The Three Levels of Mastery in Taking Feedback

"Your presentation sucks."  Wow. That hurt. I was surprised, too.  I thought my manager was going to be impressed.  Did she have to say it that way? Could she have delivered the message in a better way?  Sure.  At that time, my initial reaction distracted me from recognizing that my presentation needed work so I could start to make it better.  Years later, I know that sometimes I have to look past how people say things and find the important points in what they say.  Not everyone is going to be expert at giving feedback, but I still need to be expert at taking negative feedback.

One time at the same company, we did a 360 review. When she received her review, my boss brought me into her office to say somebody commented that she curses too much.  She sounded upset.  She said she was upset. She asked me point blank whether I was the one who had said it. Then she said she was going to find out who said it.  I never spoke to anyone else on the team about the conversation, but I was pretty sure she had the same conversation with each one of them.

This was one of the worst things she could have done.  Anybody who was being honest in giving her the feedback would no longer be honest with her again. They might take a lesson from the experience and refrain from giving honest feedback to other bosses, coworkers, and maybe even other employees in the future. This lack of honesty would undermine the success of their future bosses, colleagues, employees, and companies. I do not look back and blame my former boss. The reality is that taking feedback just was not a skill she had at that time. Why would she have had that skill?  She might not have even thought of taking feedback as a skill.  At the time I did not see it that way either.

Only when I looked back at the incident later did I realize this happened in part because the company never gave training on how to take feedback in preparation for the 360 review.  I worked at another company which did hire a consulting firm to give training on how to take feedback before administering the 360 review. However, they did not treat taking feedback as a skill. Yes, they gave us information on how to give feedback, but we cannot learn how to take feedback by listening to a lecture any more than we can learn how to ride a bike by reading a book.  

We have to give feedback on the job, practice with learning activities, get expert feedback on how we gave feedback, make adjustments, and repeat. That is how we develop any skill.  The only way we achieve mastery in management is, among other things, by 1) mastering the skill of taking feedback ourselves and 2) developing the people on our teams to master the skill of taking feedback.  The teams who do this have an advantage over other teams.  You can easily find teams and entire companies who are weak in this area.  You would be hard pressed to find those who have mastered this skill.

When we hear of the importance of taking feedback, we can easily sit back and say, "Of course feedback matters."  But understanding something and being really good at it are two very different things. Have you endured great struggle for years in building your taking feedback skills?  If not, you can safely say you have a long way to go to master the skill of taking feedback.

At the lowest skill level of taking feedback, we get defensive. While people are giving us feedback, we interrupt them. We come up with reasons why they are wrong so we can dismiss their words and deny our own sense of vulnerability. We dispute them so we can restore our sense of superiority over them. As a result we remain stuck where we are.  

Why do we avoid negative feedback?  Why do we take the skill of taking feedback for granted? Are we too humbled by the possibility that we are not perfect? Is negative feedback too painful for us to endure?  Are we traumatized by the possibility that we are not superior to the person giving us negative feedback?  We have to ask ourselves what we lose by not getting negative feedback.  

What does true mastery in the skill of getting feedback mean?  You can read what I have written here about how managers of winning teams need to probe deeply to understand what is going on with the team and the impact of having a team that does not get or give feedback. Below I will share with you the three levels of mastering the skill of taking feedback.  

Level 1 - Apprentice

On the first level toward mastery of getting feedback, you are more accepting of the feedback you get. Rather than defend, you ask clarifying questions to better understand the feedback.  You spend time reflecting on the negative feedback.  

At this stage you are uncomfortable with getting feedback, especially negative feedback.  You still worry that soliciting negative feedback is a sign of weakness, but you understand that bravery cannot exist without vulnerability. You still feel the urge to slip into defensiveness, interruption, and denial, but you are aware enough to resist those temptations. The fact that this requires your full attention while you expend maximum mental and emotional effort is a sign that you are beyond your Comfort Zone and firmly in your Learning Zone.

