>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm delighted to
welcome Sheila Heen and Doug Stone to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series.
Receiving feedback sits at the junction of two conflicting human desires. We want to
learn and grow and we want to be accepted just as we are.
Sheila and Doug's book, Thanks for the Feedback, addresses this tension head on,
offering a framework to take on advice, assessments, and criticism with curiosity and
grace.
Doug and Sheila are coauthors of the New York Times best business bestseller, Difficult
Conversations, which has actually gone galactic as it's now on the International Space
Station. And they are principals at Triad Consulting. They've been teaching negotiation
skills at Harvard Law School for 20 years.
Please join me in giving them a very warm welcome.
[applause].
>> Sheila Heen: Thank you very much. So I'm Sheila. This is Doug. Just so you can
keep us straight. And, yes, we learned recently that the book has been downloaded on the
Space Station, which was surprising to me, but actually as I think about it, it kinda makes
sense. Like if you're out on a space walk, you really want to be getting along with the
guy who is going to let you back in. You can't like get away from each other.
And so, as Amy mentioned, 15 years ago, Difficult Conversations came out. And it has
now been translated into 25 languages, and we are often surprised by the way people are
using it that we just didn't imagine, in addition to astronauts, business schools, managers,
law schools, etc., family therapists.
I recently learned that there's a woman who uses it to teach Argentinian tango.
Apparently, she explained, Argentinian tango, as opposed to the melodramatic kind in the
movies, Argentinian tango is very subtle. Does anyone here dance Argentinian tango? Is
this true? No. She lied to me.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Sheila Heen: So what she says -- and maybe you can give us a demonstration later.
What she says is that couples come to her to learn it together, and by the end of the first
lesson they are fighting. Like you're not signalling clearly enough; no, you are not
listening, as always. And so she sends them home after the first lesson with this book.
So it's really interesting the ways people are using it.
Now, when you have a book that does well, here's what happens. They want you to do
another one. And ideally they want it to be as close as possible to the one you already
did, because the people who like this book will buy the next book.
So, you know, they were floating ideas like you could do difficult conversations at work
and you can do difficult conversations at home. And, you know, there's a whole lot.
Difficult conversations for chefs, difficult conversations on the patio. It's like never
ending.
And we decided not to do that, partly selfishly just because we felt like, well, it will just
be the same book. That's not actually very interesting. And we want to learn something
new.
Now, the problem with this strategy is that you have to wait till you learn something new.
And so I spent 15 years of thinking, well, so what is it that we're learning. And
eventually what started to occur to us is that we were noticing patterns that were so
obvious that we kind of weren't noticing them.
So we spent the last 15 years going around the world working with organizations of all
kinds across industries, of course in the for-profit corporate sector but also non-profits,
community groups, families, NGOs, etc. Even in ethnic conflict.
And the first thing we always do when we start working with a new group is ask them so
what are your most difficult conversations. Because the work we do together should be
focused on what you are actually facing so that it's relevant and realistic.
And feedback comes up a lot. To put a finer point on it, feedback is on that list 100
percent of the time. It doesn't matter what continent we're on, it doesn't matter who we're
working with or why they brought us in. Often it comes up as, well, giving honest
feedback is hard because the receiver -- you know, you go out on a limb to really be
honest with them, they get defensive, they argue with you, they really don't take it in.
Even if they say they do. Nothing really changes. You damage the relationship. Or
maybe they really do take it to heart and now they're really demotivated. So, you know,
that just didn't work. I'm not sure it was worth it.
Quick on the heels of that somebody names, yeah, but what about receiving feedback?
It's unfair, it's off base, your boss doesn't really understand what you do anyway, right?
And, by the way, it was so poorly delivered as to be pathetic. Like by text. Are you
joking?
And so what we started to notice was that it didn't matter what organization you were in,
everybody feels that their feedback conversations don't really work, which is why, of
course, the feedback performance system changes every couple years in many places,
right, because we -- it must be the system is broke, so we'll fix the system. And then
when we fix the system one more time, then we conclude, well, maybe it's the people
who are broke, right, so let's fix the people.
And the typical approach is to teach givers how to give. So get all the managers together
and teach them to be more skillful at giving feedback and encourage them to be more
persistent in giving feedback.
Now, let me be totally clear. Everybody benefits when managers are more skilled and
are better at communication. But it's still a push model of learning. I'm going to decide
what you need to learn and I'm going to push you to learn it. And if there's any resistance
at all, pushing harder or more persistently or even more skillfully rarely results in real
learning.
And so it occurred to us that maybe we got this whole thing backwards actually, because
at the end of the day it doesn't really matter how much power or authority or even skill
the giver's got; it's the receiver who's in charge. It's the receiver who decides what they're
going to let in, what sense they're going to make of it, and whether and how they're gonna
chose to change.
So how come we're not actually trying to create pull and learn, all of us, how to receive
feedback more skillfully and turn even that offhand, unfair criticism into something that
might be valuable to us.
Because I think often we wait around for the perfect giver to come along, and those
givers and talented, skilled mentors who we trust and we admire and all of their coaching
comes pre-approved, treasure those. But they're rare. Right? Mostly our lives are
populated by everybody else who doesn't have time to give us the time that we need,
whose advice is maybe off base and certainly a little bit cutting, or it's so indirect you
can't quite figure out where you stand with them.
And so this book is really taking a look at, well, what's so hard about receiving and how
do we take charge of our own learning so that you can accelerate your own learning and
actually learn from anybody, so it doesn't hinge on the skill or what you think about your
giver.
