How to Process Negative Feedback

Running a technical writing agency for the last year and a half has made me realize how much I hate negative feedback. But runing an agency business has made getting poor feedback unavoidable. If you run a software business, and your software is buggy or your service is bad, your customers churn or never show up to begin with. The negative feedback is implicit, and in order to receive explicit criticism, you have to conduct user interviews and surveys.

When you run an agency business, your clients have no problem giving you negative feedback directly. You’re easier to reach, and the service interface is less clearly defined than in software, creating more opportunities for misaligned expectations. Moreover, engagements are mostly on a contract basis, and clients are a lot more willing to fire their agencies than their full-time employees—raising the stakes.

To run an agency business is to strip the work relationship down to its essence: money in, service out. Negative feedback that has to be couched in careful, empathetic terms to a full-time employee can be communicated more bluntly to an agency. 

When I started working I wouldn’t even look at my performance reviews because I was so scared that it would contain criticism. Growing up in a Chinese immigrant household, I often received severe reprimands, and I still associate negative feedback with failure, fear, and being unloved. But being forced to confront negative feedback is one of the best things that could have happened to me. People say that you should run towards the things you’re scared of. I’m scared of negative feedback, and now I’m doing a job where even if I don’t want to run, I’m being pushed towards it.

I’m scared of negative feedback because I tend to catastrophize it: I’ll leap to the thought that my business is collapsing. Not only is this histrionic, it also absolves me of the responsibility to fix the problem—if the business is collapsing, who cares! In fact, things are not nearly as dire as I think, and the most productive thing to do is to address the feedback, reflect on what longer-term changes can be put in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and move on.

Tips for dealing with negative feedback

Now that I recognize that my problem is mostly in the emotional externalities of negative feedback, I’ve come up with some solutions to deal with it. These include:

• Ask for specific examples and feedback.
• Cross-check negative feedback against historical pieces of negative feedback that I’ve received. If multiple people have given me the same piece of negative feedback independent of each other, I’ll take it seriously.
• Put processes in place for improvement in the future and communicate that to the feedback giver.
• Separate out the feedback itself from the way it was delivered. Delivering negative feedback is just as, if not more, difficult than receiving it. Very few people are good at it. If the feedback giver is a poor communicator, impatient, hyperbolic or rude, it’s easy to dismiss it. But what they say likely has a kernel of truth.
• Realize that people mean different things by different words. Just because they used a word I’m sensitive to doesn’t mean it was intentional.
• Scope the feedback and don’t rush to generalize it. Just because I did a bad job on a particular task doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.
• Physically break up my spirals of negativity by going for a walk.
• Draw on prior experience to remember that negative feedback, while meaningful and important to take into account, is rarely the end of the world, or even a career or contract.
• Talk it through with loved ones. A lot of the bad feelings around negative feedback have to do with shame. Being transparent about the negative feedback I’ve received with people I trust releases some of that shame and provides another perspective as to whether it’s valid.
• Don’t procrastinate on addressing negative feedback. The longer I wait, the larger it looms in my head, when often it’s a relatively small thing.
• Vent! Go home and yell and complain to your therapist, partner, or someone else you trust. This process is cathartic and therefore necessary, but afterwards, center yourself and try to see the situation with clear eyes.