I was interviewing a candidate for a job, and he seemed unfazed by any question I threw at him. I wanted to take him out of his Comfort Zone, so I asked him to give me some negative feedback. He told me I did not maintain full eye contact the entire time we had been speaking. I realized that he had been staring at my left eye the entire conversation. I explained that he was wrong to think that absolute eye contact is necessary. It is actually not natural. We want to find the sweet spot with eye contact -- not too much and not too little. I quickly realized I had fallen into the disputing trap.  I did not lead by example in that situation.  Upon reflection, I could have started by asking questions to understand why he found that I do not make enough eye contact.

Level 2 - Practitioner

On the next level up, you do not just accept and seek to understand the feedback you receive. You actively seek out feedback in general and negative feedback in particular. When you get that negative feedback, you welcome it. Your initial response is to express gratitude to the person for giving you the negative feedback. You treat negative feedback as a gift. You take it a step further and make adjustments based on that negative feedback. You practice translating negative feedback into learning goals. You may need to recruit the input of an expert to help translate those learning goals into specific practice activities.  

This is where the true power starts to kick into gear. The skill of taking negative feedback introduces the awareness needed to initiate course corrections earlier and make improvements sooner. The negative feedback becomes less of a threat and more of a matter-of-fact opportunity for insight and deep reflection. Whether the person is right or wrong is less important.  If somebody is thinking the negative feedback, would you rather know or be oblivious? Whatever your answer is to that question, magnify it so that the entire organization is doing the same thing. Does that work?

I once had somebody reveal to me that they were far more willing to take negative feedback from a more senior person who knew what they were talking about than from a less experienced junior-level employee. I assigned them the homework of soliciting negative feedback from a more junior-level person. This on-the-job learning activity served three purposes.  First, they needed to get over their hierarchical view of who has a right to give feedback. Second, this would cultivate the feedback-giving skills in younger people.  Third, this allowed them to lead by example and increase the likelihood and ability of those junior-level employees to solicit negative feedback.

Level 3 - Master

On the top level of taking feedback, you can no longer expect to just ask for negative feedback and get it. People are intentionally and actively hiding negative feedback from you. You are expert at early warning signs and probing beneath the surface to unearth negative feedback. This will naturally happen as you are more senior within the organization.  People are afraid to share their negative feedback with you because the personal risk does not justify any reward they can imagine.  The slightest sign of some repercussion will cause them to keep negative feedback to themselves.  

You build others’ skills of giving negative feedback. You are vigilant in creating a culture where people feel safe to give negative feedback to you and to others.  Kim Scott's Radical Candor is a must-read book on this subject.  The times when you receive negative feedback without having to solicit it are a victory.  

If what I describe sounds strange to you, it is.  The culture where people freely give negative feedback is quite unique and foreign, but do not fool yourself into thinking it is impossible.  Ray Dalio gave a TED Talk on how he instituted Radical Transparency at his organization. He shows how a 24-year-old employee right out of college publicly gave him, the CEO of one of the world's largest hedge funds, negative feedback.  You can watch it here.

This concept is so foreign to so many companies in so many industries that it reveals tremendous opportunities. Dalio applied this to the hedge fund industry, and it translated into success in other ways. Has anyone in your industry achieved this level of mastery in taking feedback?

Where do you stand in the path toward mastering the art of taking feedback? Have you gotten feedback on your feedback-taking skills? Have you solicited feedback from someone who would make you uncomfortable? Do people only share negative feedback with you when you ask for it? Remember that during your journey toward mastery, being uncomfortable is a sign that you are in your Learning Zone.

Photo by Evan Kirby on Unsplash

How Winning Managers Develop Winning Teams

In my experience, nothing can derail a company more quickly and more completely than the internal group dynamics.  However, managing groups is an incredibly challenging undertaking.  Groups are complicated.  As more people join a group, the number of interrelationships and interactions exponentially increase.  A group of ten people can have 45 relationships.  Those 45 relationships can have tens of thousands of interactions throughout the year.  With more people, the group grows more vulnerable to the risk that one bad interaction will grow into one bad relationship and then spread dysfunction to other relationships.  By the time the manager realizes something is wrong, the internal toxicity could have already made its way to customers, delivering a financial blow to the company.

