For a healthy company culture and effective teamwork, feedback is essential.

It is an opportunity to help team members develop and a chance to improve business operations.

However, fear of feedback – giving and receiving it – encourages people to avoid it until it’s too late. What can then happen is that everything spills out at once; a feedback explosion, if you like. And, like any explosion, it leaves a mess in its wake.

Storing up your feedback until the dam bursts means that you won’t properly or fairly express your views in a constructive manner.

Such a situation is not good for anyone. So, how do you give, and receive, feedback well?

Appraisal Feedback

Many people do not enjoy receiving performance appraisals. Employees are concerned that they will only hear criticism, while bosses fear that even the mildest criticism will result in stonewalling, rage, or even tears from their staff!

What is the outcome of these attitudes? Everyone keeps a low profile and speaks about possible areas of improvement as infrequently as possible.

To me, that’s a shame because most people need help figuring out how to improve their performance and advance their careers.

Resistance to hearing feedback isn’t exclusive to annual performance reviews. Many people expect the worst whenever feedback is offered: tense debates, unreasonable demands, or even threats of firing. As a result, many people try to dodge the truth and guess what their bosses are thinking rather than asking for feedback.

Face Your Fears

Why do people fear feedback? Why are we sometimes afraid to hear how we could do things better or share that constructive feedback with staff?

Simply put, it is usually due to fear.

The first step to being able to receive, and give, feedback is to accept that you may be afraid of criticism. You then need to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about recognising that fear and trying to overcome it.

Letting fear control you to the extent that you hide from feedback – giving and receiving it – could be holding you back from developing in your profession and as a person.

Ask for Support

Facing your fears and the emotions that cause them is challenging.

Accepting the criticism required to make changes and improvements is hard and can be embarrassing. Preparing to hand out criticism can be just as difficult.

If that’s how you feel, don’t continue to be held back. Ask for help from people who will listen, support, and advise you.

Asking for help can be hard in a business environment. This can especially be the case for a manager who believes they are expected to be self-sufficient. If you struggle to share feedback with your team because you fear the response, you are not helping your staff grow, and you are not helping your business by optimising performance.

Asking for help to get both these areas right is not a negative thing to do.

Feedback that Works

After confronting and overcoming the fear, we need to find ways of sharing feedback constructively. To be of any use, the feedback needs to be expressed positively and to be achievable.

Reframe the Message

Reframing is an adaptive approach that helps you change the feedback process to your benefit.

It entails framing the idea of receiving or responding to feedback in a positive light so that negative emotions and responses are released.

Break Up the Task

Another adaptive strategy is to break down the sometimes immense task of dealing with, or sharing, criticism into manageable, measurable parts and assign realistic time frames to each of them.

If the input identifies that more than two areas of work or behaviour need to change, this is especially useful. Research has shown that most people can only cope with altering one or two aspects at a time.

Breaking up the feedback allows the necessary changes to be achieved, rather than overwhelming for the employee.

Taking ownership of manageable actions to achieve specific goals minimises the likelihood of feeling overwhelmed and increases the possibility of transformation.

For a manager, it also allows you to help a team member develop and grow with it feeling like you are piling on criticism after criticism.