Now, by the way, one of the reasons that this is so important, it has to do with work.
Because the research shows that people who seek out negative feedback -- and in the
literature what they mean by that is they're not just fishing for compliments, they're
looking for what they can improve. People who seek out negative feedback at work
adapt more quickly to new roles, they report higher satisfaction, and they get higher
performance reviews.
So it's not just that it benefits your learning, it also changes how people see you. It's no
less important in our personal lives. You guys have a friend and researcher here in
Seattle, John Gottman, who studies marriage, and one of the things that John has
discovered is that the spouse's willingness to take coaching and influence from their
partner is a key predictor of a happy, stable marriage.
Now, keep in mind, that has to be true when your spouse's chronic complaints about you,
you think of that less as feedback and more as them being annoying, right, but paying
attention to that is important for the relationship. And, of course, if you want to influence
how your kids deals with setback, how they react to a bad grade or a bad call in the
baseball game, that's going to be determined more by them watching you and how you
handle the offhand criticism from your mother-in-law or the disappointing result at work
than all the lectures combined.
So that's really where we started, to take a look at, all right, well, what's out there?
Almost nothing. How is it that we can get better at it?
And I think the place to start is why is it so hard. And Amy alluded to this in her
introduction. Because what we found is that feedback actually sits at the junction of two
core human needs. Human beings are wired for learning. If you look at the happiness
research, getting better at something, seeking mastery, growing and learning is a key
piece of what makes us satisfied in life. It's why we take up hobbies in retirement. It's
why we're addicted to those games. Because getting a better score is really satisfying.
It is, by the way, why otherwise normal human beings stick with the game of golf.
Because the occasional good round gives you the illusion that you're actually getting
better. Okay?
The problem is, of course, we've got another really core human need that runs right
alongside that, which is we really want to be respected and accepted just the way that we
are now. And the fact of feedback often suggests that how you are now isn't quite
A-okay. Which is sometimes why the people closest to us, their criticisms can be even
more threatening than someone that we don't know. And sometimes that means a
stranger can tell us something that our spouse has been trying to tell us for years, but it's
so threatening there that we can't hear it when we can hear it from another source.
Let's take a look at that challenge. I'll turn it to Doug.
>> Doug Stone: Yeah, so let's dive into your challenges. Take a moment and reflect on a
couple questions. I'd like you to think about a time in your life when you received some
feedback that you did not take. And once you've identified that, ask yourself -- be as
specific as you can be -- why was it that I didn't take that feedback. And we'll give you a
couple minutes for this. You can turn to your neighbor and sort of bounce thoughts off
real quick. We'll come back together in two minutes.
Okay. Let's come back together. So let's get a sense for this. Why did you not take the
feedback? Just raise your hand real quick and throw out some thoughts. Yeah.
>>: Because I wanted to keep doing what I was doing.
>> Doug Stone: You wanted to keep doing what you were doing, right?
>>: It made me happy.
>> Doug Stone: It made you happy. I think that we can just cancel the rest of the
workshop. That captures everything we need to know. Yeah.
>>: I didn't trust the person.
>> Doug Stone: You didn't trust them. Their what? Their motivations? Their expertise
and motivation. Good. Some folks in the back have been raising hands. Until I point it
towards you. Yes.
>>: They didn't -- they couldn't share any details with me to help me understand what
was behind the judgment.
>> Doug Stone: So they didn't help you understand it, and maybe that also created a
sense of like, well, they're not sharing details; maybe there are no details. A little bit
suspicion around whether it is really right. Yeah.
>>: So I didn't feel that the other person completely understood the situation regarding
feedback.
>> Doug Stone: They didn't -- the feedback giver may not have understood the situation,
certainly not in the way that you did, and so it makes you wonder, well, does this
feedback, then, make sense if they don't know the context. There's a couple hands up
here. Yeah.
>>: I didn't realize I was given feedback until afterwards, and the person giving
feedback, being a spouse, was too close and then had to point it out in a different
situation when someone else gave me the feedback, I told you [inaudible] and this
happens so many times that you just feel like [inaudible] ->> Doug Stone: So this your spouse and your spouse gives you feedback, it doesn't
register, someone else gives you feedback and that really registers with you and with
your spouse. They're wondering why...
Others over here? Yeah.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Doug Stone: Say it again.
>>: Attachment to my own conception of what's good for me.
>> Doug Stone: Attachment to your own conception of what's good for you. Yeah. So
the feedback is often subjective, and you might have a different view of what makes
sense or what you want. Yeah.
>>: [inaudible] the following feedback would be too risky for myself because I was the
one who's actually taking the risk.
>> Doug Stone: So following the feedback is risky for you, they want you to be the one
that takes the risk, and you notice that it could have a downside. Let's just take one more.
>>: [inaudible] different feedback, somebody say you're good at this and the other
people say you're not good at it.
>> Doug Stone: Yeah. Yeah. So people give you different feedback. Do it this way.
Someone else says do it this way. And it could be the opposite. You're good at this; no,
you're not good at this. So who are you supposed to believe? And then if you talk to
each of them and tell them that someone gave you the opposite feedback, they're like, oh,
that's -- that person's ridiculous; you should believe me. And they're both saying that, of
course.
