Feedback Is a Gift
Feedback: How to Receive It, Own It, and Grow From It
“Feedback is a gift” is one of those phrases that sounds wonderful until you are the person receiving it.
Praise feels like a gift. Being told you're exceeding expectations feels like a gift. Hearing that a client loved working with you or that your manager noticed how hard you worked certainly feels like a gift. Being told that you missed something important, disappointed your manager, aren't communicating effectively, need to be more proactive, or have developed a pattern that needs to change? That can feel considerably less generous.
And yet, some of the most valuable feedback we receive in our careers is uncomfortable precisely because it tells us something we couldn't—or didn't—see ourselves.
An assistant may believe she is being thoughtful and thorough—carefully prioritizing an overwhelming workload and avoiding unnecessary interruptions—while her executive experiences her as slow, insufficiently engaged, and prone to letting important details slip. Both accounts can be sincere. Neither requires incompetence or bad faith. They are simply views from opposite sides of the same working relationship, and feedback is what makes the distance between those views visible.
And the ability to receive it well—to actually hear it, understand it, and do something useful with it—is one of the most underrated professional skills.
Your First Job Is to Understand the Feedback, Not Defeat It
When someone gives us criticism, most of us have an almost immediate desire to explain ourselves. Your manager says, “I've noticed that several important emails haven't been responded to quickly enough,” and before they've finished the sentence your brain is already building the case: Tuesday was crazy. That email came in while I was at the event. I thought she was going to respond to that one. Nobody told me it was urgent. I had 200 other emails that day.
And maybe all of that is true. There is nothing wrong with context. There is, however, a meaningful difference between providing context and immediately mounting a defense. If every piece of feedback is met with an explanation for why it wasn't really your fault, the conversation very quickly stops being about how to make things better and starts becoming a debate about whether the feedback was technically justified.
Your first job is not to agree with everything being said. It isn't even to solve it immediately. Your first job is to understand it. Ask for examples. Ask what they would have expected you to do differently.
You might say, “I appreciate you telling me. Can you give me a couple of examples so I understand where you're seeing the gap?” Or, “I hadn't realized you were experiencing it that way. Can you tell me what you would have expected me to do differently?”
Then pause and listen. You don't have to formulate your defense, your explanation, or even your solution in the first 30 seconds. In fact, particularly when feedback feels emotional or surprising, one of the most professionally mature things you can do is absorb it before responding. That doesn't make you weak; it makes you coachable.
Reasons and Excuses Aren't the Same Thing
There is an important distinction between explaining what happened and using circumstances to absolve yourself of responsibility. Context matters, and being accountable doesn't mean pretending that circumstances outside your control didn't contribute to an outcome.
Imagine a report was due at 5:00 p.m., but Finance didn't send you the final numbers until 4:45. That's relevant information and you shouldn't pretend otherwise. You could say, “I couldn't get the report done because Finance didn't send me the numbers until 4:45.” Or you could say, “Finance didn't send me the final numbers until 4:45, which is what caused the delay. Where I could have handled it better was flagging earlier that we were at risk of missing the deadline. Next time, I'll set an earlier internal deadline with Finance and let you know sooner if we're at risk.”
The facts haven't changed. The ownership has. In the second statement, you have not taken responsibility for Finance being late. However, you did take responsibility for the part of the situation you could control. That's agency, and it's one of the clearest differences between someone who gets stuck explaining a problem and someone who starts thinking about what they can do differently next time.
When something goes wrong, it’s natural to notice all the reasons the outcome wasn’t entirely our fault. And often, we’re right. Very few workplace mistakes happen in a vacuum; someone communicated poorly, priorities changed, another department was late, your executive changed direction, the instructions weren’t clear, or there simply wasn’t enough time. All of that can be true, and all of it can be relevant.
But even after accounting for those circumstances, there is still a useful question to ask: What could I have done? Maybe you couldn’t control when Finance sent the numbers, but you could have followed up earlier or flagged that the deadline was at risk. Maybe the instructions weren’t clear, but you could have asked for clarification. Maybe a new priority landed on an already impossible list, but you could have asked what should move to make room for it. And sometimes the answer isn’t about what you could have done differently in that moment, but what system you could put in place to keep the same problem from happening again.
Accountability doesn't require pretending everything was your fault. It means being willing to look past everything that wasn't and find the part that was still yours to influence.
Find Your Part, Even When You Don't Agree With All of It
Sometimes feedback will feel completely accurate. Sometimes it will feel mostly accurate. And sometimes you'll walk away thinking, That’s not what happened at all.
Before dismissing feedback you disagree with, it's worth asking whether there is still something useful inside it. Your manager's characterization of the situation may not match how you remember it, but perhaps your communication contributed to the misunderstanding. Someone else may have dropped the ball first, but maybe you could have followed up. Expectations may genuinely have been unclear, but perhaps there was an opportunity to ask more questions. You may even have completed exactly what you were asked to do while missing the larger objective behind the request.
