Learning to treat critical feedback as a gift rather than a threat
I have worked with a lot of teams in conflict. Sometimes there is overt and explicit disagreement, hurt or even harm that has occurred, and sometimes it’s a kind of low-level tension that is making people feel suspicious, separate and cynical about each other.
To get to the nub of the issue rather than treating the symptom, I try to carefully peel back the cultural curtain with people and identify the norms, behaviours and power dynamics that created the conditions for these dynamics in the first place.
What I have observed over the years is that at the centre of conflict is almost always a fear of giving and receiving meaningful feedback.
This might sound simplistic but I have come to believe that our unskillfulness in this area is why most of us have such a hard time dealing with difference, disagreements and dissonance.
Underlying this is a belief that:
Appreciative feedback is unnecessary, fluffy or too vulnerable to give (I will write about this soon)
Critical feedback makes you ‘bad’, whether you’re the giver or receiver of it
So we develop strategies to avoid feedback, prevent it from being given and received or even shut it down, no matter the cost.
I understand where this comes from.
Dominant culture - by which I mean the prevailing norms in a place like the UK that are steeped in capitalist, patriarchal, ableist and white supremacist values - is obsessed with self-improvement.
We’re all supposed to be on an infinite growth journey towards our own ultimate perfection. Whether it’s through supplements, exercise, more training, reading or even ‘inner work’, there is always something we can do to be ‘better’.
Of course that is partially true - we always have some agency to make choices that better support our wellbeing and that of others. But if we fully embrace the self-improvement logic, any shortcoming or difficulty we experience is, by extension, our own fault.
A culture that believes people are entirely responsible for their own successes will also punish them for messing up. (Apart from the crème de la crème who seem to be except from this rule, such as the tech bros who have lined their pockets by ‘failing forward’, impact on people and planet be damned.)
So this fear of failure is understandable. We associate messing up with being a ‘bad person’, which threatens our safety, belonging and dignity in the world.
But mistakes don’t make you ‘bad’, they indicate that you are human, like everyone else. In spending so much time trying to avoid getting things wrong and proving that we are ‘good’, we actually deny our own and each other’s humanity.
We operate on the false premise of perfection, which is both unachievable and highly stifling. It makes us hesitate to try new things, it makes us afraid of complexity, uncertainty and difference, and it makes us deeply judgemental of ourselves and each other.
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people […] it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism.
What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here. ”
We all mess up. It’s not a question of if but when and how. I sometimes wish this was written on the wall of every room we enter, virtual or physical.
Because if we could collectively get to a place of accepting this as true, I think we’d have a much easier time moving through relational wobbles and repairing the cracks in our dynamics.
What would happen if, instead of focusing all our energy on avoiding or hiding our mistakes, we’d invest in learning how to respond well when it happens?
I’ve spent years learning this, and I still struggle. There is always a voice at the back of my head that creeps up and tells me I’m unworthy, I should be ashamed of myself and that I will never recover from this.
That voice still visits me. But I usually take a deep breath and remind myself that critical feedback is not a burden but a gift and a commitment to the relationship.
Letting someone know how my actions impacted them is that person saying:
I care enough about you that I risk telling you something you might not like to hear
I reveal my boundaries to you so that you may know me better
I trust you to hear my truth
I invite you to shift this dynamic in our relationship so we can both be more authentic, comfortable and free
Seen from that perspective, giving critical feedback is a deeply intimate act. It’s an invitation to know each other better and to deepen the connection.
Photograph of a white hand holding a bouquet of pink, orange, yellow, purple and white flowers and green foliage above a wooden floor and white door and curtains in the background
This is especially important when we are dealing with low-level critical feedback. Things that might be easy to let slide in the moment but can solidify into resentment and mistrust over time. For example:
I struggle that you’re always late. Please just text me and we can meet later next time.
I felt left out when you did x thing without telling me. I’d really appreciate if you could let me know sooner next time.
The thing you said about x topic felt hurtful to me. Please can you be more sensitive when you speak about this in future as it can be triggering for me.
This is the level at which we can start practising with each other - with our friends, lovers, neighbours, colleagues, family members etc. It is vital for the health of our relationships, our teams, movements, communities and friendships.
Because when we let the hurt, resentment or anger build up over time, we get to a point where it either explodes, comes out sideways or the relationship simply fizzles out because people can’t figure out how to tend to these tensions.
For many of us, giving relatively low-stakes critical feedback is already challenging. Dean Spade recommends starting by talking about why giving this kind of feedback is so important. For example, reflect together on:
A time you gave feedback and it didn’t go well
A time you received feedback and you didn’t take it well
A time you gave feedback and it went well
A time you received feedback and were able to receive it well
This helps connect you to why giving and receiving critical feedback is critical and hard for most of us.
Creating connection and shared understanding before having to get close to that edge in real time will help you stay steady when you eventually apply it with each other.
I have come to think of this as foundational for any relationship, whether between two people or in a group.
When someone tells me ‘we don’t have any conflict here’, I perk up. Because that tells me a vital feedback loop is missing.
As Morgan Bassichis puts it in conversation with Dean:
“[I] really want to trust that you would tell me if you saw something that I didn’t see. That would be horrifying to me if I felt like you couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. So it’s actually what we want. Even if we’re scared of it, it’s actually what we long for in our relationship.”
This isn’t easy because it’s deeply counter-cultural. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn how to do it.
We can start small, in moments when the stakes are low. So that when something really important happens, we have built up the trust and some skill to communicate more clearly.
It’s precisely in those small interpersonal moments that we can bring to life a different culture, one that offers more breathing space for our shared humanity.