How to receive feedback as a leader without getting defensive

If we have a ton of meetings and approvals, a deadline might be at risk because there’s a lot of hoops you have to jump through. Doesn’t mean we just change the deadline and say, okay, the product’s getting shipped later, no. We say, well, yeah, that’s a real issue. Let’s look at how we can mitigate that. Are there ways to streamline approvals? Are there ways to bring some of these meetings together? Get stakeholders aligned on the backend?

Instead of just saying, hey, hey, manager, my feedback is, you know, the deadline is too quick. Like you put too much on me, I can’t do it. And we go, okay, let’s just change it, right? That’s not what we mean. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress.

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Welcome back to the show. I said it before, I’ll say it again, this is Skills Week on Managing Made Simple, diving deep into giving and receiving feedback. So our previous episode was about giving feedback, the fundamentals around how to set those expectations, make it specific with a framework, and making a clear ask. Today, I’m gonna talk about receiving feedback, because let’s face it, it’s way harder to get feedback. Now, why is it so hard to get feedback?

Well, a lot of times, feedback talks about something that we kinda knew about, or had some sort of imposter feelings around, or maybe have been working on, but didn’t quite land, or, you know, and it can sort of like feel like a, like a dagger in the heart of something that we kinda already knew and didn’t feel super confident about. That can happen with feedback. You know, it also can just be one more thing that we have to deal with and add to the list.

So it can be frustrating, it can maybe make us feel burned out or overwhelmed. Feedback can be really hard when we’re receiving it from our team members as a manager, as a team leader, because our team members don’t always have the context. And I think a lot of times, as managers and leaders, we get feedback about things that’s very incomplete, like, I don’t like how you set priorities, or feel like you didn’t push back on the client enough, or you didn’t push back on upper management enough, or things like that, where like, our team members don’t understand the full context.

So it’s frustrating to hear that because we kinda wanna say, hey, listen, like, give me the benefit of the doubt. I’m trying to do my best here. But when we receive feedback, there are certain things to think through so that it goes better. And this is really what I encourage you to think about as a manager or team leader. It’s also strategies that you can share with your own team for how they can receive feedback with a little bit more grace, not look at everything as the end all be all, right?

So when thinking of feedback, there was a TED Talk I saw years ago that talked about feedback as the sponge versus strainer metaphor. And we wanna find somewhere in the middle. Feedback is information about how we’re being perceived by another person, okay? It’s neither good nor bad. This is what the book, Thanks for the Feedback, talks about. That’s my favorite book on feedback, actually, if you need a resource. Thanks for the Feedback by Doug Stone and Sheila Heen.

It is an awesome book with a ton of tools on feedback. I have brought it into all my workshops. I cite it in my book, Unstuck, and the works. And what they really wanna reframe for folks is that feedback is neither good nor bad. It’s information signaling how you’re being perceived at a given moment. And so when we think about that, the information, there might be stuff that we soak in. There might be stuff that we let go.

But it’s not a factual statement about everything that signifies who we are. And when we remember that, it’s a lot easier to hear the information. And that allows us to have a little bit more grace if someone giving us feedback isn’t very skilled at it. And I talked about this in the last episode that the better we are at delivering feedback, the easier it is for the receiver. Now, when we think about this the other way, the better and less kind of attached we are to hearing feedback, the easier we make it on the giver.

So it goes both ways. And that’s why it’s an important thing to talk about as a manager. So I think the first thing to think through when it comes to feedback, and the first thing to really apply in receiving feedback is to listen. Listen with curiosity. Be open. Hear the person out, okay? Because when we listen to respond or to argue or to be defensive, we’re not even hearing what someone’s saying. If someone says the words, can I give you some feedback?

And you put your walls up and you’re like, oh, here we go, it’s not gonna be good. Or they don’t know about me. Or they’re always coming to me with some problem, right? When we bring this whole lens to it, we’re not curious. We’re not hearing them out. And we wanna listen with curiosity. Like what is, you know, there’s gotta be something with some value. Doesn’t mean we have to action it right away. It doesn’t mean we apply all of it.

But we wanna listen with curiosity and see, okay, what can I take away from this? So that’s the first thing. Then we wanna think about it and digest it. We don’t have to respond right away. We don’t have to have an answer. We don’t have to have a defense. Now, if there is something that’s really important to clarify, okay, fine. If something’s fundamentally inaccurate and we wanna clear it up because it’s going to help the situation, we could say, hey, I wanna, you know, I really appreciate what you said.

Actually, I wanna share a little bit of context because it’s really important. I think it’ll help sort of kind of maybe change the perspective here or give you some more context. But I didn’t say, that’s not true. You don’t know the whole story, right? Like I didn’t get defensive. So, you know, for the most part, it’s really important to just kind of digest it before responding. And if, again, if there’s some context that’d be helpful, we can share it.

But I think a lot of times, and this is really true in personal relationships, someone getting feedback, they wanna be heard. They wanna know that you listen to them. They are sharing that with you so that you internalize it. And if we start responding and defending, that’s gonna sort of show that person, oh, you’re not really open to hearing the feedback. Now, as managers with our team members, we are asking them for feedback. We are inviting it.

We’re telling them feedback’s a two-way street. I wanna be the best manager I can be. Give me feedback. Tell me how I can improve. We have to show up for them and actually like listen to it. Otherwise, they’re not gonna trust us. Did you know that I do team workshops on all of the stuff that I talk about on this show with large companies like Google and also with startups and small businesses like marketing agencies, law firms, and med spas?

