On Feedback

tl;dr: Feedback is hard to receive. But the pattern is what matters, not the outlier. And the feedback that hurts the most is usually the most true. Which is why we can’t do this work alone.

Feedback!

We all know how it feels when someone says they are going to give us feedback.

Even if we are wise enough to want it. Even if we understand that there is no way to become better at what we are doing without constructive feedback. There is still something inside us that clenches.

A deep fear.

I might even call it primal.

We are a social animal. Our survival depends on being part of the tribe, and something in us gets triggered when we think we might have done something that could mean loss of status or even worse, exile from the tribe.

Most of you reading this are folk who are already doing your best at working through those emotions. You want to be the people who can receive constructive feedback about your work, about how you show up in the world and in your relationships. Because you are mature. And because you want to be better.

When I build agreements with my coaching clients, one of the things I promise is to do my very best to tell them things about themselves that people around them are afraid to say. Serious feedback, given in a caring context, is something worth paying for.

It was 20 years ago that I was welcomed into the Rockwood Institute’s Leading from the Inside Out Fellowship. That fellowship changed my life. It put me in direct contact with my mentor, Robert Gass, and showed me that what I thought was facilitation could actually be turned into something that is orders of magnitude greater than anything I had imagined. It was there that I learned what kind of facilitator I wanted to become.

There was a moment in the year-long process when each of the participants had to look at the results of a survey on our leadership. We each had to confront feedback patterns garnered from at least 20 of the most important people in our work life. Our bosses, our colleagues, our subordinates, our clients and the people that we served.

It was amazing to be part of a circle with some of the most respected leaders in the social movements of our time. People running organizations that were having real impact towards the kind of social transformation we were about to see. As you can imagine, humility wasn’t the leading virtue in our space. And yet here we were, together, flummoxed, perplexed, shaken by what we were learning about ourselves.

For most of us, if not all of us, our gaze was focused on the people who liked our work the least. It didn’t matter if 80% of the feedback was positive; we were obsessed by the other 20%. I remember thinking to myself, “Maybe this one person just did not get the scale right. Maybe they thought that 1’s and 2’s were really good and 9’s and 10’s were really bad.” Their perspective was that different from the pattern. But it was that aberrant perspective that captured my imagination and helped me sink into the primal fear of rejection.

Look for the patterns, Robert said, don’t get stuck on the outliers.

But that’s really hard to do. Not impossible, but definitely hard. It takes practice.

Robert would say the same words that I am now pleased to repeat when working with leaders:

“If somebody calls you a horse’s ass, tell him to go to hell. If someone else calls you a horse’s ass, tell him to get lost. If a third person calls you a horse’s ass, it might be time to get yourself a saddle.”

It’s the pattern that matters, not the anomaly.

Something is probably not right if everyone you ever meet likes you and your work. It probably means you’re not living a life that takes risks.

I was blessed to partner with a remarkable woman, Jade Madrone, just as I was launching my own business. She was our business manager, the person that made everything work. We worked together for so many years that it started to feel like we shared a brain.

We are in the business of meaningful intimacy. Our work is work that knows the strategic power of authentic human connection. And so Jade, like myself, was immersed in the communities that we wove together. This also meant that Jade was privy to all sorts of opinions and complaints and ideas about how I should be and how I should go about doing what I do.

So I built an agreement with Jade. I told her that I wanted to hear nothing about individual gripes or complaints, but that I was very keen on hearing about any patterns of feedback that she heard over time. In this way, Jade could protect both me and the integrity of our work.

The agreement was simple: patterns yes, individual gripes no.

And it works.

You don’t want everyone to like you

I recently facilitated a large gathering. I got lots of positive feedback while I was there. And our debrief call was full of praise for my work, praise that was backed by stellar survey feedback.

And there was also this comment on the survey:

Use a different facilitator. I found Gibrán hokey and was put off by his self-righteous, mystic spirit leader routine.

His initial ice-breaker session, while well intended, involved going into things that for me are deeply personal... and thus very uncomfortable.

It could have been done with questions with a much lighter touch (”tell someone you don’t know where you are from, how you came to the work, etc).

It didn’t have to be done as a “I’m asking you to go deep in yourself” frame.

I always say that if I was a brand with a tagline, my tagline would be:

“Not for everybody”

If some percentage of people don’t have a strong negative reaction to your work, then you’re probably not yet working at your own leading edge.

Ron Heifetz, who taught adaptive leadership at Harvard, would remind his students that:

If you’re doing adaptive work, you should expect resistance—because you are asking people to experience loss. If no one is upset, you are probably not working at the adaptive level.

Look for the pattern. Don’t be too concerned about the outliers, and in fact, be very concerned if you don’t have any.

But it isn’t as simple as that either

The work I do is work that wants to change culture. I have long moved in the work of social movements as somebody that has a deep love and commitment to the values and aspirations that we hold together. But also as someone who holds great concern and critique for how these positions tend to be held.

I do not want to be part of a culture that polices and shames and threatens exile when people do not fully conform to the dictums of the Church of Social Justice.

So there is an added layer of complexity here:

I want to hear patterns of feedback.

I am aware that I have powerful defense mechanisms that will want to reject that feedback.

But at the same time, I know that there are patterns of feedback that will arise from a set of cultural norms and beliefs that I am actively inviting people to move away from.

So what do we do when there is a pattern of feedback that is rooted in a culture that is different from what we’re trying to do or create?

If I’m honest with you, I end up managing most of this discernment by myself. And ideally with Tuesday (my wife and muse!) But it is always best when it is held together, by a group of peers who understand the complexity and are also longing for a new way.

The feedback that hurts the most

The truth is that the hardest and most devastating feedback that I have received has also been the most accurate. The kind of feedback that points to character flaws that don’t only threaten the integrity of my work but have a negative impact through every aspect of my life.

That kind of feedback can only be held within a community of trusted ones. It is too hard for us to stay with it on our own. We will either turn away, or we will collapse under the weight of our fallibility.

I have had to make myself accountable to the kind of change that is not just a change of mind, but a change in a way of being.

There are things that we just hide from ourselves, there are parts of ourselves that belie our self-image. We could not possibly see through these blind spots without the patterns of feedback. And we could not possibly engage in the work of addressing them without a circle of loved ones and probably therapists and healers.

This is the dance of growing together. The practice of a gaze that comes with both truth and kindness.

So what if instead of aiming to tear down each other by pointing out each other’s flaws, our commitment can be to become people who aim to watch each other grow.