Over the years, I have been fortunate to work with some amazing talent across companies. The way people give/accept feedback can be mapped on a spectrum of either being too defensive or being too supportive. Of course, it's very hard for the leaders to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback and equally hard for their reports to accept one.
On giving feedback, there is an interesting pattern I have noticed. The more experience a leader gains in a role, their ability to tolerate bad work decrease drastically. Simply put, being direct and brutal is a function of age. That's exactly the test of being a true leader. Some find it hard and some do it anyways.
Surprisingly, I have found this to be the most efficient way in communicating how far off your work has been from where it should be. If it's bad, it's bad. It saves time and helps bring people on to the same page faster.
Brutality often comes from the people who cares about their work and team. People who are disinterested usually give surface level feedback that's very sugar coated. You can sense that in just one minuted conversation with them.
More often in my career I have learnt the most when the feedback started with a tone of “This is very bad”, followed by detailed breakdown of why the work was bad. That start, sets the seriousness of the conversation and got me to focus and pay attention deeply than I would have otherwise.
Being brutal also helps in performance review of your reports. Your reports exactly know what to focus an and which direction to head to. Eventually, this also helps to build good bonds with them.
On accepting feedback, great talent accept feedback with utmost humility as if they accept a gift. Just like good people don't judge the gift, great talent doesn't judge the tone of the feedback and rather focus on the substance of the feedback itself.
The only time people become too defensive or offensive when they are given some feedback is when there's a very high gap between their perception about themselves and the substance they have built over the years.
I was once having a discussion with a very senior designer and a good friend of mine, Hardik Pandya about what traits great talent possess when they encounter feedback. He gave me a very simple framework: “Yes, and > No, but”. Great talent will always say “Yes, and” and try to contribute on top of incoming feedback. Mediocre talent more often play defensively by saying “No, but” and tries to avoid ideas from the feedback giver. He mentioned think about why the fork feature exists in Github. Somebody has already built something, when you forks a repo, you say “yes” to it “and” build a new thing on top of it.
I have seen thousands of times in conversations when somebody is trying to share really great ideas but the listener constantly interrupts them with “No, but” narrative. The worst thing is it eventually kills the intent of the person to share their ideas freely. This is the exact set of people companies usually find it hard to spot and hire.
I usually seek feedback actively rather than waiting for it to be received in performance reviews. This simply accelerates growth. Feedback has a really good property that if directional can accelerate the growth which you can't even think of.
In the end, accepting feedback is a choice. If you accept it, you'll see a slope else flatness anyways follows.