Whether it’s making those feedback conversations a little less awkward, how to support your team through all of the change and uncertainty making us all, well, a little on edge right now, or delegating to empower your team to step up as owners. I come into your teams and give you the tools you need to wrestle with all this tough stuff and feel like you’ve got it handled. Reach out at hello at leahgarvin.com or pass my info along to the decision maker in your company.

And let’s make all this team stuff easier and a lot more fun. Now, there are teams where feedback’s not a two-way street. There’s industries, there’s environments, there’s certain work situations. And that’s actually not what I’m talking about here. I’m encouraging you in whatever team you’re in, whatever industry, to make feedback a two-way street, to welcome feedback from your team members, because it doesn’t mean you have to action it right away. We listen and we think about, you know, okay, well, where does this make sense to action it?

What can I maybe try? But that’s the most important thing, right? This is the third thing. Just because someone said something or asked for something or wanted something or shared a piece of feedback, it doesn’t mean we have to do that thing. Now, we don’t want to reject everything someone says wholesale and say, cool, like that’s your opinion, whatever. No, we want to consider it, but it is one perspective. And it doesn’t mean that we have to take action immediately.

So I have a client and they run a marketing business and they were wrestling with their pricing model. And the business owner said to me, hey, you know, I had this, you know, this offer at this one price and some clients pushed back and they said, you know, we really want this to be cheaper. So we’re thinking about lowering the price. And I said, okay, so two people asked you to lower your price. They’re like, that’s it.

You’re just going to go with that. You’re creating a race to the bottom, right? And I think the same goes for if someone gives us a piece of feedback or a team member says, hey, you know, I don’t like the way you do this thing or I have too much work on my plate or, you know, the timeline is too fast. We don’t just change the timeline because one person said that. We actually think it through.

We factor in other perspectives. We think about what makes the most sense for the business. Okay, I, in the corporate world, for example, I think a lot of times, you know, we’re wrestling with a lot of different stakeholders with competing needs. We have to have a lot of meetings and approvals. And if we have a ton of meetings and approvals, a deadline might be at risk because there’s a lot of hoops you have to jump through.

Doesn’t mean we just change the deadline and say, okay, the product’s getting shipped later. No, we say, well, yeah, that’s a real issue. Let’s look at how we can mitigate that. Are there ways to streamline approvals? Are there ways to bring some of these meetings together? Get stakeholders aligned on the backend instead of just saying, hey, hey, manager, my feedback is, you know, the deadline is too quick. Like you’ve put too much on me. I can’t do it.

And we go, okay, let’s just change it, right? That’s not what we mean. So again, this third kind of piece of dealing with receiving feedback is thinking about it in the context of all the other things that we know. And like I said already, it doesn’t mean dismissing it. It means really, really weighing and considering it, but weighing it as a piece of data amongst other things. So when we do that, we start by remembering, you know, feedback, we have our sponge, we have our strainer, and we’re going to absorb certain things and let other things go.

Remember, it is information about how we’re being perceived by a person, the same sort of data point multiple times over a long time, that’s gonna signal, hey, this is something that’s really, there’s a real trend here, right? We have a big center of gravity here. And that’s something that if it’s going really well, we wanna keep doing. And if it’s something that keeps working against us, well, we should take listen of it, right? Then we think through the lens of curiosity.

We’re listening, we’re not getting defensive. We wanna hear someone out, especially again, we’ve invited our team members to share feedback. We want to make it safe for them to do so. Then we think about it. We don’t have to respond right away. We don’t have to have a defense. If there’s context clarification, we share that, but it’s not on this attack mode. Even if we feel attacked, it can, I said this, it can be really hard if we feel like our team members don’t understand us and they’re not giving us credit, they’re not giving us benefit of the doubt, but it doesn’t mean we just say that at them all the time.

So we slow down, we listen, we say, thank you. We think about it and we come back and we talk about it later. Last but not least, we remember this is one perspective. We’ve got to weigh all of it amongst other things. If we have a big team and we’re receiving a lot of feedback, maybe some of it contradicts each other, then of course we can’t just action each thing and be thrashed around. And if we have a team where there’s a lot of context missing, a lot of things folks don’t know about, let’s say there was a big reorganizational change or you did a pivot or you shifted strategy based on competitive forces and your team members don’t have a ton of context on that.

So they have feedback that they didn’t like the moves you made. You don’t undo the strategic shift that was necessary for the business just because folks thought that. But it is an opportunity to think through, well, for the next time, is there more context I could have set? So I think that’s the last thing to leave with folks that as a leader, we’re listening both for feedback on how we could shift and fine tune or keep doing the good things that we’re doing, but we’re also looking bigger picture for, is there a way that I could show up better for my team in a bigger way?

So if something actually leads you to being more clear or more direct or micromanaging less, delegating, empowering a little bit more, letting go, giving people space to lead. If you recognize some macro themes in there, that’s a great opportunity to take a step back and say, hey, this is a gift. Like someone is giving me an opportunity to show up better for them. And this is something I can give to the whole team. All right, so get out there, ask for that feedback, make it a two-way street.

And I assure you the receiving of it, even if it’s a little bit tough to hear, even if you feel like it’s not fair because you’re doing all this behind the scenes, it is going to be so much easier. And the more receptive you are to feedback, the more trust you build with your teams, the safer they feel to share things. And I assure you, it’s not opening a Pandora’s box, because you’re really building relationship. And you don’t open the Pandora’s box because when there are things that you can’t shift, you don’t take action.

You say, hey, here’s what I can action, here’s what I can’t, and here’s why. All right, give it a shot and let me know how it goes. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word.

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