Surviving Open Workplace Feedback Cultures

They’re supposed to improve us, but they only tear us apart — How do you survive them?

An open workplace feedback culture is a culture that focuses on open and honest feedback between all employees, regardless of where the employee stands on the ladder. Manager to boss. Employee to employee. Employee to president. Etc. And through this constant, continuous 360° feedback loop, the employee will improve their performance to unassailable heights of excellence.

Absolute Nonsense!

The entire premise of this concept rests on this single false axiom: People will always give good, honest, and unbiased feedback.

And I don’t want to be cruel, but the truth is most people are vile, cretinous beings that will use anything at their disposal to settle scores, keep others down, and manipulate situations to come out on top.

Feedback cultures give these machiavellian workplace bullies the very mechanism they need to keep you down and destroy you. Now, there are no barriers to their vile behavior. They are actually encouraged to trash you.

And the insanity is almost every company is adopting this mantra.

You will, guaranteed, in your working life have to deal with a culture like this.

So how do you survive it?

You’ll Go Insane Listening To All The Feedback

360° feedback means there is no escape

Quick personal story: I was giving a presentation to the entire company and Dale — the shipping intern! —sends me feedback after the preso that I need to smile more. Jokingly, I tell my manager about this and he writes this down as something I need to work on. Then he sends a note to Dale’s manager to praise him for giving open, honest feedback. Suddenly, Dale is giving me all kinds of notes on how I can improve and I’m on the hook for implementing them. Do you see what’s happened here? The whole thing isn’t about improving my performance, it’s about Dale scoring feedback points.

Honestly, you’ll go nuts trying to please everybody. You need to filter out the wheat from the chaff and only listen to valuable feedback.

What I do is create a list of what I will NOT listen to. For example:

• Opinions Anything based on opinion is garbage. This is easy to spot, it usually starts with the feed-backer saying “I think that…” That’s a dead giveaway. “I think you should use power-point slides with graphics because it makes it pretty.” “I think you should smile more because it’s more friendly.” See what I mean? That’s just an opinion, not a fact. Ignored.
• Vague Vague feedback is a killer. “your energy is low” or “you’ve had an off-year” or “you need to do better” or other such murky nonsense gets the boot. There is nothing of value to build on there so why even listen to it? Ignored.
• Doubtful Sources Anybody except for your boss or a respected co-worker should be ignored. Dale, Mr. Shipping Intern, you are ignored!
• Overly Positive Feedback “Love working with you” or “totally great to have you in our corner” and other such platitudes get ignored. What the hell do I do with that? It’s good to know and gives me warm fuzzies, but how do I actualize something like that? It’s not possible so, ignored.
• Time Constraints This is a piece of brutal honestly: if I’m busy then I’m not going to bother listening to feedback. I’ll file it under “L” for Later — much much later, if ever. Getting your job done and building something of value for the company beats actualizing feedback every day of the week.

I adjust the list over time and change it from company to company, as the culture and the people will vary.

It’s best to internalize the list, so it becomes a gut, instantaneous reaction to reject anything that falls into one of these categories. You don’t want any negativity seeping into your psyche and throwing off your game.

Fortify Your Psychological Safety Wall

The unfettered attacks will break you down

Being constantly attacked from all sides erodes your psychological safety. It’s just natural to view everybody as a potential threat when they are, in fact, a potential threat.

I’ve lived it and it ain’t pretty. Every time you do anything (presentation, project posters, speech, etc) a bunch of people highlight your failures and shoot you down. I’ve had people speak openly about how I could improve a presentation during the actual presentation!! How is that for throwing you off your game?

Anyway, the cold reality is that you’re not going to perform well at your job if you’re expecting to get crucified for doing your job. It’s just that simple.

You need to build walls to protect your psychological safety.

Here are the ones you need:

• Your Manager as a Wall (I hope you have a good manager, otherwise this won’t work.) You need a trusted somebody to reality-check your feedback. I’ve had people level feedback at me that I did a bad job on a project and caused unnecessary conflict amongst the team members. This devastated me. Then I bounced it off my manager who said that was all crap, you did a good job and that conflict, which he was across, had nothing to do with me. Your manager can be a wall against spurious feedback.
• Your Gut as a Wall The insane bit about all this open-feedback culture nonsense is that it’s entirely focused on what others think about you and not what you think about yourself (which is far more important). You know You better than anybody else. Trust your gut. It will tell you if the feedback is right or wrong or just plain stupid. Listen to what it says. That’s what it’s there for.
• Your Self-Compassion as a Wall Self-compassion is the ability to forgive yourself, and provide warm understanding to your own faults and mistakes. You are, after all, only human, which is a fact that a lot of people in these feedback cultures quickly forget. Build your self-compassion into a wall. If you get negative feedback and it’s true, recognize that part of being human is being imperfect. It’s not your fault. Warm and protect yourself with this compassion. I’m quite a fan of Smiling Mind, here’s an excellent blog about building your self-compassion: https://blog.smilingmind.com.au/how-to-give-yourself-the-same-care-and-kindness-you-give-to-others

You Can’t Stop the Feedback But You Can Improve It

It pours and pours till you’re all washed up

99% of the time, feedback in these cultures is vague, mean, totally unactionable, and it keeps coming and coming and coming.

Quick personal story: I got a promotion and suddenly I’m the boss of my coworkers. And just as suddenly there is a flood of negative feedback on my performance from those same coworkers: “This project was bad and should have been better”, “I’m unhappy because J.A. isn’t enabling me to do my best work”. Etc. The challenge was twofold here: 1.) negative and vague feedback and 2.) the feedback is totally biased because they wanted to be the boss. To counteract this, I gave feedback on their feedback. “Can you be more specific on what I can do to empower you to do your best work? Your feedback is vague here.” “Can you tell me why the project was bad and what I could have done to make it better? It’s not clear how I could solve this from what you’re saying.” It takes balls to do this, but if you don’t ,their vague, negative, and unhelpful feedback won’t stop. And you never know if somebody high-up might hear their feedback, take it for real, and rescind your promotion. In this situation, I managed to slow the stream of negative feedback and got people to put more thought into giving me constructive feedback vs just dumping vague crap on me.

I say if you’re going to get it — and you are going to get it my friend at companies like this — then you might as well get feedback that’s as-valuable-as-possible.

So give feedback on their feedback, but follow this advice:

• Don’t be Vicious Being vicious dulls the blade of your intent, if you know what I mean. You’ll get a far better reception to your feedback on their feedback if you are open, honest, and polite. Stick it to them with kindness.
• Be Timely Give feedback on their feedback the moment you get it. Show them you’re not just a pile of garbage to dump their negativity into. Bounce their vague negative nonsense right back at them.

Final Thoughts

If none of this works and you are being crushed under the relentless onslaught of negative feedback from machiavellian workplace bullies, then get another job.

Your mental health and well-being are worth more than any stupid job.

I didn’t do this and tried to stick it out in such a place. The negativity seeped into my mind and I started second-guessing everything I was doing. I became my own bully. It paralyzed me. It destroyed me.

Don’t let this be you. Maintain your integrity, your self-esteem, and your psychological safety. You are the most important person in the world and should treat yourself as such.

Build your walls, your filters, and your self-compassion. Protect yourself.

And good luck. You’ll need it.