Misalignments & feedback

I’ve written about how we don’t learn or talk enough about feedback – receiving and giving of feedback. So this episode from Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast is an absolute gold mine. The story that Brene shared right in the beginning of the podcast is wonderful. The kind of emotional intelligence, ability to disarm people, muscles involved in selecting the right words, the body language, is just so important and amazing.

We want feedbacks to gather ideas and leverage on the perspectives of others; but we don’t want to listen to complaints or be put in a position to defend ourselves. So how do we set up environments to encourage constructiveness and positivity in the process of feedback-gathering? How do we set up a process to get people to cycle through both the pleasant and the unpleasant parts of feedback giving and gathering? We all need to learn that.

To be able to set up the scene, to deal with any misalignments is so important. The first step that Brene Brown introduced, to make sure that the one you’re eliciting the feedback from is able to feel that you both are on the same side. That is so important. The consistent reminder we should have during this pandemic times that getting you to do this or that; to comply with restrictions and so on, is that we are all trying to keep one another safe, and to be able to flourish once again as a society. It’s a pity these points tend to fall on deaf ears in our outcome-obsessed society.