Learn to Love Criticism: Tips for Benefiting from Negative Feedback

My otherwise overly sensitive and hyper vigilant daughter was mad as a wet hen. “Look what a student reviewer wrote on my English 350 paper” She held it up and in the corner was written ‘great job’. I didn’t have time to ask her anything before she said “I was looking forward to this class, there are some great writers and bright students and I expected to get some useful and constructive advice on my writing. ‘Great job’ – that doesn’t help me!”

I was not surprised at her reaction. She had attended grades 6-12 at an arts magnet school with a concentration in drama and lighting design for theater. Working in the theater includes lots of feedback -- positive, constructive and critical. Because she had learned early to expect feedback on her work and how to use it to improve her performance, she felt cheated when she didn’t get it in this college class. And this is from someone who, in other situations, does not respond well to criticism.

I wish this expectation about feedback could be part of workplace cultures. I don’t think anyone is born enjoying constructive criticism -- it is something you have to learn. I always include lessons on how to ask for, receive and use feedback when I train managers and I believe that both the receiver and the giver of feedback have a responsibility to be skillful.

So, if you would like to get better at receiving and using negative feedback, here are a few bits of advice to get you started.

1. Try to remember that, as unpleasant as bad news may be, at least you can do something about it once you are aware of the situation. I want to know ASAP if I have spinach in my teeth.
2. When someone is sharing observations and opinions on your work, listen closely and ask clarifying questions. The natural reaction is to explain or offer excuses, but doing that shuts down the information flow. Act like a journalist, collect as much information as you can.
3. Always take notes, but especially if the news is bad. It gives you something to do to help keep your emotions in check. Also, later you can review what you have written to sort out what is useful and what is not useful.
4. Even if the content of any particular message is untrue and completely unhelpful, you need to take it well so that you don’t discourage people from ever sharing their thoughts again. If you don’t react well to criticism, you will not get any more and the next time it might be life changing.
5. Practice. The more you practice accepting and using negative or constructive feedback the better you will get at it. You might even ask a giver of feedback to give you feedback on how easy it was to give you feedback.

The ability and willingness to accept and use feedback, both positive and negative, is one of the principle characteristics of high achievers. The sooner you start building this skill, the faster your rate of improvement and that is worth any short term discomfort. You may even get mad when you don't get criticized.

How Much Better is Your Driving?

How much better are you at driving than you were five years ago? Think about it for a minute, I will wait…   Embarrassing, huh? If you are typical, your driving skills will not change much between the ages of 25 and 65. We do something for 40 years and don’t get any better at it!  

Do your shoes ever come untied? You look down, the laces are flopping and you have to stop and retie them. If so, you are not alone. Between one-half to two-thirds of people do not tie their shoes right. A correctly tied shoelace will not come untied as you are walking. So why are so many people spending precious time attending to errant shoe laces? 

How did you learn to be a leader?  Successful executives told the Center for Creative Leadership that they learned the most from experience -- especially stretch assignments, hardships and mistakes -- and that they prefer to learn this way.  But executives and HR professionals say they are not satisfied with the quantity or quality of their organization’s leaders even though it is where they spend the bulk of their development dollars.  And, a review of multiple studies on leader effectiveness found that only about 50% of leaders are successful. 

The Root Cause

 

Learning Changes Your Brain

These three problems all stem from the same root cause -- the way we learn. All expertise -- from baseball to brain surgery – comes from physical changes in the structure and functions of the brain.  These changes in your brain allow you to process thoughts, actions, and decisions so quickly and easily that you aren’t even aware of it – you do it on auto-pilot. Automatic processing makes performance effortless – but, skills on auto-pilot never improve. That is why you aren’t any better at driving than you were 5 years ago. In all endeavors, we generally learn a great deal at the beginning and then our performance plateaus.

That’s the bad news.  Here’s the good news.  In the last 10 years, new research has produced an explosion of understanding on how people build skills and reach the highest levels of performance -- and, why most of us never come close to achieving the potential that is easily within our grasp.  We now know that we build expertise in three sequential stages that I call -- Facts, Skills, and Wisdom. The first stage -- learning the basic facts -- is best accomplished with classroom or formal learning; the second stage requires practice of fundamental skills (something we don’t really do at all in workplace learning); and the final stage – building wisdom and deep expertise – comes from experience and reflection. 