Yeah. So we've gotten a lot of interesting reasons why we don't take feedback. And it
would be easy for Sheila and me to stand up here and say you know what? You've all got
your reasons. But you know feedback is good for you. You know it helps you learn. So
just get over those reasons. Just put them aside. Take the feedback; you know you
should. Right? That would be convenient, simple. It would mean the book was two or
three sentences long.
So but that's not our advice, because in fact your reasons, the reasons that you just shared,
are pretty compelling. Right? So if we're going to get better at receiving feedback, we
have to -- step one is really getting better at understanding our reactions and then being
able to sort of sort through them in an intelligent way.
It turns out -- you might think that there's a trillion reasons why we don't take feedback.
Turns out, as Sheila and I have been teaching this material, we've seen lots and lots of
reasons. But you can put that into categories that are very useful in terms of your own
sort of mastering your own reactions.
So we would say there's three categories, three reasons that we tend to have a negative
reaction to feedback, or discard it. And the first category is what we call truth triggers, or
the challenge to see the feedback. And this has to do with the substance of the feedback.
We're listening to the feedback, and we're asking ourselves a question as we're listening,
and that question is is this feedback right or wrong, is it good or bad, is it helpful, is it not
helpful.
And when we decide that it's not helpful or bad or wrong, we reject the feedback. Now,
as far as that goes, that makes a ton of sense, right? Raise your hand if you think you
should be taking stupid, wrong, unfair feedback as a general matter. Probably you feel
that you shouldn't be, right?
So that's a reasonable question to have. If you show up to work one day and someone
says, okay, Mike, so, you know, I was disappointed with your performance at that
meeting; I thought you were really going to speak more and sort of stick up for the
project. And you're thinking, okay, A, I wasn't at that meeting; B, my name is not Mike.
So this isn't really feedback that is going to apply to me that much.
So, yeah, you don't have to take feedback that's wrong. So the challenge with this
category is that too often we reject the feedback, we disqualify it, we set it aside, before
we've even really understood it. I'll say more about that in a moment, sort of what that
means and why that happens.
A second challenge here is that we're very willing to set feedback aside because
something about it was wrong. So my name is Doug Stone, my middle name is Charles,
my middle initial is C. So if the feedback said Douglas B. Stone, I could be like, whoa,
you know, that's not me. That's totally different.
So we can find some little thing wrong with it, and then we say, well, the feedback's
wrong so I'm not going to take it.
But it may be -- even if -- even if 90 percent of the feedback is actually off target or
misguided in some way, that last golden 10 percent might be something enormously
valuable to you.
So we do what's -- in this context we do what's called wrong spotting. We've got that
radar of like what's wrong and then also this side. So we'll talk more about this in a
moment.
Second category. Relationship triggers, the challenge of we. So all feedback exists in a
relationship, in a context of the giver and receiver. And we have a relationship with the
person giving us the feedback. It might be our identical twin sibling who we've been
related to for 70 years. Might be the person at the stoplight, you know, very brief
relationship. But there's some kind of relationship there.
And in this challenge often the who, the who, the person giving you the feedback, can
sort of overwhelm the what, the actual feedback itself. So the challenges there are, as
some of you pointed out, maybe we don't trust the motivations of the person giving us the
feedback, or maybe we don't trust the expertise of the person giving us the feedback.
They don't -- they have no particular knowledge about this topic and yet here they are
giving us feedback.
A second category of this challenge of we is when we feel in some way poorly treated by
the person giving us feedback. So a classic example is if we feel underappreciated. It's
really hard to take feedback from someone who is actively underappreciating you in the
same moment that they're giving you feedback.
So if you take over for a colleague for a few days who's out sick and they then come back
a few days later and you've been working really hard to do your job, their job, and they
come back and they say, well, you know, the project that I was working on right before I
left, you still haven't finished it. And you're thinking, okay, so actually you're right
technically, I haven't finished it, but that's the first thing you say to me after I was taking
over your job because you were sick?
So what happens is we focus on how could they possibly have raised that instead of
thanking me, which is an important topic, obviously, but it's also a different topic than
how did you do in your roll of substituting for them.
So with the challenge of we what we do is we sort of switch topics and we substitute our
new topic, which is you don't appreciate me or you're mistreating me in some way, for
the original topic, which is you are actually -- this conversation started by you giving me
feedback. But we're not talking about that anymore because I don't like the way I feel
treated.
So this can be very complicating and cause us to set aside feedback that actually might be
important to discuss.
Third, identity triggers, or the challenge of being me, or in all of your cases, the challenge
of being all of you.
So we all -- we each go through life with a sense of who we are, an identity that matters
to us, so we know -- you might be someone who takes pride in being fair or
compassionate or hard working or smart of funny or creative. Whatever it is for you, you
have a set of things that you know about yourself.
And the challenge comes when you get feedback and you see it coming toward you and
you realize uh-oh, this piece of feedback has the potential to threaten how I see myself or
sort of who I am in the world or my sense of well-being in the world is potentially being
threatened.
Notice that's not a comment on whether the feedback is good, bad, useful, fair, unfair; it's
just a comment on your reaction to it, how you feel. But when we feel threatened in
important ways, we get overwhelmed and then we can't engage in the feedback.
Interestingly, neuroscientists, and some of you probably know more of this than we do,
have been studying, you know, the brain, as they do. And they found that people vary
widely just in terms of their wiring and sensitivity to how they respond to certain kinds of
stimulation, certain kinds of negative feedback, for example, and that we vary up to 3,000
percent in terms of sort of how wide we swing emotionally and our recovery time.
