Rejecting Feedback
Elaine Varelas offers advice on how to give feedback to employees who reject it.
Q: I’m a manager and have annual reviews coming up. The problem is some team members do not react well to receiving feedback—one employee cries and another gets angry and defensive. How do I handle this and still have a productive meeting?
A: Accepting feedback is a skill. It’s been proven that one of the most effective ways to become a strong employee, manager, or leader is to accept feedback—to listen to it, reflect on it, ask questions about it, and internalize it. Not all feedback is given well, but people need to look past that to see the kernel of developmental opportunity being presented.
Companies often provide training on how to give feedback, but learning how to receive feedback is equally important. Consider how employees perceive getting feedback—framing it as “developmental feedback” instead of “negative feedback” or “constructive criticism” can help reduce resistance. Feedback should be viewed as a two-way conversation aimed at learning from experiences and developing new or improved skills. These conversations are important, and people need to know how to effectively participate in the process. The book Crucial Conversations (by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler) details approaches for having conversations where stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong. Providing resources like this for your entire team is a great developmental growth opportunity. People may not know how else to react; helping them develop better ways to respond to feedback needs to be a priority.
Part of your challenge could be only giving feedback once a year. When people are surprised or caught off guard by what they feel is negative feedback, they are more likely to react with intense emotions or wonder why you didn’t tell them earlier. Effective managers have ongoing developmental conversations with employees—check in on what’s going well, what’s not going well, and what they need to pay a little more attention to. This way, they will build tolerance to developmental feedback, which can often feel like criticism when it’s only delivered once a year. Given regularly, feedback becomes more like coaching and allows you to provide better guidance: “I’ve seen a great beginning to your change in XYZ and I’d love to see that continue.” Incremental change is an effective method for behavior to change—it’s the way real development happens. Regular feedback allows employees to make small adjustments as they go, making change more likely and more sustainable.
If you can anticipate an employee’s negative reaction, plan ahead. This may mean first having a conversation about the employee’s resistance to feedback: “I’d like to have an effective meeting with you, and I am concerned about reactions you have had in the past. It’s important to me that you hear my full message, without any emotional outbursts. What do you think we can do to prevent this in our next meeting?” You may decide to provide the review in writing in advance of the meeting to let the employee process the information alone and deal with whatever initial reactions they might have. You can offer a crying employee a break, but continue the meeting. Do not continue with any employee whose anger escalates to the point you feel at risk.
You have “some” team members who react poorly to feedback. Out of how many? Two out of 20? Or two out of two? If it’s common within your team, consider your approach. Are you delivering feedback in an effective and professional manner? How often are you giving feedback? Is it concrete with specific examples? Do you clearly convey what you would like to see? Or is your feedback irregular, vague, and antagonistic? Again, this is a two-way conversation and both participants contribute to the outcome.
Giving and receiving feedback effectively are skills which take practice, and avoiding giving feedback to a resistant employee is not an option. Focus on building employee tolerance for regular feedback, facilitate incremental change, and engage in developing your skills for giving and receiving feedback.
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