Harry: 0:00

I think what’s happened is I’ve been technique-y. Maybe that’s not such a great term, but I’ve, I’ve used too much technique in delivering feedback to people. What I didn’t realize until recently was I think I’ve been using too much technique in accepting feedback. Right.

Jorge: 0:34

Hey, Harry, it’s good to see you.

Harry: 0:36

It’s great to see you too, Jorge. Thank you for making time today.

Jorge: 0:40

I always have time for you, my friend. What have you brought for us today?

Harry: 0:44

Well, it’s a little bit of a long reading, but it, it, it, it definitely catches me in a, in a, in a personal place. So let me, let me read this. I’ll just tell you after that what the title of the book is, and then maybe chat with you a little bit about what brought this into the foreground. You ready?

Jorge: 1:07

Let’s do it.

Harry: 1:08

All right.“The benefits of receiving well. Receiving feedback well doesn’t mean you always have to take the feedback. Receiving it well means engaging in the conversation skillfully and making thoughtful choices about whether and how to use the information and what you’re learning. It’s about managing your emotional triggers so that you can take in what the other person is telling you and being open to seeing yourself in new ways. And sometimes it’s about setting boundaries and saying no. The bold-faced benefits of receiving feedback well are clear. Our relationships are richer, our self-esteem is more secure, and, of course, we learn. We get better at things and feel good about that. And perhaps most important to some of us, we get good at receiving feedback. Even our toughest feedback interactions come to feel a little less threatening. In the workplace, treating feedback not just as something to be endured, but something to be actively sought, can have a profound impact. Feedback-seeking behavior, it’s called in the research literature, has been linked to higher job satisfaction, greater creativity on the job, faster adaptation in a new organizational role, and lower turnover. And seeking out negative feedback is associated with higher performance ratings. Perhaps that isn’t surprising. People who are willing to look at themselves are just easier to work with and live with. Being with people who are grounded and open is energizing. When you’re open to feedback, your working relationships have more trust and more humor. You collaborate more productively and solve problems more easily. In personal relationships, our ability to deal with complaints, requests, and coaching from our friends and loved ones is crucial. Even in the best relationships, we get frustrated with each other. We hurt each other accidentally and, on occasion, on purpose. Our ability to sort out how we’re feeling, why we’re upset, where we’re bumping into one another drives the long-term health and happiness of those relationships. Marriage researcher John Gottman has found that a person’s willingness and ability to accept influence and input from their spouse is a key predictor of a healthy, stable marriage. In contrast, working with or living with someone who shuts out feedback or responds with defensiveness and arguments is exhausting. We walk on eggshells and live in fear of pointless conflicts. Frank discussion fades and feedback gets unspoken, depriving the receiver of the chance to understand what’s gone wrong and fix it. The transaction costs involved in the simplest problem-solving become prohibitive, and important thoughts and feelings have no outlet. Problems fester and the relationship stagnates. Insulation leads to isolation. That’s not just depressing, it’s destructive, particularly today. Columnist Thomas Friedman observes, “We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not. If you’re self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings, and floors that protected people are also disappearing.”

Jorge: 4:51

This sounds pretty, um, pretty intense. And when you use the phrase walking on eggshells, been in situations like the one that you describe. Um, I described it as like stepping in a landmine, a landmine field, as

Harry: 5:05

Yeah.

Jorge: 5:06

opposed to walking on eggshells, which I guess is more dramatic. But I would, I would love to hear what brings this up, but I will say that feedback is hugely important, not just in personal relationships, obviously, right? And I, I have a lot to say about this, but I’d love to hear what this is from

Harry: 5:31

Sure. Well, let me start with the title of the book.

It’s called Thanks for the Feedback: 5:34

The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. I mean, with all of the executive coaching, with all of the management stuff that I’ve done, with all-- with, I mean, with my whole career, I thought, “Man, I must be great at giving and receiving feedback.” In particular, I learned that when you get feedback, right, you need to be open-hearted, you need to be open-minded, you need to be defenses down. You need to do what you can to kind of apprehend what’s going on around you and really take the message in and thank the person for it, right? But I hadn’t considered that there are different types of feedback, and that the different types of feedback have different subvariants, if you will, and that there are appropriate and inappropriate, or more appropriate and less appropriate, responses to different kinds of feedback. But the reason I brought this forward is that I internalized some feedback that I’ve been getting recently and realized, much to my chagrin and dismay, that I have been systematically preventing that feedback from going in and internalizing it and processing it in an undefensive way, and then dealing with it such that I could be a better person. And I was just shocked to realize how poor I’ve been at taking in this feedback, because I thought, I mean, I thought I was really good at it, and I thought I was at least gracious about it and didn’t realize that, you know, even somebody who, you know, thinks they’re good at it and thinks they’re approaching it in a, you know, in a generous way, I think the quote that I saw recently is,“Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right,” right? And it really struck me.

