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