The (Often) Untapped Power of Honest Feedback

As I wrapped up the final chapter in The Values Advantage, I detailed why Cindy and I rarely do anything resembling a check-the-box survey at the end of the large public events we host. While we work to set very clear expectations for attendees, we know we’ll only have limited interaction with many of them so there’s just not much chance the boxes getting checked align with what we were striving to achieve. Even the best reviews provide little value without specific context for the high marks, and I’ve never seen low ratings without detail serve anyone. That said, we’re very intentional about scheduling follow up conversations with multiple attendees after each event, all with varying perspectives, to ensure we can capture the (often) untapped power of honest feedback.

Much like improving any event we host, honest feedback plays a crucial role in every aspect of professional development, especially when that development involves even the slightest bit of leadership responsibility. Like it or not, there’s no such thing as a self-made leader - and that’s a big part of the role mentors play in closing the gap. In sharing how some of the initial feedback I received from Terry about how I could convey a message more effectively to a group often stung, I mentioned how most of us are naturally averse to “constructive criticism” - even when it’s based on the best of intentions. While it was usually tough to receive feedback on those group presentations, especially since I was so uncomfortable in those settings anyway, I developed a routine of going to Terry for feedback on just about anything I could through the few years that followed (and I still do whenever I can). Even though I could count on him to always share his honest opinion, I often caught myself explaining (read: justifying) why I had done something a certain way rather than accepting what he shared and working to improve. Looking back, I believe some of my attempts at justification were based on just wanting to make him proud. I deeply appreciated all he was doing for me and hoped he saw that I was taking full advantage of the guidance he was providing. That said, I know some of that justification was due to being resistant to “constructive criticism.”

In his book, Know What You’re FOR, Jeff Henderson credits Dr. Tim Irwin with the idea of “Alliance Feedback”, as opposed to the constructive criticism that can hurt even when it’s delivered with the purest of intentions. He quotes Dr. Irwin as saying, “I strongly believe that if we know deep down a person is for us, we can hear just about anything they convey to us. If we want to bring out the best in another person, we are more likely to do so if we can form an alliance intended to help the person.” Henderson summarizes the idea like this: “Alliance Feedback is where a manager aligns herself with the employee, helping them live out who they truly want to become.”

Although Terry was never my manager, he definitely aligned himself with me and has helped me live out who I wanted to become; then and still today. To start the process, I had to develop the confidence to ask for his input - the confidence to initiate that level of connection. And through all of it since, I’ve had to put a tremendous amount of energy into accepting his feedback without losing confidence in myself (and we’ll dig into that more soon). Unfortunately, we’ve all seen folks in various levels of leadership avoid feedback at all cost - and there are plenty of examples of how doing that has negatively impacted everyone around them. Why is that so often the case? And why should leaders be very intentional about soliciting honest feedback? Let’s work through both questions…

Why Leaders Avoid Feedback (and Why They Shouldn’t)

If you and I were having a conversation over coffee, I’m sure we could list no less than a dozen reasons someone with leadership responsibility would avoid soliciting honest feedback. Before moving on, I’ll emphasize my intentionality for using the phrase “someone with leadership responsibility” rather than simply referring to that person as a leader. I’ve seldom seen anyone who avoids honest feedback earn the genuine influence required to truly lead their team; they may wield a level of authority, but that ain’t leadership. That said, and with all the reasons we could pile up through a one-on-one conversation, I’ve seen two of them create more issues than all the others I can think of combined.

In far too many cases, I’ve witnessed executives and business owners purposefully surround themselves with people who nod their heads in unison regardless of their actual opinion. On the rare occasion that someone penetrates that inner circle and is willing to express the slightest bit of concern about the emperor being naked, the shunning soon follows. Sometimes that person gets called into the principal’s office for an old-fashioned paddling, but just as often the most senior yes-men take it upon themselves to police the issue on behalf of their king. How can I detail this so explicitly? I’m so glad you asked!

Early in my career, I was willing to follow the crowd by nodding in agreement rather than sharing any feedback that may have been perceived as dissent, then join right in with that crowd later on by bitching about what I wasn’t willing to address initially. Through the example Terry provided by consistently giving me feedback and by watching him routinely doing the same with anyone at any level of the organization, I saw the positive impact it could have and I realized just how rare it really was. Interestingly enough, many on the receiving end of his feedback took offense - regardless of how respectful he was with his delivery (and we’ll look at how important that respectful delivery is next).

With that example as a baseline, and becoming increasingly unwilling to watch someone in a position of authority take advantage of those they viewed as their minions, I found myself in more and more situations where I was providing the person holding leadership responsibility with feedback they worked hard to avoid. I won’t pretend that all of it was delivered as respectfully as it could have been. Quite honestly, there were a handful of times where the conversations got rather heated. Before you cast any stones or ask if that’s how Jesus would have handled those situations, I’ll point to a time where He flipped over a bunch of tables and chased the lawyers with a whip…

Regardless of who provided the feedback or how it was delivered, each of the so-called leaders I’ve seen choose to avoid it were also actively choosing to avoid the hidden power that feedback could offer. In each case, sooner or later, they found themselves dealing with significant problems that could have been minimized - and possibly eliminated altogether - had they been willing to accept a different perspective rather than pushing anyone away who wasn’t nodding in total agreement.

While it’s a distant second, the next most frequent reason I’ve seen for a leader avoiding feedback, and this time I’m just as intentional in referring to them as a leader, boils down to the demands on their time. Some of the most influential leaders I’ve ever had the chance to study have had schedules that the population at-large simply couldn’t comprehend. In each case, I’ve seen them work to build teams that help them live in their areas of strength while supporting their weaknesses; and every leader has weaknesses, the best leaders are the quickest to admit them and do all they can to offset them. Unfortunately, the folks tasked with supporting these highly influential leaders in their areas of weakness can get a bit star-struck. I’ve seen many become engrossed in self-preservation and focus solely on telling their boss how great things are while dodging a tough conversation with every ounce of energy they have. I once heard Alan Mullaly share a story from early in his time as CEO for Ford Motor Company where the company had lost BILLIONS in the previous quarter but his executive team all reported positive results in the same period. He explained that this was a result of his predecessor being unwilling to accept anything less than a positive report - reality be damned…

While this second scenario isn’t from the leader purposefully avoiding feedback, it does create an immediate need for them to actively seek out honest feedback. That requires time; time they have very little of. Doing this can be as simple as providing explicit guidance - or for our purposes here, honest feedback - to our direct reports detailing the expectation that they openly share their concerns. This won’t likely ever happen with the ones who shun the slightest bit of dissent, but they’re not really leading anyway. But even the leaders who do solicit honest feedback from their teams will have to help them learn what it looks like to do this with respect.

The behavior-based safety model that I trained teams on across North America was based on providing our peers with feedback on the actions they took to avoid the risk of injury and to point out anything they did during the ten minutes we had observed them that could have resulted in them being hurt. This wasn’t focused on how they did or did not comply with safety regulations; our responsibility was to point out, with extreme specificity, where they were exposed to potential for injury and how their behaviors either mitigated or added to the risk in the situation. Since there was no discipline involved in this process, the feedback could be very casual. We hoped to achieve some level of behavioral change that reduced the risk of injury, but our job wasn’t to force that change but to simply raise their level of awareness. Even then, though, one of the most difficult things about training my peers to perform observations was getting them to a point where they were willing to provide that specific feedback rather than just checking a few boxes on a sheet of paper. Personally, I got very comfortable with it; maybe a bit too comfortable.