Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: Giving and receiving feedback in a world where trust and relationships take a backseat to professionalism.
Feedback is hard. Right? Hard to take and hard to give. Being good at receiving feedback is a marketable skill: you’re coachable or teachable. Being good at giving feedback is also a marketable skill: you’re a good mentor or communicator. They’re in high demand because they’re difficult for a number of complicated reasons that almost nobody completely understands, and the people who are good at it are either naturally talented, have practiced a lot, or some combination of both. Today, I want to talk about what differentiates good feedback from bad, and some of the obstacles in place that make communicating that feedback harder.
I’m already going to correct myself here and say that just labelling some methods of feedback as “good” and some “bad” is inaccurate. Or at least it’s imprecise. Perhaps a better metric is whether feedback is effective or ineffective. It also depends on what kind of feedback you’re trying to give. If you want someone to improve or fix something, you want to give specific, useful feedback. If you want to motivate or validate someone’s joy, specific positive feedback is great, but general excitement is great too. If there’s a serious problem and you need to reprimand someone and give them a future goal to work towards, you want to be detailed in your description of the problem and work to lay out clear steps towards a solution. In all of these situations, the most effective form of feedback is often the most specific, and the least effective feedback is the least specific. While it’s nice to hear someone say, “you did great!”, it’s different, and perhaps better, to hear someone give an example of something you did well. Similarly, it’s not very useful for someone to tell you, “Well that didn’t go very well,” and then give you no guidance on how it could have gone better.
Of course, we’ve all had those moments where we think we’ve given really great, specific, useful feedback, and it still just doesn’t work. Something I learned when I was doing a lot of directing work is that when you’re giving feedback, you craft it in the best possible way you can, and you give it three times maximum. The first two times, if the actor doesn’t take the feedback, it’s their problem. They forgot or they haven’t worked it out yet or they didn’t understand. You remind them. If your actor does not follow the feedback after three times, then it’s not a them problem, it’s a you problem. You need to either change the way you give the feedback, give new feedback, or reevaluate whether or not it’s even important. Often, when an actor cannot seem to take the feedback, it’s because your vision is just not going to work. Every now and then, though, you’ll get a person who cannot take any feedback ever, and it is 100% about them. Maybe they get defensive, maybe they feel personally attacked, maybe they say “my way is better,” I’ve heard it all. Hell, I’ve been it all. We all have a certain level of pride that makes it difficult to take criticism, however specific and useful it is, and if you don’t work to consciously be able to take criticism, you’re not ever able to move past it.
The most common advice I’ve heard about taking criticism is that you have to remember that it isn’t personal, it’s just about trying to make something better. Except, what if it is personal? And if it isn’t technically personal, what if it feels that way, and just telling yourself that it’s not isn’t cutting it? It’s one thing when someone finds a bug in your code or asks for the UI of a website you built to be updated. That stuff is always impersonal. It’s another thing when something that feels very personal to you, like art or writing or music, receives feedback. Even if it’s good feedback and the person really wants that art or writing or music to improve! If you’ve invested a lot of your emotions and identity into something, and then someone critiques it, it feels like they’re critiquing you. I have no experience in this field, but I wouldn’t be surprised if models felt this way also, maybe athletes as well. It’s still feedback on your work, but it’s also feedback on you. On your body, on your creativity. And if you haven’t been able to separate yourself from the success or quality of your work, the feedback hits you straight in the self-worth. We’ve been taught to commodify ourselves, to look at ourselves through the lens of what makes us marketable. If your art isn’t good enough to sell, why do it? If you’re not funny enough to make money off of comedy, why bother? If you’re not pretty enough to be a supermodel, what worth does your appearance even have? And in turn, what worth do you even have? So it’s easy to say, “Oh, feedback isn’t personal, it’s not about you, it’s about the work,” but as long as we’re told to base our self-worth off of our work, the feedback absolutely feels personal.
Sometimes people are feeling personally attacked when they get defensive, and I think that in certain situations, there are even more factors that play into that feeling. I and the people I’ve spoken to observe this most often in men and boys. When they receive feedback, particularly from people who are not men, they try to justify their choice or their action, or they try to defend themselves by claiming the feedback is wrong. Their choices or actions have been questioned by someone who they judge, consciously or unconsciously, to not have the expertise to be telling them what to do. And I say consciously or unconsciously because I do believe that a lot of this is unconscious. It’s just what they’ve been taught and conditioned to do. Even when they receive feedback from other men, they still seem to feel like they’re completely justified in whatever they do and anyone who tells them otherwise is wrong. Now, this is a generalization, of course, and it’s just a pattern I’ve noticed. I think this type of defensiveness actually comes from two places. One, a place of feeling like you already know everything and that the person giving you feedback isn’t qualified to be giving you feedback. Two, a place of insecurity about what you know, so you overcompensate by acting like you already knew what the person was telling you.
