Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

Featured in the Winter 2025 Newsletter

Feedback is good for you – like exercise and broccoli. It makes you stronger and helps you grow. Doesn’t it? (Stone & Heen, 2014, p. 7)

It might seem like feedback is built into working, studying, and interacting with other people. After all, performance evaluations and progress assessments are part of the work and academic environments. However, receiving feedback can sometimes feel fraught, off-base, inaccurate, confusing, or unhelpful. Despite the ubiquity of feedback, managing internal barriers to hearing critical comments is a continual practice for people to hone. Thanks for the Feedback provides an informative framework for people to augment their ability to connect with others and improve their work.

Feedback can be useful – and it depends in part on whether people are able to glean the useful takeaways, even when it is delivered in ways that can be challenging to hear. Thanks for the Feedback, written by the bestselling authors of Difficult Conversations, focuses on how people can transform the way they receive feedback to unlock greater learning, creativity, connection, and self-understanding. While people may not be able to directly change how others give feedback, receiving it well can cultivate more trusting relationships in which subsequent feedback is easier to understand and receive. This book covers:

• The ways people receive feedback that can create a barrier to hearing what might be useful in it
• Tips for recognizing and circumventing these barriers
• Ways to stay engaged in a feedback conversation and learn from others

The Ombuds Office can help you develop your conflict competence. To learn more about giving and receiving feedback, sign up for “Conflict Competence: Constructive Feedback for Positive Change”.