Thanks for the Feedback

 

Before you tell me how to do it better, before you lay out your big plans for changing, fixing, and improving me, before you teach me how to pick myself up and dust myself off so that I can be shiny and successful know this: I ve heard it before.

I ve been graded, rated, and ranked. Coached, screened, and scored. I ve been picked first, picked last, and not picked at all. And that was just kindergarten.

We swim in an ocean of feedback.

Each year in the United States alone, every schoolchild will be handed back as many as 300 assignments, papers, and tests. Millions of kids will be assessed as they try out for a team or audition to be cast in a school play. Almost 2 million teenagers will receive SAT scores and face college verdicts thick and thin. At least 40 million people will be sizing up one another for love online, where 71 percent of them believe they can judge love at first sight. And now that we know each other . . . 250,000 weddings will be called off, and 877,000 spouses will file for divorce.1

More feedback awaits at work. Twelve million people will lose a job and countless others will worry that they may be next. More than 500,000 entrepreneurs will open their doors for the first time, and almost 600,000 will shut theirs for the last. Thousands of other businesses will struggle to get by as debates proliferate in the boardroom and the back hall about why they are struggling. Feedback flies.2

Did we mention performance reviews? Estimates suggest that between 50 and 90 percent of employees will receive performance reviews this year, upon which our raises, bonuses, promotions and often our self-esteem ride. Across the globe, 825 million work hours a cumulative 94,000 years are spent each year preparing for and engaging in annual reviews. Afterward we all certainly feel thousands of years older, but are we any wiser?3

Margie receives a Meets Expectations, which sounds to her

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

"Thanks for the Feedback is an extraordinarily useful book.  It's full of helpful techniques that can be put to use by anyone seeking to manage an organization, lead a team, engage a business partner, or navigate a relationship.... Stone and Heen have done a remarkable job of showing individuals and organizations how to leverage the enormous value of feedback, one of the most powerful instruments available for human learning."  

~strategy+business magazine 
Surprisingly little attention has been focused on being an effective recipient of feedback. Enter Stone and Heen with a well-rounded consideration of "the science and art of receiving feedback well. As they write, both of those disciplines are required to receive feedback in productive ways not only in the workplace, but in personal life as well....the authors do an excellent job of constraining the applications to feedback usefulness while also exploring some of the other ways we can define what "feedback" consists of in our lives.
 
With a culture increasingly focused on the individual and the self, this book on developing the ability to accept and utilize the input of others constructively deserves a wide readership.
~Kirkus Reviews
 
"I'll admit it: Thanks for the Feedback made me unconformable. And that's one reason I liked it so much. With keen insight and lots of practical takeaways, Stone and Heen reveal why getting feedback is so hard -- and then how we can do better. If you relish receiving criticism at work and adore it in your personal life, then you may be the one person on earth who can safely skip this book."
~Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell is Human and Drive
 
"Thanks for the Feedback is a potentially life-changing look at one of the toughest but most important parts of life: receiving feedback.   It's a road map to less defensiveness, more self-awareness, greater learning, and richer relationships.  Doug Stone