Common Problems in Workplace Learning

What does this mean for driving, shoe tying and leadership development?  These three examples highlight common problems with learning and performance improvement in the workplace.  

Just like driving, performance in any endeavor will stall on auto-pilot (and eventually decline) unless you purposefully make an effort to improve.

  

Effective learning requires an expert teacher, not an expert doer.  If you tie your shoes wrong, it is because someone failed to teach you how to do it correctly. Don’t blame your mom -- auto-pilot makes it difficult for experts to share what they know with new learners. 

You learn leadership (or anything) from experience because stretch assignments and new jobs force you off auto-pilot – you must learn or fail.  But learning on-the-job mixes stages 1 and 3 learning and skips stage 2 altogether. Trying to learn facts, build skills and use them at the same time is, at best, slow and inefficient.  At worst, it puts skills on auto-pilot incorrectly.  (If you’ve been tying your shoes wrong since you were 5 years old, what else could you be doing wrong that you don’t know about yet?) 

So, Here’s What You Do About It:

• Avoid a performance plateau by continuously stretching yourself just a little beyond your current level of ability.  Always have one area of performance that you are working on improving. 
• Use expert teachers to help you create your development plans, provide you with basic information and show you how to practice skills before you start to use them.  Ask mentors and supervisors (expert doers) for advice and guidance when you are in the final stage of learning – building wisdom through experience.
• Sequence your development plans to work with the three stages of learning – Facts, Skills, Wisdom.  Choose one thing to improve and then research and memorize relevant facts, practice fundamental skills until you can do them easily, and turn it all into wisdom by using it on the job. 

Most importantly -- learn how to learn.  Let’s face it; you are responsible for your own development. If you understand just a little about how the brain works, you can learn faster (as much as five times faster), achieve higher, and avoid the stagnation of auto-pilot.  Plus, never retie your shoes again!

Learn more on the SJM+A website

How Did You Learn To Be A Leader? Was It The Same Way That Foulois Learned To Fly?

How did you learn to be a leader?  Successful executives told the Center for Creative Leadership that they learned through experiences, especially stretch assignments, hardships, and even mistakes. (1)  Currently the majority of leadership is learned on the job and most leaders say that they prefer to learn from experience.  But when executives, HR professionals and leaders are surveyed they say their organizations do not have the quantity or quality of leaders they need and that they are not satisfied with the current development methods.  So, why do we believe that experience is the best way to learn if it is not producing the leaders we need? And why are we not getting better results from this approach?  Perhaps looking at learning in a different context can shed some light on that question. 

Great Leaders are Polite

I read the Declaration of Independence today and I was struck with how polite it is, not just for a call to revolution, but polite for any context or purpose. 

Don't Try This At Home... Yet

Turning good advice into performance improvement takes more than you might think. 

You learn about leadership because you want to get better at leading.  Good advice and ideas about leadership are interesting, but not useful until you put them into action.  The problem is that there is a world of difference between knowing what to do and being able to do it.  So before you try it on the job, ask yourself five questions:

The Mythology of Leadership

In their article, The Problem with Leadership Development, Curphy, Hogan and Kaiser offer a great summary of what is wrong with leadership development.  But, as I read it, I couldn’t help but think that the core of the problem is that we confuse charisma with leadership.

What Can You Do With A Brick?

How many uses can you think of for a brick? Or a paper clip?  Or a broom handle? These questions are part of a classic measure of creativity called the Alternate Uses test.    Your creativity is measured by the fluency (total number of ideas), originality, and flexibility of your answers.  

Please God...

Please God, would you make business schools include psychology in their curricula!

Critical Thinking: Just what the heck is it and how do you get better at it?

Fisher & Scriven define critical thinking as "Skilled, active, interpretation and evaluation of observations, communications, information, and argumentation." -- huh? In simpler terms, critical thinking generally requires the ability to recognize problems and to find workable means for meeting those problems.  To be a good critical thinker you need to:

• marshal pertinent information 
• recognize assumptions and logical fallacies
• appraise evidence and evaluate arguments
• draw warranted conclusions and generalizations
• test conclusions and generalizations 

and ultimately to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life. Bottom-line: critical thinking is about being both willing AND able to evaluate your own thinking and the thinking of others.

Experience is Good, Right?

