What is Three Minute Leadership?

Welcome to a new episode of Three Minute Leadership! My name is Laura Weldy, I am a women’s leadership and career success coach, which means that I work with women who are in the ‘Pre -Suite’ on the way to the C-suite and need to develop a really strong sense of their own leadership approach and style and the confidence to carry that style out.

In this series, I teach you a critical piece of leadership development information in under three minutes. So let’s hop in! Click the video below to watch or read on for the transcript!

What do I do with negative feedback in my performance review?

Today’s episode is about how to handle feedback, specifically what to do, and how to implement when you receive either positive or negative feedback. I know that performance review season is upon us (which can be really intimidating!) and I’m hoping this video will be helpful as you head into your annual review.

Now, it’s important to remember that feedback is neutral. I know a lot of us get our emotions tied up in feedback, especially when it’s something we care about, like being an incredible leader. And the truth is that feedback is just information.

The 5 steps to accept and integrate negative feedback as a leader

Here are the five things I want you to do next time you’re going into a meeting where you know you’ll be getting feedback, or if you receive it via email.

1) I want you to enter scientist mode. I want you to immediately consider yourself somebody who’s just curious and looking for data. We’re not here to make conclusions or assumptions. We’re just here to get the facts.

2) I want you to consider the origin of the feedback you’re getting. Specifically is the person somebody that is important to your day to day actions at work? Is it somebody that you respect and have a good connection with? Is it somebody who has your best interests at heart?

3) If you do consider the origin of feedback to be important, and you decide to take this feedback upon yourself, I want you to take step number three: which is categorize this feedback as being based or doing based. Is this feedback about who you’re being at work and something that you might want to shift behaviorally? Or is this about something you’re doing a more task oriented bit of feedback?

4) Step number four, is I want you to first identify and then solve the problem. So what I mean by that is, if the feedback is that you’re too direct, I want you to get clear with yourself: is the problem your direct tone of voice and your delivery, or is the problem a lack of relationship with the person giving you the feedback. Whatever the real problem is, design a path for you to solve it.

5) And action step number five that I want you to take anytime you get feedback is release the feedback, okay. It’s something we need to remember is that all feedback positive and negative is just a snapshot of a moment in time. It’s how somebody was feeling right when they were asked. And we as humans have a strong tendency toward recency bias, as well as emotionally charged incidents.

So specific moments in time may really stick out to somebody giving feedback about your performance and may not be representative of you as a whole. Whatever the feedback is, once you’ve decided on your action steps, release the emotional component of the feedback and know that you are doing the work of being a strong leader.

Let me know in the comments below how you’re going to use this information in your performance review this year, and make sure that you subscribe to my email list and Youtube to get more information like this!