Surviving Feedback: Don't Toss Your Baggage
About seven years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in an intensive leadership development program. After going to many different company retreats, high production value events and team building boondoggles—I was completely skeptical. I wasn’t sure I could handle another corporate trust fall.
Once I was further briefed on what I would come to call my “inpatient” leadership development program, my skepticism gave way to complete terror and vulnerability. There was a fine, blurry line between growing as a leader and reconfiguring who I was as a person. Both egos responsible for their respective posts seemed extremely threatened and thus began to retreat.
The program involved a fairly hearty 360-review from colleagues and partners, along with a Myers Briggs personality assessment (I am an INTJ just like Napoleon, in case you were wondering) and a 6-8 week remediation, i.e., coaching plan to follow. I trusted my coach completely—a lovely woman who I had known for some time with amazing credentials, who could sense my trepidation from a mile away. She was like Yoda, handling me with a mix of practicality, realism and care that only a true master can perform.
I met her in San Francisco to review the results of my 360-review—the collation of the feedback and perceptions from her conversations. Others had warned me about this phase of the program. Two of my most macho colleagues described the experience akin to being “hit with a lead pipe.” Not overly comforting. I sat through the three hour meeting—staring at pages of data. There was a lot of great feedback, but like any human—I rushed through the good to get to the negative. “This positive stuff is great, but get to the good stuff, I mean the bad stuff. Where do I suck?” I knew it was there. And it was—trust me. Neatly packaged in Arial font, clear as day and I felt the sting of that lead pipe…
My coach and I discussed the processing phase and then I went back to my hotel, threw the binder in my roller bag and flew back to Seattle.
I didn’t unpack that suitcase with that binder in it for 3-weeks. It sat with all of those words, perceptions and vulnerabilities neatly nestled in my black roller bag between my work clothes and my dirty gym clothes. I evaluated if I could throw the whole bag out—determining what clothes I would be parting with. But, alas—I unpacked the bag and in turn, began unpacking the feedback to do the hard work that would follow.
Managing a brand is about making choices—what you are willing to do versus what sacrifices you make is sometimes a greater tell about your values or your overall strategy. The same goes for personal brands—we often forget there are choices to be made about the feedback we get. I’ve been in very feedback-centric cultures and have come to appreciate feedback like a gift. But just like a gift, not everything you get is your style or the right size.
Here’s a framework I leverage for thinking about feedback:
1. Actionable, fix now. This is the stuff that follows you around. If you are honest with yourself, you probably already know what falls in this bucket—they are the behaviors that hang you up over and over again, the center point of most of your conflict, poor or lack of performance. If you’ve been working for a while, you know it won’t go away by switching jobs, putting on different clothes or trying to be on your best behavior. There is heavy lifting required here or it will truly hold you back.
2. Adjust for the ecosystem. Every work environment is different, so there are different values or rules of engagement that work well in one place and are verboten in others. It is perfectly acceptable (and most likely necessary) to make adjustments for the culture you are in, so you can perform and be effective. (Really) adapting your style so you can be effective, but authentic is a learned skill. Learn how to do it—you will get things done and be happier with yourself.
3. Embrace your faults. I have a well-respected colleague I’ve worked with for close to 15-years. When push comes to shove, he will look at me and say, “I can’t change. This is who I am.” It’s jarring to hear at first, but I’ve come to appreciate his honesty with his own limitations. The masterstroke here is to figure out how to own these traits, using them selectively and effectively, as well as knowing whom else you need around you to keep the pH level in check.
We need to be clear about who we really are from the authentic sense, what is within the scope of our psyche and what corporate culture expectations we buy into or not. I’ve seen good leaders take all the feedback to heart and try to reconfigure their entire psyche, only to come back less effective than when they started. Just like dieting—yo-yoing back and forth can be worse than just splitting the difference. Like companies that have stretched their value proposition and their offerings—leaders who try to fake their authenticity and build experiences that are not true to their core strengths and overall constitutions are easily tested and are quickly found out.
That so-called “inpatient” program would become one of the greatest investments I ever did in my career. I kept that binder and look at it from time to time. It has been a good reminder of my strengths, areas of continued development and other items now deemed “out of scope.”