So just as a quick check-in, so some people are very sensitive, some people are
insensitive -- actually, that's probably not the best word. Did you comment on this
already? I'm suddenly having déjà vu.
>> Sheila Heen: No.
>> Doug Stone: So, yeah, so insensitive isn't the best word.
>> Sheila Heen: Use even keel. That's a good word.
>> Doug Stone: I'll use even keel, but calling the insensitive ones insensitive isn't
bothering you guys because you really are insensitive. How many would say you're on
the sensitive side of the spectrum in terms of you have a big, emotional reaction to
receiving feedback? How many would say you're on the even-keeled side? Yeah. So,
you know, sort of 50/50, similar, and some of us are kind of in the middle.
Now, two things about that. One is it's really useful to know your own tendencies, both
in terms of these triggers and how sensitive you are. A second aspect of that is that you
all are giving each other feedback. So sometimes it's two sensitive people giving each
other feedback and sometimes we're sensitive and insensitive, and there's every kind of
combination. And we tend to assume other people are kind of wired the way we are, and
we tend to give feedback based on how we think we would receive it. And this can
create all kinds of havoc and mismatches in terms of someone being very direct or blunt
and having it badly received or someone being sort of indirect and trying to be friendly
and having it not received at all.
So these three challenges, or triggers, this is step one in terms of receiving feedback well,
which is knowing your own reactions. And as Sheila mentioned, receiving feedback well
doesn't mean that you take the feedback. It might mean that. But we would define it as it
means you're understanding the feedback, you're engaging well in the conversation about
the feedback. And then whether you take it or not, you're making an informed decision
about that rather than simply not taking it, or even taking it for reasons that don't make
sense.
Just a couple further thoughts on this. Digging in on the challenge to see. I'm going to
put up a sentence here that is feedback, and it's feedback that we have all either gotten,
given, or wanted to give but not given. And I want to just have -- I want to do a quick
brainstorming session with all of us about what are some possible meanings that could -that this sentence could [inaudible].
So I don't like the way those pants look on you. What might someone mean if they said
this to us?
>>: You're fat.
>> Doug Stone: You're fat. What were you going to say?
>>: Those pants are a little tight or too loose.
>>: So one is you're fat. By the way, notice that you're fat has nothing to do with pants.
This word here, pants, it has nothing to do with that feedback. But yours does, the pants
are too tight, they're too loose. So it's the relationship between the pants and the person.
What else might it mean?
>>: Those are ugly pants that they don't like.
>> Doug Stone: Those are ugly pants. So that really is about the pants. What else?
Yeah.
>>: He is in bad mood.
>> Doug Stone: Say it again.
>>: The person who say this in bad mood.
>> Doug Stone: Yeah. All those words, I could have just said I'm in a bad mood and I
felt like saying something mean to you. Other meanings? Yeah.
>>: The person cares about you. That person cares about me.
>> Doug Stone: The person cares about me. What says I care more than I don't like the
way those pants look on you? You could write Valentine's Day cards.
[laughter].
>> Doug Stone: But there's a potential aspect of that, right? They're saying I want you to
look good, I don't want people to make fun of you or whatever. So this absolutely right.
So was there one last one?
>>: Yeah, I was about to say you should choose a different style.
>> Doug Stone: You should choose a different ->>: Different style.
>> Doug Stone: A different style. So it's a whole category of pants, right, potentially.
So yeah. So this is -- interestingly this -- it's a kind of a silly example. But this is the
way feedback tends to be given and received in the world. We use words like this, and
each one of these words has some meaning, and we all would say, yeah, I know all those
words.
But it's actually very vague and subject to a huge, insanely huge range of possible
meanings. These are a few that -- similar to the ones you've suggested. So I don't like
this, the particular -- so this one's very specific. Those pants are -- actually they look
fine. These kinds of pants, right, the type of pants. This is about not -- this is not so
much about the pants as the person. This is more -- this is more -- this isn't even about
the way the person -- this isn't about the way they look; this is about their judgment, their
ability to function as an adult in the world. Sort of getting a little more intense.
Now it's not even about the other person. Now it's about -- it's about our whole
relationship in the world together, us. And then this is the tragic one. So it could be a
way of easing into something very serious.
So the pattern here -- so now we all know what to say or not to say about pants. But if
you have other feedback situations, we need to step back and understand the bigger
pattern. So the pattern here is that the comment about the pants is what we would call a
label. It's just very general words that don't have any particular specific meaning.
And so, for example, at work we often hear things like be more assertive or take your
skills to the next level or bring more energy or be more proactive. And those are all
words that have meanings, but it's not really that clear what they might actually mean.
We were doing a radio interview the other day and the host -- we were talking about
labels, and the host said, yeah, you know, I got some feedback a little while ago that I
should be -- I should have a edgier persona on the radio. And the host was saying, you
know, I was trying to figure out whether that would work and how to do that and maybe I
should like use swear words or yell at people or talk about sex. He was just unsure. And
he was feeling very uncomfortable about because he didn't really want to change his
persona. He went back to the producer and said, you know, I'm not sure I want to take
this feedback, but what did you mean by it when you said edgy, and the producer said
you should be more sort of emotionally open and vulnerable. And the guy was like, well,
that's actually worth exploring.
And there's no -- it's not about a right interpretation or a wrong interpretation; it's that we
tend to either reject or accept feedback based on the label, whatever it is we think that
label means.
