By that, I mean two things – an inability to read the room & a lack of awareness of the impact you have on other people in it.
So, if you aspire to senior leadership, what can & should you be doing now to develop that muscle?
One of the simplest things I recommend to coaching clients is asking stakeholders, peers & team members three questions:
What would you like me to STOP doing?
What would you like me to START doing?
What would you like me to CONTINUE doing?
Simple.
But there are two obvious problems – senior leaders don’t always want to hear the answers &, quite often, the people around them don’t want to give them.
So here are three ways to improve the odds of getting feedback that is genuinely useful:
- Don’t do it yourself.
Make the process anonymous & have it facilitated by a coach or a trusted third party. Psychological safety matters. Removing the fear of attribution often removes one of the biggest barriers to honest participation, also be clear about why you are asking & why now.
- Accept that you have blind spots.
Everyone does. However capable you believe yourself to be & however positive the feedback you’ve historically received – there will be things about your behaviour & impact that are more obvious to others than they are to you. Luft & Ingham captured this brilliantly in their ‘Johari Window’ back in 1955.
That ‘blind spot’ is often where the most valuable development opportunity sits. It may contain exactly the insight that helps you secure that next promotion or succeed once you get there.
- Do something with what you learn.
This is the big one & the most common reason people give for not providing feedback. The belief that the whole exercise is performative:
“Nothing will actually change.”
The moment you ask people for feedback, you create an expectation that something will happen as a result. That doesn’t mean acting on every comment.
It does mean being clear about:
What have I heard?
What am I going to work on?
What will you see me doing differently?
…& if your instinct, having asked for feedback, is to explain away or defend every comment you dislike? You may have been better off not asking. In fact, if that is your default response, it may be worth reconsidering how serious you are about progressing into increasingly senior leadership roles.
None of this needs to be complicated – I worry some organisations have over-engineered leadership feedback & self-awareness to the point where the process becomes more important than the outcome.
Ask good questions.
Create the conditions for honest answers.
Listen without defending yourself.
Then act.
That will give you more than enough data to start developing greater self-awareness.
If you’d like to explore how I support leaders in developing greater self-awareness & leadership impact, message me here or at rupert@strongerhumans.com & for the record I’m with Shakespeare on this one, over 300 years ago he was bold enough to assert “Happy are they that can hear their detractions & put them to mending” .
#strongerhumans