None of this means taking responsibility for something you didn't do, or agreeing with an assessment you believe is unfair. Accountability isn't performative self-blame. It's being able to disagree with part of the story without immediately dismissing everything the story might have to teach you.
Sometimes, after looking at the situation honestly, you'll decide that most of the feedback was fair. Other times, you may only find a small piece that belongs to you. That's enough, and that's the part you have the power to change.
Feedback Is Not Always a Debate
This can be uncomfortable to acknowledge, but workplace feedback is not always a courtroom proceeding where two sides present their evidence until someone determines who was objectively correct. Sometimes there isn't actually a disagreement to resolve. A manager is simply communicating an expectation.
If your executive says, “I need all of my meetings confirmed the day before,” and you believe confirming them the morning of has been working perfectly well, you can probably make a reasonable case for why your approach works. But that isn't necessarily the point. An expectation has been clarified. You now know what success looks like to the person you support, and continuing to argue for your preferred approach may mean missing the information they were actually trying to give you.
Other feedback is less about a specific expectation and more about someone's experience of working with you. That can be harder to hear because our instinct is often to prove that their perception is wrong. Imagine your executive says, “I don't feel confident that things are closed-loop unless I ask you about them.” You might immediately think of ten examples of things you handled without being asked, and those examples may be completely valid. But they don't necessarily invalidate what your executive is telling you.
If the person you support routinely wonders whether you saw the email, followed up with the vendor, confirmed the reservation, tracked the deadline, or remembered the thing they mentioned in passing last Tuesday, something isn't translating. Maybe the issue is consistency. Maybe it's communication or visibility. Maybe you're doing far more behind the scenes than they realize. Whatever the reason, if they don't feel confident that things are being handled, there is something worth paying attention to.
This is especially important in an Executive Assistant role because confidence is part of the deliverable. Your executive shouldn't have to continually wonder whether something has been seen, remembered, followed up on, or completed. Even when the work is happening exactly as it should behind the scenes, part of your job is creating enough visibility and consistency that they don't have to spend mental energy wondering about it.
Doing the work matters. Creating confidence that the work is being handled matters too.
But What If the Feedback Really Is Unfair?
Sometimes it will be. Managers are human. They misunderstand situations, forget conversations, communicate expectations poorly, and sometimes apply standards inconsistently. Occasionally, they are simply wrong.
Being coachable does not mean accepting every criticism as fact, and accountability should never require you to abandon your own judgment. You can correct a factual misunderstanding, provide context that materially changes the situation, ask for specific examples, or respectfully explain that you remember something differently. There is a difference between reflexively defending yourself and appropriately advocating for yourself.
There are also situations where the issue goes well beyond ordinary performance feedback. Discrimination, harassment, retaliation, abusive behavior, or other serious workplace concerns shouldn't be reframed as an opportunity to become “more coachable.” Those situations may require documentation, HR involvement, or another formal avenue.
Most disagreements at work, however, live somewhere in the much less dramatic middle. The feedback may be overstated, based on incomplete information, or simply not how you see the situation. That doesn't automatically make all of it useless. A helpful question is: Even if I don't completely agree with the diagnosis, is there something useful in the prescription?
If your manager tells you that you aren't communicating enough and you feel like you communicate constantly, you could spend the rest of the conversation listing every update, email, and message you've sent. Or you could ask, “What information would you like me to communicate more consistently, and at what cadence?” Maybe the answer reveals that the problem was never the amount of communication at all. It was the type, timing, or visibility of it.
Now you have something you can act on without agreeing to something you don't believe is true. You haven't conceded that your manager's entire assessment was correct. You've simply moved the conversation from debating what happened to understanding what needs to happen differently going forward.
Professional Feedback Is Not Personal Rejection
This can be especially hard for people who care deeply about doing excellent work. The more invested you are in being good at what you do, the easier it is for criticism of your work to feel like criticism of you.
Your manager says, “Your attention to detail needs to improve,” and somehow the message becomes, I’m bad at my job. A conversation about one part of your performance starts to feel like a judgment about your overall ability.
But “I missed something” is not the same as “I am incompetent.” “My manager is frustrated with this outcome” does not mean “My manager doesn't like me.” And “This behavior needs to change” is very different from “I am a failure.” Learning to keep those things separate is one of the healthiest professional skills you can develop, because once feedback becomes personal rejection, it becomes much harder to actually hear what is being said.
You will make mistakes during your career. You will misread situations, overlook details, make the wrong call, and have periods when you simply aren't doing your best work. At some point, someone will probably point out a weakness you were already painfully aware of, and at another, they may point out one you hadn't noticed at all. Neither has to become a referendum on whether you are capable or good at your job.
