SOMETIMES IT’S NOT SO FUN.

Recently, a Harvard Business Review article popped up in my LinkedIn feed telling me to “Stop Asking for Feedback” because “feedback has little impact on our performance — and often, it impacts it negatively.” Oh, crap. I’ve been doing life wrong again.

Most of the article was a bunch of anecdotes – the disgruntled author had to give a presentation once for an interview, got unsettling, unhelpful feedback and decided “never again”. But there was one reference to a study with some actual data. Researchers found that across 24,000 observed “feedback interactions,” more than one-third resulted in decreased performance. That’s a lot! But, here’s the thing: in total, the feedback still had an overall positive effect. There’s value in feedback; we must be smart about extracting it.

The Feedback Funhouse

I think about feedback as a funhouse of mirrors. What you see as you walk through a funhouse reflects not only you – how tall you are, what you’re wearing, the tilt of your nose, how frizzy your curly hair happens to be that day – but also the shape of the mirror. Some are convex, some concave, some wavy in ways that make you a little nauseous, some will turn you upside-down, some filter out certain colors or shift the entire spectrum. Not one of them is flat. And, plenty of them – a third of them the study tells us – are so distorted, that if you really believe what comes back at you, you might be permanently scarred.

The author of that HBR article tells us to abandon the Funhouse entirely. I think that’s walking away from a lot of value. Instead, three tips for getting the most out of the Feedback Funhouse:

Get more feedback, not less.

Look in as many mirrors as possible. If you look in just two mirrors and see a red sweater in one and blue in the other, it’s awfully hard to know what to do with that. If you look in 100 mirrors and 95 of them show a red sweater, there’s a pretty good chance your sweater is red. The mirrors are distorted, but if they are randomly and uniquely distorted, looking in lots of them will help us find the patterns, ascertain the truth.

For bonus points, avoid systematic distortion in your mirrors by getting them from lots of different sources: personal, professional, volunteer, hobbies, school.

Disregard (much of) the feedback.

That’s right: I’m telling you to go get a bunch of feedback, then ignore it. Because some of it – a lot of it – is bad. Your job is to process the feedback and act on it sparingly. Only do the things that make sense to you, that resonate with you, that pass your own “sniff test.”

The professional guidance most of us get on this topic completely overlooks this step. I have had formal training on how to give feedback and how to receive it, but no one has ever told me what to do with it. The implication is that we’re just supposed to obey it but that opens us up to harm. And since our (lack of) professional guidance seems to bias us towards accepting more of the feedback then we should, I contend that purposefully deciding what to ignore is a helpful exercise.

Still, don’t throw the rejected feedback away completely! Store it away. I used to have a file cabinet in my brain of disregarded feedback; now it’s more like a warehouse. Most of it’s useless, but occasionally, somebody will say something that clicks, or I’ll have an experience that makes me look at something in a different way, and I can go back to the warehouse to pull out pieces that suddenly make sense to me. Storing the rejected feedback is another way to do tip #1: get lots of feedback.

Characterize the mirror.

One way to remove distortion from the images we get back in the Funhouse is to deeply understand the shape of the mirror. Then we can correct for the distortions in the image we see; we can do the inverse transform (for my fellow science and math nerds!). This is the hardest tip to pull off, so it’s not worth using on every mirror. But for mirrors we’re bound to look in frequently – long-time bosses, close friends, spouses – it’s worth the investment to help us make the most of these regular sources of feedback.

Forget Harvard. Keep visiting the Funhouse. It’s not necessarily fun, but it is valuable, especially if you remember to look in lots of mirrors, choose what to ignore and account for the shape of those really important mirrors.

What tips do you have for making the best of feedback? How do you distinguish between good, but surprising, feedback and that which is harmful? Put your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe to the blog!