What to do When Your Best Work Gets the Most Feedback

Here’s something weird but true: sometimes really great work gets more critical feedback than work that is mediocre, bad, or good enough. That’s because when a deliverable or work product is almost perfect people get excited and want to help push it over the line. And when work is really good, there might be interesting little problems around the edges that people find fun to work on because they’re building on a solid foundation. For example, a marketing plan that is really great but left out one social media platform might get everyone excited and talking about how to use Bluesky for the rest of the meeting. Or a business case that is rock solid but doesn’t talk about one small expense might get everyone piling on to talk about what that expense is, and how to lower it, and whether it’s avoidable and before you know it people are helpfully creating  spreadsheets to solve this minor oversight.

When you’re on the receiving end of this it can be overwhelming. Your feelings can drop from “Yay, people really like this” to “I’m getting so much feedback this must be terrible and is there a table I can crawl under?” Here are a few tips about how you can recognize and interrupt this pattern, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end. 

How to identify disproportionate criticism and what to do about it

I first twigged to this pattern of behavior when I was a student at the writing workshop I talked about in my last article. We were in a critique group meeting and one of my classmates had submitted a really wonderful story, easily a lot of people’s favorite that week. Our instructors thought it was great, too. The story just had one or two areas that needed a little tweaking. We all got very excited trying to find a way to perfect this story we loved. We came up with more and more ideas and the student was writing down notes as fast as she could. 

Then one of our teachers called a timeout. He pointed out that we were giving a lot of really specific feedback on a very small plot point. He didn’t want the story’s writer to misunderstand what was going on and think her story sucked. He pointed out how the group was caught up in the excitement of trying to perfect this already very good story. It wasn’t that our ideas were bad, but we’d lost a sense of proportion. And furthermore, we weren’t going to solve this now; our job was to provide the feedback and let the writer decide how to handle it. 

If you think this might be happening to you, ask yourself:

• Did the feedback start out very positive?
• Are you getting a lot of critical feedback related to just one or two specific parts of a much larger deliverable? 
• Are those specific parts relatively small, or not related to the main value of the deliverable? 
• Are people trying to solve the problem and look like they’re having fun doing it? 
• Do you agree with the diagnosis but think the proposed solutions are all over the place and you need time to think? 

I was on the receiving end of this scenario just last week. I was meeting with my novel writing critique group and they were giving me feedback on a scene from my novel. The feedback all started out very positive with just a few minor questions or points of confusion. Then a couple of the members started to hone in on two areas where the scene could be a lot stronger, and take it from pretty good to really good. They got caught up in figuring out how to do this. I got some great suggestions and a number of reasons why these parts weren’t as strong as the rest of the scene. I agreed that these two places could and should get reworked.

But the feedback kept going and getting more and more detailed and more and more impassioned about why these sections needed to be changed. I finally cried uncle and said “I get it but can we move on to the rest of the scene now.” In retrospect, I wished I’d said, “I see the problem and I agree it can be better. But I need to go off and think about the best way to fix this so I’d like to hear the rest of your feedback before we run out of time.” Not a big deal, but I could have a been a tad more graceful. See, I’m always learning about this stuff, too!

If you’re getting overwhelmed with feedback, ask yourself if this is core to your deliverable, or is it peripheral? Is the feedback for 99% of the deliverable good and this is about 1%? Are you getting diminishing returns as the group piles on with more and more ideas? In these cases, you can get control back by summing up the feedback and explaining your plan for next steps. 

When you’re giving feedback 

I’ve also been guilty of giving disproportionate feedback. Here’s one I remember after more than a decade because the moment I realized what I was doing was crystal clear. I was a project manager for a big project to convert a bunch of web sites to a new content management system. Part way through the project we had a big release that went really well. I was talking to the engineering manager for the team and telling him how well things had gone, except for this one thing, and how we could fix that next time, or maybe fix it this other way, and how much better it would be next time, and then we could—. 

And then I realized he was looking at me like I’d grown another head. “Oh right!” I said. “That’s like a tiny tiny piece of this big release and everything went great and we should just take this moment to appreciate that. Never mind.” And I learned that my tendency to want to perfect things can really be misplaced sometimes. 

If you’re giving feedback, look for these signs that you might be overdoing it:

• You think this work is really great.

AND one or more of these is true: 

• You think it needs just a tweak but you’re spending a lot of time and energy talking about that tweak.
• You know this person does really good work in general but now you’re not letting them solve the problem you’ve identified.
• You’re trying to solve this small problem and it’s several pay grades below the work you usually do. I’m not saying this to to be a snob, quite the reverse. Sometime it’s fun to solve other people’s problems, especially if they’re similar to problems you’ve solved before. But that’s often doing them a disservice because they either already know how to solve it or want a chance to figure it out for themselves.
• Several other people are all jumping in to solve one or two small problems and the group is dogpiling on work that is, in fact, really really good. 

If you find yourself overdoing it, it’s easy to course correct. The feedback you’re giving is useful; you just want to keep it in proportionate to the overall significance. Just take a pause and reiterate how good the work is and ask the person if they have what they need to address any of these small issues. You’ll probably see the gratitude in their eyes!

Your Dot Release: It’s helpful to sort feedback you’re getting into core and peripheral. If you’re getting a lot of feedback on a deliverable ask yourself if it is foundational to the deliverable or is it something on the edge, or a small thing easily fixed once a decision or two gets made. Use that insight to guide the feedback discussion and your next steps. If it’s foundational you need to plan some rework; if it’s peripheral refocus on what’s right and have a plan to quickly address the small stuff. 

Release Notes: That workshop story I mentioned got published. Twice. It’s “Debridement” by C.D. Covington which you can find in the War Torn anthology.