It sounds outrageous but, often, veteran project managers do not produce high caliber results BECAUSE of their experience.  A recent article by Kishore Sengupta, et. al. in the Harvard Business Review shows there is something wrong with the way managers learn from their experience, especially in complex, dynamic environments.  The authors conclude, “Despite their experiences with complex projects, veteran managers do not meaningfully improve the mental models they have formed in simpler contexts.”  Mental models are hypothesis about how things work and assumptions about cause and effect that we develop over time and then use to guide our decisions and actions.  Experience creates problems for performance when our mental models are wrong. 

Practice Off the Field of Play

Practicing a skill is not the same as using a skill.  Just as there is a distinction between practice and performance in activities like sports and music, you should distinguish between practice and performance in building your leadership skills.  When you are learning a new skill you will be somewhat slow, awkward and clumsy.  This is not the time to use that fledging skill in a situation where performance "counts". 

Do Some Research

One of the biggest mistakes in leadership training is exhorting a list of rules for managers and expecting them to execute successfully.  There is a world of difference between knowing what to do and actually being able to do it.  Before you assume that you have the knowledge and skills it takes to implement  rules like Google's -- check.

Start Small

When it comes to improving your leadership skills, lists of attributes and behaviors frequently aren't that helpful because they create analysis paralysis -- you simply can't keep all the advice in your head.  So, when you find a good list of guidelines, don't try to implement the whole list at once; choose one relatively small behavior to work on.

For example, "Be a good coach", includes two specific items: "provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive" and "have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employee's specific strengths".  The general rule of  "Be a good coach" is too broad to tackle, but either of the specific items is a good place to start.  You should aim for a behavior to work on that you think you could practice and master in a matter of weeks.  Systematically work on items one at a time until you have mastered everything on the list.  Just like the tortoise, slow and steady wins this race.

Old Dogs, New Tricks

With today’s dizzying pace of change and the need for constant innovation, the willingness and ability to learn quickly may be the single most important characteristic for success.  The research on high-level performance has a secret about how to motivate people to learn -- and it is remarkably simple.

International-level soccer players have birthdays in January, February, and March at a much higher rate than would be expected by chance.  The statistics are dramatic – what would cause such an anomaly?  The cutoff date for participation in children’s soccer leagues in Europe is December 31.  This means that youngsters born in the early months of the year are slightly older and therefore faster, stronger and more agile than their teammates and competitors.  That slight advantage leads to early success at the game, with more playing time, attention from coaches and encouragement by parents.  But, most importantly, that early success creates “rage to master” -- a desire to succeed and work hard that drives the future world-class performers to put in the time and energy it takes to reach the highest levels of performance. 

So what do soccer players have to do with learning in organizations?  We can see in their experience a fundamental truth about all human beings -- we like to do things that we are good at; we do not like to do things that we are bad at.  People are not reluctant to learn, they are reluctant to fail.  Of course, learning by definition requires failing – imagine a child learning to walk.  The secret is to structure the learning and practice so that there will be more success than failure. 

The Prodigy Method teaches people several different techniques for creating development and practice strategies that are inherently motivating.  Some of these are:

• Critical stretch - attempting something new that is slightly out of your current range of abilities, but not so far that you can’t master it quickly. 
• Sequencing - mastering simple skills first and moving to increasingly difficult and complex skills
• Root cause analysis – identifying the precise skills to practice that will have the biggest impact on performance

You can see the principles of critical stretch and sequencing executed brilliantly in most video games.  They take the player systematically to increasingly more challenging activities, but only after they have mastered the current level of play and are likely to be successful at the next level of play - that is why they are so addictive.  We can teach people how to use these same principles to structure their learning in organizations so that old dogs eagerly learn new tricks.  

Leadership is a Sport?

Leadership is often referred to as an art and a science, but is it a sport? A sport is an organized, competitive, and skillful physical activity requiring commitment and fair play. Well, maybe it's not a sport... but, can it be practiced like a sport? One of the surprising findings from research on world-class performers is that the difference between the good and the great is in their brains -- not in physical abilities. It is a seemingly superhuman ability to process information that produces tennis players that know where their opponent's ball is going to land before the ball leaves the racket, firefighters who "know" the floor is about to collapse, but have no idea how they know and chess players that can play multiple opponents simultaneously - while blindfolded.

