Have you ever received feedback that hurts, whether from a colleague, supervisor, client, or friend? As leader, you may be sheltered from feedback because your team members hesitate to share their thoughts with you – until someone like your leadership coach collects unexpectedly harsh input from team members. Then “pow!” – you discover hard feelings that have been stewing for months. Or, as a team member, you may discover that others have been resentful and gossiping about something you did with the best of intention.
In these situations, you wonder how-on-earth your actions or words could have been so vastly misunderstood. You second-guess your capabilities and strengths, your choice of words and actions. You question whether you can trust your peers and colleagues to speak out when they’re bothered, or who’s out to get you regardless of what you do.
It’s a punch to the gut, to receive cutting feedback indirectly and long after the initial cause: painful, unsettling, and even confidence-shattering. And yet, you can recover and grow from this uncomfortable experience. Here’s what I learned about bouncing back, from my own recent experience with harsh feedback:
Digest the Feedback
- Take time to digest the feedback. If your first exposure to someone’s feedback makes you raise your fists or crawl for cover, set it aside and revisit it when you’re calm. It can be harmful to your relationships, reputation, and career if you react verbally or by email when your emotions run high.
- Have a rant (privately!). You know you want to! Vent your emotions and say the words you can’t say in a professional setting. but in the privacy of your office, car, or home. Wonderfully cathartic, venting can lead to insights hidden in the feedback.
- Move your body. Feeling under attack from difficult feedback puts your body on high alert. To dissipates stress hormones and restore your body and brain to a state of well-being, it helps to move: walk, run, lift at the gym, dance, or play a sport.
- Enlist a listening partner. A trusted friend, peer, or counselor can help you understand the feedback from a different angle, digest your reactions, and figure out how to address it constructively. An ideal partner will listen objectively, ask helpful questions, and refrain from gossiping or trash-talking those who offered the feedback.
Learn from the Feedback
- Take a learning approach. After your rant, review the feedback from a stance of learning and self-development. Look for the two percent that you feel could be true (I found this advice especially helpful; thanks, Julie!). For those parts, what do you need to learn, change, or do differently in your approach to leadership and work relationships?
- Identify differing expectations. Feedback that you find harsh or unfounded is hard to take in. Yet your resistance signals the need to get curious about the cause. One frequent cause is a lack of shared expectations. For example, when a leader believes they need to be “highly involved” in project teams, their project teams may resent what they experience as “micromanagement.” Communication gaps can lead to misunderstandings about expectations for deadlines, quality of work products, or behavioral norms. Mismatched expectations also arise when roles are not clear: what should you be doing in your role compared to others in their roles? Get curious: what part of the feedback can be fixed by clarifying expectations, communication, and roles?
- Leave room for context and compassion. The people who offered you feedback gave it from their own context. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by workload pressures, concerned about their jobs, resistant to an initiative they never fully endorsed, or resentful about the promotion that you got. There are endless reasons that people give poorly worded, unkind, and thoughtless feedback, including a lack of skill in giving feedback constructively. (See the next article about this: “Yes, It Does, Feedback Improves Relationships”). Leaving room for context and compassion puts feedback inside a workable frame of reference, in which no one is perfect and poorly chosen words can be forgiven.
Move on with Strength & Integrity
- Remember your strengths. As an act of self-compassion, take a moment to remember your strengths. Harsh feedback may come across as if every part of you is being judged; that’s a normal reaction from the part of your brain that feels under attack. However, you can regulate your emotions by remembering the genuine strengths that you bring to your work and the rest of your life.
- Respond with integrity. Sometimes feedback requires a response, depending on your situation. Consider carefully whether and how you want to respond and be clear about your reasons for doing so. Refrain from responding if your motives are self-serving: to defend your position, to get back at others, or to repudiate the feedback. Go forward of your motives are to grow as a person, improve who you are at work, and repair relationships.
- Then, let it go. It’s easy to mull over feedback, especially when it cuts to your core. However, it hurts you more than anyone else to let it ricochet around your mind for more than a few days. Find the gold nugget in the feedback, the one or two things that you can address proactively, and then release the rest.
Receiving negative feedback is hard. Yet it happens to all of us, sooner or later. How you recover from the situation is key to your growth as a leader, as a professional, and as a human being. Make the most of the situation by learning from it and responding with integrity.
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Thanks for reading! I help teams learn how to give and receive feedback constructively, often in tandem with Patrick Lencioni’s Five Behaviors of Cohesive Teams. Contact me to find out how I can help your team with team coaching and learning essential soft skills such as Conflict Competence.
