12/07/2017

Accepting Criticism Shows Strength, Not Weakness

How to accept negative feedback with ease

Most people assume that given a choice between receiving positive or negative feedback, the majority would choose positive. To test that assumption, my colleague Jack Zenger and I created a psycho-metrically valid assessment that measured preferences for both receiving and/or avoiding positive and negative feedback. The assessment used a series of paired comparison items to distinguish the participants’ preferences. After analyzing the results for a global sample of 8,715 respondents, we discovered that only 22 percent indicated that they preferred receiving positive feedback, while 66 percent expressed a stronger preference for receiving negative feedback. A small group, 12 percent, had an equal preference.

Does Your Preference For Getting Feedback Impact Your Effectiveness?
Regardless of your preference for one kind of feedback over another, and whether you want it or not, everyone receives feedback. The question that interested us was, does having a preference affect what you do with that feedback?

We combined the results from our self-assessment of feedback preferences with 360-degree evaluations of each leader’s effectiveness. The 360-degree assessment used was Zenger Folkman’s The Extraordinary Leader™ survey, which measures 16 competencies that are the key skills leaders need to transition from good managers to great leaders. Combining the data from both assessments gave us 588 leaders for whom we had responses for both assessments. We then broke the feedback preference data down into four groups. The table below shows each of the groups, and the percentage of population in each. 

Please click here to read the complete article from Forbes.