Dreading feedback isn’t personal. It’s a prioritization problem.

“I have some feedback.”

Did you cringe?  It’s okay, I still do too. 

Through my partnership with leaders creating true learning organizations, I’ve discovered the secret to offering and receiving feedback as a building block to higher performance and greater emotional connection.  It all comes down to prioritization. 

They prioritize curiosity over correctness.  Prioritize the long-term development of their people over the immediate client impact. And when they’re the one offering feedback, they prioritize the other person’s perspective over their own. 

Your association with feedback says a little about you and a lot about your environment.  Workplaces that carefully avoid feedback or offer it irregularly perpetuate the pit-of-stomach stress response to the idea.  But communities of curiosity do it differently.  

It’s more important to be curious than correct.

My client Whitney is struggling with a team member who appears paralyzed by fear of being wrong.  She procrastinates, then asks her partners to check and re-check her work before making a decision.  Whitney and I brainstormed various ways she can create a safe scaffolding of conversation to encourage her team member to take action more confidently.  But we quickly realized this wasn’t just about one person.  We had to demonstrate the entire firm’s understanding of what it means to make a mistake.

Working in parallel alongside a personal development plan for this team member, we aimed to develop a culture of curiosity. And like all great change, we started small. 

There was already a standing weekly deadline meeting.  We added an agenda item: Lessons learned. Whitney went first, reviewing a case her team had lost and a key element they realized they missed but would have set them up to win.  Typically this meeting would be reserved only for a quick celebration of wins and a deep dive into calendars and deadline planning.  Her story added five minutes, and opened the door for others to follow up with questions or insights.  A small step for the agenda, a giant leap for curiosity’s sake. 

Prioritize Curiosity as the Receiver of Feedback

Let’s say you are receiving feedback from your manager.  If your priority is to be correct, your inner monologue–and perhaps the conversation over drinks later with friends– might sound like this:

“...but they don’t know the context.”

“...but that wasn’t a clear expectation.”

“Changing my course is too costly.”

“Their opinion doesn’t matter anyway.”

If your priority is curiosity, consider changing the running lines in your head:

“...and that offers me more context.”

“...and I know more about them now.”

“Changing my course might be difficult”

“Their opinion widens my perspective.”

Your Action, Your Choice

The only real way this can stick, instead of sounding like the textbook answer to roll your eyes at, is if you own the power you have already. If you take feedback as an unquestionable directive, you add defensiveness on top of loss of control.  Pretty hard not to cringe at the idea from the start.

If instead, you evaluate the options you have to move forward, and consider feedback as informing those options, you remind yourself of your agency.  You are a contributor receiving information on how you might better align with your constituency.  What you do with that information is up to you, but can be simplified to really only 3 options: use feedback to inform future action, dismiss the feedback, or dwell on it.  Dwelling is where drama happens, and you get to choose that too. 

Small Shifts toward Curiosity

When you prioritize curiosity, you breathe space into reality.  When you prioritize correctness, you strangle real human performance.  To get there mentally, I often ask my clients to consider the consequences of criticism vs growth. If you are doing work that is meaningful enough to be criticized, you are doing meaningful work. If that work can improve, what might be the potential opportunities for growth? What would it mean if you could do even more of the type of work you love? Change is scary, but that kind of change is the transformation we crave.

Because feedback is an indicator of trust within a community, it’s also worth studying what happens when people make mistakes. Are projects reviewed only by what worked? What avenues exist to openly share lessons learned? What metrics do people pay attention to that might be clues to where performance has improved, and how are the improvements—not just the end results—celebrated? If these questions leave you worried or hopeless, there is promise in baby-stepping your priority of curiosity. Rather than presenting a full dissertation on the mis-steps we learned from and statements of discovery, be the one to introduce a gentle question.

“What did you think was important that turned out to be less of a big deal?”

“What, if anything, would you tell someone trying to do the same thing you set out to do?”

“In hindsight, what might have made this more enjoyable?”

You don’t have to have the answer. Sometimes, you just have to ask the question. And that—as it turns out—is curiosity at its finest.

Stay tuned for more on Feedback and the 3 Priorities of Learning Organizations. 

Ready to take your approach to a more challenging and connected level of growth?  Contact us today to learn more about coaching, speaking, and facilitation support.