by Robert Husband
Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.” – Colossians 4:6 (NASB)
This is part two of my thoughts on Gracious Speech. In the first entry I suggested the above verse specifically spoke to the pattern in which we best give feedback to others. In this short piece I want to speak to how others receive feedback. How they hear it. How they understand it. And, potentially how they see you as the person giving it.
Years ago, a colleague and I presented a paper at an international conference on how people receive and evaluate feedback. Just between us, the conference was in Hawaii and if our paper was accepted it provided an all expenses paid trip to Hawaii. As you might imagine, we looked forward to doing the study and presenting the findings.
We asked two fundamental questions: How do people judge feedback? And how do they label it? We were quite surprised when we found that the subjects used only two criteria to judge feedback. We expected many more. The two criteria were Valence and Utility. That is, they judged feedback to be either positive or negative (valence). And they judged it based on whether they could do anything with it (high or low utility). In short, the person tried to determine if what they were hearing was positive or negative, and if they could do anything with it.
Then we asked the participants to label the feedback they received based on the criteria they had used. The following labels were the ones most often used for each quadrant in the matrix: For high valence/low utility: flattery or ingratiation, for high valence/high utility: positive feedback, for low valence/high utility: negative feedback or constructive criticism, and for low valence/low utility: aggression.
| Flattery or ingratiation | Positive Feedback |
| Aggression | Negative Feedback or Constructive Criticism |
Their labels were both revealing and fascinating. First, try as you might, you can’t control valence. Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the receiver of feedback always determines whether the feedback is positive or negative. I might say “good job” meaning to be positive, but for the receiver “good” isn’t good enough. It needed to be “great” work. So, even though you intend to deliver positive feedback, it can frequently be perceived as negative.
Secondly, the key to giving “gracious/good” feedback is specificity. If people can’t do anything with your feedback, they perceive you as just being flattering. or worse yet, aggressive. It is so important to provide feedback that is useful, that is information that the person can use or do something with. You should develop the habit of being as specific as possible in giving feedback. To ask yourself, “If I share this can they do anything with it?” If they can’t and they perceive it as negative, you have invited a serious problem upon yourself.
Maybe the most important and fascinating discovery in our study was that when others receive feedback that has no utility, and they perceive it as negative, they no longer even hear it as feedback! They hear you being aggressive. Their mind switches from hearing the information as being about them to simply it being about you— being aggressive.
Some years back I was asked to do a conflict management workshop at my church. Since I did these workshops professionally and I was new to the church, I wanted to contribute where I could. So, I said yes. When I was done, I was walking out of the church talking to myself saying, “Not bad, but not good either. A 6 on a 10 point scale. But then again, I am expensive, and they got me for free.”
Right then, a church member whom I had never met came up to me and said, “You know, for a communication professor, you sure are a lousy communicator. Inside, I said to myself “who asked you?” Since I was trained to respond differently, I proceeded to ask him a series of questions to find out what he didn’t like about the workshop. In the end, he really couldn’t identify anything specific. Clearly, he was bad at giving feedback. But more importantly, in all likelihood you began to think more about this fellow than you did about me and the workshop. You began to ask what kind of person is this? How could he say such a thing? How could he be so aggressive? I rest my case.
In the end, if we want to provide feedback that is gracious and meets a need it must come as a result of knowing the need (i.e. being a good listener) and then addressing the need by being very specific in our observations and comments to provide as great a utility as possible.
©2025 Robert Husband. PhD, THE ASLAN GROUP. Used by permission. Dr. Husband can be reached at: rhusband@illinois.edu