The Leader's Inner Work
What you have to look at in yourself before you look at anyone else.
This is part two of a four-part series on feedback. If you missed it, part one is on the conditions that make feedback work. This piece picks up where that one ends.
There is a question most leaders never ask before giving feedback.
Not "what do I want to say?" Not "how do I say it kindly?" The question is: what did I contribute to the situation I am about to talk about?
It is a hard question, and that is exactly why most leaders skip it. The conversation is about them. We came to talk about their behavior. Their performance. Their pattern. The whole point of feedback is to focus on the other person.
Except that is not the whole point. Not according to the research. And not according to what most experienced leaders eventually learn the hard way.
The thing most feedback content quietly skips is this: a feedback conversation is a system, not a delivery. The leader is part of that system. The leader's contribution, the leader's blind spots, and the leader's capacity to receive feedback themselves all shape whether the conversation has any chance of working. If you cannot do this work on yourself, the feedback you give is going to keep missing in ways you do not understand.
I learned this the hard way, more than once. Issue No. 5 of this newsletter told one of those stories. There are others.
Three areas of inner work matter most. They are uncomfortable on purpose.
Inner Work 1: Examine Your Contribution
Every situation you are about to give feedback on has a system behind it. You are part of that system.
This does not mean every problem is your fault. It means you are rarely a neutral observer. You set the priorities the person was working against. You modeled the behaviors they learned to imitate. You tolerated the patterns that got worse. You rewarded the moves that paid off and ignored the ones that did not. Your direct report did not develop their habits in a vacuum. They developed them inside the environment you helped build.
This idea is not soft. It is foundational to how organizational behavior actually works. Edgar Schein, who spent more than fifty years studying organizational culture and leadership at MIT, argued that the leader's most important behavior is not telling but asking, specifically asking questions that genuinely seek to understand what the other person is dealing with (Schein, 2013). The asking is what reveals the leader's contribution. Without it, the leader operates from assumption, and the assumption is almost always self-flattering.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, the same research underneath much of week one, has a piece that sits directly on this point. Edmondson and her colleague James Detert found that 85% of employees had withheld important information from their manager because they feared the consequences of speaking up. Read that again. The person you are about to give feedback to may have been trying to tell you something for months. You did not hear it because the system you built does not invite hearing it.
Your contribution is rarely obvious to you. It is usually obvious to the person sitting across from you in the conversation.
What it looks like when it's missing
Feedback that focuses entirely on the direct report's behavior with no acknowledgment of context. Patterns you complain about that map almost exactly to behaviors you have modeled or rewarded. Direct reports who eventually quit and tell other people, but never told you, what they actually thought. The phrase "I have given them feedback on this for years and nothing changes," which is sometimes true and sometimes a sign that the feedback is hitting a wall the leader built.
What to do about it
Before any meaningful feedback conversation, write one sentence answering this question: What did I do, not do, model, reward, or tolerate that contributed to this situation? Not as a way to let the other person off the hook. As a way to be honest about the full picture. Then, in the conversation itself, name your contribution out loud before you name theirs. The conversation that follows is almost always different.
Inner Work 2: Find Your Blind Spots
You see yourself by your intentions. Other people see you by your behavior. The gap between those two views is your blind spot, and it is usually larger than you think.
The research on this is uncomfortable. In a Harvard Business Review piece that has held up well, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall summarize a body of research called the "idiosyncratic rater effect." When one person rates another, more than half of the variance in that rating is explained by the rater's own characteristics, not the ratee's (Buckingham & Goodall, 2019). In plain language: when you rate someone, more of what you say is about you than about them. And when someone rates you, more of what they say is about them than about you.
This cuts both directions, and the implication is significant. Your assessment of your direct report is partly a mirror. Their assessment of you is also partly a mirror. The way through is not to dismiss either. The way through is to seek enough perspectives that the patterns separate from the noise.
This is what 360-degree feedback was designed to do, and the research on it is consistent on one point: for most leaders, self-ratings are among the least accurate assessments in the entire process. People rate themselves on intentions and others rate them on behavior. The gap is the work.
The leader who is most dangerous in a feedback conversation is the leader who has never seriously examined how others actually experience them. They are giving feedback from a self-portrait that no one else sees the same way.