The Science of High-Level Performance
Experts don't know more, they know differently. If ALL world-class performance is a function of changes in the brain, can you develop leadership skills like an athlete develops sports skills? Anders Ericsson and others have been diligently pursuing the alchemy of excellence in their research on the acquisition of high-level of performance. Popular writers, such as Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, Geoff Colvin in Talent is Overrated and Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code have described the processes by which the extraordinary abilities of world-class performers are created. Created - not born. The research shows that the process is pretty much the same regardless of the domain of performance, be it sports, science, or occupations. Nearly all people who reach the highest levels of performance get there with 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice". Deliberate practice is effortful study which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. It is easy to see how a special practice method would apply to sports, games or arts -- we are used to thinking of practicing these things. But, does it apply to leadership?

Practicing Leadership
I have been teaching managers how to use deliberate practice for over three years. Not only can you use it to build leadership skills, but the practice can easily be done as part of your regular job duties. To use deliberate practice you need to break leadership down into a practicable segment, create a practice plan that you can repeat, and monitor your performance until you can execute that leadership skill perfectly. The Prodigy Method training provides leaders with these practice segments and techniques. But think about it - leadership training classes are full of processes and techniques (e.g., for problem-solving, giving feedback, making presentations, etc). It is these processes, and techniques that we master with deliberate practice. Check out prodigymethod.com to learn more about how to use deliberate practice for leadership skills and see some examples.

For most of us, deliberate practice is not about becoming a world champion. But, in today's world, I don't know anyone who couldn't benefit from learning faster and reaching a higher level of proficiency. Leadership may not be a sport, but the research on learning is clear -- you can practice it like athletes do and at least double or triple the speed of learning.

Deliberate Practice for Thinking Skills

It is easy to imagine using deliberate practice to improve your skills in sports, music, technical occupations, or even in observable leadership skills like listening or giving feedback, but what about thinking skills? Effective leadership is about analysis, judgment, decision-making and other cognitive functions. Can you use deliberate practice to improve these aspects of leadership?

The United States Army would say yes. They have used deliberate practice techniques to teach leaders adaptive thinking skills. They define adaptive thinking as the ability to respond effectively under complex and rapidly changing conditions when a multitude of events compete for the leader’s attention. Traditional training techniques are not very effective in teaching this skill because traditional training teaches processes and techniques but does not teach someone how to recognize which technique is appropriate for a particular situation.

The Army’s Think Like a Commander (TLAC) program is designed to teach officers how to recognize indicators that should be considered in making a decision regarding combat operations and tactics. The results of the training program are impressive. People trained showed a 700% improvement from the beginning of the training to the end in speed and accuracy of identifying critical indicators. Not only did the trainees’ performance during training improve, but those who were trained on the TLAC program outperformed, in some cases, experienced officers who had already been deployed to combat situations.

Experience Doesn't Guarantee Expertise

Just because someone has been performing a job or hobby for a long time doesn't mean that they are improving their skills. Ask any weekend golfer who has played for 20 years and barely improved at all over that time. Don't make fun of those weekend golfers (or any other group for that matter), the research evidence is VERY clear --length of time spent on a hobby or occupation does not necessarily improve performance. I don't want to scare you, but here are just a few of the occupations where length of experience is not necessarily related to performance -- physicans, clinical psychologists, computer programmers, financial advisors, physics professors and auditors.

I know you are thinking "That's not true, I have improved dramatically at my job over the years." Yes, you probably have. But, if you are typical, you have only improved for about the first two years in a new job and then plateaued at an acceptable, but not prodigious, level of performance. And that is not because you stopped trying. There is a quirk of brain development that stops our improvement. The best performers know how to overcome this natural ceiling on improvment. So what is related to performance? The best predictor of performance is the amount of time spent in deliberate practice.

Smart stuff my friends say...

One of the advantages of being in a profession for a long time is that you accumulate friends and colleagues that are really really good at what they do and very smart.  One such colleague of mine -- Rick Cartor  -- has written what I think is an insightful and (even better) useful analysis of the issue of generations at work.  You can read his article at Truth #8. Generations Don’t Matter that Much (or, Woodstock was not a Job Fair)

Deliberate Practice is Unique

Deliberate practice is not just any old practice. Given equal amounts of time spent practicing, typical practice doesn't improve performance as much as deliberate practice. So exactly how do the best of the best practice their skills?

