The performance evaluation: every person whose had a job for more than six months has been there…captively sitting and listening to a laundry list of your faults or the infuriating, “You’re doing great,” with nothing added for improvement. Or the worst—the “feed-back sandwich”—where your faults are wedged in between what you do well. The entire time, you are frozen in fear. Then, you stew over the negative things said about you. Then you complain about what a waste of time it’s all been. Managers and supervisors are often trained, work-shopped, and coached about how to give good feedback. But the work is lost if the person they are evaluating isn’t receptive.
Thanks for the Feedback is vital for anyone who wants to learn how to be better—a better parent, a better spouse, a better employee—because it teaches how to accept various kinds of feedback. This is not instructions on how to grow thicker skin, though. Stone and Heen use their own experience as consultants and Harvard lecturers and copious amounts of research in organizational behavior and psychology to explain exactly what feedback is and why it’s so hard for us to do anything constructive with it. In the first part of the book, the authors explain different types of feedback (appreciation, coaching, and evaluation). Then, they take us through the “triggers” that cause us to react badly to feedback (truth triggers, relationship triggers, identity triggers). Once we understand exactly what they have learned is going through our minds when we hear feedback, they explain what to do about it. They share conversation techniques, negotiation suggestions, and lots of problem solving tricks.
This book is an excellent combination of popular psychology, self-help, relationship advice, and career building. I recommend it for anyone who has a serious desire to improve their communication and listening skills. Or for anyone with a performance evaluation coming up.
The BiblioFiles 