A Strategic Piece of Advice for When You Receive Critical Feedback

One of the most difficult things any of us can experience in our organizational life is to receive critical feedback.

So often we speak as if like feedback, we value feedback, we even welcome feedback.  I worked with a client a number of years ago who’s mantra was "We are a feedback-rich environment!"

But let's be honest, most of the time this desire for feedback is because we want validation that things are going really well. 

Do we have the same reactions however when the feedback we receive is more critical? Is there a best way to respond when you are given feedback that your performance is not up to standard or that your behaviors are not valued by others?

Misaligned Expectations

I had a client call me a few weeks ago and he was audibly frustrated when I answered the phone. We really didn’t even exchange any pleasantries like, "How are you doing?" to start our conversation.  He just dug right in…

“Scott, you would not believe my boss and what she just did! We have been working really hard all year to deliver on a really important project for one of our top internal customers.  The project has gone well overall, the client has been very pleased and there have been zero complaints, and we are even under budget. When I sat down to review the project as part of my performance review, my boss acknowledged my hard work and then said I would be getting an average performance rating. Average! I can tell you my performance was anything but average!”

 He said that he just sat there just stunned and ask himself, "How could anything on the project went any better? Average performance? What do you have to do to get a top performance recognition around here?”

He told me that he was so emotional that he couldn’t even hear anything else his boss was saying to him. All he wanted to know was WHY she felt this way. Was she paying attention at all? 

Receiving Feedback that Feels Critical

I think there are times in our corporate lives when we receive critical feedback that is not intended to be harmful but it sure feels like it is to us.  

I said to the young man on the phone, “It sounds to me like what your boss is saying is that your performance is like that of most people in the organization and that means that it is good enough that they want you to stick around for the near future.”

That went over like a ton of bricks.

“Scott, you have no idea how hard I worked, how many hours, what we did to make that project happen on time and under budget.”

“I am sure I don’t understand the details, but I am wondering if you are hearing the message your boss is trying to send. She is saying well done, but since you are expecting to hear 'excellent,' and you are not, what you are hearing is 'bad.'”   

Then I said, “Are you sure her message to you is BAD?”

I don’t think he heard my question because he was still so fired up that he said to me, “All I want to know is WHY she feels this way."

“That may be the wrong question,” I said,  “I think what you want to really know is HOW you could do better next time to get the rating you are expecting."

When we get feedback that feels critical in nature, our natural urge is to defend ourselves. We can’t help it, it is part of our hard-wiring. The goal as you work to develop yourself as a leader is to overcome these natural defense mechanisms and develop new response mechanisms so that you can learn and grow.

Your Experience

Have you ever experienced this? I mean, worked really hard on something, poured your life into it, thought you were doing really well, and then suddenly you are confronted with the feeling that what you are doing isn’t really good enough?

If you have been in an organization long enough you no doubt have experienced this type of misaligned expectation or critical feedback. The feedback may not be critical in the sense that it is mean or demeaning, just that what you are doing or working on has some room for improvement.

Strategic Advice

Here is what I want to encourage you to do when you feel like you are receiving Critical Feedback.

1. Step back and try and not take the criticism personally.

2. Take a deep breath and let go of the negative, defensive feeling.

3. Change your WHY to HOW. Focus on what your improvement needs to be rather than have your boss defend their position.

In the end, your supervisor feels how they feel, and there is probably little you can do in the moment to change his/her mind. The question is less about WHY they feel the way they do and more about WHAT you need to do differently and HOW you can make changes for the future.

4 Ways to Avoid Being an Instapot Leader

Last week I encouraged leaders to think about how receiving feedback can be an opportunity to capitalize on personal growth. If you want to go back and review the post, or if you missed it entirely, you can click here and get caught up.

Utilizing feedback doesn’t get enough attention in organizations. Most of the emphasis is placed on making sure leaders have feedback. Ok. Great. We are spending money making sure they have the information, but how are we investing and supporting them in processing the gift they receive?

In organizations, we treat feedback like getting an Instapot for Christmas. This complicated pressure cooking device has more buttons than my TV remote control (which I don’t know all those buttons either). The instructions on the Instapot are so complicated and overwhelming, there is genuine fear of blowing spaghetti sauce all over the living room if you press the wrong button!

Receiving feedback from organizations could be compared to the fear of pressing the wrong button on the Instapot. All of this data comes in and you hold the instructions in your hands not quite sure what to do with it. You may struggle with being completely overwhelmed, or even feeling paralyzed if the proper processing support is not provided. All of this feedback is well-intentioned, but is it helpful if the leader doesn’t get the chance to really take the time to understand what the feedback is saying?

When working with clients who are getting organizational feedback, there are four key elements that will help them process the information:

1. Ownership:  How emotionally dependent or independent are they on what others are saying? Are they trying to fit in and be like everyone else? Or are they in control, and not overwhelmed by the emotion they are feeling from the feedback? A leader with ownership can tolerate people not liking them or agreeing with everything they say.

2. Empathetic Understanding: Are they able to see the feedback from the perspective it was given? They don’t have to agree with it, but can they contextualize it? The goal isn’t to fix everything right away, but to understand the feedback and take some steps toward processing change.

3. Rigid Stance: The polar ends of this spectrum are performance and relationship. On one end, the leader focuses so heavily on tasks that they cannot see relationships are damaged. On the other end, the leader is so focused on relationship nothing ever gets done.This usually shows as justification for whatever behavior the feedback has uncovered.

4. Self-Regard: How well does the person know themselves, their strengths, and their weaknesses? Are they attuned to their natural gifts and using them to achieve their calling in life? Do they understand their position and are they working to strengthen their organizational voice? If not, they are more than likely on the other end of the spectrum, which is a lack of acknowledging strengths and using victim voice.

As we use the gift of feedback in organizations, we should also work with our leaders on how to process the gift. We need to help them contextualize and get the full breadth of the feedback before we run to an action plan to fix anything. Most of the time, nothing is really broken. In my experience, most development work comes from overplayed strengths. While the changes might seem monumental, the person receiving feedback is more-or-less experimenting with slight modifications and practicing their newfound insights.

Do you know someone who has recently received feedback or are you in the process of giving feedback? Helping them process feedback will go a long way to revealing the gift of becoming the person they desire to be.

A Golden Ticket for Learning From Critical Feedback

Last week I wrote about how it feels to receive critical feedback. This week I want to give you another example of how critical feedback can present itself and some more ideas on changing your response when this happens to you.

Blinding Glimpse

When my manager doesn’t see my performance the way I see it my natural reaction is to protect myself by desiring to understand WHY!

The feeling is that if we can understand the rationale of what the other person is thinking then we will somehow be better able to cope with what is going on.

My encouragement for you is going to be that when this happens to you, that your initial reaction change from “why” the person is saying this to “How could I do better?"

The goal, when someone is providing you critical feedback, is to not become defensive. If your knee-jerk reaction is “why” your defensive posture may be inhibiting you from learning. Focusing on you can improve and learn from the feedback can give you more of an open posture. In the moment, the “why” question can cause the other person to feel attacked.

 If our goal in organizations is to learn, then we have to stop feeling like we are being attacked and get much better at learning from each other.

Please allow me to elaborate:

One of the tools that I find most effective in both my coaching and training practices is to use a 360 feedback tool. In my executive coaching, I prefer to use  Leaderpath 360, which is a leadership-oriented interview feedback tool. When it comes to training leaders in classroom settings my preference is the EQI 2.0 360.  

Both of these feedback tools provide for different professional and personal relations to give feedback to the participant I am working with. Professional clients receive feedback from direct reports, peers, and their direct supervisor.

While each of these relationships provide some interesting perspective for those receiving the feedback, the supervising manager's rating is the most impactful when it is lower than any of the other relations' ratings. This often causes the participant to become the most defensive. 

I pulled an example from a sample EQI 2.0 360 report to illustrate my point. The Emotional Intelligence Competencies being measured are color-coded on the far left of the illustration. The Green icon “M” is the supervising managers feedback. The Blue icon “S” is the person’s self-reported feedback. (The Red “F” is family and the Brown “O” is other).  The numerical scale at the top goes from low of 50 (70 is first number shown) to a high of 150 (130 is the high number shown.) 

In each of these cases, you can see that the supervising manager's feedback is lower than the person’s self-reporting feedback. Not necessarily a message any of us likes to receive. 

You can imagine that if this were your EI 360 report, opening up to one of the first summary pages and seeing that you and your manager do not see eye to eye on most of the key leadership attributes. The first and natural reaction is "why?"

A perfectly natural, yet, oddly enough, not very helpful reaction.

Defensive Reactions Inhibit Learning

I had the opportunity to lead a training using this very instrument for a client several weeks ago and had a young leader come up to me at the lunch break. He was obviously trying to make sense of the data in front of him. Similar to the graphic above, his feedback showed that in every emotional intelligence competency, he, his peers, and his direct reports rated his emotional intelligence higher than his manager rated him.

The young leader was intently focused on trying to understand why this was so. 

His very natural, defensive reaction was to try and understand, to put story as to the reason why the manager saw him in this light.

“I just do not understand the reasons behind this feedback," was his opening comment to me.

“What is it that you do not understand?” I asked.

“Why would my manager rate me this low on all these competencies?” Tears started to well in his eyes.

As a coach, I knew at this point my job was to help this young leader see past the “why” of the situation. The important thing in that moment was not “why” the supervisor had done this, but what the young leader was going to focus on moving forward. 

Focusing on the wrong question was not going to help this young leader move forward. In that situation, in that moment, we were not going to be able to answer those most basic of “why” questions. The supervisor was not present, and even if he/she were present, the question could very well put the supervisor in a defensive position. 

If that were to happen we would then have a defensive supervisor and a defensive employee each focused on defending their position. Not a recipe for a healthy development conversation.

The Coache's Role

As someone in a leadership or coaching position, in that moment the goal must be to help the person let go of the "why" and focus on what to do next. For development to happen, we must use our coaching ability to help them see the change they need to make. This is our first step towards development.

The conversation when something like this:

Me: “I want to encourage you to let go of the question of 'why' and focus on what the report is telling you overall.” 

Participant: “But if I understand why my boss sees me this way, I can do something about it."

Me: “No, that is a rabbit trail, you think is logical, but in reality is a dead end.”

Participant:  Long blank stare followed by an even longer pause. “But why…?”  He just couldn’t help but get one more defensive salvo in before he let his guard down.

Me: “ Why isn’t important right now. Maybe someday it will become clear to you, but what is important now is to see the bigger picture the report is showing you. What are you going to do with this feedback? Who is going to help you move forward? These questions hold the object of your focus.”

As he exhaled I could see the shift in his demeanor from agitation to calm listening.  

Now The Development Conversation Can Start

This was hard for him, really hard.  Ultimately, what the young leader was experiencing was some form of put-down or rejection in the moment. None of us likes to be rejected or even experience the feeling of being rejected. This feeling of a cold shoulder toward our performance is disruptive, and, might I add, quite a valuable gift.

The bonus that this young leader received from the supervisor's feedback is more valuable than any nominal raise in pay he will ever receive. Now the young leader knows there is work to be done. Until this moment in time, he thought he was doing well across most of the leadership domains being measured.

Focusing on the next move or two can help the leader who is stuck on the wrong question to be able to move forward. And it is moving forward that best describes what development is all about.

Strategic Summary

Our first and natural reaction when receiving critical feedback is to defend ourselves. Even when we don’t think we are being defensive, many times we just can’t help ourselves.  It seems perfectly logical to want to understand why someone doesn’t see the world in the same way that we see it.

Move past your knee-jerk reaction of wanting to understand “why” behind the feedback and move quickly on to more productive ground of doing something about it.