It’s very easy for a feedback conversation to spiral from healthy conflict over the merits of an idea to a toxic argument about who’s smarter. The purpose of feedback is to get information to consider, not to pick a winner.
Feedback and conflict are essential for good decisions—but only up to a point. Once a feedback conversation tips into argument, it risks damaging both the decision and the relationships involved.
In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, Peter and Richard share three strategies to keep feedback in the productive zone and show how to recover quickly when things spiral. Through fresh stories of their own missteps and recoveries, they demonstrate how clarifying decision ownership, using the Humanizing Work Feedback Process, and moving from opinion to experiment can turn heated debates back into better outcomes.
Episode Transcript
Peter: Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show. I’m Peter Green here with Richard Lawrence. When you’re working on a product or you’re trying to make a good decision, you’re gonna get better results when you ask for and incorporate feedback from people with expertise, especially from those that have a different perspective from yours.
But that can be hard to do. That kind of feedback, if it’s done well, is going to lead to conflict. Not everyone sees the same thing. You have blind spots and so do they. That’s all healthy, and helps us make good decisions, but sometimes in the process, that debate can hit a tipping point, where we go from healthy conflict over the merits of a decision, to toxic argument about who’s smarter.
We teach our clients three strategies for how to get as wide a variety of perspectives and feedback on a decision as possible, and then how to be quickly decisive. We’ll share those strategies today along with three real examples of using those to get unstuck.
Richard: Now, even though we teach this stuff to our clients, it doesn’t mean we do it perfectly. We are still human, and we had a couple recent examples of needing to use the things we teach. Sometimes we can prevent those spirals into debate from happening. Sometimes we just need to use what we teach to recover quickly. So we’re going to tell you about some of those.
One example that came up in the last week: I’d done some writing towards an event page. We recently announced our Certified CAPED Consultant workshop, and I was excited about an early draft of that. I’d been struggling to write my way into it. I felt like I had a breakthrough in the morning, and so I shared it on our #needsreview Slack channel.
I wanted feedback, but I was hoping for some affirmation. I was hoping people would celebrate how great my idea was. Example one of being human. And the feedback I got did not meet my expectations.
It wasn’t just not affirming feedback. It also felt kind of passive aggressive and critical, and we got into a debate pretty quickly and I started feeling like, maybe I shouldn’t even ask for feedback until things are really done.
Peter: I want to dig into the pain a little bit because I think this is where a lot of us find ourselves sometimes. I think when I read that it was early in the morning and I was tired, and we’ve been working on this stuff and the stakes are high. All of those are factors that can lead us to be more reactive than creative.
Our friend Jake Calabrese has a nice framing of this, that you have capability and you have capacity, and those are two different things. Our capability are, do we have the skills to do a thing? Our capacity is, do I have the skills to do that thing right now in this moment? So I probably had capability to give really good, constructive feedback in that moment, but for whatever reason, I did not have the capacity. And I’ll fully own that that was not skillful feedback, even though we wrote the process for how to get feedback, which we’ll talk about in a moment. I didn’t use it well.
Richard: It felt like I had my sculpture that I was really excited about. And then I got a clarifying question that sounded something like, “tell me more about your decision to make it ugly.”
Peter: Hahaha. Oh, I can so empathize with that. I could think of similar examples where any kind of feedback, even trying to be helpful, can strike us as, “oh, why did you do such a terrible thing?”
Yeah, my reactive response probably pushed you into a reactive stance: “He’s gonna respond that way. Fine. I’m gonna retreat into my corner and I’ll just knock this thing out.” Right Richard? And I know our reactive tendencies from The Leadership Circle. We know where we’re likely to go if we’re not at our best, so I can almost exactly anticipate what Richard might do if I were to push him into reactive here.
Richard: Right. My tendency is to go to distance. I’m gonna check out: “I don’t need the feedback anyway.” But it was worth it to stay in the conversation, figure out how to recover and get to useful feedback, because like you said in the intro, Peter, getting feedback makes for better results.
And eventually we actually ended up with much better content on that event page than if I’d just run with my initial gut for how it was gonna work, or if I had just scrapped the thing that I’d worked on. We ended up with something that was way better.
So we went to two of the three strategies that we’re gonna teach today to get out of that spiral into debate, starting with strategy one, who decides, and at what level?
Peter: For this particular instance that was already clear: Richard owned the creation of that copy for that event page at a level five on the seven levels of delegation. If you’re not familiar with the seven levels, go check out episode 67. A Path to Real Empowerment A Five basically means Richard, you own the decision on this, providing that you seek our advice. And you don’t have to take our advice, but you should consider our advice.
So that’s where it was. So that was pretty clear. I did have a very recent example though, Richard, where we needed to go back to this, to who owns the decision at what level. I was working with an executive team, in fact, and they had done some surveys about how employees were feeling. They were working on some new product initiatives. All of the data that was coming back to them said: “It’s unclear who owns what decision. This executive is sort of bickering with that executive and it’s trickling down into their orgs. And does this group own it? Does that group own it? Who owns it at the organizational level?”
That can be hard to map because there are so many decisions to make. But we got into a room for two days and we put up the seven levels of delegation and we made sure everybody understood what those meant. And then we got out sticky notes and we started saying, what’s an example of a decision? And we would write it on the sticky note and we’d say, Who owns it where?
That strategy for us was pretty clear. This was at a five. That didn’t really impact us, but it can be a big thing. And what we’ve learned, Richard, is that if you don’t do that at the beginning of a process, you’re gonna circle back to it at some point, right? It’s gonna come back to who owns it and at what level.