Jorge: 8:08

Where my thinking goes when I hear the word feedback Is to systems thinking, because it’s a concept that, as far as I know, originated from, or at least the word I think originated from that field. Or maybe that’s not true. It’s where I became aware of it. No, that’s not true either. I heard of it, you know. I heard the word feedback, and eventually as I studied more about systems and systems thinking, I understood that feedback was a word that had a technical meaning that had been explored as a formal concept. Which is an understanding that removes a lot of the emotional overtones that I think most people associate with the

Harry: 9:07

Yeah.

Jorge: 9:07

word feedback.

Harry: 9:08

100%.

Jorge: 9:09

I think that a lot of us, when we hear feedback, the context in which we encounter that word is a manager, someone higher up in the hierarchy or maybe a peer saying, “Can I give you some feedback?” And then you brace yourself because invariably what follows is, “Oh no, I did something wrong, and I need to correct course.” In systems thinking, there is no. It, it, the word doesn’t have that emotional valence, right? Um, a-and I’m going to vastly oversimplify here, but feedback is a mechanism in a system that allows it to gauge how the system is behaving vis-à-vis changing conditions. And then it can alter its behavior to drive towards some ideal state or some goal. Again, I might be mangling that in oversimplifying it, right? But I describe it like that because that’s also what I think feedback does when we receive feedback as people, but we can’t help but feel criticized when we receive feedback, which immediately layers this emotional reaction. And people who liked Star Trek, you know, the old Star Trek, right? Uh, whether the original series or The Next Generation, there was this moment where the, in many episodes where the ship is under attack and either Kirk or Picard or whoever is at the helm goes, “Shields up!” Right?

Harry: 10:55

Yeah.

Jorge: 11:01

Uh, I know that when I’ve heard the word at the tail end of a sentence like, “Can I give you feedback?” that’s been my inner homunculus has gone, “Shields up!” Right?

Harry: 11:14

Uh-huh.

Jorge: 11:20

I think that what’s coming I won’t like. I think that’s what you were alluding to with that reading.

Harry: 11:26

You know, over the years I’ve been, um, it’s sort of been beaten into me, you know, was it morale will improve? The beatings will, will, will, will stop when morale improves or something like that. But over the years I’ve been taught like, hey, feedback is a gift, right? And, you know, I’m not sure whether it’s like, you know, whether it’s a, you know, a pointed sharp gift or if it’s a soft fuzzy gift. But I’m-- I think having just sort of blindly accepted the kind of the axiom that feedback is a gift and then maybe uncritically learned that the appropriate response to feedback is thank you, that that that was sufficient. But this book, Thanks for the Feedback, is really, really quite good. Uh, because what it does is it deconstructs how to think about feedback and provides plenty of examples for how to think about different types of feedback, right? It talks about feedback as appreciation, right? That’s the kind of feedback we want. It talks about feedback as coaching, right? Uh, and, eh, I mean, sometimes we want coaching, sometimes we don’t. But generally, the notion of coaching feedback is it’s really about, you know, performance improvement versus the third type of feedback, which is evaluative feedback. And that’s like, that has often a sting associated with it, right? Because it’s somebody’s judgment or evaluation of you. And it might come-- Implicit in that evaluative feedback might be some coaching and might even be some appreciation. But the fact is that the-- If you go from appreciation to coaching to evaluative, like shields up at evaluative for sure, at coaching pay- maybe, and at appreciation, hopefully not. Um, I didn’t make the distinctions that there were these different types of coaching. You know, I’ve always, I’m always trying to show up in the world and be of service and help people improve and get better. So I’m always leaning into it as a coaching-style feedback. And I think I often will package up that coaching feedback with, you know, appreciation. You know, someone once said, “Give them a shit sandwich,” right? Something tasty on the outside, something not so good on the inside, something tasty on the other side, right? And I think I’ve been technique-y. I think what’s happened is I’ve been technique-y. Maybe that’s not such a great term, but I’ve used too much technique in delivering feedback to people. What I didn’t realize until recently was I think I’ve been using too much technique in accepting feedback. And that has created some unfortunate negative unintended consequences in terms of one relationship that I have in my life that’s super important to me, because I thought I was taking the feedback in, but I didn’t realize that I was really missing the forest for the trees, that the feedback was coming in in all sorts of different ways, but I would never really connected it to an underlying root cause of what that feedback was intended to get me to shift or change. Because the feedback wasn’t coming in as instructive or directive as clearly as I needed it to have come in for me to have done something different about it. And therefore, I don’t think I read it as important. I didn’t give it as much importance as I probably otherwise would have needed to have given it in order to have sat back and said, “Oh, wait, I got some feedback over here and I got some feedback over there, and there underneath this is something common that I need to address.” I think had I had a broader, more expansive understanding of what feedback is and how it works, I might have been more thoughtful and more methodical about taking that feedback and processing it in a way that allowed me to be more honest with myself about what that feedback was addressing and how I might have gone about improving myself and the ways I was wording things, the tones I was using, the approach that I was taking, to incorporating this feedback into my life in a way that would be that would help me improve and help me have better relationships. So I know I’m being a little bit coy about it. I don’t mean to cloak the whole thing, but, you know.