First, they analyze the task, breaking it down into very small segments of performance. The very best golfers don't practice golf or even practice their swing; they practice not pushing their hips forward on the downswing. As a leader, don't practice effective listening -- practice a smaller component of listening, like perfecting your use of nonverbal cues to show the speaker you are interested.

When you have chosen an aspect of leader skill to practice, set a precise goal for the practice session that focuses on process (perfectly executing the task or move), not on outcome. In golf an outcome goal is to consistently hit drives a set distance, which is how most of us (incorrectly) practice. Instead, set a process goal to perfectly execute the motion and form of the swing. Your listening goal might be to completely eliminate non-verbal cues that show you are distracted while listening, like nervous fidgeting, too much head nodding, or facial expressions that indicate you want to interrupt.

Practice is different from performing and, although for leadership you don't necessarily have to do extra work to practice, you do need to choose a specific practice strategy. To practice your golf swing, set your golf bag close behind you and in contact with your body, so that if your hips move forward on the downswing, you will be able to tell. To improve listening skills, you might practice staying focused on the content of the speaker's message (as opposed to thinking about what you are going to say next, which is what most of us do) by listening and then writing a brief summary of the content for yourself.

Practice is useless unless you monitor your progress on each iteration of the practice strategy. If possible, it helps to record how you are doing. To monitor how well you are hearing the content of a speaker's message, you might try listening to a TV news broadcast, summarizing the content and then checking yourself against the on-line written version. Or practice listening with a friend that will review your summary. Some skills have built-in feedback mechanisms, some you have to work harder to find out if you are correctly executing the move or task. Monitoring is where an expert coach and feedback are most important to performance improvement.

Along with monitoring, you must evaluate how well you are performing. Are you getting better? What do you need to change? It is this reflection that makes deliberate practice so powerful. Monitoring and evaluating is the reason why we learn so much from our mistakes. We are more inclined to reflect on what went wrong and what we need to do to correct the problem when we make a mistake than when we are doing well. It is this reflection that creates the learning -- not the mistake!

If the evaluation shows you are not getting better at the task, look for what you need to do differently. World class performers are not afraid to change the way they do things if their current methods aren't working. If trying to stay focused on the speakers message by paying closer attention is not working, you might try taking notes. The key is -- if it isn't working, try something different!

The Hard Way or...

Ask any group of successful executives "How did you learn to be a leader?" and the majority will reply, with a grin and a nod - "the hard way". What they mean by "the hard way" is summed up by the Center for Creative Leadership's (CCL) study that showed that over 90% of a leader's "education" happens on the job.

Leaders told CCL that their leadership lessons were learned through hardships (e.g., business mistakes, lousy jobs, problems with subordinates, downsizings), challenging assignments (e.g., start from scratch, turnaround, project/task force, change in scope) and through relationships, frequently negative (e.g., role models - bad and good, mentors, peers, and difficult people). They said that only a small portion of their learning came from coursework, books, and traditional learning vehicles.

Furthermore, leaders said that their education wasn't really planned or directed -- they learned their lessons as chance and opportunity chose to provide them. The current state of the art in leadership development encourages managers to seek out these difficult situations for the learning experience. Does it have to be this way? The research on prodigies, champions and high-level experts says no. The learning that results from hardships, mistakes and challenges is not a function of the difficulty. It is because these situtations cause us to naturally, albeit unconsciously, switch into using the Prodigy Method of learning.

Years of extensive research shows that there is a remarkable consistency in how the highest levels of performance are achieved. Across diverse fields, there are four requirements for mastering any complex skill set at the highest levels:

• Deliberate Practice
• Hard Work
• Support
• Ability

The reason that mistakes and difficulties are such great teachers is because they create two conditions essential to improving performance - reflection and motivation. When we are concerned about our performance, we stop and think about what we are doing, what we have done wrong and what we have to do to make sure that our future performance will be up to our expectations -- this reflection is the core of deliberate practice. Mistakes and challenges also make us highly motivated to learn new things and make changes in our behavior -- in other words, work hard and seek support.
The principles of the Prodigy Method teach managers to replicate the enhanced learning environment of a new job or a difficult assignment with their regular daily job activities. There is no waiting for a challenge or a mistake to come along to accelerate your learning. Learning can happen on a daily basis without changing much of what a person is doing. The Prodigy Method is not about doing something extra or different to practice your skills; it is merely thinking differently about what you are already doing.