For anything in life to work, both sides need to want to get better. Marriage, friendship, a working relationship. It does not matter the context. Both people have to be looking forward, willing to change, willing to hear things they might not want to hear.
Feedback is no different. In my experience, feedback is the single most important thing for us as individuals to grow. It is also one of the hardest things to do well, because it requires both people to be honest and neither to be defensive.
The best companies I have worked with were the ones where feedback was part of the culture. Not a quarterly ritual, not a form you fill out, but something people actually valued and practiced. My managers over the years have been very different from each other, different styles, different approaches. But the ones I learned the most from gave very good feedback. Not always comfortable, but very good.
When you are not ready to hear it
When you are inexperienced, and when you are undeveloped in terms of emotional and social intelligence, you are extremely prone to getting offended by any feedback. The offense does not come from the manager directly, as in “why did she tell me this?” It is a mix of ego, self-perception, and self-disappointment with what you have been told. You hear the feedback and instead of processing it, you fight it internally because it challenges the image you have of yourself.
A lot of people think they crave feedback. A lot of people will tell you, in casual conversation, that they lack it. But many of those same people are not ready to take it. They cannot sit with it, hold it as information, and process it. Instead they take it to heart, get offended, get defensive. What they actually want is validation, not feedback.
The ideal response to feedback is not a response at all in the moment. Take it. Let it sit. Sleep on it. Then come back, go through it with your manager, figure out what is right, what needs more context, what you disagree with and why. That is the productive version.
Adam Grant has a concept he calls the “second score,” which I think captures this well. The idea is simple: when someone gives you feedback, that is your first score. Maybe it is a three out of ten. You cannot change that. What you can do is try to get a ten for how well you took the three. Score yourself on how you received it, not on the feedback itself. It shifts your focus from defending yourself to proving that you can listen. I find this works especially well for people who are still building the emotional muscle to sit with criticism.
You have to seek it
Like everything else, to be able to receive feedback, you also need to be open to it. You need to build a relationship with your manager where you are not just waiting for feedback to arrive. You actively ask what you can do better. You throw the ball into their hands a little so you can relieve yourself of some of the anxiety.
There is a subtlety here in how you ask. Grant makes a point that stuck with me: when you ask someone “can you give me feedback,” you tend to get either cheerleaders or critics. Cheerleaders tell you what you did well, critics tell you what you did wrong. Neither is particularly useful. What you actually want is a coach. And the way to get people into coaching mode is to ask “what is one thing I could do better next time?” That shifts the conversation from evaluating the past to improving the future. It is a small change in phrasing, but it tends to produce much more useful input. The relationship still has to be there for this to work, but how you frame the question matters more than most people realize.
A lot of people I see, including some of my colleagues, fall into an anxiety trap because they are not getting any feedback at all. And what makes it worse is that they are not seeking it either. When feedback finally comes, they react badly because it feels uncomfortable, or because it is not what they wanted to hear.
This is exactly like a relationship. If you have ever dated someone, especially when you were younger, you know how it goes. One of you sits on something for months. Then six months later it explodes: “you did this, and then this, and then this.” And the logical response is always the same: “Why didn’t you tell me when the first thing happened? We could have sorted it out.”
This applies directly to feedback at work. If it comes too late, if it accumulates, it arrives all at once and by then the process has already failed.
It goes both ways
Your relationship with your manager is not one-directional. Your manager is not there to monitor you, to program you, to knock on your door, to stand behind your shoulder. Your manager is someone who hopefully cares about you, but also someone who, as a function of their role, exists for you. If you need advice, if you need feedback, you go to that person.
If you have not built a good relationship with your manager, that is also a problem, because it usually comes down to trust. And if the trust is not there, you need to step back and ask: what can I do to improve this? Because through improving trust, you open the door for honest feedback in both directions.
And it does go both ways. A manager must also be able to take feedback. This street is rarely one-way. Nobody is going to sit there and listen to a manager who refuses to hear anything back. If you want to give feedback but are not willing to receive it, people will stop taking your input seriously. They will see you as someone who talks but does not listen.
Three types of feedback
There are three types of feedback.
Outcome feedback tells you the final result but not why. It shows overall performance: a test score, a grade, audience applause. It says good or bad but offers no advice on how to improve.
Informational feedback tells you what you are doing wrong. It provides a direct reaction to your actions but does not tell you how to fix it. An error message in code. A native speaker looking confused when you speak their language. Missing the dartboard.
Corrective feedback is the most useful. It tells you what is wrong and how to correct it. It comes from a mentor, a coach, an expert. It is the kind of feedback that makes the most difference at higher skill levels, because it directly addresses what to change and how.
In my experience, corrective feedback is ideal when it is possible. But a manager also has to be careful not to overdo it. If every piece of feedback is corrective, the person on the receiving end starts to feel like everything they do needs fixing. The mix matters. Using all three types, adjusting based on context, that is what makes feedback sustainable.
Avoiding corrective feedback because you are worried about hurting someone is a mistake. But I have seen managers avoid it for a different reason entirely: not because they care about the other person’s feelings, but because it is not worth the effort to them. They avoid responsibility by not putting themselves in those situations at all.
That is a bigger problem.
If you are a manager and you are not having these conversations, you should be talked to. Nobody enjoys telling people they are doing something wrong. But that is the job. That is how people grow. If you avoid it, you put people in a position where, months or years from now, they are confused about why they are not getting promoted, why their career is not moving, because nobody told them anything honest for a very long time.
Build your life around it
Feedback is not just a work thing. It is a life thing. Through your judgment, your thinking, your self-awareness, your willingness to be wrong, you need to start seeking feedback everywhere. From close friends. From family. You have to tell your friends: if I am talking too much, if I am saying something stupid, tell me.
Surround yourself with people you can argue with, disagree with, people who think differently than you. Not people who confirm your biases. Build yourself into a person who is open to hearing things that are hard to hear.
When you do that, it becomes visible to others. They see that you are humble, that you welcome critique, that giving you a piece of advice is not going to turn into a fight. And on the other side, if you build yourself up defensively, if every time someone approaches you with something you instantly start explaining and justifying, people stop trying. They see that it is pointless. They see that helping you means fighting your battles for you, and nobody wants to take on that responsibility.
If someone is trying to help you and you keep pushing that help away, the likelihood of them trying again is very, very low.