Thanks for the Feedback
authors of the classic Difficult Conversations teach us how to turn evaluations, advice, criticisms, and coaching into productive listening and learning We swim in an ocean of feedback. Bosses, colleagues, customers-but also family, friends, and in-laws-they all have "suggestions" for our performance, parenting, or appearance. We know that feedback is essential for healthy relationships and professional development-but we dread it and often dismiss it. That's because receiving feedback sits at the junction of two conflicting human desires. We do want to learn and grow. And we also want to be accepted just as we are right now. Thanks for the Feedback is the first book to address this tension head on. It explains why getting feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, and offers a powerful framework to help us take on life's blizzard of off-hand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited advice with curiosity and grace. The business world spends billions of dollars and millions of hours each year teaching people how to give feedback more effectively. Stone and Heen argue that we've got it backwards and show us why the smart money is on educating receivers- in the workplace and in personal relationships as well. Coauthors of the international bestseller Difficult Conversations, Stone and Heen have spent the last ten years working with businesses, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
13mentions
12people
2016–2022years
85% recommend8% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I’ve just made this transition myself! Congratulations! I have a very short list of reading recommendations here: https://www.cenizal.com/reading/
In addition to the blog links on that page, I found these books to be the most useful:
High Output Management, by Andy Grove. My number one recommendation for anyone interested in managing people, particularly engineers. This book presents methods and processes for helping individuals maximize their impact, while remaining grounded in reality and humanity.
Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. This book gave me great insight into how I handle feedback and what I can do to make the most of it. It also helped me understand how others might take my feedback, and develop methods for sharing my feedback effectively.
The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier. A pragmatic guide to the stages of technical leadership, from tech lead to CTO. A great read even for engineers with no interest in people management, because it provides a clear line-of-sight into what those folks care about and how they make decisions.
- I'm partial myself to two books from the Harvard Negotiation Project (Douglas Stone, Shiela Heen, et al): Thanks for the Feedback (on how to receive feedback), and Difficult Conversations (on how to give feedback). I imagine books about the topic tend to all provide similar frameworks, I happen to like these two because they're very structured and I do well with that.
- On the topic I often recommend the great book Hard Conversations, and another by the same authors Thanks for the Feedback. They give a detailed breakdown of how communication actually works so that my overly technical brain can apply it.
- Thanks For The Feedback[1] is a pretty decent book on the subject. Highly recommended if you're interested both in the mechanisms and improving how you receive/give feedback.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science-Receiving-Wel...
- I don't know that any of them changed how I think about everything, but some books I liked that I think are somewhat less well known:
- Thanks for the feedback [1]. How to give and receive feedback well.
- Start [2]. Sort of your run of the mill self help book. Thought it had some nice insights in it.
- Glass House [3]. Talks about the deterioration of industrial towns and the society that used to be built around them.
- Thinking in Bets [4]. Approaching situations from the perspective of a gambler and how to choose what to do when you don't know all the facts.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114120-thanks-for-the-...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17249189-start
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939240-glass-house
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957157-thinking-in-bet...
- One of the most useful books I've ever read was "Thanks for the Feedback" [1]
I've read a lot of the more standard books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People", etc. I feel like this book is similarly valuable, but a lot less well known.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114120-thanks-for-the-...