In fact, turning every mistake into a judgment about yourself can make improvement harder. Instead of asking what happened and what needs to change, you end up spending your energy recovering from what the feedback seems to say about you. The more useful approach is to treat it for what it is: information about your work at a particular moment, in a particular area, that gives you something to respond to.
A mistake is information. A pattern is information. Feedback is information.
What you do next is what matters.
Beware of the “Yes, But”
Defensiveness doesn’t always sound defensive. Sometimes it sounds very agreeable.
“Yes, absolutely, but…”
“I completely understand, although…”
“You're right. The only thing is…”
The problem isn't that what comes after the “but” is necessarily wrong. Your explanation may be completely valid. But if every acknowledgment is immediately followed by a reason the criticism isn’t quite accurate, you’re probably not leaving much room to actually hear the feedback.
There is nothing wrong with providing context, especially when it changes the way someone understands what happened. But timing matters. Listen to the whole thing first. Ask questions if you need to. Make sure you understand what your manager is actually concerned about before jumping in to explain your side. Otherwise, it's very easy to spend the entire conversation responding to each point as it comes up rather than actually hearing the larger message.
Before offering an explanation, ask yourself what purpose it serves. Does this context help your manager understand the situation more accurately or help the two of you figure out what should change? Or do you simply feel uncomfortable letting criticism sit there without immediately balancing it with your side of the story?
Those are two very different things, and it takes some self-awareness to know which one is driving you.
Sometimes the strongest response is simply, “That’s helpful. I hadn’t realized you were experiencing it that way. I’d like to think about how I can improve it.”
And then, as difficult as it may be, stop talking.
Accountability Is a Team Skill
The people we most want on our teams are rarely the people who never make mistakes. Those people don't exist. What matters far more is what someone does when something goes wrong.
People who are good at accountability don't hide mistakes or spend enormous amounts of energy proving that somebody else was technically more responsible. They don't make every difficult conversation so uncomfortable that their manager starts avoiding feedback altogether. And they don't become so focused on protecting themselves from blame that the rest of the team is left figuring out how to solve the actual problem.
They help move things forward.
When something goes wrong, a team-oriented response sounds like: What happened? What was my part in it? What needs to change? How do we prevent this from happening again? A defensive response tends to focus somewhere else: Whose fault was this really? Why shouldn't this count against me? How can I prove that I had a good reason?
The difference matters because mistakes rarely affect only the person who made them. Someone else may need to fix the issue, adjust a deadline, manage the client or executive's expectations, or change their own work as a result. When the person involved can acknowledge what happened and immediately become part of the solution, the team can spend its energy fixing the problem instead of negotiating responsibility for it.
Accountability doesn't mean volunteering to take the blame for everything that goes wrong. It means being secure enough to own what belongs to you and collaborative enough to focus on what happens next. Over time, that makes you someone people trust when things go wrong, not just when everything is going well.
And that makes you someone people want on their team.
Agency Is More Powerful Than Blame
There is another reason accountability matters: it gives you options.
If every problem is explained entirely by circumstances outside your control, you may be completely justified in your frustration, but you're also left with very little ability to change the outcome. Your executive changes plans constantly. Your colleagues are unreliable. The instructions weren't clear. There isn't enough time. Requests come through six different channels. Nobody responds when you follow up.
Maybe all of that is true. Now what?
Agency doesn't ask you to pretend those circumstances don't exist. It asks a more useful question: Given the reality of the environment I'm working in, what can I build, change, clarify, communicate, anticipate, or control?
If your executive frequently changes plans, maybe you build more confirmation points into the process. If another department routinely sends information late, you create an earlier internal deadline. If requests arrive through email, Slack, text, and conversations in passing, you create one place where you capture everything for yourself. And if your workload has genuinely become unrealistic, agency doesn't mean quietly working longer hours and hoping you can somehow keep up. It may mean flagging the capacity problem before something important gets dropped and asking your manager to help decide what moves.
None of those responses makes the original circumstances less frustrating, and none of them guarantees that the problem disappears. What they do is move you from identifying what is happening to you toward identifying what you can still do within it.
You won't always be able to change the environment you're working in. But there is usually something you can change about how you operate within it. Agency doesn't deny that a situation was difficult, unfair, or outside your control. It simply refuses to let that be the end of the story.
“I'll Try Harder” Is Not an Improvement Plan
One of the easiest mistakes to make after receiving feedback is to genuinely intend to improve without changing anything about the way you work. You leave the conversation thinking, I'll be more careful. I'll stay on top of it. I'll make sure that doesn't happen again. The intention is sincere. The problem is that intention alone isn't much of a system.
If your manager tells you that your follow-up has been inconsistent, don't simply resolve to “be better about following up.” Build a way to track outstanding items so you're not relying on memory. If you've missed details, create a quality-control checklist before work goes out. If meetings aren't adequately prepared, develop a standard meeting-prep process. If important emails are getting buried, establish designated inbox reviews. If your executive doesn't know where projects stand, create a consistent way to keep them updated.