So the way out of this is two things. First, spot the labels. And we'll give you the
homework assignment to -- next time you give or even receive feedback, notice whether
it's really -- is there real substance to it or is it a pretty vague label.
Once you spot the label, ask two questions. Were is the feedback coming from and
where is it going to. The feedback has a past and a future. Where it's coming from,
you're asking what stimulated this feedback, what did you observe, what are you worried
about, what were you thinking -- what did you see in terms of what I was doing or what
others have done that made you want to give me feedback. So it's about the past.
And then so if I was going to take this feedback looking to the future, what would I do
differently. Specifically what would I do differently. How would I know if I was doing
it the way you wanted me to do it, how would I know if I was going too far or not far
enough. So you're trying to sort of sketch out a picture of what it would look like going
forward.
>> Sheila Heen: So so far we've been dipping into a little bit the challenge to see. And
the challenges to see includes both to see what the giver means, what is it that they're
trying to comment on. It also includes, by the way, the challenge of seeing yourself.
Because we all have blind spots. I mean, actually I don't have blind spots, because I
would know if I did, but I know that you guys have blind spots. Okay?
So there's a chapter that looks at things that typically fall in blind spots. One of the
interestingly is not just facial expression and body language but tone of voice. There's a
little part of your brain, it's called the STS, sits right over your ear on each side, and it's
dedicated to listening to other people speak. It decodes the meaning of language and
especially the emotional tone in the language.
When you yourself speak, that part of your brain turns off. This is why when you hear
your voice on a recording you are horrified. Yes? Okay. We think we've listened to
ourselves every day of our lives, but in fact our voice is the one that we don't actually
listen to the same way we listen to everybody else. And when it comes at us through the
speaker, it suddenly gets routed through that part of your brain for the first time in a long
time.
So particularly feedback about your tone, it's just a little bit too aggressive or whatever is
really hard to understand, and it's why people say like I'm not yelling, what are you
talking about, right, because you don't actually listen to yourself; you're focused on what
you mean.
So so far we talked about the challenge to see. By the way, when you write a book like
this, you have to figure out in what order do we tell this story. See we me is what we
finally settled on. So you'll see that when you look at the book.
We considered we see me, which, you know, has resonance for trying to see yourself.
The only one that we knew was really not going to work was see me we. That was
something we really needed to stay away from.
All right. So let's talk a little bit about the challenge of we. And the part of this I want to
just raise is that sometimes the feedback is actually coming from the relationship itself,
between you and the giver. And what they are saying is there's a problem between us,
there's friction in this relationship, and therefore you need to change.
Now, we know that that's not true; that they are the problem, of course. And so the
easiest way to illustrate this is with an example. A few years ago I got a call from a CEO
who said I need you to come in and work with my team. I've got eight senior vice
presidents. They can't stand each other. They don't talk to each other. They can't make
decisions together. They all come to me to complain about each other. So I need you to
fix them.
Okay. So I said, well, you probably are going to need to be involved, but let me talk to
each of the eight. So I do individual interviews with each of the eight to find out what
they think is going on. And what I learned on this team, which is common on teams that
are having trouble, is that you've got a couple of primary conflicts between individuals
that everybody else is reacting to and trying to work around.
And on this particular team one of those primary conflicts was between a guy I'm going
to call Sam and a guy I'll call Pete. Now, Sam is like one of these no-filter guys. Like
whatever comes into his head he just says to you. In fact, when I called him the first
time, he answered the phone not by saying hello, he answered by saying you're seven
minutes late. I said, Hi, Sam, that's true. Let's use our last 23 minutes well, shall we?
And he said, Well, look, this is just a total waste of time. The CEO is making us come to
this two-day thing with you. But the problem here is that these guys on this team, and
especially Pete, can't handle conflict. If I got a problem with you, I'll tell you. We'll
argue it out. We'll settle it. We'll go out for a beer afterwards. It's no big deal. That's
the way it should be. But you're not going to change their personalities, especially not
Pete's personality, and that's why this is a waste of time. And he hung up.
A few days later I get ahold of Pete. Pete tells me right up front: Sheila, I hate conflict.
In fact, CEO's making us come to this two-day thing with you. I am just hoping to have
my heart attack in the first hour. Like it is going to kill me one way or another; the only
question is how much suffering will be involved. So I'd hate to have it in the last hour.
Now, to make this even more fun, Sam runs operations, which used to be Pete's job. Pete
left operations and took over international, partly because it's the growth engine for the
organization, but also, he admits to me, so he can be out of the country most of the time
and not deal with Sam.
So there's a problem between operations and international, you know, every few days.
You tell me: Who starts the conversation?
>>: Sam.
>> Sheila Heen: You betcha. So Sam calls Pete. What happens?
>>: Avoids.
>> Sheila Heen: Yeah. He doesn't answer. From Pete's point of view, caller ID is the
best invention ever. Okay? So he lets it go to voicemail. What does Sam do next?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Sheila Heen: He leaves a message and he sends an email. Does Pete respond? No, of
course not. Just seeing Sam's name in his inbox like sends his anxiety skyrocketing.
And, by the way, Pete is busy doing other things, right, so he's in a meeting and he thinks
I'll deal with this later, I don't even want to open it. So he lets it sit. Then Sam texts.
Pete ignores it. Sam then typically would go to Pete's right-hand guy, like I'm looking for
Pete. The right-hand guy texts Pete: Sam's looking for you. Pete texts back: I know.
Right?
