My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Dubler, was an evil woman. She once told me – an unkempt, problematic, but clearly gifted ten-year-old – that I “would go nowhere and be a failure at life”. That’s the kind of feedback that destroys a child, and it very nearly did.  I acted much worse after that – because hell, if I was already a failure, what more did she expect?  In fifth grade, I had Mrs. Adams.  She took one look at me – disheveled, angry, and smart enough to figure out exactly what I wasn’t supposed to say – and took me by the hand and dragged me into the broom closet.  She told me in no uncertain terms, “You are not going to act this way in my class.  You’re better than this.”  She literally cut my fingernails (which by that point were probably lethal weapons with their length and the crap growing underneath), sat me in the front of the class, slammed a high-school book in front of me, and demanded that I read it and tell her what I read about at the end of each class.  And when she signed my graduation book a year later, she wrote, “Be the best that you can be, and more… because I expect it of you.”

These are perfect examples of feedback in action.  The first is an example of terrible feedback that does nothing to help the individual and instead breaks them down.  The second is an example of constructive, caring, blunt feedback, and the third is what I would consider nearly perfect feedback. Now that I think about it, Mrs. Adams is probably why I have always loved blunt, honest feedback, whether positive or negative. Like in Queens College, when Professor Mitropulis gave me a C- for a paper, he left a message that echoed Mrs. Adams – “Come on now, you can do better than this!!” – and he was right.  I had hung out until way too late the night before, and had handed in a well-written but half-assed paper, one that he immediately recognized as not being up to the quality of discussion I normally brought to class, and so he held me to task. Again, constructive and blunt feedback – and in the end, I aced that class, exactly as Mrs. Adams and Prof. Mitropulis expected.

I used to find it confusing that not all people appreciate bluntness like I do, but I’ve since learned from my wifey and my therapist that people don’t control their emotions the way I do, and as such, feedback can feel like an attack to them. For me, as I grew older and realized certain facts about myself and the way my brain worked, I realized that I didn’t care about other people’s feedback unless it made sense to me. If so, I’ll think about incorporating it; if not, I discard it and keep on keeping on. There was no emotional weight to it at all for me.  But, since that’s not the case for others, I often try to start with what some people call the “sandwich” approach – making sure to give feedback in between complimentary statements to ensure that the person understands that it’s not a personal attack, just something that may help.  Even then, not everyone appreciates the sandwich approach – some have told me it’s pandering, insulting, and in one case “pulling the rug from under them” – and so I’ve learned other methods, like the “STAR” or “SBI” approaches, which are more focused on results or behaviors rather than the specific person.  Personally, I’ve had success with a forward-looking approach with my work subordinates, since it tends to minimize the problems of my normal communication style – accidentally insulting them by not registering their emotions – and also allows me to teach by direct examples rather than pointing out mistakes that might upset them or make them feel bad.