High Pressure by John Twohig johntwohig 14750996318 EDIT

High Pressure by John Twohig johntwohig 14750996318 EDIT

Much of my work as a coach and teacher involves helping people improve their abilities to deliver feedback more effectively. It’s a critical skill, particularly for both leaders in flat organizations where giving orders is generally counter-productive and for anyone who needs to manage up or across by influencing their bosses or peers. And it’s a topic on which I’ve written extensively, not only in posts on this site [1] and for the Harvard Business Review [2], but also in the HBR Guide to Coaching Your Employees. [3]

But a recent exchange with my colleague and former Stanford student Anamaria Nino-Murcia [4] made me realize that I’ve been neglecting the other half of this equation: How to receive feedback more effectively.

First, we need to recognize that receiving feedback is inherently a stressful experience. As Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone of the Harvard Negotiation Project have written,

"Even when you know that [feedback is] essential to your development and you trust that the person delivering it wants you to succeed, it can activate psychological triggers. You might feel misjudged, ill-used, and sometimes threatened to your very core." [5]

And this is true even in feedback-friendly organizations, and it’s even worse in environments where feedback is infrequent and surprising.

As a species, we have developed a "threat response," a cascade of physiological, emotional, and cognitive events that occur when we perceive a conflict. We typically refer to this set of reactions as a fight, flight, or freeze response. Recent neuroscience research has shown that our brains and bodies can respond to certain interpersonal situations the same way we react to literal threats to our physical safety. Psychologists refer to these experiences as "social threats."

Executive coach David Rock conducted an extensive study of the relevant research and developed the SCARF model [6] to help identify interpersonal dynamics that are likely to trigger a social threat. What’s striking is how many of these dynamics are present in a typical feedback conversation:

• Status: Feedback often comes from leaders and managers who occupy a position of higher status in the relationship. And when feedback comes from a peer or subordinate, you may interpret their behaviors as the temporary assumption of a higher status role.
• Certainty: You may know little about the content of the feedback, particularly in an organization or a relationship where feedback is rarely offered. Even if you have a sense of what the conversation will be about, you can’t be certain about its specific content.
• Autonomy: You may feel required to participate in the conversation, especially if a manager has initiated it. And the increasing prevalence of a “feedback-rich culture” (which I’ve helped to promote) may make you feel obligated to participate in a feedback conversation anytime anyone wants to have one. This makes your participation feel less like a choice.
• Relatedness: As with status, when someone is providing feedback you may perceive them as temporarily assuming a more distant role, resulting in a diminished sense of personal connection or closeness.
• Fairness: You may well view feedback as unfair, particularly if the feedback giver makes inaccurate assumptions about the motives behind your behavior (as they often do.)

These dynamics can trigger a social threat in every one of us. When we encounter people of higher status, when we experience uncertainty, when we feel less autonomy or freedom of choice, when we feel less connected to those around us, and when we believe that something is unfair we are more likely to experience a social threat. It’s no wonder that feedback can be so stressful!

With this context in mind, here are the keys to receiving feedback more effectively.

Reframe the experience: In the moment, you can use Rock’s SCARF model to better understand what’s happening, and employ your conscious awareness of those dynamics to diminish your sense of social threat. This is a long-established psychological technique derived from cognitive-behavioral therapy known as cognitive reappraisal or, more simply, reframing. Psychologists such as James Gross [7] and Rebecca Ray [8] of Stanford and Kevin Ochsner [9] of Columbia, among others, have shown that reframing can reduce stress levels and increase our abilities to manage negative emotions.

In the context of a feedback conversation, you should remind yourself of the following:

• Your perception that feedback is threatening is rooted in clearly understood neurological and psychological dynamics. The feeling of being threatened doesn’t automatically imply that you are facing a literal threat.
• The person providing you with feedback isn’t necessarily assuming a position of higher status or lording their status over you. In most cases their intentions are simply to help you improve—even if they’re doing so ineffectively.
• Even if you feel obligated to participate in the conversation, you are making the choice to respond to that pressure, and you do have some agency.