The Five Levels of Feedback: How to Transform Criticism into Progress

My thoughts and experience on why receiving feedback is demanding and how you can improve.

Especially in the work context, many companies are focusing on building a better feedback culture. Most of the initiatives I have participated in in my career have focused on giving feedback. Feedback training sessions usually will teach you how to phrase and structure feedback.

Giving great feedback is not easy and does need a lot of practice. I will cover in a future post how you can become a better feedback giver. But before you learn to give feedback, you should understand how to receive and process it. Unfortunately, many people I have met were never taught how to do so.

It becomes even worse when people in feedback training sessions use it as a carte blanche to be jerks. Too often, I heard people say things like: “Well, we should be franker with feedback. Your work is always crap, and you are bad at your job.”

But even if you receive expert feedback, it is often overwhelming. Suddenly, you start defending yourself or need help with how to process and learn from the feedback.

Feedback should be a gift. I’ll try to teach you how you can treat it as one.