And then eventually Sam goes to the CEO. By the way, about four minutes has elapsed.
[laughter].
>> Sheila Heen: Now, who are you more sympathetic to? How many people are more
sympathetic to Sam because by being this unresponsive is just unprofessional. You're
more sympathetic to Sam. How many people are more sympathetic to Pete, like Sam's ->> Doug Stone: Wow.
>> Sheila Heen: These either means there are a lot of Sams at Microsoft or you drum
them out, right, and all avoid each other. Are they both contributing to this?
>>: Yes.
>> Sheila Heen: Yeah. So this is what we would describe as a self-reinforcing
relationship system. They each have feedback for each other, by the way, about what you
need, what's wrong with you, and why you need to change. But, in fact, each of them has
a coping strategy emotionally for dealing in this relationship, and that coping strategy is
actually making the problem worse.
Meaning the more Sam pursues, the more Pete avoids. And the more Pete avoids, the
more aggressively Sam pursues and the more Pete flees.
So their coping strategy is actually creating exactly the behavior they hate in the other
person.
Can this change? We're not going to change their personalities. And one of the things
about feedback is that, particularly when you're frustrated with someone, it grows from
here's a behavioral change you need to make to you need to go get a personality
transplant, right, and I'm Googling all of your mental illnesses.
So we finally -- what'd you say?
>>: We Bing here.
>> Sheila Heen: Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.
[laughter].
>> Sheila Heen: Yes. So the place ->>: [inaudible].
>> Sheila Heen: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. The place where this actually
finally got some traction was on the afternoon on the first day. We kicked CEO out; it
was the eight senior vice presidents. And it was a moment where Sam looks at Pete, and
he goes: Pete, I just don't understand why when I tell you you're full of shit, you think
I'm attacking you.
[laughter].
>> Sheila Heen: So, of course, this is exactly what Pete hates. Excuse my language, by
the way. So Pete is like silent. And then another member of the team said like, okay,
Sam, I know that that wouldn't feel like an attack to you; that's like an invitation to a
healthy conversation. But for Pete actually it's hard. And, by the way, some -- couple of
others of us, it's not our favorite thing about you either.
And so we started to draw this, and they started to see the ways in which their own
behavior was actually reinforcing, and it was part of their relationship system.
So what we did is we just reversed these arrows. So we had Pete coach Sam. So, Pete, if
Sam wants a response from you, what should he do? Tell him how to get one. Tell him
one thing he can do. And Pete said: Oh, that's easy. Don't call me. When you call me,
you already know what the problem is. You already have your preferred solution. I have
to answer the phone cold and get this barrage of arguments for what you think should
happen and why team has screwed it up, and I don't even know what the issue is yet.
And I hate being unprepared for something like that. Really stresses me out. Instead,
send me an email. In the email tell me what's the problem. If you have a preferred
solution, just tell me what it is. And in particular, by the way, tell me when do we have
to figure it out, because everything is a crisis with you, and so I can't take it seriously and
I've got to juggle everything on my plate too.
Sam said, all right, I can do that. And we said all right, Sam, coach Pete. If he wants you
to back off, what should he do? And Sam said, well, it's not that hard. Just tell me you
got it. Part of my anxiety is I can't tell if I'm getting through to you. I'm an operations
guy. I got a problem to solve. So I can't tell whether I actually have your attention. And
when you tell me you got it, tell me when we're going to talk. Then I put it on my
calendar: We're going to talk Thursday morning. I can relax.
Did this change? Yeah, for a while. Okay. So let's be really clear about one of the
challenges of receiving feedback is often you're persuaded. That coaching is good
coaching; I do think that I would improve. This is something I fully intend to do.
But actual change isn't easy. So although they both took the coaching that the other gave
them, they also needed to agree that they would help each other and not use falling off the
wagon as more evidence that you're impossible, but instead nudge each other with a little
bit of humor, like, hey, you forgot to let me know if you got it or you forgot to tell me by
when we need to decide. And also their teams and their colleagues agree to help.
Because changing a relationship system actually takes some work and some time. So
slowly, over 12 or 18 months, it got better. When you try to understand a relationship
system, what's going on here that's producing so much frustration and feedback between
us, one of the ways that we suggest to do it is to take three steps back.
The first step back looks at what are the intersections in how I am versus how you are.
That's creating some of the friction. We're just different. And this is one of the reasons,
by the way, that the people you find challenging to work with our actually sometimes
MVPs for you, your most valuable players, because the people you like and who like you
and you work easily with, they sometimes don't see your edges, right, because you just
fall into an easy rhythm together. The people you do have some friction with, they do see
your edges. Right? Probably because they're so good at provoking them.
So they actually have valuable insight and a different perspective of you under stress so
that they sometimes can be really helpful.
So looking at what is it that is different between us that's causing some of the problem.
Step back one more step to say, okay, is there something about the roles that we play that
creates conflict. My job is to pester you to get something done. But in your role this
thing is not actually that important so it keeps falling down your to-do list. So I keep
saying that you're being irresponsible or unresponsive. But part of it is simply that it's
built into the role that it's more important for me than it is for you or your role is you're
overwhelmed because you're sitting in a role that is a bottleneck, let's say. So how much
of it structural.
And then, finally, the bigger picture: Are there other players, other processes, is there
physical environment that contribute to the challenge; that if we're going to change this,
we would have to also address those things.
