Unfair feedbacks

What are long-term advantageous (for you) ways of dealing with unjust feedback in contexts where whoever is giving the feedback believes it to be true?

If you receive a specific negative feedback you are sure is unfair, being annoyed at this and becoming combative or withdrawn are natural and common but also immature and unproductive responses. Your best bet is to listen carefully and take notes and understand that a perception problem is a real problem, in the same way that a problem that could or should have been avoided but was not is a real problem.

Restriction: this advice is only applicable when whoever is giving the feedback believes it to be true. Dealing with truly intentionally disonest feedback requires an entirely different strategy (small tip: playing poker is a good way of learning what to do in such cases).

If you are perceived to be, say, someone who spends resources in an unthoughtful manner this is a problem even if you don't and you are extremely careful with resource usage - the perception itself has plenty of negative ramifications for yourself and the company and people around you will make worse decisions because of it.

Be happy and understand this feedback as a gift: the key reason for this is that it is often much easier to change perception than to fix a real problem. So you have a chance to revert the feedback with much less effort than it would be if it was a real problem - in which case you would need to both address the legitimate problem itself and the perception since fixing a problem in many cases does not entail people changing their view of you.

Given all that, think of a strategy to change the perception and execute it. Doing this in the long term will bring you several benefits:

• People will more often bring you more feedback since you don't make it a painful experience for someone to bring you their perceptions, right or wrong. Some of this other feedback will be accurate and help you grow;
  
• You will be more perceived as someone who changes and improves quickly;
  
• When you are working with changing perception in mind you will sometimes realize that the original feedback was not unfair after all, and when you do so you will already be on the road for improvement.