Post 488: Thanks For The Feedback

 Thanks For The Feedback Book Review

 

I just took a 7 week Fortis College Book Club Professional Development class where we went over the book, Thanks For The Feedback.by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. This exciting book goes over different kinds of feedback you can get from a teacher, an employer or a family member, and this book teaches you how to receive feedback graciously, and how to give effective feedback that gets results.

I learned a lot from this book from how to not be blown away from a bad evaluation and how to give feedback that students can use to improve their papers. In the class, our instructor gave us scenarios from the book, and asked us how we would respond to it.

He asked us, "What was your worst feedback? How did you respond to that?" When someone gives us bad feedback, three triggers are triggered: Identity Trigger, Relationship Trigger, and Truth Trigger. In the Truth Trigger, your inner voice says, "That's not true! I am not a lazy worker! I am a good hard working worker! From the relationship trigger, you say " What does he know? He is just my boss, and he does not know me very well." and then your identity trigger where you evaluate yourself as a person. You are a good person if you get good reviews, and you are a bad person if you get bad reviews.

In life, we all get lemons, a divorce, we get fired from a job, a flat tire, a missed airplane, a bad job review, and a low grade. How do we react to this? Heen says we all have a baseline personality. Those people who see hardship as a challenge to overcome and to grow fare better than people who crash and burn and become devastated when they receive a low grade. 

To overcome obstacles, you need to have what Heen calls a 'growth mindset' where you see obstacles as challenges for growth, you see a low grade as a chance to learn and improve, and that if we seek out ways to improve our job, improve our personal relationships, improve our grade by asking the teacher, we learn and grow as individuals when we receive bad feedback rather than crash and burn when we get bad feedback or encounter hardships.

Rather than be devastated by negative feedback, you should give yourself a second score of how much effort you put into improving and growing from that experience. You say to yourself, "I may have gotten an F on the paper, but I give myself an A for bouncing back and will work on getting a better grade next time by asking the teacher what I did wrong so I can learn and grow from this experience."

To give feedback, I have learned and I have told my students when they give peer review responses to other students to give actionable suggestions if other students have mistakes on their papers. Do not simply say, 'Your paper sucks.' but instead specify exactly ways in which that other person/student can improve their paper. Example: Your thesis statement needs to be the last sentence of the first paragraph. Google Funnel Introduction Paragraph.

If you are giving job feedback, do not simply say, "Your English is too informal." That is too vague. Give actionable suggestions such as, "Stop saying 'You know' at the end of each sentence because that annoys other workers and makes your English too informal and too conversational for work."

There are three kinds of feedback I tell my students that they will encounter in the Peer Review Forums: Appreciation Feedback--where they compliment the other student on their work. Mentoring Feedback--where they answer any questions students may ask others to help them with. Coaching Feedback--is when the students see mistakes in other students' papers and fix them for the other students. Then, Evaluation Feedback is when I grade their papers.

People would do better if they saw feedback more as mentoring and coaching rather than evaluation. Being able to distinguish between the two is essential to how you react negatively or positively to the event. If you can see your worst feedback as coaching, you will then realize that the person who gave you that worst feedback may have been just helping you, and seeing devastating feedback as just coaching or mentoring takes the sting out of it and brings it into perspective, says Heen.  It is important to be able to tell the difference between coaching, mentoring and evaluation.

Then, I learned about three kinds of Evaluations: Assessment--where you are graded and given a rank on a topic or paper or event. Consequences--the real world implications of that low grade such as being expelled from class, having to redo the assignment, or moving out of the house if you are divorced or not being able to pay your bills if you lose your job. Judgement--How others judge you, and how you judge yourself. You don't have control over the first two, but you do have control over the third, go easy on yourself and don't judge yourself too harshly, says Heen.

For me, the two most important lessons I learned from this book is to keep a positive growth mindset if I fail so I can improve next time, and to give actionable suggestions if I give feedback to others. Now, I seek feedback about my work from both students and from my boss so that if I make any mistakes, I can quickly fix them rather than wait for my annual evaluation. When you seek out feedback rather than dread feedback, you become a much better team player,and a more positive worker.