The manager must deal with these group issues before they have a chance to intensify and sabotage the success of the team.  These issues do not solve themselves.  They do not go away when ignored.  They fester and grow over time.  These issues reflect a lack of certain group skills.  Those group skills do not get developed without deliberate practice.  Deliberate practice to develop those skills requires full attention and great effort.

What are you doing to improve your skills in managing group dynamics?  What is your manager doing to improve their skills in group dynamics?  The manager who believes they do not need to expend great effort every week developing their skills in managing group dynamics is living in delusion.  The manager who is not racking their brain each week on how to better manage group dynamics is setting their team up for failure.  The manager who is not getting better at managing group dynamics each week is getting worse.  In the worst cases, the managers who do not push themselves out of their comfort zone and into their learning zone of managing group dynamics each week end up pulling their teams down the path of dysfunction.  Managers must work against competing forces to actively search for the current state of the group’s interrelationships, they must constantly cultivate their skills in facilitating productive group meetings, and they must forever develop the interaction skills of the team.  A lot of bad advice floats around these topics, so I am sharing what works with you below.

Probe below the Surface

People can and do hide bad relationships from the manager.  With so many interrelationships and so many more interactions among the members of the team, when something dysfunctional happens, it can fester below the manager’s radar for quite some time before it emerges.  Sometimes it has time to spread into other relationships, and the true source of the dysfunction can forever remain a mystery.  The manager must be on the lookout for red flags that something is amiss within the group.

I used to work at a large financial conglomerate.  The company had been formed through many acquisitions over the years.  Dysfunctional group dynamics were everywhere.  Some acrimonious relationships were decades old and carried on by people who had no idea how the rivalries had originated.  Some departments referred to other departments as the enemy.  Aggressive behavior and hostile interactions were the norm.  Individual relationships were even more challenging to uncover with so many people, relationships, and interactions and because people were good at hiding things from their managers.  The senior managers were either oblivious to the dysfunction or unaware of its impact on the performance and results they cared about.

Unless the manager is actively on the lookout for the truth when it comes to group dynamics, they can guarantee that they are oblivious to what is really happening below the surface.  Managers suffer from arrogance when they proclaim that everything is well with the team’s interactions.  They can never assume this to be the case because the reality is that things change so quickly and most of the truth is hidden from them, no matter how trusted and connected they are to the team.

While Ed Catmull was building Pixar into a successful company, he had to come to terms with the fact that even though he thought he had his finger on the pulse of his team, he was wrong again and again.  After being blindsided more than once by exploding issues with the group, he had to learn the hard way that the mere fact that he was the boss meant that people kept things from him, and his job was to forever work to uncover that truth.  He had to speak to a lot of people, establish connections with them, and gain their trust so they would be open and honest with him.  He had to expend great energy in asking and asking again about how things were going.

This involves real soul searching and can sometimes make management feel more like psychology.  When was the last time you asked your team how well they work together?  How many times have you asked this same question over and over again?  Were you satisfied with the answer, or did you keep asking regularly?  How comfortable are people with revealing information to you?  When you do make discoveries, do you react in ways that tell people they should not have revealed something?  If you react with anger, fear, control, or aggression you send the signal that revealing information to you incurs consequences.

Group Problems Require Group Discussions

Managing one person involves establishing a connection with that individual and developing their skills toward mastery.  Managing multiple people is completely different.  One of the rookie mistakes that new managers tend to make is that they try to manage a bunch of individuals through one-on-one interactions.  However, this neglects the power of assembling teams and groups in the first place.  Part of the purpose of assembling individuals into a group is to tap into the uniquely human ability to learn collectively.  Collective wisdom translates into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

I had a manager who as her team grew from one to five people, her team grew progressively more dysfunctional.  She inadvertently created dysfunction within her team by having discussions in separate one-on-one meetings with individuals about the others.  Then she would tell the others what someone else had said about them in a genuine attempt to try to resolve the issues.  However, her approach backfired, and this created a sense of paranoia among the team as people started wondering who said something bad about them to the manager.  In a more extreme example, another manager I knew had a team of over 40 people, and she did the same thing.  Looking back, I realized that this one-on-one approach was a major contributing factor to the revolt that team eventually made against her.

