1% Leadership by Andy Ellis

Author:Andy Ellis [Ellis, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Your job is not to like your team; it is to not dislike them.

28

Feedback needs to be a window, not a one-way mirror.

I’VE PARTICIPATED IN A LOT OF PEER FEEDBACK SESSIONS, OFTEN scheduled at the last moment. A meeting facilitator connects participants into pairs, and each gives five-minute feedback to one another. It’s a fascinating format; I think its goal is about building connections and demonstrating active-listening skills, but there’s something else that I’ve observed. The feedback often becomes shortened to a descriptive form of name-calling: “You’re an empire builder” or “You enjoy picking fights.”

For people I’ve worked with very closely, the feedback can be fairly insightful. But for people I’ve had more casual relationships with, their perception usually feels… wrong. Sometimes I can twist it around in my head to find a way to make it fit. But sometimes even that doesn’t work very well; the description is at complete odds with the facts I have at hand.

In the early stages of my career, I mostly walked out of those conversations a little puzzled, chalked it up to an odd interaction, and moved on. Until the day a colleague gave me feedback that not only didn’t resonate, but was exactly the feedback I’d considered giving them, until I realized it would be blunt and harsh and I probably shouldn’t say it. And now, of course, I couldn’t, really, since it would sound like a slightly more adult version of “I’m rubber and you’re glue; it bounces off me and sticks to you.”

Often when people give feedback, they’re not really giving you feedback. They’re giving themselves feedback. They’re judging your actions against their own self-image and then talking about their perceptions of your actions as if they had taken those actions; they’re engaging in self-improvement near you. If you’re like them, then that critique might be helpful, but if you’re not, it seems odd.

Casual criticism is directed at you through a one-way mirror. The giver of feedback sees themselves overlaying a shadow of your actions. The more light that is on you, the better they can distinguish you from their own reflection, but mostly they’re talking to themselves.

They see their worst impulses, and compare them to the actions that you took, and see if they can judge you by them. They see their own strengths and weaknesses and assess your outputs against them.

As a giver of feedback, you can overcome this with care, but then you need to recognize that feedback is also heard through a one-way mirror. If you have a person who misuses a skill you’re strong in, it’s very hard to tell them to stop. They see you continuing to use that skill, and doing so successfully, and wonder why you’re telling them to stop using it; they see your successful use of the skill as a reflection of their own use of it.

One key approach to giving, and receiving, feedback is to separate the problem from the solution. All too often, feedback becomes “Stop doing X” or “Start doing Y,” which can suffer from the one-way-mirror problem.

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