Getting Better Everyday: How to Effectively Give and Receive Feedback

In today’s world, working effectively with others either one-on-one or on teams is key to achieving long-term and large-scale success in both industry and academia. Part of learning about one’s self as well as practical and successful strategies to better work with others is by both soliciting as well as providing feedback from or to others. Feedback is a gift we can all give and receive to make sure that we are continuing to self-improve, and help others do the same. The results lead to being more efficient, effective, and ultimately working on high performing teams. Feedback can be a stressor to many, however, if not approached or given in a constructive manner with everyone’s best intentions and a growth mindset in place. Often, when receiving feedback, many can become defensive and ultimately shut down from not only hearing, but really listening to and digesting feedback in order to identify actionable things that one can do in order to improve the way they perform and work with others. When giving feedback, individuals can take many approaches with good intentions at heart, but ultimately fall short. Whether its not being direct and getting to the heart of an issue (beating around the bush), or by being too direct and not letting the individual receiving feedback know how much they are valued, or what they have been doing well. At the end of the day, everyone, regardless of their title, situation, or reporting structure need to hone the skills of both giving AND receiving feedback in order to truly be successful. During this career development session, attendees will learn some of the most successful skills for both giving and receiving feedback, with references to helpful resources that anyone can learn from after they go back to work/ home. Parallels will be drawn between giving and receiving feedback in everyday life to giving and receiving feedback in a professional setting. Strategies focusing on what topics, when, and how to give feedback will be discussed. At the end of the day, we want this session to be interactive, and for folks to realize the value of both giving and receiving feedback to hopefully remove some of the stress and the stigma of feedback in the professional setting.

Like any good career development session, this one comes with an interactive activity. For this session, individuals will be asked to work with someone with whom they live and to put together a puzzle or Lego set. Using only their words, attendees will try and assemble the materials by receiving verbal cues from their partners who will have the instruction booklet or picture. Of course, the point will not be to build it the best or the fastest, but to both give and receive feedback in both directions on how they performed during the activity after learning the skills of giving and listening to feedback.