Jorge: 16:46

Well, well, I’m, I’m-- First of all, I’m grateful that you’re so open and bringing what is clearly a sensitive subject, and I can tell from your voice that it’s a tender-- like you’re tender about this situation. So I’m grateful for your openness. Um, and we could talk about feedback per se, but I think that there is the-- I’m hearing something of a higher order in what you’re saying here, which is that when you make a subject central to your life’s work you run the risk of becoming inured to it somehow, or becoming so, so used to thinking in those terms you fail to appreciate the degree to which it is calling for you to change.

Harry: 17:51

Mm-hmm.

Jorge: 17:53

And that’s something that I think happens not just with feedback. I mean, it happens with lots of other things, right? But feedback just happens to be a kind of like primitive building block for relationships. So it’s kind of if there was like a stack, like a software stack, this would be pretty far down the stack, right?

Harry: 18:20

Yeah.

Jorge: 18:22

So it does feel like an important subject and one that we should all work on. And now, like, with that in mind and thinking of the fact that it is Traction Heroes and we want to be in service of gaining traction, we could go down two paths here. One is how can we give feedback more effectively? And the other is how can we receive feedback more effectively? And I suspect that based on what you’ve been saying so far, maybe we should focus on the second one of those.

Harry: 18:59

Yeah, that, uh, so, uh, again, that’s right. And that’s really what the book is about. The book is not so much about delivering feedback as it is about receiving feedback. And that is an orientation that I’d never really looked at with any sort of deep intellectual curiosity, I’ll put it that way. And, you know, one of the-- one of my takeaways, speaking about, you know, kind of slapping some snow chains on this and maybe helping other people, especially leaders, get traction, I think there are a couple things to think about here. Number one is I think I fell victim to two things here. One is something we’ve talked about in a previous episode, which is that in relationship, authenticity is more important than technique. And that was Richard Farson. And that’s not exactly how he said it, but he wrote a book called Management of the Absurd, where he looks at paradoxes in management. And the one that’s always stood out for me is that thing about showing up in relationship. Like, you’re way better off showing up with authenticity and humility and being genuine than using technique. And in this particular case, I think I didn’t realize I was engaging with technique. I’d lost sight of that, right? It had become just a part of my repertoire. And that really leads to the next thing, and it’s also something we’ve talked about, which is the seductive sense that my point of view was correct. And so the term associated with this is naive realism. And for the moment, I’m drawing a blank on the book that we talked about that this was discussed. It’ll come to me in a minute. But having a label for this experience, which is that, you know, gosh, I’m showing up in the world that my point of view, I’m at the center of everything in my world, therefore, you know, I must be some version of correct. My view must not be 100% wrong. How could I be completely wrong? That’s just not possible, right? But even that position is somewhat lacking some humility and is lacking a very distinct possibility that I’m 100% wrong. Back to the traction, to the point of traction, for me personally, it’s often very helpful to have some kind of protocol or model to use when I need to do something differently or more effectively. And in the dialogue that I’ve been having with this person with whom I’m in a relationship, what occurred to me is that I tend to be fixating on what’s at the center of the bullseye when I’m getting the feedback, and I’m not actually opening the aperture up wide enough to look at potentially second and third order effects or second and third order implications more specifically. So now I have a picture in my head of a bullseye. I used to just have a dot, you know, a circle, and like the if-- the feedback I was receiving was in that circle, and I would say thank you and move on. It was a gift, right? And, well, over time, what’s happened is I’ve received a lot of feedback from the same person, and what’s the feedback has been, I mean, some of it’s been very consistent, and some of it’s been very different, but the circumstances have seemed different to me. But I think had I been more methodical about opening the aperture, every time I got that feedback, opening the aperture to look at second-order, at least second-order, possibly third-order effects and implications, I might have seen there was an underlying root cause to this that I was explaining away but never really addressed the problem. And therefore, every explanation that I provided for what happened in this particular circumstance actually was just a guarantee that it was gonna happen again from the other person’s point of view.

