David Lange

Thanks Emma, great to be here and looking forward to talking about this with you.

You know, this happens more often than you'd think, Emma. Not everybody takes feedback in the way that you want them to receive the feedback, right? It has a lot to do with timing. It has a lot to do with the emotional state that the receiver may be in.

And so you'll often have situations where the person will perhaps be listening, but not really taking it on board, or they will be in a situation where they may even actively resist.

A lot of the key to delivering feedback and to overcoming some of the objections to feedback is to make sure that it's kind of a two-way conversation, that the person giving the feedback is listening for understanding, trying to understand the other person's perspective, trying to find some common ground, and looking at a way of perhaps even adapting the feedback or adapting the perception of a behavior based on a two-way conversation that the feedback opened up.

In any event, it really is important that if the person giving the feedback has a strong point of view, something that they need to get across about a specific behavior, that they stick to their point of view in this particular regard. This doesn't mean being disrespectful. It doesn't mean not listening.

But it does mean making sure that the person receiving the feedback hears a clear message about the issue at hand or the behavior at hand, and that they come to an ability to have a conversation about resolving the issue.

Upward feedback is always a challenge. And at the root of successful upward feedback actually is often the quality of the relationship between the manager and the direct report.

If the direct report feels like there's an environment of what we would call psychological safety, in other words, the ability to have direct conversations with the manager without any consequences to having direct respectful conversations, upward feedback actually becomes something that a direct report will offer regularly and proactively to their leaders. The best leaders actually ask for it.

In any event, to do it well, if you are somebody needing to give feedback to somebody a bit higher in the hierarchy than yourself, often it's helpful to start with perhaps a leading question rather than a criticism. Try to figure out what's behind the leader's actions or motives.

The idea of the way a CEO receives feedback is really, really critical. In fact, Ty will also say that the two things that are really true for a CEO, in fact, the only two things that are true, are that the coffee will always be hot and that they will have to work really hard at uncovering the truth in an organization.

So it's even more important that CEOs really understand how to create a culture where proactively people can provide dissent, criticism, feedback directly up to the CEO so the CEO can learn about the things in the culture that are important to address. The best CEOs do this in a couple of different ways. They are frequent with this request for feedback.

So they're doing it in a lot of different ways with a lot of different audiences at a lot of different levels. And they do it in the form of questions and probing and dialogue trying to get at the truth rather than just direct pointed statements. They're really trying to create environments where people will have conversations with them.

And the more that they do this and the more that the organization sees that it's okay to constructively dissent, the more that this behavior becomes part of the culture.