Hi there, hope you are all doing well in these interesting times! I spent a lot of time last week doing our regular performance evaluations at work. That made me realize how much better I have gotten at receiving constructive feedback and improve based on it. At this point, I think I owe a lot of what I accomplish to this specific skills.

The post below is a series of reflections on what I learned to do better when handling feedback from others. Hope you enjoy it!

Receiving Feedback Is A Skill

Delivering feedback is a critical part of my day job as a manager at Google. However, it took me a while to realize that receiving feedback is one of the skills that helped me grow the most in my career.

For many of us, our job is the first setting where we receive developmental feedback from people other than our parents or teachers. That experience may be quite shocking.

I still remember the first time I got professional feedback early in my career. I remember almost every single word that my manager chose to use.

What I remember even more vividly though is the strong reaction that feedback caused in me. Within seconds, I got defensive, I felt like I was being criticized, attacked, unappreciated. I heard what they were trying to tell me, but something inside me kept translating that into a personal criticism. A statement about how I, personally, fell short of expectations.

Good feedback sounds like "here's one thing you can do better next time". Better feedback sounds like "here's one thing that you could do differently to achieve a greater result".

Embracing that mindset allowed me to accept, process and build on feedback. While I can't say I prefer criticism over praise, constructive feedback no longer makes me uncomfortable. Instead, I actively seek it.

Changing my mindset around feedback required me to make two key changes:

• stop doing things that hurt my ability to improve
• start doing things that help build on what I hear

Read More (6 min read)

Also, here's a bonus post, a review of a book I liked.

Programming Machine Learning

A book written with developers in mind, covering Machine Learning with a hands-on approach. Each new topic is introduced by laying out a real world problem, guiding readers through implementing a working solution based on ML algorithms and then explaining the theoretical foundations in a very accessible way.

Read more (2 min read)