Why One Person Grows Through Feedback and Another Stays Stuck
David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam. In this article he explains how not to get defensive at work and why receiving feedback shapes your development and career. You learn why feedback can feel like criticism, and which three questions decide when to listen.
Picture two colleagues. One never really listens to feedback. Every remark gets deflected, waved away or explained. The other listens, takes what is useful, and lets the rest go without losing sleep over it.
Who develops faster? Who gets promoted sooner?
In my years as a director I watched this play out again and again. The people who stay open to feedback grow harder. Visibly faster than the rest. Learning how not to get defensive at work is a skill that steers your career.
The Same Feedback, Two Completely Different Reactions
Take those two colleagues again. Their manager gives them roughly the same message. For example: "Your presentations are strong on content, but you lose the room in the first five minutes."
One hears useful information. Something to work with.
The other hears an attack. It feels like a verdict on who he is.
Same words. Same manager. Yet it arrives completely differently. And this is the crucial point to think about: who decides whether something is constructive feedback or criticism?
You do. You attach the charge to it. Criticism is feedback with a negative judgment you add yourself.
Why Feedback Hurts
The reason we so often experience feedback as criticism runs deeper than the remark itself.
We all carry an image of ourselves. And an image we project to the outside world. The successful manager. The empathetic colleague. The person who has it all under control. We build that image carefully. This process is mostly automatic and subconscious, but very, very real.
The moment information arrives that touches that image, because it clashes with how we see ourselves, it feels like a threat to our identity. That carefully built picture might turn out to be different than we thought.
Our subconscious does everything it can to fend off that threat. We question the other person's sincerity. We dispute whether the feedback is even right. We attack. Or we exaggerate and drop into the victim role.
All of it human. And all of it counterproductive.
Because the core is this: you are okay as you are. And at the same time, on some points you can become more effective. Those two things can exist side by side. Feedback helps you with the second, without touching the first.
Three Questions to Decide Whether to Listen
Being open to feedback does not mean swallowing everything whole. The colleague who develops fastest listens selectively. She weighs what is useful and lets the rest go.
Adam Grant taught me a simple model with three criteria. Before you take feedback seriously, you ask yourself three questions about the person giving it.
Does this person know what she is talking about? Someone with real expertise here deserves more weight than someone talking loosely over the top of it.
Does this person have your best interests at heart? Feedback from someone invested in your growth carries more weight than from someone with their own agenda.
Has this person actually seen you in action? A judgment based on observation is more useful than an assumption from the sidelines.
If the feedback scores on all three, it is worth reflecting on carefully. If one is missing, you may weigh it more lightly. That keeps you open without letting everything in.
How to Practise This in Daily Work
When you notice yourself getting defensive, that is your signal. That rising resistance is exactly the moment to pause.
Ask yourself one question before you react: what if there is something true in here? You do not have to accept it right away. You are only opening the door a crack.
If you do not understand the feedback, ask for concrete examples. And thank the other person. In most cases they are taking a risk by sharing feedback. Apart from that one colleague with no filter, most people take a personal risk. The relationship might suffer for it. And still they tell you something that makes you better. That deserves your thanks.
Give yourself a day to let it settle before drawing conclusions. The resistance often eases on its own when you give it room.
This is work you can practise. When leaders come to me with feedback patterns that get in their way, we look together at what lies beneath the resistance. Often it is that image of themselves asking for protection. In a course of leadership guidance we work through it calmly. For leaders at director level, executive coaching is a natural next depth. And for a leader who wants to train this skill in a focused way, a 1-on-1 leadership course is a concrete next step. Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.
Want to read more about how self-image affects our ability to learn? Tasha Eurich's work on self-awareness offers useful insights: What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It).
