 Learning how to handle criticism and learn from criticism is an incredibly important step for everyone. As you progress your career and certainly as you progress through the management ranks, you are asked to handle more and more criticism in a positive way. It can be infuriating to get criticism after you put your heart and soul into planning a project, building a team or any number of other activities and tasks. You cannot please everyone, nor should you try. Learn five actions to turn even the harshest of criticism into useful digestible feedback that won't destroy your confidence. How great managers handle criticism comes down to looking for the learning points and creating actions, whether the criticism is justified or not, whether it is fair or not. Worry about what you can learn for each situation rather than if the criticism is fair. Get better at dealing with criticism at work by following these five actions for how to handle criticism. Firstly, listen carefully and acknowledge the criticism. Secondly, ask questions to get the specifics. Third, find the kernels of truth. Fourth, create an action plan. And then fifth, practice receiving feedback. Being in positions of responsibility exposes you to more criticism. It is an unavoidable part of the job. Leaders and managers need to build emotional resilience and mental toughness without shutting off their empathy and consideration for others. I hope what we covered today will help you improve how you're dealing with criticism at work. My name is Jess Coles, and if you're new here, enhance.training shares people management expertise, resources and courses for you to manage your team with integrity and fairness and get outstanding results. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as a video timestamp, so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first action to handle criticism at work is to listen carefully and acknowledge the criticism. When being criticised, keeping your emotions under control is the first task. Counter criticising, being defensive, showing anger, annoyance, hurt and any other negative emotion doesn't help you in handling the criticism in the workplace. You mentally turn the, this is personal, response into a, this is a learning opportunity and listen to what is being said. Do your best to take in the messages and information without ignoring or challenging it. Then seek to understand what is being told to you. Don't interrupt, use your body language to encourage them to say everything they plan to. Keep good eye contact, keep your facial features positive and open, use little nods and lean forward in an attentive posture. Developing the habit or action of listening carefully with positive body language when being criticised is pretty key for managers and leaders. If you don't listen to your staff they will stop telling you anything useful. Then guess how effective you'll be. Be as encouraging as possible to the person giving you negative feedback or criticism. After the person has finished speaking, always thank them for sharing their feedback regardless of what you think of their feedback. The second action that great managers handling criticism take is to ask questions to get specifics. The majority of people give feedback in general terms. For example, I think your plan is rubbish or I can't see how this project is going to work or this piece of work has loads of mistakes. Great that they are voicing their concerns. To make the feedback useful to you understanding what exactly they don't like or disagree with is needed. Ask questions to get more depth. Ask questions to move the feedback from opinion led to factually led feedback. Then the criticism and negative feedback becomes useful to you. For the I think your plan is rubbish comment you could ask what exactly makes this plan rubbish? What steps need to be changed in your opinion? What limits this plan from working? For the I can't see how this project is going to work comment you could ask what do you think is stopping the project working? What parts of the plan do we need to change? What would you do instead? Keep asking clarification questions until you understand the specifics of the criticism and the why behind the criticism. Asking questions to learn more demonstrates you are listening and are interested in what they think good for any manager leading a team. The third action to handle criticism at work is to find the kernels of truth. A loss of criticism is individuals expressing their difference of opinion. There can be a huge range of reasons why they are criticising if for example they could feel threatened in some way or they might be afraid of looking silly if they need to learn something completely new or they may have spotted something really important that you've missed. You can learn a lot more than you think from criticism if you work to figure out what is behind the criticism. As a manager or leader of a team learning the cause of the criticism is gold dust when it gives you signposts towards what you need to fix to improve team performance. Don't receive criticism as a personal knock or a put down. Ask yourself why are team members or colleagues criticising? Keep asking questions until you understand what is behind the criticism. When you understand a problem you have a good chance of fixing it to the benefit of all. If you don't understand the problem the chances of fixing it are very small. Great managers look to remove problems and enable their teams to do the best work they can. Removing problems is a key way to leverage the efforts of your team members to produce great results. A manager that can get their team producing great results is going to be in demand and be asked to manage more people. Work to find the kernels of truth in the criticism. The fourth action that great managers handling criticism take is to create an action plan. There is no better response to criticism than taking action to address that criticism. For example, changes you are proposing are resulting in a criticism because a high performing team member feels their status is being threatened. You can invite them to take responsibility for an important high profile project as a way of reconfirming their status and keeping them engaged. They will love that you've listened to them and took them seriously and the rest of your team will be also very positive towards you. Another example, you are criticised for not dealing with a high performer that treats the rest of the team poorly. Take action to address the high performance behaviour towards the rest of the team. Your team will be impressed and love you for taking action. Another example, if your manager comments that they don't know what you're up to work out what KPIs you can provide and create a projects and activities summary and email it to them each week. Then book in one-on-one meetings with your manager to keep them up to date. Your manager will be impressed by your response to their comments and your proactivity. There will be times that criticism given is criticism to put you down or knock your confidence. The most important action is to recognise what drives the criticism say job insecurity and not let these types of comments impact the job that you're doing. Do the best you can to understand what is behind the criticism and do your best to take action to address the underlying reasons for the criticism. I've found that in 90% plus of the time that I've received criticism I can do something positive to change the situation. Create an action plan and take action so you are personally better off. The fifth action to handle criticism at work is to practice receiving feedback. There is definitely an art to receiving feedback, good or bad. Knowing what to do when receiving criticism helps massively. And practice receiving negative feedback allows you to gain control over your emotions and your responses when being criticised. I've found that when you can control your emotions and responses you can reframe the criticism into a learning opportunity much more quickly which in turn helps you deal with the criticism in a much more positive way. The more practice you have at managing your emotions and mindset in the face of criticism the quicker and better you'll become at dealing with criticism at work. Seek out feedback, ask for feedback and when you receive feedback, good or bad, always be grateful and be positive and thankful towards the person giving you the feedback. Taking this approach will encourage that person to continue giving you feedback. If you deny the feedback, don't take it in, don't understand it or worse be defensive or counter criticism with your criticism of your own the other person won't give you useful feedback in the future. While not getting any feedback may be easier to deal with no feedback will slow your growth and ability to manage teams and others effectively. Encourage others to give you feedback by asking for it and carefully managing your emotional reactions to that feedback. So in summary, learning how effectively does handle criticism makes the prospect of having to deal with criticism at work a lot more manageable. Remember that most of the time criticism is not directed at you personally but rather at your ideas, actions and decisions or the situation these create. Encouraging challenge and criticism from colleagues and team members when creating solutions to problems results in measurably better outcomes. As you progress through the management ranks learning how to deal with criticism constructively is a must. You cannot please everyone and nor should you try. Instead learn how to recognize criticism as a great learning opportunity to improve what you do and take action. The five key actions for how great managers handle criticism are firstly listen carefully and acknowledge the criticism secondly ask questions to get the specifics third find the kernels of truth fourth create an action plan and fifth practice receiving feedback. If you have any questions on how great managers handle criticism five key actions to take please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. And don't forget to take a look at the additional videos and resources in the description below. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.