Receive Criticism With Grace

I’ve noticed that the skills of giving and receiving constructive criticism and feedback are diminishing. The people giving the feedback are either too uncomfortable to tell the recipient anything actionable and useful because they’re worried the recipient will be upset or angry. The recipient is often quick to close down and get defensive, thus losing the opportunity to accept the feedback and perhaps have something useful to work on in the future.
Giving Feedback
Everyone, boss or not, has opportunities in their day to give feedback. Notice that I’m not saying criticism. That’s just part of the spectrum. Feedback should be a constant experience throughout the day, through explicit and implicit queues. Think about it.
If your kid wakes up and quietly reads for an extra half hour to give Mom a chance to sleep, that’s an opportunity to say, “It’s really great when you read quietly in the morning. That helps everyone ease into the day.”
At work, you might tell a peer, “When you give me code without documentation, it really makes it difficult for me to do anything with the code. What can you do to help?”
Feedback has a language all its own, and it is vital to both give it in a way that is useful, and to receive constructive criticism with grace.
Manager Tools
There’s a great podcast about management that applies to this. It’s called Manager Tools. They ran a show on giving effective Feedback a while ago (maybe last fall), and the lessons I learned from it are still with me.
Here’s a link to the podcast. There’ll be a button you can click to listen at your computer, or you can download the mp3 file to take with you.
If you’re not ready to jump into listening to useful podcasts, here’s a page they’ve set up called the feedback model. Give it a read. You’ll find great tips on how to give and receive feedback.
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Housekeeping
Thanks to everyone’s comments and feedback about drupal. After reviewing it further, and reconsidering what I’m going to use it for, I think I’ll stick with WordPress for the new site launch. I’ll revise my question accordingly: are there any WordPress gurus out there? I need to tweak the format a bit and get it set up a bit more like what I need. Plus I want to put my own graphic in the big fat box, etc. Help?
Finally, if you haven’t subscribed to the RSS feed with something like MY Yahoo or Google Reader or Bloglines, whatever your reader of choice, I’ve added a new button on the right hand side of the site that says “Add to Any Reader.” I’ve tested it with about 7 readers and it worked great with each one. Why don’t you try? : )
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