Feedback or criticism?!: A lesson in constructive feedback
“A senior three student writes better than you, did you apply any brains while you were writing this?”
This is not a statement you want to hear after submitting a document you’ve devoted some time or sacrificed sleep to deliver, right?
Has anyone ever given you “feedback” that left you feeling so worthless and incapable of going on? Could it be that we often confuse criticism with giving feedback? Do we know the difference? Or am I a millennial who doesn’t know how the world operates and as I have been told before “you millennials want everything given to you easy?” I’m going off topic (there’s another blog idea, title “You Millennials”, look out for it), so back on track.
In the bid to establish whether there’s a difference (thank you prof google) I found that, yes, there’s a very big difference between criticism and feedback. That there are two types criticism; constructive criticism and projected criticism. Constructive criticism focuses on answering the question, what could be done better and projected criticism is a negative reaction to what has been done and is often a projection that could be a result of a number of things.
Psychologist Steven Stosny writes that criticism is destructive to relationships when it is about personality or character rather than behavior, filled with blame, not focused on improvement, based on only one right way to do things and belittling. He adds that criticism fails because it calls for submission as opposed to cooperation. It is also important to note that critical people often delude themselves into thinking that they merely give others helpful feedback. Feedback is defined as information about reactions to a product, a person’s performance of a task and is used as a foundation for improvement.
What then is the difference between criticism and feedback? Whereas criticism focuses on what’s wrong, what we don’t want, feedback focuses on how to improve, and what needs to be done for that to happen. Criticism implies the worst about the other’s personality while feedback focuses on the behavior and not personality. Criticism is also viewed as coercive and a source of deflation and devaluation while feedback encourages autonomy and inspires cooperation towards making things better.
Maybe we are a generation that has experienced and learned that attacking our personality to breed productivity is not functional, we have learnt this difference in turn questioning and asking for better.
It is time for people to stop hiding behind phrases like “this is the kind of person I am, I am brutally honest, giving you tough love”. I can’t say that I understand the experiences that breed others exercising power over, where people exercise/ show power to others by treating them the way they were treated to avoid it happening to them. But giving feedback that is specific to the tasks and gives recommendations that enable creativity, cooperation and overall improvement in the line of work is what will build our work.
I guarantee you that you will cultivate a good working and learning an environment if you take this route. We are brilliant, visionary and creative and it only gets better if the environment is favourable, just because you went through it doesn’t mean I should too.
