Managing director Hora Tjitra of management consultancy Tjitra and Associates said that emotional control – our ability to refrain from reacting emotionally– should be on top of mind whenever we hear or read another’s criticism about our work or performance.

“There are some people who are too quick to be defensive on being criticized by a coworker. Even if somebody is criticizing you merely to vent their negative emotions, it’d be helpful if you to practice active listening to really hear what that person is really saying to you, to assess whether what they are saying is useful to you or not,” Hora told The Jakarta Post in a phone interview.

In order to do so, Hora said, you should probe them with questions for further details on how you might be falling short of professional expectations and how you might improve.

Feli, a 24-year-old content writer at a creative agency, does exactly this whenever she receives feedback from her coworkers.

She was recently asked to help out with a client’s digital marketing campaign on a new product, which helps human resource professionals transition from working from home to working partially from the office.

But Feli was used to writing “long-form” content that could go over 1,000 words, whereas this copywriting assignment required her to write five- to seven-line sentences for posting to the client’s social media accounts.

“Upon reviewing my copy, my coworkers told me that I had failed to deliver the key brand messages. So I asked them which parts of the copy I could improve, and they told me that I was writing the [content] for too broad a target audience when I needed only to focus on human resource staffers,” she said.

On getting further insight from your coworkers on how to do better at your job, Hora said, you needed to then process their feedback so you can apply them to the task at hand.

This worked for Feli. After narrowing down the audience profile to just human resource staffers and imagining being in their shoes, she was able to produce content that met the client’s demand for a strong brand imprint.

Quite often, people had a hard time learning from others’ criticism of their work because they lacked self-confidence in that they actually had what it took to keep on learning and expanding their skills, said Hora.

This is what American psychologist Carol Dweck calls the “growth mindset”.

Thanks to brain plasticity, or neuroplasticity – the human brain’s capacity to wire and rewire itself regardless of one’s age – people can continue to learn at any age and at any juncture in life.

To build self-confidence, however, Hora said that people needed to cultivate personal goals nurtured by strong social support and external motivation, preferably from someone among their fellow coworkers who had commonalities in terms of their career stream and place at work.

Hora mentioned that personal coaching from a coworker would also be of great help, in which a person got a coworker to help them devise a plan to improve their work performance and then follow through within a set time limit.

So far, so good. But what if other people’s criticism sounds mean-spirited that you cannot help but feel offended?

Rama, 31, works for a government institution that encourages its staff to publish their articles in the mass media. Every time employees get their article published, they post a photograph of the article to a WhatsApp group as a way to congratulate each other while also giving feedback on the article.

He did the same thing several years ago, when his article was published in a national newspaper. Rama received mostly positive comments from his coworkers, except one.

“A male senior whom I admired greatly simply texted ‘[this is] super terrible’ in all caps on the WhatsApp Group,” Rama recalled. “Later, I found out from my peers that he did that to everybody. One time, he even called a colleague who was giving a presentation ‘stupid’. Apparently he was jealous, because this colleague had successfully set up a partnership with a foreign body.”

At the end of the day, said Hora, we should be able to tell apart destructive criticisms from well-intentioned ones.

“There are some supervisors and seniors that criticize their younger peers and/or subordinates mercilessly, merely to show off their power. Oftentimes, they criticize their subordinates endlessly to conceal the fact that they are incompetent. No need to react to this, it’ll [only] destroy your own career,” she said.

To avoid this kind of verbal abuse, Hora said, companies needed to set internal protocols to prevent super-ambitious coworkers from playing dirty games as well as to reassess the toxicity of their corporate culture.

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