Review: Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Mon May 14 21:38:36 PDT 2018


Thanks for the Feedback
by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen

Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2014
Printing:  2015
ISBN:      1-101-61427-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     322

Another book read for the work book club.

I was disappointed when this book was picked. I already read two
excellent advice columns (Captain Awkward and Ask a Manager) and have
read a lot on this general topic. Many workplace-oriented self-help
books also seem to be full a style of pop psychology that irritates me
rather than informs. But the point of a book club is that you read the
book anyway, so I dove in. And was quite pleasantly surprised.

This book is about receiving feedback, not about giving feedback. There
are tons of great books out there about how to give feedback, but, as
the authors say in the introduction, almost no one giving you feedback
is going to read any of them. It would be nice if we all got better at
giving feedback, but it's not going to happen, and you can't control
other people's feedback styles. You can control how you receive
feedback, though, and there's quite a lot one can do on the receiving
end. The footnoted subtitle summarizes the tone of the book: The
Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (even when it is off base,
unfair, poorly delivered, and, frankly, you're not in the mood).

The measure of a book like this for me is what I remember from it
several weeks after reading it. Here, it was the separation of feedback
into three distinct types: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation.
Appreciation is gratitude and recognition for what one has
accomplished, independent of any comparison against other people or an
ideal for that person. Coaching is feedback aimed at improving one's
performance. And evaluation, of course, is feedback that measures one
against a standard, and usually comes with consequences (a raise, a
positive review, a relationship break-up). We all need all three but
different people need different mixes, sometimes quite dramatically so.
And one of the major obstacles in the way of receiving feedback well is
that they tend to come mixed or confused.

That framework makes it easier to see where one's reaction to feedback
often goes off the rails. If you come into a conversation needing
appreciation ("I've been working long hours to get this finished on
time, and a little thanks would be nice"), but the other person is
focused on an opportunity for coaching ("I can point out a few tricks
and improvements that will let you not work as hard next time"), the
resulting conversation rarely goes well. The person giving the coaching
is baffled at the resistance to some simple advice on how to improve,
and may even form a negative opinion of the other person's willingness
to learn. And the person receiving the feedback comes away feeling
unappreciated and used, and possibly fearful that their hard work is
merely a sign of inadequate skills. There are numerous examples of
similar mismatches.

I found this framing immediately useful, particularly in the confusion
between coaching and evaluation. It's very easy to read any
constructive advice as negative evaluation, particularly if one is
already emotionally low. Having words to put to these types of feedback
makes it easier to evaluate the situation intellectually rather than
emotionally, and to explicitly ask for clarifying evaluation if
coaching is raising those sorts of worries.

The other memorable concept I took away from this book is
switchtracking. This is when the two people in a conversation are
having separate arguments simultaneously, usually because each person
has a different understanding of what the conversation is "really"
about. Often this happens when the initial feedback sets off a trigger,
particularly a relationship or identity trigger (other concepts from
this book), in the person receiving it. The feedback giver may be
trying to give constructive feedback on how to lay out a board
presentation, but the receiver is hearing that they can't be trusted to
talk to the board on their own. The receiver will tend to switch the
conversation away to whether or not they can be trusted, quite likely
confusing the initial feedback giver, or possibly even prompting
another switchtrack into a third topic of whether they can receive
criticism well.

Once you become aware of this tendency, you start to see it all over
the place. It's sadly common. The advice in the book, which is
accompanied with a lot of concrete examples, is to call this out
explicitly, clearly separate and describe the topics, and then pick one
to talk about first based on how urgent the topics are to both parties.
Some of those conversations may still be difficult, but at least both
parties are having the same conversation, rather than talking past each
other.

Thanks for the Feedback fleshes out these ideas and a few others (such
as individual emotional reaction patterns to criticism and triggers
that interfere with one's ability to accept feedback) with a lot of
specific scenarios. The examples are refreshingly short and to the
point, avoiding a common trap of books like this to get bogged down
into extended artificial dialogue. There's a bit of a work focus, since
we get a lot of feedback at work, but there's nothing exclusively
work-related about the advice here. Many of the examples are from
personal relationships of other kinds. (I found an example of a father
teaching his daughters to play baseball particularly memorable. One
daughter takes this as coaching and the other as evaluation, resulting
in drastically different reactions.) The authors combine matter-of-fact
structured information with a gentle sense of humor and great pacing,
making this surprisingly enjoyable to read.

I was feeling oversaturated with information on conversation styles and
approaches and still came away from this book with some useful
additional structure. If you're struggling with absorbing feedback or
finding the right structure to use it constructively instead of getting
angry, scared, or depressed, give this a try. It's much better than I
had expected.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-14

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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