The best response to feedback is often not more effort. It's a better system.
This becomes even more important when you've heard the same feedback more than once. Anyone can miss something once. But when the same issue keeps resurfacing, good intentions are probably no longer enough. At that point, the question isn't simply whether you're trying hard enough. It's whether the way you're working is actually designed to prevent the problem from happening again.
And once you've made a change, close the loop on the feedback itself. A few weeks later, you might say, “You mentioned last month that you weren't always sure where outstanding items stood. I've been maintaining the tracker and sending you the Friday recap since then. Has that improved things from your perspective? Is there anything you'd still like me to adjust?”
That kind of follow-up does more than show that you remembered the conversation. It shows that you took the feedback seriously enough to change something, paid attention to whether the change was working, and didn't wait for your manager to raise the issue again. Particularly when feedback has touched on trust or reliability, that can go a long way toward rebuilding confidence.
Ultimately, the goal isn't to become someone who never needs feedback. It's to become someone who knows what to do with it. “I'll try harder” is a promise. Changing the way you work is evidence.
Giving Feedback Is a Responsibility, Too
Of course, “feedback is a gift” only works if the person giving it is willing to do their part too. Being coachable doesn't mean employees should be expected to read minds, piece together months of unspoken frustration, or discover only when a role is in jeopardy that something hasn't been working for a long time.
If you manage someone, giving feedback is part of your responsibility to them. People deserve to know where they stand, particularly when something isn't meeting expectations. They also deserve enough time and clarity to actually do something about it. One of the hardest situations we see is when an employer has been frustrated for months, but the employee is hearing the full extent of that frustration for the first time when the relationship is already close to breaking down.
Useful feedback gives someone something they can work with. “You need to communicate better” may describe the frustration, but it doesn't tell the employee very much about what needs to change. “There have been several occasions recently when a deadline was at risk and I didn't know until after it had passed. Going forward, if you think something may be late, I need you to tell me before it becomes a problem so we can make a decision together” is much more useful. Now the employee understands the issue, why it matters, and what better communication looks like in practice.
Feedback should also be given with the genuine intention of helping someone succeed. If you've already decided that an employee is hopeless and every conversation has become another opportunity to collect evidence against them, that isn't really coaching. The point of raising a problem should be to give someone a fair opportunity to understand it, take responsibility for their part, and show that they can improve.
And if they do improve, tell them that too. If someone receives difficult feedback, takes it seriously, changes the way they work, and you can see the difference, acknowledge that progress matters. We can't ask people to be open to hearing where they're falling short while allowing every mistake to remain permanently on the record and every improvement to quietly disappear.
Accountability works both ways. Employees have a responsibility to hear feedback and do something with it. Managers have a responsibility to make sure they're giving people feedback they actually can do something with.
Feedback Is an Investment
There’s one more thing worth remembering the next time someone gives you thoughtful, constructive feedback: in many cases, it would have been easier for them not to.
Giving feedback can be uncomfortable, and plenty of managers avoid it for exactly that reason. Instead, they start quietly working around someone’s weaknesses. They double-check things themselves. They stop handing over certain responsibilities. They lower their expectations. Eventually, the employee may realize something is wrong, but by then the manager has been frustrated for months and the relationship can be much harder to repair.
So when someone is willing to sit down and say, “Here’s what I’m seeing, here’s where I think you’re falling short, and here’s what I need from you going forward,” there’s something important in that conversation beyond the criticism itself. They’re giving you information, but they’re also giving you a chance to do something with it. In many cases, the fact that the conversation is happening at all means there is still an investment in making the relationship work.
That doesn’t mean the feedback will always be delivered perfectly. It doesn’t mean every criticism will be fair, or that you need to agree with every assessment. But you now know something you didn’t know before about how your work is being experienced by your manager. That’s valuable, even when it’s uncomfortable.
The strongest professionals aren’t the ones who somehow make it through their careers without criticism. They’re the ones who know what to do when it comes. They can hear something uncomfortable without unraveling or immediately getting defensive. They ask good questions. They provide context when it matters. They own what belongs to them, change what needs to change, and build better systems when good intentions aren’t enough.
And then they move forward.
That’s really what coachability looks like. It doesn’t mean agreeing with everything you’re told or taking the blame for everything that goes wrong. It doesn’t mean becoming someone who never makes mistakes. It’s being able to hear something difficult, look at it honestly, figure out what’s useful, and let it make you better at what you do.
Maybe that’s where the “gift” part of feedback actually comes in. Not because criticism feels particularly generous when you’re sitting across from someone hearing it, but because it gives you something you didn’t have before: the chance to see your work from the other side of the desk and decide what you want to do with what you’ve learned.