Just as an example, between Sam and Pete, one of the physical environment challenges is
that sometimes Pete was not getting back to Sam, not because he was ignoring him, but
because he was sleeping. He is many time zones away, right? And so Sam in anxious
about why am I not hearing back from him. Well, you know, you got to think ahead from
their point of view, where are they or why is it taking so long.
Before we run totally out of time, I want to just touch on the challenge of being me. So
what we did is we looked at differences in sensitivity to feedback. And we looked at
three different variables. The first is what we call baseline. In the literature this is
sometimes called setpoint; that all of us have sort of a level of happiness or satisfaction of
life that in the absence of other events we gravitate back to.
This comes from the studies of lottery winners. A year after winning the lottery, they're
about as happy or unhappy as they were before. People who go to jail, a year later they're
about as happy or unhappy as they were before. Some people live life at like -- if it's a
scale of 1 to 10, they're like an 8 1/2 or a 9. Like these people are irrationally cheerful all
the time. Other people live life at like a 2 or a 2 1/2.
Now, the reason why this matter vis a vis feedback is, particularly if you have a lot
setpoint or baseline, positive feedback can sometimes be muffled for you. The volume is
kind of turned down. It's harder for you to hear it.
The second variable is what we call swing. So when you get positive or negative
feedback how wide do you swing positive or negative. Some people -- the same piece of
feedback will come to two team members. One of them is devastated; the other is like,
well, it's going to be a busy day tomorrow. Right? We'll get it fixed. Then, of course,
the person who is even keel will way to the sensitive person like you're so thin-skinned,
like you got to not take it so personally, like and heap another piece of feedback on top of
it; that you're not handling the feedback very well. Which is always really fun for the
sensitive person.
The third variable, then, is what we call sustain or recovery, how long do you sustain
positive feeling or how long does it take you to recover from negative feeling.
How many of you all would say if you get a piece of positive feedback in email that
matters to you, you know, that positive feeling would actually stick with you all day,
maybe even leak into the rest of the week? How many people, like, it's gone by the time
you open the next email. Yeah.
Okay. So, by the way, positive, sustained, and negative recovery are completely
independent of each other. You could have long sustain and short recovery. You could
have short sustain and long recovery, which is a particularly tough profile. But
understanding your own reactions can help you understand how to manage those
reactions. It can also keep you from falling into or help you recover from the distortions
that come with big negative swing.
So if you are really upset by a piece of feedback, you can fall into what we call the
Google bias.
>> Doug Stone: The Bing bias.
>> Sheila Heen: Yeah, the Bing bias.
[laughter].
>> Sheila Heen: We are now -- can I have those books back, please? We need to change
it. Yeah.
[laughter].
>> Sheila Heen: The Bing bias is actually a better name, right? It's alliterative. So it's as
if -- like you get one little piece of feedback, like the user interface on this isn't quite
right, or whatever it would be, and that causes you to actually mentally search everything
that is wrong with me.
And you get 1.2 million hits, right, of all of your past mistakes and disappointments and
bad judgments. You got sponsored links from your father an your ex, you know? And
the reason we call it a bias is that your results are based on your search term, as you guys
well know. You are not Binging -- is that now a word? Binging, okay -- you know,
things I'm handling relatively well. Then you would get 5.2 million hits and you would
have a more balanced perspective on yourself, okay?
Falling into this bias affects your sense of the past, your present, and your future. And so
a piece of -- there's a chapter in the book about how do you dismantle the distortions so
that the feedback doesn't become super-sized and you can see it at actual size in a place
that you can also see is there anything that I can learn from this.
I'll turn it over to Doug, and then we'll take questions.
>> Doug Stone: Let's just -- let's take questions.
>> Sheila Heen: Okay. We'll open it up to questions. Yes.
>>: So kind of growth/maturity thing, people are often -- this thin-skinned comment is
always about, hey, you need to toughen up, you need to deal with this.
>> Sheila Heen: Yeah, yeah, grow up.
>>: People like consciously reduce the distance of their swing, is it age? Is that a
function of maturity? How do you categorize that?
>> Doug Stone: So the literature that we look at -- these are very rough numbers, but the
neuroscientists and psychology people have said that about 50 percent of how we respond
and who we are in the world is based on our wiring; it's kind of the way we showed up in
the world. About 10 percent is based on our circumstances, like, you know, where we
live and who we live near and who we're married to or not. And about 40 percent is
based on the way we're telling the story of our life and what's happening to us. So the
place where we have real leverage, you can -- with neuroplasticity you can maybe adjust
your wiring a little bit with exercise and meditation, whatever.
But the place where we have the most leverage is how we're telling that story. And so
our recommendation is that's the place to go if you're trying to have a different way of
reacting. Or if you feel like you're too sensitive, you -- it's hard to sort of change your
physiology, but you can ->> Sheila Heen: Do you want to ->> Doug Stone: -- you can change the -- yeah, well, the ->> Sheila Heen: You should say something about yourself.
>> Doug Stone: The -- oh. What's that?
>> Sheila Heen: About your journey ->> Doug Stone: My experience.
>> Sheila Heen: -- on this.
>> Doug Stone: Yeah. So when -- so I tend to be on the sensitive side ->> Sheila Heen: Very.
>> Doug Stone: Go sensitive people.
>> Sheila Heen: Very.
[laughter].
>> Doug Stone: Sheila is on the more even-keeled side. So in that sense we're a good
team in writing the book because we had one of each extreme. But, you know, I was
looking forward to think about so I'm sensitive. I struggle with negative feedback. It
takes me a long time to recover and I go pretty low sometimes. So I'm thinking this is a
great book to write and I'll come out the other side; I'm looking forward to how it turns
out, writing the book, reading it, etc.