Jorge: 23:30

Hmm. It sounds like one of the useful things from this book is that it offers a taxonomy of feedback, different reasons why. Well, the, the taxonomy that you read out sounded to me like there are different reasons or motivations for giving feedback. Uh, and that might be one dimension, but that, and I don’t know if the book gets into this because I haven’t read it obviously, but I can imagine that there are other dimensions of feedback. For example, magnitude, or maybe call it something like the import of the feedback might be one dimension. And I’ll give you an example there. Last week I was, or a couple of weeks ago, I was at a store, and there was this person who I had never seen before, this guy, and he was repairing the checkout machine. And I said, “Buddy, your zip is open.” Right? And he was embarrassed and flustered a little bit, but he pulled up his zipper, right? So that’s like a very low-impact thing, but I think that that’s a little bit of feedback, and I was being friendly and helpful and hopefully, you know, it was clear that we were both a little embarrassed. That’s kind of on one end of the spectrum. The other end of that spectrum would be something like, an intervention, right? Like the thing where all the person’s friends get together and like

Harry: 24:53

Yeah.

Jorge: 24:53

to like

Harry: 24:54

Three

Jorge: 24:54

get them off drugs or something, right? That’s a major, major thing, right? So that would be one axis that I would look at. The other one, which I heard implied in what you were saying is patterns over time.

Harry: 25:12

Hmmm.

Jorge: 25:13

If you keep having different people point out that your zip is down, maybe you are, I don’t know, buying pants that don’t fit you well or something, right? And then that requires having the, I don’t know if the phrase is presence of mind to step back and say, “Hey, this is like the fourth time this week someone’s told me that my fly is open,” right? Um, maybe I have to do something. Maybe I have to go visit a tailor. And maybe even an ultimate reason behind that, or, you know, it’s like maybe I have this tendency to buy clothes that I think flatter me, but actually don’t flatter me. I don’t know. I’m making stuff up, right? But it just feels like having internalized a model for kinds of feedback. Well, another one that I can think of right off the bat is who is telling me this,

Harry: 26:11

Yeah.

Jorge: 26:12

It’s one thing for your life partner to be giving you feedback than a complete random stranger at the checkout line like I was a couple of weeks ago, right? And you will take that feedback very differently. It just feels like there is this whole landscape of feedback that we can and maybe should become more competent on

Harry: 26:42

I mean, that’s definitely the point of having brought the reading. I think it’s a really worthwhile book for anybody in a leadership position who wants to get better, and I think the benefits accrue at home, they accrue in the office, they accrue out in the world. I am, you know, smarting from the realization that I wasn’t taking in and sort of internalizing and dealing with some feedback recently, and I’m blown away by the knowledge that that escaped me somehow.

Jorge: 27:15

Well, thank you for being willing to be vulnerable in the open like this, and I hope our conversation helped soothe things a little bit.

Harry: 27:26

Yeah. And, you know, I hope it’s good. I hope somebody connects with it and picks up the book. It’s worth it.

Jorge: 27:32

All right, Harry, thank you so much.

Harry: 27:34

Yeah. Thank you, Jorge.