Editor’s Note: Grace Ueng is the founder of Savvy Growth, a noted leadership coaching and management consulting firm, and an expert on wellbeing and performance science. Grace writes a regular column on happiness & leadership for WRAL TechWire.
Why do we not look forward to feedback even if we think we did well? Why do we brace ourselves for it? It is because of our inbred negativity bias. We fear for the worst.
Why do we bias toward the negative?
Thousands of years ago, cavemen needed to be on the constant lookout not to be a saber tooth tiger’s lunch. We were also wired to suspect that a berry on a bush was a poisonous pokeweed not a friendly huckleberry.
In reviewing online feedback to your company’s offering, it’s important to understand that negative reviews are given unprompted. That is due to the way our brain reacts; negative emotions are processed more thoroughly and last much longer in our minds and appear more urgent than positive emotions.
You are more likely to store a negative experience than a positive one even after one episode. If you’re old enough, you are likely to remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news on September 11, 2001.
Ask for feedback to get what you need
If you want balanced feedback, it is best to ask for it immediately and make it easy and quick to receive a higher response rate. Otherwise if a survey is delayed a few days or is effortful to complete and only sent one time, unhappy customers are 10x more likely to write a review than happy ones. Positive reviews usually take additional nudges.
Decades later, I look back at my childhood learning from Aesop’s fable “The Man, The Boy and The Donkey” that if you busy yourself trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.
What is important when you get the feedback is to decide what you’re going do with it, whether you’re going to discard it if it is not representative of the general sentiments of your key stakeholders or if you’re going to seek additional feedback to seek better ways to approach.
The power of positive news, harm of negative
It is sometimes hard for us to believe good news. I remember my son telling me he thought it was a mistake when he opened up his ACT report and read that his score put him in the 99th percentile.
When he saw his SAT score, he thought it was a mistake for a different reason. He thought his score was out of 3200, instead of 1600, and thought he had done horribly, instead of quite well. He was nowhere near the top of his class based on grades at his rigorous high school where he had to work hard to earn an A.
Our brains were created to not only to anticipate bad feedback, but also to focus disproportionately on the negative parts of the feedback we do receive. Barbara Fredrickson, the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology who leads the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (PEPLab) at UNC Chapel Hill, discovered that our brains need several positive experiences to offset a single negative one.
One of my son’s teachers said she noticed that he rose up and quickly became a leader in the classroom. This external validation of a couple of positive experiences helped him to see his potential!
The power of self awareness
Having high levels of self awareness, understanding what one wants and can achieve makes us more confident, better teammates, and gets us more promotions. We become more effective leaders with happier employees and more profitable companies.
Two types: Equally important
Complete self awareness comes when two forms are realized: (1) internal and (2) external.
Internal self awareness is how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our surroundings, and impact on others.
External self awareness is understanding how others view us on these same aspects. When internal and external perspectives align, there are better relationships between leaders and their employees.
While most people think they are self-aware, research reveals that only 10-15% actually are. The other 85-90% of us are in one of the other quadrants. This graphic explains the limitations of not being in the upper right quadrant:
Source: Harvard Business Review
Intake and 360
The first thing I do in beginning a new coaching engagement is to provide my client with a tailored intake questionnaire, similar to what a physician would do, but of course, with completely different questions. The leader’s answers help me understand how well they know themselves internally, who they are, what they stand for, and what they want to accomplish.
The next thing I do is conduct an extensive 360, where I have 1-on-1 interviews with their key stakeholders including even their partner/spouse who may know them best. This gives me a view into their blind spots (how to see your blind spots and possibilities), which if revealed to them, can help move the leader closer to the upper right quadrant.
Hard to give and receive: How to make truth comfortable?
Do you know the one thing that if you changed in yourself, you’d have the ability to change the world?
Unfortunately, most of us are unaware of this one thing, as we innately have blind spots. And for many of us, it is more comfortable to keep these spots blind than to have them revealed to us. We are scared of understanding the issues that the world sees in us.
That is why it is easier for me as an external third-party with no skin in the game, other than what is best for the client, to ask the questions and seek out the real truth and then figure out the best way to share this truth. While one of my first clients told me decades back upon hiring me, “I seek truth, not comfort” another client asked a few years later, “What about comfortable truth?” Interestingly, this was a CEO that I was asked to help “soften” his reputation.
And this goes beyond coaching and into our consulting work too. When we conduct external discovery interviews with customers, prospects, and lost deals, the findings have been transformative for our clients. Especially from lost deals, who share just why our client was not chosen. They may not have felt comfortable telling my client directly, but telling me is therapeutic!
Sandwich
Knowing how our brain is wired and how the amygdala works, we hone in and focus on the negative. Why sandwiching feedback is so important, which keeps in mind Professor Fredrickson’s positivity ratio that many positive thoughts are needed to combat the downside of experiencing a negative one.
Processing negative feedback
Many leaders choose just to be direct and not sandwich at all because they think that it’s better, but in the end, this way of sharing could backfire on them when the receiver shuts down, or at least temporarily.
When one has worked very hard on a project only to receive unsandwiched negative feedback, it takes time to process. Advice for those who are in this situation: (1) Acknowledge your negative emotion. Do not squash how you are experiencing the feedback. (2) Reframe by writing down or thinking about things you did well. Affirm at least a few things others told you that were good, especially if the feedback you were given was unsandwiched.
(Source: Pixaby)
While the receiver could ultimately focus on turning around the negative aspects of their work, the natural human response is to unconsciously distance themselves from the person giving the direct feedback, who then won’t benefit from the improved results.
The rare, but best situation is when the receiver follows up with the giver, shares their progress, and says thank you. As the client who asked for “comfortable truth” would often tell his team, “Feedback is a gift, for which you say, ‘thank you.’”
EXERCISE: What steps can you take this week to increase your internal and external self awareness? Who can you ask to be your loving critic?
About Grace Ueng
Grace is CEO of Savvy Growth, a management and marketing consultancy that since 2003 has been helping leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential through conducting strategic reviews, marketing audits, and coaching.
A marketing strategist, Grace held leadership roles in marketing, business development and product management at five high growth technology ventures that successfully exited through acquisition or IPO. A TED speaker, her work has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, and Inc.
Contact her firm for more information on Grace’s flagship workshop, HappinessWorks™.
Subscribe for free to her Happiness & Leadership@Work. You will receive one research based lesson each week to learn to be a happier and more productive leader: click here
