Veja como você pode navegar pelos desafios de receber e aceitar feedback em um trabalho de sustentabilidade.

Project Adjustments: Receive feedback that recycling bins are underused? Relocate them for better access and visibility. 🔄 Stakeholder Engagement: Find your sustainability reports too technical? Simplify and add visuals to enhance understanding and engagement. 📊 Team Collaboration: Team feedback suggests sourcing practices cause delays? Collaboratively seek alternatives to balance sustainability with efficiency. ⏳🤝

Embracing feedback in a sustainability role starts with cultivating an open mindset, recognizing that both positive, negative feedback offer valuable insights that can drive progress. Seek feedback from various sources—colleagues, stakeholders, community members—to gain diverse perspectives on initiatives. When receiving positive feedback, use it to reinforce successful strategies and motivate your team. With negative feedback, adopt a problem-solving approach, analyzing the root causes, implementing corrective measures. By viewing feedback as an opportunity for growth and continuous improvement, you can enhance your sustainability projects, ultimately achieving a greater impact on environmental and social goals.

Remember: there’s no such thing as bad feedback. Positive feedback is helpful to show relevancy and to boost morale. Negative feedback can help identifying loopholes, improve strategies and before being discharged as useless, can give us an opportunity to practice active listening for when useful negative feedback comes in.

Openness and growth mindset are the basis for personal and professional growth. Especially in such a dynamic field where e.g. new regulations are coming on a quarterly basis keeping an open mind is crucial. Navigating through the challenges and especially giving and receiving feedback (yes it is bi-directional) can broathen your perspective and represent a shortcut towards a new idea, new solution or a mental shift helping you to overcome the challenges ahead.

In sustainability, managing feedback effectively hinges on three key traits: flexibility: to adapt methods to current trends, self-awareness: to process feedback without bias, and resilience: to handle critical insights constructively. These qualities ensure professionals remain effective and contribute positively to environmental challenges.

Listen to their approach and work together on how to integrate sustainable practices in their way of working. Reflect on the feedback together and cluster for example into points of action, points of thought and points of ideas. These findings can be the start of workable challenges.

As a professional it is imperative to seek feedback and also clarify in case the feedback is ambiguous. Most forward looking companies and leaders try to give key feedback messages - both positive and negative - with clear examples to ensure that the individual understands the specifics. This gives clarity to the individual to make specific changes in his/her ability or behaviour. A great way of doing this proactively is at the beginning of the sustainability project to clarify expectations about your role and expected performance. This clarity on "expectations" is key. Follow this up by regularly asking how you are performing and more importantly what you can improve. Constant dialogue is imperative to ensure there are no surprises.

If feedback on your sustainability efforts is vague or confusing, seek clarity by asking specific questions and encouraging open dialogue. This helps ensure you understand the perspectives being shared, allowing you to make informed decisions about your actions. Create a safe environment for stakeholders to elaborate on their feedback, using follow-up meetings, surveys, or one-on-one conversations to gather more detail. If needed, provide context or ask about specific experiences to help them articulate their thoughts. Restate their feedback to confirm your understanding and ensure everyone is on the same page. By seeking clarity, you avoid misinterpretation and can implement changes that directly address the concerns.

Ask open questions to uncover specific aspects of your and their work. A good exercise can be to reformulate their feedback after asking those questions. Then ask them if this is what they mean, if it consists of the right nuances, if the priority is correct and/or if anything is missing. This exercise works both ways and is often used when supplier and designer don't understand each other and therefore miss out on opportunities for sustainability. With this exercise you make sure that the problem, the action whatever it may be is clear for all parties.

Eu sempre acredito que um bom feedback, estruturado e com exemplos práticos, traz muitas possibilidades de evolução e reflexões. Para tanto, saber ouvir, a verdadeira escuta ativa e compreender os pontos trazidos de forma construtiva podem se transformar em novas possibilidades, sem viéses e com clareza sobre o que de fato agrega valor e pode reverberar em mudanças positivas. Equilíbrio sempre deve ser considerado em qualquer decisão. Corrigir rotas é para as pessoas que sabem ouvir e aceitam um bom feedback. Saber viver o processo! Sustentabilidade é um tema muito amplo e por essa razão é sempre bom ter vários olhares e muita diversidade cognitiva. Não existe um caminho único, existem possibilidades.

Feedback should be applied constructively by considering it as an opportunity for growth and improvement. Mistakes can be learned from, and adjustments can be made to enhance performance. Suggestions should be carefully analyzed and implemented where necessary to foster professional development.

Translate every point of feedback into actionable tasks. Preferably doing this together and keep asking those questions to make sure you really find the underlaying feeling. Make a plan to do these actions and check-in often and prepared.

Perspective must be maintained by understanding that feedback is given to help achieve sustainability goals. It is essential to view feedback objectively, focusing on the bigger picture rather than taking it personally. By keeping a broad perspective, one can identify areas for improvement and contribute effectively to sustainability initiatives.

Fostering dialogue around feedback is crucial in sustainability roles. Engage regularly with colleagues, stakeholders, and mentors. 🗣️ For instance, host monthly feedback forums where team members can discuss ongoing projects and sustainability challenges openly. This encourages shared insights and collaborative problem-solving. 🔄 By nurturing a culture of open communication, you build strong relationships and create a network committed to collective progress and innovation in sustainability goals. 🌍💬

The feed back could be considered as an opportunity to grow if analyzed and considered into the sustainability initiative to make a progress. If it is based on wrong beliefs, then the concept is not clear and need to be explained . In both cases the feed back is important to assess the process and improve it

Creating a feedback process in your projects involving key stakeholders from the beginning helps unlock many barriers. Early validation helps keep the project on track ensuring alignment, and avoids drastic changes in later stages.