What is Reddit's opinion of Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

+1 on feedback. It's much harder to get than you might think. You can't ask general questions like "How am I doing?" - the questions must be more specific - "In that last review we were in, I felt that we weren't on the same page. Are there areas that I can improve in how I can communicate you?" or "There was quite a lot of back-and-forth in the last PR - how do you prefer to work to review things?". An excellent book on these kinds of things is: https://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science-Receiving-Well-ebook/dp/B00DMCV0XE/

I've had similar experiences - especially in environments where the ratio of women to men was low. At my last job, I had a lot of challenging conversations with my direct manager that unfortunately didn't go anywhere. He wasn't really able to provide specific examples or situations when I requested them. I did cite statistics that women are more likely to receive vague feedback that focuses excessively on their personalities or communication skills and that was why I wanted to get more specific and actionable feedback. I don't think I will take that approach again. It came to the point where he basically thought that I thought I had nothing to improve, which wasn't my point at all. This was complicated by the fact that I'm an American expat in Europe, so I don't think it was just gender at play - language barrier, culture of the organization, and poor leadership also contributed.

I did try to take the feedback to heart even if it wasn't that helpful. I tried to be more open to approaches other than the ones I thought were best and I made a more concentrated effort to get the engineers involved in the process as a group (I'm a PM). I changed teams and had a good experience with them, but I was not able to win over my boss. I ultimately left because I saw that nothing was going to change.

Two things that I found helpful:

1. Going to a therapist. As cliche as it is, I was able to see a connection between how triggered I felt by the entire situation and some aspects of my childhood / upbringing.
2. Reading Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. This helped me understand why my reaction to the feedback and the way that I handled it actually made things worse. Their bottom line is that feedback is a gift and you are in control of what you do with it. This was a bit of a mindset shift for me, so I found it helpful to view the situation in a different light.