How to be open to feedback

When I had about 6 years of PM experience, I was not very good at getting feedback. As a new PM, I had been eager for every little bit of learning and loved every idea people would toss my way.

But as I gained experience, I started to think that I *should* know all the answers and that I needed to carefully guard my time to move as quickly as possible. When people offered to help, I sometimes reacted defensively and interpreted their offer as a statement that I was messing up. When people shared product ideas, I thought I was doing them a favor by quickly explaining to them why the idea wouldn’t work.

Obviously none of that is good, and I’m very thankful that I was able to use Asana’s coaching benefit and work on being more open to feedback. Since then, I’ve also read up on non-violent communication and taken training from the Conscious Leadership Group.

These skills have been some of the most impactful soft-skills I’ve learned in my career, and I credit them with a lot of my career growth. I drive a lot of important and controversial decisions, and I’m now able to do that while still maintaining friendly relationships of mutual respect and wisdom-sharing with my coworkers. A big part of why I love coming to work everyday is how great and supportive my work relationships are.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Take note when you feel defensive and slow down

Feeling defensive is a great signal that you can watch for. When you notice it, slow down and think about what triggered you. What assumptions did you make, or what stories did you tell yourself? Consider if they’re true. And consider whether it might be more true that they were just generously trying to help you by sharing their feedback.

For example, I could say “When you suggested that I make our idea list more actionable, I told myself a story you were saying I was doing a terrible job at running the process.” Just hearing that story made me realize how silly that leap was, and I was able to reinterpret the suggestion as a helpful idea.

In another example I had real success letting the other person know why I felt defensive: “Let’s slow down because I’m feeling a little defensive. When you complained about the mistakes made moving quickly during the launch, I feel like you unfairly judged the launch as bad because of the small visible mistakes while overlooking the larger less-visible win of delivering customer value really quickly.” That helped the other person understand my point of view and changed their thinking.

Find a way to say “Yes, and…” to feedback

You don’t have to agree with someone’s idea to say yes to them. Find the part you agree with and say yes to that.

For example, if someone shares a terrible product idea with you, you can say “Yes, I understand the problem you’re trying to solve and agree it’s painful. We’ve got a different solution that I think gets at the problem and we’ve got some higher priority problems we’re working on first. How’s that sound?”.

I have been astounded at how well this works — I’d been afraid people would really push back for the original idea but 90% of the time people are really happy with this answer.

Create scalable ways to receive feedback.

At Asana we’ll often turn a new feature on for all of the employees at once. It would be overwhelming to have a conversation about each person’s feedback, so instead we’ll create a single project where people can add their feedback and then reply to the top pieces of feedback all at once.

It can also help to buy yourself time in responding to feedback, especially if you get it face-to-face and have trouble responding on the fly. Try “Thank you for the feedback, can I follow up with you later”.

Have any more tips? I’d love to hear them!