There is a quality assurance approach or theory from W Edwards Deming that needs to be absorbed by institutions, and it’s that everyone is trying to do their best job and it's the machinery that is getting in the way or creating barriers. Most errors arise from processes but anything in an organization could potentially get in the way. One role of a manager is to work to remove these barriers.
You should demand any negative feedback provided is specific and try and see it as someone taking the time to try and help. Given that someone is trying to help, ask questions you can use to improve things and see the feedback giver as a person who has knowledge you lack and can gain.
You also have to be prepared that you will get unskilled feedback and that is a different opportunity for you to stretch leadership muscles.
My response was taking into account many assumptions, but Deming’s 'Out of the Crisis' is nearly 500 pages on the topic, so I can’t do him justice in a few lines.
Let me try and give you a simple illustration. So imagine you’re a new manager at an ad agency and you task a team of writers with developing some ad copy. You get the documents back and they are filled with typos. The writers are all professionals with experience and training. So you have to ask yourself, in assigning the task did I develop a stable system of copy development? The result is a major amount of rework and may increase the cost of the project or delay the deliverables to the client, so no this isn’t a stable system of production. So as the manager you need to look into the causes of failure, perhaps it was unrealistic timelines, a lack of a dictionary for use by the team, or a lack of internal process the writers should use like proofreading their work before submitting it, or lack of training on effective proofreading. There could be a number of barriers in the system that are getting in the way of quality goals that as a manager you can address.
Of course, some people are in the wrong job or incompetent and that’s another story, but Deming argued that most problems in organizations are caused by poor management and faulty processes, not by individual workers. He advocated for a systemic approach to quality improvement that involves everyone in the organization.
There is a quality assurance approach or theory from W Edwards Deming that needs to be absorbed by institutions, and it’s that everyone is trying to do their best job and it's the machinery that is getting in the way or creating barriers. Most errors arise from processes but anything in an organization could potentially get in the way. One role of a manager is to work to remove these barriers.
You should demand any negative feedback provided is specific and try and see it as someone taking the time to try and help. Given that someone is trying to help, ask questions you can use to improve things and see the feedback giver as a person who has knowledge you lack and can gain.
You also have to be prepared that you will get unskilled feedback and that is a different opportunity for you to stretch leadership muscles.