Perhaps one of the biggest challenges professionals face in the workplace is accepting feedback—especially when they feel confident in their work. It’s natural to resist criticism if you feel like your motives, core values, or skills are being questioned, but feedback isn’t an attack on your character; it’s an opportunity to asses alignment.
Does your brand positioning or product offering truly connect with your audience? If not, don’t you want to know why? Feedback from our colleagues, users, and managers can be a powerful tool for increasing audience engagement, reaching the right people, and even personal growth. Embracing new opinions with a sense of curiosity instead of combativeness, is essential to finding support in them, instead of bitterness. Whether refining your approach to your social media strategy or your pitches to potential clients, it’s all about ensuring that your solutions effectively address the right problems.
Let’s explore strategies for accepting, analyzing, and applying feedback to fuel your professional and personal growth.
Are You Open to Understanding Audience Feedback?
Whether you’re leading a project, running a business, or managing a team, fostering an environment where people feel they can share their true opinions and showing that you hear them by taking intentional actions can set you apart. Receiving unsolicited feedback is not always fun, but as a visionary leader, do you actively invite feedback or is it all up to your audience to hit you with those unexpected comments?
Take a moment to truly reflect. Are you really open to audience feedback? Do you have a clear and dedicated space where people can share their thoughts about your work? When they do share, are you willing to listen? Understanding your audience’s challenges, needs, and wishes can be pivotal in shaping your offering. User research is not just data analysis—it’s about brand perception, as in, you’re someone who truly listens to your constituents. By dedicating time and space to conducting user research, you open opportunities for meaningful interactions.
Being open to feedback is half the battle. The real challenge often lies in how to process and respond to that feedback, especially when it’s not exactly what you want to hear.
Why Listening Matters
While receiving validation on your concept is important, it’s also important to accept new ideas, criticisms, or challenging opinions that could fuel your growth and positively impact your long-term success.
No matter what each of us is working on, we likely share the same core vision: to provide a solution to a problem someone has. If users expresses a desire for something specific, it usually stems from their true needs. When their experiences engaging with what you’re offering don’t fit their need or almost fit their need and they let you know about what you’re lacking, they’ve almost given you a gift. Someone did what you asked, and they want to help you make even better!
There are always going to be haters and trolls. Not everyone has good intentions, and your product or service can’t solve everyone’s problems. You don’t need to convert everyone’s advice into action. It’s important to be able to decipher the difference between when someone is sharing feedback with bad intentions, and when they’re saying something valuable that hurts.
What’s worse than facing feedback you don’t want to face? Knowing that no one is using the thing you created. Worse than that? Not knowing why. When you’ve poured your heart and soul into something that doesn’t resonate, it’s time to reassess. Your audience’s insights can guide your business in the right direction, aligning your goals with their expectations.
Techniques for Accepting Feedback Gracefully
Embracing feedback, especially the tough kind, is a skill in itself. Here are some techniques to help you accept feedback gracefully, even when it challenges you.
1. Create a Feedback Process that Works for You
The way you design the dedicated space for others to offer their opinions should align with the way you process information. This way, your reception to feedback will already have an open head start because the format is conducive to how you engage in active listening. For example, your ideal feedback process might be to review user comments at a certain time of day when you already know you feel most receptive. Instead of reading feedback directly, you might prefer to have the key points summarized and presented as data instead of angry emojis.
2. Reflect Before You Respond
When reviewing feedback, pay attention to any pings, emotions, memories, or thoughts that come up as your initial inner response. Before you respond externally, reflect on what is making you feel or think that way. Could it be that a user has triggered a bad experience you had with a failed company, but they’re also making a great point? Is someone’s “complaint” actually a helpful idea? Maybe a user has brought up something that you agree with but have been afraid to face alone.
Take as long as you need to gain perspective so you can respond appropriately and thoughtfully.
3. Ask Questions
Maybe your initial reaction is due to a lack of information. In some cases, all you need is clarity to be able to form the appropriate response. The beauty about offering a dialogue with your users or audience is that you can reach out and ask questions. Ask them when in the process they had the experience. Ask them what exactly they need from you to have had a better experience. Understanding the context behind the feedback can help give you insight into a perspective that differs from your own. This not only shows that you value your audience’s opinion, but may also illuminate factors you would not have considered otherwise.
4. Recognize Patterns
Like we mentioned earlier, there will always be trolls and haters out for blood on the internet! It’s important to set boundaries with people who aren’t actually responding to help you, but rather to illicit a response that might not work in your favor. Ultimately, you and your team still need to decide which feedback is worth acting on or responding to. A key indicator is recognizing feedback patterns. For example, if someone who has used your product for years is having the same experience as a new user, there could be good insights there. Once you know the core issue, you can work at improving it.
5. Show Appreciation
More often that not, when people bring up a critique of a product or service, it’s because the product or service didn’t solve their problem. AKA: they did not feel heard. If someone from your audience takes time out of their day to explain this to you, it’s worth recognizing. Starting your feedback response with a “thank you” validates the user that they did the right thing in trying to support you with their free advice. Your intentional reply could even be the start of the journey to winning that user back, even if they chose to move on to a competitor!
The Risk of Ignoring Feedback
Choosing to ignore feedback that doesn’t align with your perspective is exactly that: a choice. If you do make the choice to ignore feedback, you’re signaling to yourself that only your perspective matters. But remember: you’re not the only one using your product. Don’t allow yourself to get stuck inside your own echo chamber. What if your audience is requesting something that aligns with your goals and could differentiate you in the market?
It’s important to note that you are not required to act on all feedback. Whether not you choose to act on feedback or respond to it should ultimately align with your business goals and drive your business forward.
Conclusion
Accepting audience feedback can be a difficult challenge, especially when uncomfortable feelings arise. However, the importance of being open to your audience can empower you as a visionary leader, propel your project, business, or company into new territory, and positively impact your brand perception. Deconditioning your thinking around user feedback will allow you to be more open to alternative perspectives, will help you become a better leader, and will improve your product.
Choosing to be open, to receiving, to processing, and to taking action around feedback can be impactful teachable moments!
We’d love to help you facilitate user interviews, create a feedback system that works for your organization, or analyze your audience feedback to track significant patterns that can help you move the needle.
Let’s talk!
