Why we're defensive when receiving feedback
A founder I know was asking me why engineers get defensive when receiving feedback. This was/is one of my areas of improvement. I think this is why:
Feedback is an opinion, not a fact. In fact, three people in your team could give you three different feedbacks.
Some of us want to improve ourselves, but not every situation has a takeaway for us to improve. Sometimes things just happen randomly and you’ll go crazy if you start looking for meaning in everything.
Saying yes to the feedback doesn’t mean accepting guilt. Feedback is not a police interrogation where you don’t want to admit, “I killed him.” It does not mean you’re at fault. It does not mean you completely screwed up. Saying yes does not mean you’re committing to changing yourself. It just means you’re going to think about it with an open mind, without being defensive about it, and whatever the conclusion of your thinking is, you’ll follow it.
Some of us feel the need to respond to feedback on the spot, so we end up saying no. Instead, take the time to think it over.
Sometimes we’re defensive because we’re afraid negative feedback will hurt our reputation1. But nobody has so much influence they can doom your entire career. So this becomes an unhealthy obsession on the part of many engineers. By contrast, I’ve observed that quite a few businesspeople don’t care at all about what people think of them. This is something some of us engineers should learn from2.
Defensiveness could hurt us more than accepting the feedback.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care AT ALL about what others think of us, but that some of us should care LESS about it.