Taking control of your feedback experiences

Feedback is a tool that is commonly used in organisations as a mechanism for growth and change. It’s typically expected that a manager or team leader will give feedback periodically on an individual’s performance to help the individual grow and develop, and also for the team and organization to better develop.

This isn’t an article on how to give feedback. This is an article on how you might deal with feedback you receive – particularly given its power and potency to be for good or for harm. Like any tool, feedback can be misused, misapplied, and have bad consequences when used by someone without the appropriate competency.

The quality of feedback

So what is feedback? A very technical definition: ‘A process in which the outputs of a system are fed back as inputs to the system as a way to determine effectiveness or completeness‘. It’s a way of making sense of information of something’s performance, and using that to shape future actions and decisions of performance. It’s how you know whether something’s working well or not.

Author
Helen Palmer, Founder of Self unLimited, has been in many workscape situations that included feedback experiences. She reflects on such things to offer fresh advice to help others navigate power dynamics, and exert self-leadership. She’s a strong advocate for self-care, and getting real and practical to prevent harm and enable people to express their best selves at work.

 

Photo by pan xiaozhen on Unsplash