How To Receive End-of-Year Feedback (even if you’re not looking forward to it)
Muriel Maignan Wilkins
CEO Advisor & Leadership Coach //Host of HBR podcast, Coaching Real Leaders// Author
As an executive coach, I’ve spent nearly 20 years working with highly successful leaders who’ve hit a bump in the road. My job is to help them get over that bump by clarifying their goals and figuring out a way to reach them so that hopefully they can lead with a little more ease.?I work with my clients through my firm?Paravis Partners ?and with some of these leaders on my Harvard Business Review Presents?Coaching Real Leaders podcast , where I take you behind the closed doors of real coaching sessions. I also host the?Coaching Real Leaders Community , where I’m joined by an amazing group of leaders and coaches who come together to take a deeper dive into leadership issues.?And in this?Coaching Real Leaders?newsletter, I share takeaways from the many coaching conversations I’ve had over the years. Whether you are a coach or a leader, my hope is that this will help you more easily navigate the challenges you and/or those you coach face.
So here we are at the end of the year and what’s most top of mind for a lot of my coaching clients is, wait for it…. performance reviews! Participating in this annual feedback ritual (which IMHO needs to be totally revamped but that’s a post for another time) can be quite stressful for many especially if you are on the receiving end. To that end, I want to share some suggestions on how you can approach receiving feedback with a little more ease.
There are four steps I offer my clients when they are on edge going into their performance reviews. And, yes, I coach very senior, highly successful people and even they get the jitters when it comes to feedback discussions. Here’s what I suggest:
Let's unpack each step.
First, you need to prepare for the feedback. This happens before you sit down with your boss for the actual review conversation. ?Please, please, please – don’t skip this step. It’s the warmup that you never think you need. So, what to do to prepare?
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Ok, so now you’re in the performance conversation and your boss is giving you the feedback. Some of it is good; maybe some of it not so good. Maybe it's very detailed. Maybe it’s all very vague. Regardless of what’s happening, now is the time for you to seek to understand the feedback. Notice I didn’t say agree or disagree with the feedback. There’s a distinction between understanding and agreeing. Why is the focus on understanding? Because without it, you’re going to have a very hard time knowing how to respond (more on that below.) To really understand anything, including your feedback, you need to listen well. Check out Amy Gallo ’s video vignette on The Art of Active Listening if you want a refresher on listening effectively. The goal at this stage is to hear and understand what your boss is telling you – not get distracted by what your thoughts are on what is being said. And if you’re not sure if you are understanding the feedback, check in with them by saying “So let me make sure I’m understanding the feedback….” and synthesize (not repeat) what you’ve heard. It will give an opportunity for the boss to clarify any points made. ?
With a good enough understanding of what was shared, you can now move to processing the feedback. This is where you make meaning of what’s being said. What do you think about it? How do you feel about it? What does this mean in terms of how you respond and how you move forward? This can take place during the review conversation but for some of us, it may need to be processed outside of the meeting. I often advise my clients to get some distance from the feedback (ie, take a day or two away from it) to let it marinate for a while. This is especially true if you find yourself getting all caught up in your feelings as you’re hearing the feedback – your chest tightens, your neck gets prickly, your jaw clenches – all signs that you should probably thank your boss and suggest that you all have a follow up to discuss further. I have a client who I recently had to give feedback to from 360 interviews I’d conducted, and he was a bit taken aback from some of what he heard. I told him to put the feedback away and not read it again until two days later. That next week, when we met, he said to me that he felt like he’d gone through Kubler Ross stages of grief in processing the feedback and now he was ready to decide what to do with it. Processing in this way is a very real thing -- Adam Grant aptly illustrated it as the “7 phases of feedback grief”. Has this ever happened to you?
The goal at this point is, regardless of the feedback, to get yourself to the growth stage and, like my client, make a choice on how to move forward given what you've heard.
Once you’ve processed, you can now respond to the feedback. You see what I just did there? We didn’t go straight from prepare to respond. That would be called reacting not responding. You want to slow your roll and be intentional with what and how you respond. In no way am I suggesting that your response can never be one of disagreement. All I’m saying is be clear about what ever next step it is you want to take. The anchoring question I ask my clients when they reach this stage is “what outcomes are you looking to drive to that are within your control?” which is a fancy way of asking them “what do you want and is it realistic?”. ?For some, it might be that they want to counter the feedback. For others, it may be that they want to show their boss their willingness to own and work on their gaps. And there are a lot of other options in between. The bottom line is you choose how best to respond in a way that is aligned with what you want for your professional development and is reflective of your understanding of the feedback.
As you head into review season, may you give yourself the space and grace to approach it with ease. I hope these words have helped a bit in making that happen for you.?
Thank you for reading my LinkedIn newsletter!?Don’t forget to subscribe to Coaching Real Leaders episodes on?Harvard Business Review ,?Apple ?or wherever you get your podcasts. And please join me in my?Coaching Real Leaders Community , where I host members-only live Q&A’s, CRL episode debriefs, and more. You can also learn more about the coaching work I and my fantastic team do by visiting us at?Paravis Partners.
Executive Consultant & Corporate Real Estate Executive | Executive & Leadership Coach | Public Speaker | Healthcare Infrastructure Strategist | Molding the Next Generation of Leaders
1 年Just listened to your session on “How Do I Overcome My Disillusionment with the Executive Team?” and the discussion extremely relevant and timely. Many thanks for that podcast.
Sr. Electrical Engineering Technician at City of Healdsburg | Sec+ |
1 年Muriel Maignan Wilkins I just discovered this podcast! Wonderful info! I'm presently in an Executive Leadership class (Utility/Energy space) and this podcast should have been in the curriculum. Thanks for some valuable advice.
Ik zorg ervoor dat LinkedIn je elke maand nieuwe klanten oplevert.
1 年Preparing for feedback is an important one. We have weekly reviews at my company, which allows you to always be reflecting and evaluating. The big yearly review then does not come as a surprise. And the review goes both ways, which makes it a bit more of a constructive conversation of what is going well and where there are opportunities to improve.
Chief Advancement Officer at National Geographic Society
1 年Perfect timing….thank you Muriel Maignan Wilkins!