So now when I get negative, challenging feedback, I still feel really crappy.
[laughter].
>> Doug Stone: So that's the bad news. There's nothing that makes bad news good news
or negative feedback positive feedback. The good news is that I feel lousy but I feel less
lousy and for a shorter period of time. So it's not like a huge transition where I have a
different physiology. I just have the same physiology, but I've learned ways of telling the
story, ways of interacting, specific tools that actually make a huge difference to me and
my life.
And once the stress and anxiety or upset of getting feedback starts to go down, then you
can participate in the upside of the feedback, the learning. And also the relationship side
of it is huge. Because if you're really sensitive to feedback, it's very easy to kind of wall
people off and say, well, you know, it's going to be too painful. That has a big impact on
you; it also has a big impact on people you're close to because they can't then interact
with you in certain ways. There's no outlet for them to talk to you about relationship
issues.
So, you know, it ends up having quite a big impact, a positive impact on my life.
>> Sheila Heen: I think as you age sometimes that happens naturally because you have
more perspective on how important is this, but I don't actually think it happens naturally
for everybody and that, I think, actually working at it means you get better at it much
faster, which is what we were looking for, is how do you work at it and get better faster.
Yeah. It's a great question. Yeah.
>>: [inaudible] you looked at how people change over their age or over time, different
groups, millennials over Generation X versus ->> Sheila Heen: No, we haven't looked at that, and I don't know of anybody who's
looking at that specific question. People are looking at how are millennials in the
workplace, different generations in the workplace, but I don't know if anybody is looking
at, well, does that change over time. I think that's a great next book.
>> Doug Stone: But he's -- I think he's asking ->> Sheila Heen: I think you should write that book.
>> Doug Stone: -- like the different generations, are they different from each other.
>> Sheila Heen: Yeah, maybe. So we'll offer one thought on that, which is we use the
word feedback to actually mean three really vastly different things. So if we're really
going to be crisp about our definitions, part of it is we have to understand that feedback
really means three different things. It's appreciation; I see you, I get you, you matter.
When people say I wish I got more feedback, sometimes they just mean I wish somebody
noticed that I work here, right? The second is coaching. Helps you get better at
something. The third is evaluation, which is judgement/assessment, here's where you
stand, here's your rating or ranking, and that tells you what you can expect. That's the
loudest emotionally. And so it can drown out coaching or appreciation.
And so I think millennials, the popular wisdom is that they're more likely to have gotten
lots and lots of appreciation and positive evaluation for what they do in life, and a lot of
attention, because parenting is more attentive, apparently, generationally than it used to
be. So that then when they come in the workplace they expect that to continue, and then
also it's really easy for all of us to interpret coaching as evaluation. Like if you're telling
me something I should be doing better, it must mean I'm not doing okay.
And, by the way, I think it's particularly challenging for high achievers. Do you guys
know who this is? McKayla Maroney. And disappointing ourselves as high achievers
can sometimes be the most damning, and I think that that's something that we often share
as well.
>> Doug Stone: The best fix on this, the best fix on any difference, whether it's
millennials or World War II veterans or whoever is working together, any way that
they're different, is to not only give and receive feedback but to make explicit and have a
transparent conversation about our preferences and styles and just the way we each are.
We often act like, well, we just -- we're supposed to try to guess and we do our best and
we're thoughtful and considerate, but often we just guess wrong. It's much easier just to
talk about it and say, you know, what are your expectations, here's my expectations, here
are my tendencies, here's what I'm good at when I give feedback, here's what I tend to be
not so good at when I give feedback, and just have that conversation.
>> Sheila Heen: We'll offer one more thought, and I want to be respectful of your time,
but we'll stick around to answer questions and chat with anybody who wants to chat.
The last thing that we'll leave you with is how you ask matters. So there's no one right
way to give feedback, which is why only teaching people how to give is tough because
the receivers are all different and it's a collaborative venture. But there are a couple of
don'ts for asking for feedback.
One don't is don't ask, hey, do you have any feedback for me? Nobody knows how to
answer that question. Right? Like what are you -- what are you -- it's on your
performance? On your personality? On your pants? I don't understand. What do you
want? And how honest am I supposed to be? It's not clear.
Instead, what we suggest is ask for one thing. So say, hey, what's what thing I'm doing or
I'm failing to do that you think is getting in the way or I'm getting in my own way.
What's one thing I could change that would really make a difference for the team.
You are much more likely to get something concrete and specific, it lowers the stakes for
both of you, and it's clear that you actually assume there is one thing, so you can be
honest.
And if you actually take one thing, you can actually take charge and accelerate your
learning and elicit coaching as well as probably appreciation year in and year out and you
don't have to wait for the performance management system, which is really geared mostly
for evaluation. And when it's used for coaching, sometimes the coaching gets drowned
out. So that you can actually take charge of your own learning.
Thank you so much for joining us. And, please, stick around. We're happy to answer
questions. If you like us on Facebook, you'll get updates. And then on our website here,
we're going to be posting it in the next month or two, a team guide so that you can
actually, with your team, read pieces of the book and then sit down and talk about it, talk
about your wiring, what gets in the way of learning, what's helpful to you, talk about your
blind spots, etc., talk about how you want to accelerate your learning together as a team.
Good luck.
[applause]