How Do You React to Negative Public Feedback?

No one likes to get blasted, misunderstood, or criticized, particularly in public. But sometimes it happens (and gosh, I wish this wasn’t the case.)

The bigger our audience, the greater the chance we’ll get a bad review, a hostile post, community complaints, or negative survey responses. Each one hurts someone in your organization, even a little bit. When it happens, we all react differently.

We can dismiss🤨, dwell🥺, or become defensive😡, and depending on the circumstances, any of these trigger responses may be entirely wrong for the people we seek to serve. Ultimately there’s no one correct answer here because there’s no guaranteed way of avoiding criticism and also continuing to move ahead. Somebody’s not going to be happy with the way we are rocking the boat!

Perhaps the best thing any of us can do when the inevitable (but hopefully infrequent) blast comes our way is to respond with generosity and curiosity. (This is TOTALLY easier said than done—I know, but hear me out.)

Responding with curiosity may help us realize we made a mistake that we can apologize for. Responding with generosity might help create a more productive conversation. Responding with curiosity might help us identify things we can do better in the future. Responding with generosity might help your community of stakeholders trust you even more.

Maybe thinking to ourselves now, ‘the next time I get unwelcome feedback, I’m going to immediately adopt a stance of generosity and curiosity,’ will help us do exactly that rather than fall back on our gut reaction when we are surprised/shocked/startled. Author’s Note: Note to self.