Leadership in the Hot Seat: Mastering Team Feedback in Four Steps

“It knocked me off my feet.”  That was how a client described how it felt to receive some constructive feedback from her team.  

Just to give you some context, as a head of product, my client (who we’ll refer to as Christine) had worked very hard over the past few years to create a culture of feedback, safety, and transparency with her organisation. So, in a way, the fact that she received this feedback was a sign that the culture was alive and well.

She just didn’t expect the feedback to be about her.  

Or to come from her entire leadership team. 

The members had come together to talk to Christine and share their concerns about not feeling heard. That their opinions and expertise were not being considered in major decisions. 

Continuing to describe the moment, Christine said that the comments literally “took her breath away.”

The feedback was in direct conflict with how Christine views herself as a leader—and from feedback that she’s received in the past from team members, stakeholders, and other managers. 

She described it as an out-of-body experience, struggling to reconcile the feedback with her own identity and leadership style. Unlike critiques of missed deadlines or sloppy reporting, this feedback struck at the core of her leadership values and how she enacted them, sparking an internal crisis of self-doubt and reflection on her daily interactions with her teams.

Christine and I collaborated to navigate through the feedback and chart a path forward that would resonate with both her and her team. 

There were four phases that we worked through together.

Acknowledgement - While Christine said that she felt like she was in the midst of an out-of-body experience during the feedback conversation, she did a few things very well in the moment.  

She didn’t get defensive or automatically push back on what her team members were telling her. She listened and played back to the team what she was hearing, paraphrasing their statements to show that she acknowledged what was being said and clarifying that she was receiving the information as it was intended. 

She used phrases like “let me make sure I heard you” or “it sounds like…”  Playback is a coaching tool that Christine had become accustomed to from our sessions, and she used it extremely well in this challenging situation. 

After the team meeting, Christine also followed up with an email to everyone who was part of the conversation, playing back what she heard and how she interpreted the feedback. She again made sure not to become defensive or accusatory in the email. It was merely to capture in writing what she heard from the conversation. 

 Here's how you can apply this to your own work: 

Practice acknowledging any feedback you receive with phrases like, 'It sounds like you're saying..." or "I'm hearing… Playing back what your conversation pattern is saying to you lets them know that you’re listening and processing the information. 

Reflection - Christine then took a step back to audit and reflect on what she heard. She started by free-writing to capture everything she remembered from the conversation with her team—including her emotions. She also talked to trusted colleagues, mentors, and friends. She received a lot of positive support from those around her, including her own manager, which she found comforting, but at the same time, she felt that her entire leadership team couldn’t be wrong.

So, she went back to her team members individually to get more context on their feedback. And, of course we talked about it in our coaching sessions where she could openly describe the hurt and confusion that the feedback brought to her. 

Here's how you can apply this to your own work: 

It’s essential to take a few minutes after a challenging conversation like the one Christine had to get back to baseline.  Empty your mind by writing down the experience.  (I’ve written previously bout the benefits of processing thoughts through writing.) Also, build up your “team” of colleagues, mentors, coaches, and friend to give you support and external perspective. 

Acceptance - Throughout her process of reflection, Christine continued to express that she wanted to find a path forward with her team that enables her to accept the feedback in a way that aligns with both her perspective and feelings, and the team’s. She was ready to accept the feedback, but she also wanted to feel heard, too. In many ways, this is the toughest part of receiving feedback—how to reconcile your own feelings and beliefs about a situation with what you’re being told. 

We talked about her options for doing that, which she said ranged from telling the team they were right about everything and moving forward to pushing back on everything and letting the team know that she felt the feedback was unfair. But at the end of the day, neither felt right to her. So, we talked about a third option. Something that would ensure the team did feel heard, but would also align with her feelings and perspective.  Leaving herself out of the equation would feel like a “half-truth,” she said. 

The exact words that she decided to use with her team members are between them, but I can say that she met with each team member individually to better understand what being heard really meant to them so that they could do that work together and move forward.

Here's how you can apply this to your own work: 

You have more options than you may realise!  If the first thing solution to a challenging situation doesn’t feel right to you, keep thinking. Challenge yourself to come up with at least three options.

FeedForward - The final phase of my work together with Christine was to shift the conversations with her team members from feedback, and creating judgements based on what’s happened in the past, to finding a positive way to move forward.  

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith counterbalances feedback with a concept of feedforward. While feedback is retrospective, typically addressing negative behaviours that have already happened, feeding forward advocates positive steps forward. Goldsmith says, “We can change the future, not the past and feedforward helps people envision and focus on a positive future, not a failed past.”

Here’s how you can apply this to your work: 

Next time you’re ready to give feedback to a team member, think of how you could reframe it to feedforward. For example, if a member of your team bombs a presentation, instead of calling out all that didn’t go well, ask how they will approach the next presentation?  How will they prepare differently? How can you help. Think about what’s coming next, not what’s in the past.

So, in the end, despite being caught off guard by the feedback, the experience set Christine on a path toward making some real positive changes in how she leads and how she and her teams think of feedback and feedforward. Christine and her leadership team have found a new energy, and a new drive to be even better. And let me tell you, it's been inspiring to see the transformation.

I am an executive coach who works with product and technology leaders who are experiencing a bump in the road, like receiving tough feedback, giving critical feedback, influencing challenging stakeholder, and more. Find out how we can work together here.