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Friends,

Thank you for joining me again this week. If you’ve been reading for a while, you may have noticed that this particular subject keeps turning up, and that is intentional. Self-awareness has probably shown up in this newsletter more than any other single idea, and the reason is simple. Everything else a leader is trying to build in him or herself depends on it.

Two pieces are worth pulling up next to this week’s letter. One is an earlier issue in the archive called The leader must be an actor (or so I thought), where I worked through Patton honestly cataloging what he lacked and then spending the next two decades building it. The other is last week’s blog, Self-Awareness: The Gateway to Development, which argues that this is not just one attribute sitting alongside the others. It is the condition that makes developing any of them possible.

This week is about what comes next. Getting honest feedback is a challenge, and it’s not enough.

Somebody finally tells you something true about you, and your first reaction is that they have it wrong.

That reaction is not dishonesty, and it is not ego in the way we usually mean the word. You have been assembling a picture of yourself for a long time, built out of your intentions, your effort, what you meant when you said it, and the reasons behind every decision. Someone hands you a different picture, built entirely from the outside out of what they saw and heard, and the two do not line up. Something in you starts defending the first one before their sentence is finished.

I have watched that reflex cost leaders a lot of ground.

Last week I wrote about the most difficult leaders I encountered in the Army, the ones who could not see themselves. What is worth adding here is that most of them were not short on feedback. People told them things. Evaluations said things. The information arrived. What failed to happen was true reconciliation because the feedback got explained away.

None of this matters if nobody will tell you anything, which is a separate problem and one I have written about before. Earning the Truth: How Leaders Set Conditions for Honest Feedback walks through what it takes to build a team that will say hard things to your face, and the short version is that permission is not enough. You have to model it, protect the people who do it, and never once make them regret it.

So assume you have done that work and it worked. Somebody just told you something you did not want to hear. That is where this week picks up.

Feedback only turns into something of value when three things happen: You acknowledge it, you internalize it, and you build a plan against it. Each one is harder than it sounds, and each one fails in its own particular way.

Acknowledge it. Say it back to the person without appending anything. No context, no explanation, no history. Just what you heard, in their words, confirmed. That sounds easy, and it is the step a lot of us screw up because we want to explain, or dismiss, or justify. Usually it is “but.” I hear you saying I shut down the conversation, but what you may not know is . . . Some of us have figured out that “but” sounds defensive and have quietly swapped in “and,” which doesn’t really change anything. Whatever follows either word is the defense, and the defense is the only part the other person will remember. You can give them the context another day if it still seems necessary. It usually will not.

Internalize it. The question most of us run at this stage is whether the feedback is fair, and that question is a trap. Feedback can be wrong in its particulars and still be right about how you land on people. How you land is what you were trying to learn in the first place, and you can’t see that from the inside. How you land is about you.

So run a better question instead. What would have to be true for this person to see it that way? You are not conceding the charge. You are asking what they watched, what they had no access to, and what you did that made their reading a reasonable one. That question is answerable, and it usually turns up something you can work with, even if the example they chose was wrong.

Build a plan. Name one behavior, not a quality. Be more approachable is not a plan. I will look away from my computer when somebody comes into my office is a plan. Put a date on it, and tell one person what you are working on so that somebody besides you knows whether it changed. Feedback that produces a feeling and no behavior has produced nothing.

That example about the computer is mine.

People used to arrive at my door with an apology attached to the front of whatever they had come to say, and a fair number of them hovered outside before coming in at all. I noticed it long before I did anything about it.

Nobody ever told me I was difficult to approach. The feedback was not a sentence, it was a pattern, and I had been watching it for a long time without recognizing it as feedback at all.

So I ran the question in this letter. What would have to be true for them to hesitate like that? The answer was sitting in my own behavior. Somebody would walk in, and I would keep typing and tell them to go ahead, I’m listening. I believed it when I said it. What they saw was a man who did not stop what he was doing, and they believed the part they could see.

So, when somebody came through that door, I stopped, looked up, and turned to face them. It was a small thing, and it was the difference between telling people they matter and showing them.

The feedback that does the most damage is not the piece that is flatly wrong, because that one is easy to set down and walk away from.

It is the piece that is mostly right and partly wrong. Seventy percent accurate, thirty percent off, and the thirty hands you a legitimate, defensible, entirely honest reason to dismiss all of it. You are not even lying when you do. The example really was unfair. The timeline really is off. And the seventy percent walks out of the room along with the thirty.

If you take one thing from this letter, take that. The moment you catch yourself able to disprove part of something, slow down, because that is when you are most likely to throw away the part you needed.

That drill I ran with a group of lieutenants one Friday afternoon works just as well on yourself.

Write down the two best leaders and the two worst leaders you have been in personal contact with. They do not have to be coaches. A parent counts, a teacher counts, anybody who held real influence over you. Next to each one, write down why they landed where they did.

Now the question that changed that conversation. If those four people saw your lists tonight, would any of them be surprised? Would they be able to tell you why they were on it?

Then turn it around, which is the uncomfortable half. Think of the last time somebody told you something about yourself that you disagreed with. Do not relitigate whether they were right. Answer the single question instead. What would have to be true for them to see it that way?

Write the answer down, and send it to me if you are willing. I would like to know how many of you find that the answer comes easier than you expected it to.

If this was useful, forward it to a leader who is better at collecting feedback than using it, and if somebody forwarded it to you, you can subscribe at ianpalmerleadership.com/newsletter.