Richard: And once you have that clarity, once you know that somebody owns this, but they’re getting advice and feedback from other people, you can move to our second strategy, which is when you’re getting feedback, use the Humanizing Work feedback process. We talk about this at length in episode 1 21.
The quick version here is when you wanna get feedback on a thing, share a little bit of context, share the thing, and then invite people to give feedback in three ways in a particular order. First off, clarifying questions. Which should actually be questions clarifying what was happening there and not advice or opinions in the form of questions.
Second, kudos. What do you like about it? We wanna make sure we highlight what’s good, so we get to keep what’s good and not go straight to what might need to change.
And then opinions and advice very clearly framed as offers of opinions and advice and not things to debate, or things that must be done. And going through that process can be really helpful.
Going back to our story about the content for that event page, we were struggling a little bit of back and forth where Peter framed it as a clarifying question, but it really came through as kind of backhanded advice or opinion.
Peter: Which, by the way, is where this process most often goes wrong, right? Is opinions coming through as clarifying questions. And I help people do this well, and I still screwed it up. I just wanted to own that and say, Richard, I’m sorry. I gave you cloaked advice, in the Trojan horse of a clarifying question.
Richard: And I tried to answer the question that was actually being asked, but I also felt like I needed to push back on the advice because it was unclear what this was. It felt like I needed to answer the question, but it wasn’t really a question. It was advice.
So if I’m answering the advice, I’m debating with the advice, and eventually we got to a point where I made myself type: “thank you for sharing this feedback for me to consider.” And I actually had it in my head, kind of like that really deliberate word by word, because that was a reminder to both of us of what we’re doing here.
I needed to remind myself that I’m receiving the gift of feedback and I can choose what I do with it. And Peter probably needed to remember, we’re not having a debate about this thing, but he’s offering something to me. And it got a whole lot better after. We reset around that.
Peter: What’s funny is I, I heard it exactly in that tone too, like, uh, very mechanical and it woke me up, right? Because it’s very easy for a feedback conversation to turn into a debate, and that’s not the purpose of a feedback conversation. The purpose is to get information to consider. As soon as it turns into a debate, it loses its benefit. So for me, that was super helpful. It reminded me, oh yeah, we’re using this process that we teach all the time. Richard owns this at a five. I’ve given my advice now it’s his to do with as he pleases, so that was super helpful.
When that came through, it didn’t feel like snarky at all to me. It felt incredibly useful and it lifted me out of the funk of the argument.
Richard: And on my end, it made me able to actually consider the feedback, instead of fighting with it. And then over the next couple hours I was able to do something with it, and I think we ended up with a much better result than we would’ve otherwise.
Peter: Another example comes to mind, which I think will help us get into our third strategy that we often share. I was designing the logo for the Certified CAPED Consultant and we had done some rounds of feedback on Slack the same way that we did for the event page, as Richard was describing.
Then we were on a call and we said, let’s lock this thing down. I assumed I was at a five, ’cause I was doing the work of designing the logo and I was gonna seek advice and then make a decision as we got into the debate on the merits of one specific little choice, which is, does the humanizing work logo go in this little section in the bottom or not?
And you would think a little decision like that is, you know, “oh, it could go either way.” But it turned into this debate about the future of our company and the future of CAPED and what is our five year, 10 year strategy. And it took on legs. And at one point I said, what level of delegation is this at? I assumed this was at a five for me. Maybe it’s not. And I think, Richard, you said, yeah, it feels like this kind of thing, especially if it’s gonna be something that is hard to change, we probably need to be at a four on it. I said, okay, so now we’re at a four, and when you’re at a four, how do you decide? So we went through a few different possibilities there, right?
Richard: Right. We had to decide how to decide. We just debated it, I think, hoping that we would get to consensus, and it became clear pretty fast that it was like two against one. Then the person who had the one kind of started treating it like it was voting and they’d lost. But that didn’t feel right to the three of us. Like we hadn’t really agreed there.
And then the debate picked up again, maybe in an attempt to get to consensus. And finally we got to a breakthrough, which was one of us realized we’re not going to align on this thing just by debating. It’s guesses about how things are gonna work in the future.
So I proposed, we run an experiment, and say, what side of this can we do that has the least downside and is most changeable later? Let’s try that for a while, and here’s how we’ll know if we’re right or wrong, and we can always change it the other direction. So we designed a safe experiment and we were all able to get to consensus on running that experiment.
Peter: Yeah.
Richard: One of my favorite examples of this kind of approach, like “we can’t agree, let’s run an experiment, let’s get more information somehow,” comes from Ron Jeffries, one of the extreme programming pioneers.
And I remember probably 20 years ago, um, Ron talking about when there’s a debate and he’s pair programming with somebody, it can be really tempting, especially for programmer types, to just keep debating and try to be right and persuade the other person that your way is the best way. And he said he’s come to a place where his preference, when there’s debate is, “let’s try yours first.” Especially if it can be small and safe, and we can try going in that direction.
If you try the other person’s preference first, as long as it’s safe and reversible and small, you can get data quickly. You might learn something if they’re right. If they’re wrong, they’re gonna be much more willing to try your way. So I like that move from debate to experimentation when you need to have consensus and there’s not clear authority.
Peter: We would love to help you through the complexities of deciding who owns what, at what level, how to use the feedback process to either prevent or recover from feedback going wrong, and when and how to go from opinions to experiments.
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