By ROBERT JUMPER
One Feather Editor
“No give and take. No exchange of thought. It gets you nowhere, particularly if the other person’s tail is only in sight for the second half of the conversation.” -Eeyore the donkey
We don’t want to hear it. All the negativities. If they are not praising us, then we prefer not to hear anything from them at all. They have a right to remain silent.
A consistently funny feature on the series Saturday Night Live was the animation of Mr. Bill. Mr. Bill was a clay figure who was constantly being mashed in part or in whole by Mr. Hand or his clay counterpart, Sluggo. Mr. Bill’s signature line was “Oh no! He’s going to be mean to me!” In Mr. Bill’s case, he was usually right. The problem was that Mr. Bill never seemed to learn from his encounters with Mr. Hand and would be right back in the same predicament in the next episode.
Fear of negativity or rejection is common in our society. We don’t like to have our behavior analyzed. It might mean extra work or, in some cases, an additional session of therapy. Besides, you can’t please everybody, right?
We are not immune to fear of criticism hear on the Qualla Boundary. If you happen to be in a profession where you provide a public service or deliver a product to the public, there is always going to be someone who is not pleased with one or the other. Indeed, you cannot please all of the people all of the time.
So, does that mean we should never ask for feedback on our work or work product? Should we be afraid of, for example, surveys of the public concerning our product or performance?
I have always told friends and staffs that my belief is that we are all marketers and salespeople to a certain extent. Whether we are in a business or at home, we are constantly selling something. At work, it is the product or service that we sell. At home, we might be selling our way of life, our interests, and even our faith. And, if we are going to be any good at selling, we must be committed to the “thing” that we sell. Half-hearted commitment to anything will not produce best effort or good outcome.
If you have bought in to something, are committed to something, It personally stings a bit when anyone criticizes your effort or your product. In your mind, they are criticizing you. Personally. At that point, it doesn’t matter to you if the criticism is justified. The only thing that matters is that you feel attacked.
In the realm of tribal politics, as with many other things, appearances matter. A little bit of gossip can have big implications to political futures. Keeping in mind that gossip may or may not be factual, the person on the receiving end of criticism based on gossip will naturally be defensive.
And we sometimes get so battered by people’s opinions that we become too defensive to be objective.
Researching best outcomes has been a staple of marketers for decades, maybe even centuries. The logic is simple. If you want to know how your product or service is being received, the best way to know is to ask those who are using your product or service.
An amazing thing that you hear from people who serve is their predisposition concerning asking for feedback from the community. Managers and supervisors who discourage even the asking of questions because they either presume a negative response, like Mr. Bill, or worse, they know that there is a justified negative response coming and they don’t want to hear it.
We routinely encounter those who would be just fine with never asking questions about their product nor service. Rather than conduct a survey of the community, they prefer to pick up feedback from random gossip or from their circle of friends and family.
You see this behavior on social media as well. Instead of posting information, that will be subjected to primarily unfiltered feedback on a public community venue, public figures will post information to their individual, less followed and less public, social media pages. Why would they do that? To control the negative feedback that they might endure on a more public page.
The problem with suppressing community feedback is that businesses, non-profit entities, and governments rarely improve their products and services through positive feedback. Surely, compliments will boost morale and that can lead to better productivity, but the real, substantive change occurs when we take the time to listen to the issues and concerns that people have with what we are doing.
Some folks just cannot feel good about themselves unless they feel better or superior to another person. It is all about that “crabs in a bucket” mentality that we have talked about before in commentary. The mindset that rather than bettering myself, it is easier just to pull the others down so that they stay at my level. It is not surprising that sometimes we hear much more negative than positive feedback in our lives. We are so used to hearing it that we have ready made excuses for when the bad review hits. “They didn’t ask the question in the right way.” “They put a negative spin on the question so it was inevitable that they would get negative feedback.” “Those negative people are just uninformed.”
Instead of making excuses or condemning the messenger, what if we learned to be analytical when it comes to feedback from our community? It is hard to detach ourselves from our dedication to our work, but if we could learn to disconnect long enough to listen to the feedback for the betterment of ourselves and our community, both would benefit, and our products and services would get better. And no matter how good we all are, we may all benefit from getting better.
Taking a term from my mom’s kitchen, when it comes to information gathering, I like to use a sifter. Mom would use it when baking to sift out any impurities or lumps in her flour. She would put the flour in the container, crank the handle, and the fine, powdery flour would be stirred and shaken to the preparation table and any of the impurities or unbroken lumps would remain in the sifter. When looking at feedback of any sort, sift through it. The factual, relevant information is the fine flour. The emotional, whimsical, and vindictive gossip, like the lumps and impurities, should stay in your sifter and be tossed out.
Clamming up, not engaging, or hiding when it’s time to analyze will not help us grow as individuals or as community. Everyone is going to respond to your inquiry from wherever their minds are. It is not rocket science. It is just good common sense. We do not need to be ostriches with our heads in the sand. If it helps, look at negative feedback as just another form of adversity. And if there is anything Cherokee people know how to do, it is overcome adversity. We don’t hide from it. We listen, learn, and adapt. It is how we have flourished for thousands of years.
