On receiving feedback

Years ago, I attended a seminar on Getting/Giving feedback, hoping to learn how to best receive feedback. To my chagrin, the seminar was really just on giving feedback, and although I got some useful tips on how to better offer feedback, I had really wanted to know how I could better solicit and integrate feedback to get better professionally.

Happily, there are now some resources available to offer this kind of advice. Although a lot of these resources focus on feedback in the corporate world, the tips are very relevant to researchers who receive feedback from colleagues or comments from grant reviewers.

Kevin Kruse for Forbes suggests that when you receive feedback, you should evaluate it slowly. After you put reviewer comments in the drawer for a few days to allow for the sting of a rejection to subside, then take them out and spend time poring over them. Be thoughtful and reflective both around what comments you think are good to accept and incorporate into your grant and those that you don't think are helpful. Just as you should not reject all the comments you get, nor should you accept them all at face value either.  Sometimes reviewers are spot on and sometimes they are off base.

Simply being aware of why it's difficult to take feedback can help us better prepare to accept and use good feedback. Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone in their Harvard Business Review article and book identify three triggers that make it difficult for people to accept feedback, described briefly below.

• Truth triggers: Stone and Heen suggest that people have a difficult time seeing, hearing, or reading themselves. So, although my grant might make sense to me, I have a more difficult time spotting the holes and flaws than an outside reader.
• Relationship triggers: I recently had someone explain something to me where I considered myself well-versed and I didn't think he knew what he was talking about. I found myself totally blocking him out until I realized what I was doing and thought there was no harm in trying to understand his perspective. This trigger causes us to ignore or reject feedback based on the source and our relationship with that person.
• Identity triggers: Identity triggers cause us to disregard feedback because it infringes on our accepted identity. For instance, I once had someone give me the feedback that I needed to work on my writing. For me, who had been a professional technical writer and taught graduate courses in writing and editing, the feedback giver might as well have slapped me in the face. Now, it turned out that she was talking about a specific piece I'd written, which did indeed need some work, but I had the hardest time hearing it after her first comment struck me in such a core piece of my identity.

The point here is if we can recognize what's being triggered in us that keeps us from hearing and understanding feedback, sometimes we can get past our frustration and use the feedback, even when it's poorly delivered, to get better.

Resources:
How to Receive Feedback and Criticism - Kevin Kruse (Forbes)
Get Better at Receiving Feedback - Sheila Heen (HBR)