Anyone can do this; I’ve been in both situations. But the way we socialize men to exist in the world and interact with others creates a perfect space for both of those feelings to occur. If a man is entirely convinced that he knows everything there is to know about something, then he’s going to get angry when someone implies that that’s not the case. If a man knows that he doesn’t know everything, but he feels like admitting that would be like admitting weakness in a way that men are not allowed to do, he’ll pretend that you’re actually the one who doesn’t know everything to cover up his own insecurity. Both of these situations are harmful to the men in question and the people trying to give them feedback.
It’s complicated. Obviously. There’s a lot of factors informing these seemingly simple interactions. So how do we get to a place with ourselves and with the other people in our lives where we feel more comfortable giving and receiving feedback? In my opinion, it all comes down to trust. If I don’t know or trust you, I won’t be able to make use of any feedback you give me. Similarly, if I don’t know or trust you, I won’t be able to give you any feedback that is useful to you. But trust is an extremely challenging thing to build, especially in a work environment. I can ask for and take feedback from my close friends all day long, because I trust their intentions and they trust mine and we know we’re working towards the same goal. In a professional setting, I might understand that someone has expertise I do not have, and I might understand that they’re trying to share that expertise and help me be better, but I still end up approaching those situations with my guard up because I don’t know what to expect and I don’t entirely trust the person. Work environments that prioritise trust and teamwork are not only making the community healthier, but are also creating a space for communication that feels safe. But not all workplaces prioritise those things. Some places want to keep all employee interactions completely professional. Some managers or employers would prefer to be left alone until the time comes when they need to give their employees feedback. Some companies have such hostile environments or fierce competition that there’s no possible way to gain any sort of trust. In every area I’ve thought about recently – in food justice, in education, in political movements, and in work – every solution to every problem that I can think of involves trust. Increasing trust. Increasing communication. Increasing transparency. Increasing genuine interest. Increasing community engagement. All of it.
I’m planning an episode more about this later, but I’ll give you a snippet of my thoughts now. I do volunteer work in the food justice field, addressing hunger and such, and recently I have been thinking about ways to make the work more community-focused. Even though our whole goal is to serve and support the community, I don’t think we’re as deeply engaged in the community and in building connections as we could be. I want to figure out what we want to do but haven’t actually done yet, what we could do that we haven’t even thought of yet, and what kinds of obstacles stand in our way. And something I keep coming back to is this issue of trust. But what’s stopping us from building trust in the community? What’s stopping any community, be it work or school or something else, from building trust?
I think there are several obstacles, but one of the biggest ones is this idea of professionalism. Well… “professionalism” is an insufficiently specific word, so I think I’ll have to break it down further. Because we need work-life balance or school-life, and we need clearly defined boundaries between being friendly coworkers and being friends, and we need rules and customs that acknowledge power imbalances that exist in a professional setting. We need all that. That’s all good. Which is why I don’t think professionalism is a problem, I just think it can be an obstacle to creating a trusting environment. I’ll probably talk about this again soon, but in the work I do with food justice, we get so caught up in protecting people’s privacy, in protecting their dignity, in making sure they’re as anonymous as possible and that nobody has to know they’re struggling. We want people to not be ashamed to ask for help because we want to help them, but then we continue to treat them like it is shameful and they shouldn’t want anyone to know, and we do it under the pretense of trying not to make anyone uncomfortable. We maintain as professional a relationship as possible so that we don’t butt in to people’s personal lives. But I have been wondering what we could accomplish if instead of keeping everyone extremely separate, we treated the entire network, so all the farmers that supply food, all the volunteers who package and transport the food, and all the recipients of the food, like a community that should know and work with each other. I don’t know what we could accomplish, what strides we could make. I don’t know. We’ve never done it before. But if we weren’t focused on keeping up this guise of professionalism, I think we could manage to create some trust that doesn’t currently exist.
To give a work-related example, I’ll talk about my mom’s job. My mom is a computer programmer and is currently the manager of two other programmers. She wants to be a good manager. In her mind, good managers listen to the needs of their people and try to balance those needs with the needs of the company. But in a virtual world where the programmers she’s in charge of are young and don’t trust The System, how can she build trust without breaching the barriers of professionalism? How can she assess and cater to their needs without being nosy about their personal lives? In my humble opinion… you don’t. You can’t do both. You have to breach some of the taboos and norms set by professionalism. You have to say “Hey, employee, don’t let me pile too much work on you. If I ask you to do something and you can’t do it, tell me and I won’t make you do it. If your kid is sick or you’re moving or you have a physical or mental health issue or you literally just need more time or feel overwhelmed, tell me and we’ll make it work.” But… how awkward! We’re not used to this!
