understand the improvement area in your writing skills for producing high quality blogs. Never have a discussion that your objective should be marked as complete since you have written the blogs already. It just defeats the overall purpose.

Define tangible action items:

Sometimes verbal feedback is lost in translation. Define and document tangible action items before you sign off from a review meeting. This helps in setting clear expectations. Then it is your job to follow up aggressively and provide a timely closure to all the action items.

Understand that your manager is not an angel:

Your manager is a human. He may end up giving feedback in an aggressive tone sometimes. You should empathize with him here and should not expect him to be 100% cool all the time. You never know what kind of a day he is having.

Best approach in such a situation is to avoid confrontation and define action items to be discussed in a follow up meeting.

Seek feedback from people outside your company:

You should have a mentor outside your company as well for discussion of your career growth. This mentor should have more exposure in professional life than your immediate manager. It helps in getting a broader perspective.

Know when to reject feedback:

You should create alignment with your manager about your long-term goals. Consider a situation where you want to specialize in Artificial Intelligence eventually but your manager advises otherwise. Given such a situation, it is okay to resign from the company or request a team switch because you need to align your current work with your long-term goals. This should be done in an amicable manner without any resentment.

Remember, a person is always learning in life. You cannot master the art of absorbing feedback in one day. It takes a lot of practice and you might have to fine tune your personality a bit as well. In short, learn to absorb feedback and use it to refine your skills for career growth.