#10 😡 Getting Defensive
Do people go out of their way to tell you how much of a joy it is to give you feedback? It might be time to ask yourself Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Continuing last week's theme of diving into the pillars of my current Leadership Plan, this week I’d like to talk about how we learn from our mistakes. How we react to feedback says a lot to others about our ability to learn from your mistakes, and I haven’t always had the best reactions.
🚌 Driving me crazy.
In college, I worked full-time as a bus driver. Over 1,000 hours behind the wheel, it comes in handy whenever I need to parallel park a moving fan (so, rarely), but I still say hello & thank you to every bus driver whose path I cross.
That job was a lot of things to me. It was also the first time a colleague told me, "I'm not going to even bother, Liam. You get so defensive."
I can't remember what prompted the response - it hardly matters - but I know it hit home deep enough that I’m still tempted to run in the same circles today as I did when I first heard it. Like Socrates in the Parthenon, I ripped apart the tautology of such a statement -"How can I defend myself from such a criticism? It's a guaranteed conversation-ender." My quips & parries were on-brand but missed the mark, despite my attempts to avoid technically getting defensive.
That was the first time - let's jump past the three separate bosses that told me nearly verbatim the same feedback over the last five years and skip straight to the smack-across-the-face realization:
The only correct response to getting feedback is to acknowledge that you've heard it by paraphrasing it, thanking the person for giving it, and letting them know you will work on it.
The more time I've spent with it, as an employee and more recently as a leader, the more I understand the need to emotionally distance yourself from the output - a decision, an idea, a priority, a plan, a result - in order to build the machine - the process, the playbook, the method.
A college-level classical philosophy class can teach you the socratic method, but you can't win the argument unless you turn it into an argument. This is the underlying principle behind being defensive - team players are on the same team, defending themselves against the other team, not each other.
As a team member, you are expected to defend your ideas passionately, and therefore being defensive is an acceptable drawback if you achieve results. Everybody knows somebody in tech who brings up Steve. Jobs every time the discussion veers too close to the D-word.
That's because, as a leader, getting defensive means created an inferior machine, one that only accepts & receives inputs from a single source (you) or finite sources (your team). It's doubly punishing as it is self-fulfilling: people are less likely to provide feedback when they don't enjoy the experience of giving you feedback or don't believe that you listen, let alone internalize it.
There's a lot you can do to change people's impression of you over time - although first impressions tend to stick - but what you can't do is try to change their feedback in the moment. Trust me: I've given every degree of retort, comment, insight, perspective, and - when all else fails or I fall short - excuse.
You may not think you're defensive, but ask yourself how many times people have praised you for how easy it is to give feedback. If it's zero, know that it's sufficiently rare that most people are surprised when it's a positive experience and they say something about it.
📚 Crucial Conversations & True Explanations
There's a lot to be said about how to better receive feedback - one boss told me "it would be nice if you could paraphrase what you've understood so that I can be sure that you've heard what I'm saying" - but if you'd like to get better at receiving feedback as a leader, creating a culture of feedback in your team is an objective that will help you work on your own reactions in the process.
Crucial Conversations focuses on conversations at the intersection of high stakes, opposing opinions, and strong emotions. It walks through the stages of the book, demonstrating how any misstep can provoke silence or violence, a fight-or-flight reflex to feeling unsafe. They advize combating this reflex by safety, contributing ideas to the collective understanding starting with your experience and exploring others' paths.
Radical Candor is another book that makes the case for creating an environment of honest feedback; however, I must say that in my experience, candor is more often used as a sword than a pen - that is, people misunderstand Radical Candor's thesis to mean "tell people you're about to give them harsh feedback and then lay it on them." The book actually advocates for balancing challenging directly & caring personally about the person you are challenging - where most people go wrong is that they care about the collective (company, product, mission, strategy, big picture) and challenge the individual, and in doing so challenge whether the individual cares about the collective.
If you can create enough trust in a team that they can be honest with each other without fear of judgment or reprisal, you’ll learn 10x faster and achieve 10x more.
🤔 Give yourself feedback by asking Why.
The best defense is a good offense. If you want to get past being defensive about feedback, go on offense and start giving yourself feedback.
The Five Whys is an easy enough habit to get into, because it works exactly as it sounds. You identify a problem (mistake/error, failure/shortcoming, difficulty, etc.) and ask yourself Why. The brain will seek the easiest answer as well as the answer that will require the brain to do the least work in the future, so you take your answer and you ask Why to that. About five iterations in, you should get to the root cause - something that feels sufficiently true, actionable, and for which the answer to "why" tells you the course correction to make in the future.
A good equivalent for encouraging team feedback that doesn't get defensive is a Post-Mortem, in which a team first documents the who/what/when/where/why of a collective effort, analyses that effort by collective feedback from the team (bonus points for collecting feedback from the team's greater stakeholder ecosystem), explains as best they can why they got the results they did, and then commits to set ⚡️ Next Steps.
Being a great person to give feedback to isn't hard. Like most things, all you have to do is make it a priority.
🚦 Start. Stop. Continue.
🟢 Start paying attention to your own non-verbal cues of being defensive and overtly counteracting it with a non-defensive action. Don't just unfold your arms, offer a hug.
🟢 Start making time just to listen to your team, either as part of your existing meetings or as a dedicated one.
🟢 Start seeing success as having heard everything some has to say about a problem.
🟢 Start asking "What else?" until they say "I think that's all."
🔴 Stop challenging feedback's validity before acknowledging it and proposing a next step.
🔴 Stop trying to fix problems right away.
🟡 Continue asking yourself key questions before meetings: how do you feel? what's needed from you? what would make this meeting a success?
🟡 Continue asking incisive questions to uncover what works & what doesn't.
🟡 Continue to paraphrase feedback you hear to get a clear handshake on it.
PS: Last week I shared a book on following through called Following Through, which I hadn't read before. I started listening to it the next day and I couldn't make it through "the pitch," the part of every self-help / business book where the author convinces you of why the book is important, even though you've already committed to reading it. If you read it, let me know at what chapter it starts actually talking about following through and I'll jump back in