Feedback Strategies: To Praise or Not to Praise

(Flickr)

I read the articles How to Craft Constructive Feedback and The Difference Between Praise and Feedback. The two articles had a different focus, but both promoted the idea that sometimes it's a good idea to withhold praise, although the contexts were very different.

The article on constructive feedback said that sometimes your feedback isn't necessary. Not everything that someone does, particularly in the realm of art and other creative pursuits, requires outside opinion or interjection. It can be enough to just see it. Perhaps you will like all or some of it, perhaps you will not, but that's not its purpose. Its purpose is to express something from the heart and mind of the creator. In the situations where feedback is desired, it shouldn't constructive, not mean. Simply telling someone that you didn't like something does nothing to help them improve it, and if you're unkind in your criticism, it's unlikely that they'll take your advice anyway.

The article on praise and feedback was interesting in that I wasn't quite sure how I felt about labeling praise as a bad thing. After reading the article, I understood better that it's not so much about withhold praise per se, but about being more involved in the thought processes that children are using, and allowing them to develop their own thoughts and opinions. I do think that our culture tends to overpraise, but I see some value in it when its deserved and focused on the correct thing. I find Carol Dweck's ideas about process praise to be a good middle ground.

Feedback Thoughts

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I read the articles 14 Signs Your Perfectionism Has Gotten Out of Control and Overcoming the Fear of Feedback. I have some perfectionist tendencies, although they tend to be focused on specific things  rather than being a generalized perfectionism. Several of the points made in 14 Signs definitely applied to me, and are things that I'm aware of and try to control. Procrastination and a go big or go home mindset are probably two of my worst flaws, but I have managed to wrangle them quite a bit as I've gotten older.

The article about how to overcome a fear of feedback was very interesting. In some situations, particularly when the criticism seemed particularly harsh or unfair, I have had to pull back hard on a desire to lash out. Most of the time, I have a completely backwards way of responding to criticism: I fix the thing I'm being criticized or corrected for, and do it exactly the way the criticizer wants, but I do it out of spite. For example, while I was in Afghanistan, one of my coworkers accused me of never taking out the trash (it was a shared responsibility). My response was to not only take out the trash every single day, but to go out of my way to do all of the office clean up that we shared. He and I still laugh about it. He told me that I have a warped idea of what spite looks like.

There are some situations where I very much want feedback, and I think that I tend to take it well. I think that it comes across better when you aren't only slapped with criticism, but also receive positive feedback to highlight what you're doing right.