Leadership Skills: Feedback and Managing Difficult Conversations Part 1
One of the most important skills of a strong leader is the ability to deliver feedback. And one of the greatest tools we can acquire to help ourselves grow is the ability to effectively receive feedback. Unfortunately, most of us struggle with both.
Personally, for years receiving any feedback that was less than an “A” was difficult for me. My pattern: I’d hear it, immediately feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, then spiral for a day or two into shame, followed ultimately by some level of greater self-awareness. As a leader, I’d waver between being too direct (sending back documents full of redlines) and being too evasive.
Thankfully, there are tools that can help us all upskill our ability to effectively receive feedback and provide truly constructive feedback to help others learn and grow.
Let’s start with receiving feedback.
Our brains are naturally focused more on the negative, constantly searching for it to protect us from perceived risk. When we find that risk — for instance when we receive negative feedback — we have a natural human limbic reaction: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We get defensive, we want to escape, we ruminate, we shame ourselves. If we stay there, the feedback doesn’t help us.
We need to connect our feeling and our thinking to move out of the reactive state. One approach we can use in the moment is “CURE”:
Collect yourself: Move to a responsive vs reactive state by pausing, taking a breath, and considering the story you’re telling yourself. What’s your ego (your limbic system) protecting you from and what else might the feedback mean?
Understand: Be curious,ask for examples. Detach yourself from what’s being said as though it’s about a third person.
Recover: Allow yourself to take pauses in the conversation. If needed, ask for a moment to step away. Avoid the urge to immediately respond – you can listen, acknowledge, then give yourself some time to process before returning to engage.
Engage: Examine what you’re told, look for truth. Acknowledge what you heard, what you accept and what you commit to doing.
We can also prepare ahead of time for a feedback conversation. Take time to visualize yourself as you’d like to show up in the conversation and consider:
What do I expect to hear?
What would be great to hear?
What would concern me the most to hear?
Finally, remember that your locus of control is internal -- you can frame what you hear in the way that will help you the most. Keep in mind:
“That which we cannot see about ourselves is impossible to change.” It’s uncomfortable hearing or seeing ourselves from other perspectives. It’s why we don’t always like seeing ourselves on video or hearing a recording of our voices. We sound and look different from the inside out than from the outside in. At the same time, that outside in view is essential to our ability to grow.
Feedback is merely data, important data, but data, nonetheless. It’s not about your identity, not about who you are. While receiving feedback is valuable, remember that feedback is about your behavior, not about your worth.