Feedback is one of the most effective ways I use to become better at my communication skills and also at any task completed. Not everyone finds it productive to receive or give feedback, but regardless it is important to be able to be able to analyze one another's work. Giving feedback in my opinion is also an art, because many times you could come across as too critical and may loose a connection with a coworker or teammate. It is important to learn how to receive feedback and use it to one’s advantage to grow as a professional and teammate.
A couple of years ago I was helping organize a conference for women in the community college system. It was a great experience and this was a situation where I remember thinking about how useful it would have been if we had received information of the previous years' planning committee for this conference. We would have learned what our audience wanted and how they felt about the message the organization wanted to portray through the conference. In general we can say that students, professionals and everyone can benefit from feedback.
The thing about feedback is that some people take it as negative when it should be positive criticism. Feedback helps you become a better individual and definitely helps industries that are trying to prevail in the mainstream. I to have had past experience with feedback, but it was somebody trying to mislead me into not succeeding. I work with kids, so everyday I want to hear feedback from them regardless on what it is. The thing I tell them is that if you guys don’t tell us what you want, we won’t know how to make the program a better place to be in.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your emphasis of feedback. I wish you well in your continuing career in academics and social work. As well as being a system of loops to connect communication and action like the text says, its is also a human are. There is a sense we are balancing creativity and constraint. We can be creative with our positive feedback to others performance while being critical with constraint. I think feedback is bad when it tries to close the loop of communication with maybe harsh interpretations or negative assertiveness. For me at work I enjoy the feedback from anyone especially patients (I work in a pharmacy) that felt I helped them out in a meaningful way to them. It connects the responses to my actions with self progression. Without feedback it's sometimes harder to strive harder.
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