Julian’s Business Tips: Negative Feedback from The Apprentice
As long term readers will know, I have a love-hate relationship with the BBC show, ‘The Apprentice’.
Just like you shouldn’t use Love Island as a source of dating tips, you shouldn’t use The Apprentice as a demonstration of how to be commercially successful!
However, whilst putting together a bunch of arrogant, self-centred, wannabees in the same show and making them compete for something has always been a winning formula for good television, the producers need to find a winner who goes on to be successful, to keep the series going.
As this year’s Apprentice winner is just being chosen, I was reading an article from last year’s winner, Harpreet Kaur, about how to respond to feedback.
She was saying that it’s easy to be derailed by negative feedback, so she gives four ways in which you can respond to it.
• You’re going to sit on it and you’re going to think, ‘Hang on, they might be right. Maybe they’ve got a point.’ You don’t have to admit it to them. You just say, ‘Cool, thanks.’
• You think, ‘I agree with them 100 percent and this is what I should be doing and the direction.’
• You say, ‘Maybe I don’t quite agree. But you’ve just given me another seed to think about and I’m going to go look into that instead. You’ve done me a favour by pointing something out to me that I didn’t realise before.’
• You can just completely throw the feedback away – just say, ‘Thank you’ and move on. You’ve digested it. You’ve realised from a calculation based on your experience and knowledge, that actually, that person isn’t right.
Ultimately, she said, welcome all feedback, keep the emotion out of it and go with your gut and your experience. Now that IS good advice!