One of my professors gave some words of wisdom that he had learned the hard way through experience.  Every once in a while, you need to bring the team together and ask the simple question, “How well are we working together as a group?”  The first time this question is asked, people are understandably uncomfortable and hesitant to speak openly and honestly about each other while in front of each other.  But the discomfort does not mean it is wrong.  It just means that people are not used to having candid group discussions.  Having these discussions is a skill, and facilitating these discussions is a skill.  Cultivating these skills is critical to achieving productive group dynamics.

As the manager, your job is to get people to speak openly, honestly, and respectfully.  This means facilitating group discussions.  I have rarely seen managers who are experts at facilitating group discussions.  This is unfortunate because major opportunities are missed.  The facilitator engages the group to draw upon the full knowledge of the group, asks open-ended questions, and focuses the team on specific topics.  Sometimes the manager must withhold their perspective from the group, so that people feel more comfortable expressing their opinions.

I knew a manager who had grown accustomed to solving the problems of the group himself.  After coaching him through the process of group problem solving, he tried presenting the team with a current problem and asked them what they should do.  He was surprised by the insightful responses of the team.  They came up with and agreed upon a solution that was beyond anything he could have come up with on his own.

Cultivate the Interaction Skills of the Team

One of the red flags for a manager that something is wrong with the interpersonal communication of the team is when the members of the team tend to speak to the manager rather than to each other.  This tendency toward centralized communication means that the manager and the group risk losing valuable feedback on ideas proposed by members of the team.

When JFK dealt with the Bay of Pigs, his team tended to speak to him as opposed to each other, so he was unaware of how much people disagreed with what others were saying.  As a result, they moved forward with a plan that many people did not support.  Afterwards, JFK consulted with former President Eisenhower and by the time the Cuban Missile Crisis began, he began asking the members of his inner circle for opinions on proposed courses of action that others had suggested.  He also asked open-ended questions and was able to generate debate among the team to more fully explore the various options available.

The night before the Challenger space shuttle was launching on January 28, 1986, in colder-than-normal conditions, some of the engineers on the team knew the o-rings would fail at that temperatures, yet some held back from fully expressing the certainty and impact of the failure.  The management team had some inkling of concern, but failed to explore the concerns enough to cancel the launch.  The very sad outcome illustrates what can happen when groups experience interpersonal relationship and communication issues.  The shuttle blew apart 73 seconds into the flight, and all of the crew died.

We would hope that NASA learned from the incident, so it would not be repeated, but almost two decades later the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated and killed all seven astronauts.  Upon review, someone knew what would happen ahead of time, but the communication failed.  The engineers and managers involved in the Challenger incident did not seem to learn from the incident either.  Decades later, they were interviewed for various documentaries, and they all continued to blame and complain.

Fortunately, somebody did learn from the experience.  Stuart Diamond was one of the journalists who wrote about the incident, and won a Nobel Prize.  Diamond spent the next few decades putting together a process for negotiations, which he shared in his book Getting More.  I recommend Diamond’s book to everyone on my team.  He lays out an approach to negotiations based upon empathy and respect for others.  Preparation starts by writing a list assessing the problem, situation, options, and actions.  People then role playing in advance to practice for the negotiation.  People then use role reversal to play the other person in the negotiation, which gives further insights.

Role playing and role reversal are so uncomfortable that people will shy away from the exercise.  However, these are some of the most powerful negotiation tools.  Almost any interaction with another person can be considered a negotiation, and improving negotiation skills improves interaction skills, so groups with better negotiation skills are better equipped to work together.  Working effectively with others is an employee skill. Getting others to work well together is a management skill.

The manager must connect to the team, facilitate group discussions, and cultivate the team’s skills in healthy interrelationships, interconnections, and interactions to enhance team performance.  Winners can be cherry picked, but winning teams must be developed by managers who design and implement specific, detailed learning plans that include the skill of getting others to work effectively together.  The manager's key asset is the ability to increase the speed of the team learning how to learn together and building the team’s skill in translating individual learning into organizational learning.  This is how winning managers develop winning teams.

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash.