What it Takes to Have Feedback Land

By Adam Quiney

Your staff’s resistance to feedback is a reflection of your own.

Feedback, when done well, reveals something we are not yet aware of. It points to what currently lies in our blindspot. 

Our human tendency is to receive feedback through the lens of “This is what I should be doing, and I’m not already doing it”. 

As a result, when we receive feedback that exposes our blindspots, it can leave us feeling a little “caught out”.

Maybe you feel a touch shameful — like you should have already known, or the fact that you are receiving this feedback means you’re behind the curve.

Maybe you project onto the person leading you that they’re displeased or feel you should be further along, and that’s why you’re getting this feedback.

Or maybe you’ve got many years of experience and feel that this feedback indicates your expertise is going unseen.

Whatever it is, good feedback will, by definition, confront.

When confronted, we work to reassert our safety.

Have you ever given someone feedback, only to have them nod their head and say “Oh yeah, I know about that”?

Or perhaps they justified to you why they had done something else, in the situations you are inviting them to look at.

Alternately your direct report may take in the feedback, but they’re almost too eager for it. Sure, we want them to receive the feedback, but it’s almost like they had no reaction at all.

(If good feedback is, by definition, confronting, and there was no reaction at all… Did the feedback actually land?)

These are all subtle ways of reasserting our sense of safety. 

Each of these strategies (along with many others) allow the person to escape the experience of being caught out or confronted, and instead replace it with “Okay, sure but I already knew that” (or “NOW I know that”).

This can be frustrating when you’re delivering feedback, as it may land like your direct report is either un-coachable, or feedback never really makes a difference.

Some leaders may bulldoze their direct report with more feedback in the hopes that this will hammer it home. Other people simply give up and start to manage around the direct report, until they can eventually let them go or move them to someone else’s department.

The trap in these scenarios is that it looks like the problem is with the direct report.

It isn’t — it’s with the leader.

The vast majority of leaders resist receiving feedback the same way their direct reports do. They rely on their experience and prior growth to convince themselves they’ve “done the work”.

This is done innocently, under the belief that your results or success are indications that you’ve done the work.

But this isn’t enough — it simply provides a new blindspot in which the ego can hide out and keep us safe from confrontation.

Leaders need to commit to working within structures that provide them with the same kind of powerful feedback they are hoping to provide their staff.

Modeling leadership in this way is not something you ever fully “learn”. Unlike a learning process, there will always be a new edge in your leadership — a new aspect of your leadership that sits in your blindspot.

Leaders that transform others recognize this, and commit to continually walking through the same fire they ask of those they are leading.

You cannot learn how to do this by reading books. You learn it by going through the same process you wish for your direct reports.

Receiving powerful feedback is an act of feeling, not thinking. We have to let the impact of that feedback actually land with us, instead of filtering it through the safety of our intellect.

When you are held and supported through this kind of process, you’ll start to experience how much vulnerability it really requires to let feedback in. 

Instead of being there for your directs when they’re resisting feedback, you’ll be able to be there with them, because you have walked through this exact same path.

After a leader has walked through this crucible, and only after, they can then hold space for their staff to do the same.

Leaders of followers rely on their experience and prior growth to convince themselves they’ve “done the work”.

Leaders of leaders recognize that the road to mastery is never over, and continue to choose into what they ask of others.

Which kind of leader are you committed to being?

– Adam Quiney

Listen to our Saroca Speaks episode with guest Adam Quiney below.