Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

41 - When Feedback Hurts

• Leah Fink • Season 1 • Episode 41

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Ever felt blindsided by negative feedback and wondered how to keep moving forward with your team?  In this episode, we delve into the emotional whirlpool leaders often find themselves in when receiving painful feedback and highlight the importance of not shying away or downplaying it. Alongside, we offer strategic advice on how to seek support, explore the feedback, and ensure it is helping you grow.

How do you react when feedback hurts, and is it serving you?

If you are ready to embrace the painful feedback and invest in your growth, this is the episode for you!

To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story

Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST.  Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/

Speaker 1:

Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we're going to be talking about the reality of painful feedback what happens when you feel really hurt by some sort of feedback you got and what you can do about it. Jr shares their story. I've been with my company for over 10 years and it made my way up to a senior leadership position. I recently got a 360 leadership assessment back and the results surprised me. I got ranked quite low in the categories about caring for my staff. Even worse, I was talking about it to one of my colleagues and trying to process and they mentioned. I shouldn't really be surprised, as I'm known around the office as being very demanding. I feel blindsided by this and I'm worried in all my interactions with staff now. Thank you for sharing your story, jr. It sounds like this is quite a hard experience for you to go through and I can empathize with how hard it is to get that very pointed feedback. First, I want to say that I really appreciate that you're starting to reach out for support like this.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes as leaders, when we try so hard and it's so painful to get this feedback, we start to kind of protect ourselves by doing things like justifying, like, oh, this must have just happened because I recently had to make a hard call for the team, or I must have gotten these low results because I know that one staff doesn't like me, or the staff are just unhappy because they didn't get bonuses this year. There's all sorts of things we might tell ourselves to try to protect from this pain, because it really hurts to know that our good intentions did not come across the way we hoped and that we had some sort of negative impact, and this is one of the biggest things I work with leaders with is this gap between their intentions and the impact they actually have, because it's a reality. We all make mistakes, we all try really hard, but still have actions that hurt someone, and so, now that we know this, and as we're processing this, what are we going to do with it? The first thing I want to do, jr, is check in about what support you have. Usually, when 360 assessments are done, the organization that runs them provides some sort of debrief or support, and I know that kind of support can vary a lot, though, and might not have met your particular needs in this situation.

Speaker 2:

Now, since you didn't mention it, I can think of a couple reasons. One could be you couldn't have maybe gone through that process yet. Maybe you didn't get a chance to go through that process yet. Ideally that should happen pretty quickly after you get your results, so you're not kind of festering in what happened. And so if you still have that coming up, this is definitely something I would bring up with the assessor and really talk to them about what support they would recommend based on their particular assessment. It's also possible that you had that meeting and maybe you focused on some other components. Maybe you had a really technical skill development area that needed a little bit more attention, so that was what was focused on. Or maybe the company had even asked assessors to focus on one particular area. That's different than this. Maybe it was just that you didn't have enough time and space and limited time to fully process this emotionally, and then you went and had this conversation with a colleague, which just brought it up even more. So for now we're going to assume that you didn't get this full opportunity to go through this with this assessor, with this resource, and that's part of the reason you're seeking some of this external support.

Speaker 2:

So who else do you have? Of course, your own leadership would be the next place to go, if that feels safe and appropriate for you. If you have a positive relationship with your supervisor, I would go to them for some support and some advice in this matter. So first you could ask if they were aware that this was a perception of you around the office. You can ask, maybe, how they've dealt with some challenging feedback that they've gotten in the past and so you're starting to create this conversation about it. You can also ask if you've been given similar feedback to this before that just didn't register or have an impact. Maybe you didn't even realize it. Sometimes we can interpret a specific comment in a way that doesn't recognize it as a request for behavior to change. So maybe you have heard something similar to this in the past, not taking this as feedback. But suddenly, when you have a 360 and more people are commenting on it this comment from the coworker now it kind of lands in a different way. So if you're able to have this conversation with a supervisor because it feels safe I hope you can, because this is a great space where you could hopefully be getting some emotional support and practical support about how you can do better in your role. Now you have support.

Speaker 2:

Let's assume that, and so now it's time to get more to the heart of this challenge, and there's two important things to address, in my opinion. One is the emotional impact on you, and the other is this impact that you're having on staff and what you're going to do about that. And I'm going to say, if you're a little bit older or maybe very used to work cultures that don't believe in all the wishy-washy emotional stuff, I'm going to invite you to try to consider this with an open mind. We've talked on this show before about how, when people are in positions of power for a long time, your brain actually changes and you start to lose mirror neurons, which are the basis of our empathy. And if you have staff that are saying that they want to feel cared for and you want to be able to care for them, you have to actively work actually to keep this empathy, to keep those mirror neurons happy, and some of the ways we can do that is we can use gratitude. We can seek out feedback which helps connect us back to people. Gratitude, we can seek out feedback which helps connect us back to people, and we can really take on the emotional impact of situations like this instead of trying to push them off to the side. So part of this is, as a leader, keeping this empathy. It is actually important to relate a little bit more to your emotions, especially with a lot of younger generations of staff really wanting this component in a work culture. So I already touched on this, but I think it is absolutely critical that we, as leaders, do not shy away from this or work to diminish it or put the feelings to the side.

