Here\u2019s something I wrote last summer (after our documentation-group gathering at work) but ended up not posting at the time.<\/p>\r\n
Yesterday afternoon, as part of our mini-conference at work, I attended a session about how to usefully give criticism\/negative feedback to co-workers (especially to people who report to you), in which people gave a bunch of useful suggestions that I hope will come in handy next time I have to have such a conversation.<\/p>\r\n
But the thing that surprised me most about that session was what happened when I mentioned that I\u2019ve had a hard time giving that kind of feedback in various contexts: Two of my colleagues spoke up to say that they felt that I do a particularly good job of that, especially on internal mailing lists. (Worth noting that both of the people who explicitly praised me about this were white men; I don\u2019t know whether other folks in the room have the same impression of me.)<\/p>\r\n
Which made me feel really good\u2014that was great to hear. But it was also a little confusing\/surprising, because I know how often my handling of such situations doesn\u2019t meet my own standards.<\/p>\r\n
I think that the kind of interaction that my colleagues were praising me for isn\u2019t quite the same thing as the kind of negative feedback that we were talking about in that session. So for the rest of this post, I\u2019m setting the negative-feedback context aside, and just looking at my mailing-list responses (and other similar online responses) from my own point of view:<\/p>\r\n
I get easily irritated by certain kinds of behaviors, especially in written online communication, and I too often respond from that place of irritation.<\/p>\r\n
At my best, I do handle such situations well. I manage to breathe, pause, step away from the interaction for a minute, calm myself down, and then come back and respond from a place of empathy, of understanding what the other person meant even if their phrasing wasn\u2019t perfect, of honesty and vulnerability. I can sometimes even mention\u2014gently\u2014that I was annoyed or upset by the other person\u2019s phrasing or framing.<\/p>\r\n
But at my worst\u2014too often\u2014I instead react with defensiveness and lashing-out. And I almost always regret that later, especially when (as is often the case) I later see that what I was irritated by was something really minor.<\/p>\r\n
I\u2019m not suggesting that nobody should respond to anything while they\u2019re distressed; there are plenty of situations and contexts where it\u2019s perfectly reasonable for someone to respond with distress. (And please don\u2019t take this post as an opportunity to complain about anyone else\u2019s reactions or responses to things.) I\u2019m just saying that in my own life, I too often overreact to minor irritations.<\/p>\r\n
So what I\u2019m hoping to take away from yesterday\u2019s unexpected praise is a reinforcement of my desire to be better at this kind of thing\u2014hoping that I can live up to my colleagues\u2019 respect about this.<\/p>\r\n
(No advice, please.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18509"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18510,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18509\/revisions\/18510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}