Life Is Risky

For those who might not know I work in IT in the real world as they say, and therefore I had to learn early on how to deal with negative feedback. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you thanked your IT tech? How about yelled at them for the network not working as fast as you wanted? Point proven.

The first thing I do when I receive negative feedback whether online or in person is to take a few seconds and compose myself, or more often than not a few minutes. I do that because my first response is often not the best one for my career or my livelihood, sometimes my second or third response isn’t either but hey I am working on it.

After I am sure I am composed, or as composed as I am likely to get, and can respond in a non-threatening manner I try and look at it from their point of view. Maybe they have a valid point of view, maybe not. Either way, something struck them the wrong way and it was important enough for them to comment on it. If they have a valid point, I let them know as much and ask how they think the issue should be corrected. Sometimes people have worthwhile solutions, other times they are simply complaining. I’ve often found this is also an excellent way to diffuse a potential situation. Nothing stops a complainer like “You know you are right. What do you think we should do about it?”

I guess the biggest thing with handling negative feedback is that you cannot take it personally even if it is about you. The person giving the feedback should be doing it to help you improve and not as a means of cutting you down. If they are coming at it from the wrong perspective, then it makes it that much harder to take, but you have to, at least that is what all those personnel skills courses I had to sit through said.

Tags: feedback

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.