Speaker 2:

Our society focuses a lot on moving away from uncomfortable feelings. You distract yourself, you soothe yourself, and this often has really poor results, not only for you yourself but for your relationships. So instead, I'd really recommend leaning into this, think about and let yourself truly feel how painful this was, how deeply sad you feel, how frustrated you feel. You could take this space alone and just let yourself emotionally process this, let it in fully. And where you'd normally maybe be pushing your feelings away or soothing yourself, that's going to lead to more of that justification behavior. You're going to justify what you did as something fine, it's not a really big deal and when you do this, take this time to really settle into your feelings. That's when you get more inspired, because you don't want to feel those things anymore. You don't want to cause that pain. So instead you're going to take action, make real, meaningful change. So really settle this, take the time, go through it. That was tough and you did it Good job.

Speaker 2:

And now we finally get to this critical piece of how you're going to interact with your staff. Jerry, you even mentioned you're worried about this, and the first thing we're going to consider here is we don't actually have your staff's perspective. Sure, we have little pieces. You probably have an anonymous 360. Maybe it was even just a percentage or a scale. You might not even have quotes or comments from your staff team and you have the second-hand information from this colleague of yours. So you're really wanting to seek some more information, particularly about what staff want. We kind of know, we have a sense now of what wasn't going so well, but we want to know what they really want in the future. Now I'm going to suggest and this is a bit different than some of the other ways we've talked about feedback previously. You can listen to those episodes.

Speaker 2:

If you have come across previously as super demanding and you're getting a low score on caring for your staff, I suggest that you want to be very careful in how you approach this and take a step back from how we'd usually ask for feedback and give feedback In your staff one-on-ones. I would keep it very simple and ask just one question, which is what's something I could do to improve our professional relationship this week, this month? However often you have your staff one-on-ones, take whatever they say, make a note of it and thank them for sharing that. Now, if it's something you know you can't do, obviously tell them right away. If they ask for, say, a 50% raise, you're probably going to say I'm sorry, I can't do that. Is there anything else? Even if they ask and you're not sure, make sure you tell them that up front and if not, let them know that you'll take this, you'll consider it and you'll get back to them on what you're going to do. Hopefully they'll see that change behavior.

Speaker 2:

Now, if this is a new behavior, staff might suspect this is from the 360. And if they ask, I wouldn't lie about it, I wouldn't deny it and even either way though I wouldn't try to provide a lot of context I wouldn't tell them immediately. Well, everyone says I'm super demanding and no one. I don't care about staff. So I'm going to address that. If they've previously seen you as coming across demanding and you're sharing about this and the kind of feedback you're looking for, I might see it coming across, or they might see it potentially is coming across as more demanding and this might limit any potential feedback for improvement. They might feel now like they have to defend something or pretend that everything's fine to keep the peace. No, no, no, no, of course you don't come across as demanding. That's the last thing you want right Now down the road, once you've had a chance to start responding to the feedback they do give you, once you've maybe got some support from your leader and you start talking about the feedback you've gotten.

Speaker 2:

You've really interacted with this and hopefully you've seen some pieces that, as you've reflected on them, kind of went well. Maybe that did come across as a bit demanding. Maybe that did come across as uncaring. Now that I'm hearing all of these pieces, so we're assuming your team shared some things about this behavior. You've been able to apply it. You've checked in that. They've appreciated the change. That's really great.

Speaker 2:

If you're still feeling there's leftover pieces now from the 360 feedback, maybe now you mentioned that you check in about that maybe you ask for more specific feedback about how they would like to be cared for in their role or appreciated, whatever that language is that you want to use. Now you can start looking at that feedback because you've created a safe space for feedback and you're again, you're not demanding. Why do you think I'm super demanding? You're not giving them that kind of space. And if you are not getting anything from your staff let's say you've had multiple one-on-ones you keep opening this door very gently. Hey, can you tell me something that could improve our professional relationship?

Speaker 2:

You have a bigger problem. You can listen to some previous episodes, of course, about building trust with your staff team understanding a little bit why it can be so challenging. But they might honestly be in a position where they're not willing to engage with you. They don't want to even invest in the relationship enough to give you feedback. They're worried about it and this might be the time to bring in external support. Once again, talk to your leadership. Maybe there's an HR person who does some training or support around interpersonal relationships, maybe a leadership consultant like myself. Maybe you're doing some form of team building that helps really start this relationship on a healthier foot, or restart it on a healthier foot. When there is this space of staff not even willing to give this feedback blank walls you're not able to interact in the healthiest way. Having someone external there to support them, so lessen that power dynamic in some ways can really help.

Speaker 2:

This is tough JR. I hope this gave you some ideas about how you can explore this. Please reach out for those supports. Please take the time to really feel this, and the same for anyone else who's gotten that pointed feedback. Take some time, let those emotions in and then move on from it. I can't wait to continue our conversation so I can support you even more. And, as a reminder, if you want to share your story, that's one of the things I'll do is a follow up and so I can say thank you and so I can make sure your question is fully answered with some of those more sensitive details. If you'd like to hear these kinds of things in podcast form, you can do that. You can go to the link in the description below. That comes out on Friday mornings and I want to thank you so much really be able to respond in healthy, fantastic, useful ways to feedback. So thank you so much for that and, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples are you going to create this week?

Speaker 1:

We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at.