Reinterpreting the Unpalatable

At college I studied languages. One of the exercises I still remember as being great fun was translating from French to English a factual account of an incident in the style of various English newspapers.

One of the styles was The Sun, a British tabloid. If you know this newspaper, one of their trademark skills is to condense the complex into the (possibly over) simple. Another is the use of vivid metaphors and play on words.

Though not a perfect analogy, I share this story as a way to consider feedback.

Specifically, the feedback we receive that we find hard to stomach.

Whilst we might chew over it for a short while, we typically leave it undigested.

But casting aside feedback doesn't help our growth, so what can we do about it?

Just as we take pains to modify the style we adopt to give feedback – with the aim of having it land well and be acted upon, so we can modify the way in which we interpret the feedback we receive – so that we consider and act on it.

Do you know your preferences for receiving feedback?

Quickly reflect on the times you have been impressed by the perspicacity of the feedback giver and the way in which they have served up the feedback for you?

What was it that caused you to wholly devour that feedback? (And what causes you to leave untouched feedback that is less appealingly served up?)

Perhaps the factors that make you open to feedback include:

• The ambience in which it was delivered
• The tone of voice
• The pace of delivery
• The succinctness of the message
• The precision of the observation
• The degree of command - was it a suggestion or a direction?
• The framing - aspiring to the positive, or focused on highlighting a fault, without a solution in sight.

With these insights, how do you want to use your translation skills to craft a feedback statement that appeals to you?

If you hear, ‘’Can’t you update the sales pipeline properly?’’

delivered in a stressed and frustrated tone, you might want to rephrase that for your own consumption to:

‘’ How helpful would it be for business forecasting purposes if I updated the pipeline data daily?’’

Or if you hear, ‘’ We expect all our people leaders to hold regular 1-1s so our employee engagement ratings increase. Why aren’t you doing this?’’

You might want to rephrase that to:

‘’Building trust requires conversations focused on topics outside daily business transactions. How about setting up – and keeping – a regular 1-1 connect with my team members? I’ll probably learn a lot – and hopefully build trust in the process.’’

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Rather than dismissing the feedback that isn’t concocted to meet our taste, we can take the essential ingredients and prepare a serving of feedback that does hit the spot.

Because just as we prepare our communications* with our audience in mind, we can also modify others’ communications to meet our own unique needs – that special audience of the self.

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*Clearly, reinterpretation can relate to any poorly expressed perspective or communication that would benefit from a recrafting.

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Andrea Stone is an Executive Coach and Educator, working with leaders and their teams in global, dynamic technology-oriented organizations to create greater success based on a foundational of leadership excellence and emotional intelligence.

? Andrea Stone, Stone Leadership