What it looks like when it's missing
Surprise when you receive critical feedback, especially patterns you have heard before but dismissed. Direct reports who seem cautious around you in ways you cannot quite explain. The phrase "but that is not what I meant" coming up a lot in your conversations. A general sense that you are being misunderstood by people who, at some point, you may have to consider have understood you accurately.
What to do about it
Find out how you actually come across. The cheap version: ask three trusted people, ideally including at least one current or former direct report, what you do that makes you harder to work with than you realize. The investment version: a real 360-degree feedback process, ideally one tied to coaching, so you can interpret the gap between self-rating and others' ratings without spiraling. Either way, the question to sit with afterward is not "are they right?" The question is "if any of this is true, what would I change?"
Inner Work 3: Build Your Capacity to Receive
There is a quiet rule that runs through every body of feedback research worth taking seriously: leaders who cannot receive feedback well do not lead teams that give it.
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, in their book on receiving feedback, argued that the entire feedback industry has been pointed in the wrong direction. We spend billions training people to give feedback better. The actual leverage, they argue, is in receiving (Stone & Heen, 2014). When the receiver knows how to metabolize hard input, the conversation works even when the delivery is imperfect. When the receiver cannot, the most carefully delivered feedback in the world bounces off.
Now turn that around. You are the receiver of feedback from the people who report to you, every day, whether or not you have made it explicit. They are watching how you respond when something does not go your way. When someone challenges a decision. When the data does not support what you wanted to do. When a junior person points out something you missed. Your response in those moments is the data your team uses to decide whether to bring you the next hard truth.
Most leaders fail this test in small ways they do not notice. A flash of defensiveness. A subtle shift in tone. A "yes, but" that signals the input was not actually welcome. None of it is dramatic. All of it is read.
The research underneath week one applies here in reverse. Kluger and DeNisi's central insight, that feedback effectiveness collapses when the receiver's attention shifts from the task to the self, is also true of you (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). When you receive feedback and your attention goes immediately to defending yourself, your team learns that bringing you hard truths is not safe. They stop. The information dries up. Your blind spots get bigger.
What it looks like when it's missing
You cannot remember the last time a direct report told you something that genuinely changed your mind. You find yourself frequently explaining or contextualizing instead of listening. Feedback you receive arrives only through formal channels, never in the moment. You assume the absence of upward feedback means everything is fine. (It almost never does.)
What to do about it
Start asking for feedback specifically, not generally. "What should I do differently?" beats "any feedback for me?" Pick one specific area: how you run meetings, how you communicate priorities, how you respond when challenged. Ask one direct report. Watch your first three seconds. Then thank them, name what you will try, and follow up.
The fastest way to build a feedback culture on your team is to be visibly, genuinely good at receiving it yourself. Not perfect. Visible. Your team needs to see you change behavior because of something they said. That is the moment they start trusting that the feedback you give them is being given by someone who is also doing the work.
The Common Thread
All three of these (your contribution, your blind spots, your capacity to receive) are versions of the same underlying discipline. They ask you to treat your own behavior as a legitimate object of examination, not as a fixed point around which everyone else's behavior gets evaluated.
This is not a one-time exercise. It is a posture. The leaders who do this well are not better people than the ones who do not. They are people who have built the habit of asking, before they give feedback, whether they have earned the right to give it. Not whether they have the authority to give it. Whether they have done the inner work that makes the giving useful.
Authority gets you the meeting. The inner work is what determines what happens in it.
A short reflection before you go
Pick one direct report. Honestly answer one question, the harder one of the three.
If I asked them what I do that makes feedback harder for them than it should be, what would they say?
You will not actually know the answer. That is the point. The question is whether you are willing to find out.
Next week, we move from the inner work to the conversation itself. Specificity, the pairing of care and challenge, two-way dialogue, and naming the purpose of the conversation out loud. The mechanics of the moment, grounded in the research that explains why some moments work and most do not.
See our resources section for a downloadable tool to support this week's work.
This is part two of a four-part series. Read the series hub for the full arc, or subscribe to The Grow Point to get the next two pieces in your inbox.
References
Buckingham, M., & Goodall, A. (2019, March-April). The feedback fallacy. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Performance/Edmondson%20Psychological%20safety.pdf
Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1996-02773-003
Schein, E. H. (2013). Humble inquiry: The gentle art of asking instead of telling. Berrett-Koehler.
Stone, D., & Heen, S. (2014). Thanks for the feedback: The science and art of receiving feedback well. Viking.
