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Summarized by Allie Sturm Vecchiet. How well (or how poorly) do you receive feedback? How do your residents or employees receive feedback? Have you ever poorly received feedback and later regretted your reaction?

Authors, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, in Thanks for the Feedback argue that the business world has it all wrong. Businesses spend billions of dollars and millions of hours each year teaching people how to GIVE feedback more effectively, but the authors explain why the smart money is on educating RECEIVERS. Receiving constructive feedback is tough, especially when it elicits an emotional response.

What type of feedback triggers you to respond negatively or emotionally?   Stone and Heen have identified 3 triggers that typically cause people to become flustered or emotional:

1. Truth triggers: set off by the substance of the feedback – it’s somehow “off,” unhelpful, or simply untrue.
2. Relationship triggers: set off by the particular person who is giving the feedback. Focus shifts from the feedback itself to the audacity of the person delivering it.
3. Identify triggers: set off by ourselves. Whether the feedback is right or wrong, something about it has caused our identity to come undone – we might feel threatened or ashamed.

Can you identify a time where you received feedback that tripped one of these triggers?

 For example, is there a certain manager or preceptor that has set off your relationship trigger? Some who you just didn’t click with and whose feedback always made you wonder, “Why is he/she so rude to me?”

The authors offer various solutions for receiving feedback more gracefully and being able to apply it effectively. Below are 4 strategies:

1. Separate evaluation from coaching and appreciation.
   • Example: If someone is telling you to improve how you run staff meetings, but has not first evaluated how you run a staff meeting, you will be distracted and take the coaching as insincere. Make sure to ask for an evaluation and then coaching.
2. See your blind spots. Others observe things about us that we literally can’t observe about ourselves.
   • Example: If someone gives you feedback and you notice yourself wondering, “What’s wrong with them?” Make sure your next thought is, “I wonder if this feedback is sitting in my blind spot?” Ask, “what do you see me doing or failing to do that is getting in my own way?”
3. Don’t “switchtrack” from receiving feedback to talking about your feelings.
   • Example: When a person offers feedback that trips off your relationship trigger, we tend to breeze past the feedback and instead talk about how they made us feel.
4. Don’t exaggerate feedback. Instead separate feeling, story, and feedback.
   • Example: Someone gives you feedback that your staff satisfaction is very low and it makes you feel that you are the worst manager. Ask yourself 3 questions: “What do I feel? What is the story that I am telling myself? What’s the actual feedback?” This helps you separate the feeling of failure, the story that you’re the worst manager, and helps you clearly see that you should spend more time improving staff morale.

Before your next evaluation, think about how you might utilize these strategies to reduce your emotional responses and clear your head so that you can make the most of the feedback you are given.

Comments are welcome.

*Allison Sturm Vecchiet, PharmD
PGY1/PGY2 Health-System Pharmacy Administration Resident
Nationwide Children's Hospital
M.S. Health-System Pharmacy Administration Candidate 2016
The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy
Email: Sturm.42@osu.edu