In recent years, a few teachers here and there have begun to give their students surveys at the beginning of the year that allow students to tell teachers about their mental health journeys or about other things going on that complicate their lives. These teachers vocally advocate for students and support in any way they can. These teachers recognize the importance of trust, but also recognize that their position of power makes it harder for them to appear trustworthy, so they must work harder for that. The teachers that I have been able to trust with information about my mental health are the ones who have been consistently open about theirs. Not super detailed, since the boundaries of professionalism still exist, but they’re the ones who acknowledge that mental health exists at all and who regularly say to the class, “This assignment is due on X day, if that can’t happen, for any reason, talk to me and we’ll make it work.” They’re the ones who take late work, who write comments on grades, or who don’t grade things in the first place. They ask about our lives and talk about theirs every now and then. They work tirelessly to create environments where we can trust them to support and help us succeed. I apologized for bothering a teacher recently, and he laughed and said, “Callie, it’s almost like teachers are here because they want to support students.” I laughed back and we moved on, but that particularly struck me because even though I trust him and I believe that he wants to support students, I don’t believe that he’s right about everyone. Maybe he is! It makes sense that teachers would want to support students. But I don’t trust that, you know? Because I haven’t seen it very often. I think teachers are in a difficult position because they might want to help, but they don’t know how to get students to actually ask them for help. I’ve heard some teachers say “I’m not going to go chasing you down, you have to come to me if you need help.” Which I understand! I understand that it’s a lot of work and it’s not something everyone can do. I’m just saying that if you want students to trust you, and you’re aware that we’ve been brought up in this system that is aggressively untrustworthy, then you have to put in more effort than you think is necessary to get us to believe that you actually mean what you say.
I think another thing that teachers worry about is that if they just come to us all the time and never make us advocate for ourselves, then we’ll never learn to advocate for ourselves. I understand this concern, and it’s a concern that I sometimes share, before I remember how I learned to advocate for myself. I was fifteen, I think, working as a counselor-in-training at a summer camp. We had a CIT mentor named Ray whose job it was to help us learn whatever we wanted to learn: how to be counselors, how to be good leaders, etc. Whatever our goal was, Ray’s whole job was to help us work towards it. So I’m fifteen or so, and my goal for the whole summer is to learn how to be a counselor. That week, Ray’s challenge for me was to get better at asking for feedback, because I had learned basically everything I could learn from just watching, and I needed to get feedback on specific questions that I had. But all I heard was “ask for feedback,” and I didn’t really know what that meant or what I was looking for, so I sort of awkwardly went up to a counselor and said something like, “Hey, do you have any feedback for me?” And they said something like, “No? You’re doing great?” Which is not terribly effective feedback, but I didn’t tell them anything to look for! So I recounted this experience to Ray, and they realized that I really had no idea what to do. They wanted me to advocate for myself, but I simply did not know how. So, they started to give me the kind of feedback they wanted me to look for. They started talking to my counselors, hanging out in my camp group, asking me questions about things I did or noticed in camp, and then wrote down very specific feedback about moments or things that I did well or didn’t do well, and how I can improve them, and what to look out for so I get a chance to try again. And as I began to recognize that this type of feedback was really useful, I was able to ask others for similar types. I could say, “Hey Meredith, I’d like to try and debrief the game after we’re done. Can you watch what I do and give me feedback afterwards on what I said, how I ran it, and how you think the kids received it?” And Meredith could say “yeah!” and then give me really effective feedback afterwards. I got good at advocating in this way, and once I had established a good line of communication, I could advocate for myself in other ways, like when I needed a break or I was busy at the moment or I needed help with something. And I don’t know this for certain, but I think that ability to communicate and self-advocate and seek feedback really improved my reputation and relationship with the rest of the staff, and it’s a reputation that helps me today, three years later.
I want to note that all it took for me was one person teaching me how to ask for feedback. And they didn’t do it by saying, “you have to advocate for yourself, go,” they did it by showing me what I should be asking for, showing me why it was useful, and then making space for me to try it until I got comfortable doing it on my own. The rest of the staff didn’t all have the time or energy to do that for me. Which is okay. Because all it took was one person. Now, everyone’s experience is unique. For some people, it might take a lot longer to learn that skill, or it might take more people teaching them, or they might need a different method. But that’s what worked for me. And now, I’m aware of what kinds of feedback are effective for me, and I can seek that out. You can 100% train people to give you the feedback you need. Some people are and always will be bad at it, but for a lot of people, if you consistently ask them for the type of feedback that is useful to you, they’ll start to get better at giving it. You have to be specific though. One of my biggest frustrations in life is when people don’t say what they mean. If you don’t say exactly what you mean, how do you hope to get exactly what you want? This is when people tell me, “Callie, you can’t have exactly what you want!” Bull! I can, and I have, and I will!
I’m not in a position to be giving anyone advice, but I desperately want to, so here goes. Ask for feedback when you can. Try not to take it personally. You and the person trying to help you are on the same team. If you need them to communicate it differently, tell them that. Give feedback when you can. Build trust with a person as much as possible before giving feedback. Be specific. Be clear. Be kind. Do those things together. Build and maintain your community. We can’t do this without each other.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. Follow this podcast to be notified whenever I release a new episode! This is Callie, signing off.
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