How to Take a Punch

reprinted from my company's internal blog

I've been with my company for decades now, and it never ceases to surprise me at the cyclic nature of how people understand things. There truly is nothing new under the sun, and what's old becomes new again.

Lately, the concept of feedback have become our “return to bell bottoms”, and because we seem to be struggling with the same teething problems that we've been through before about what feedback is, how to give it, and most importantly of all, how to accept it, I thought it might be worth a few words. My intent here is to offer you a perspective about it that will make it easier to both give and to take, and if I play my cards right, help you to do both.

If you know me at all, you've probably heard me say the following: “I want to work with people who will tell me when my fly is down.” By that, I mean that I know how very easy it is to take silence as a sign that you're doing well. Not everyone is deeply introspective and second guessing themselves. I do, but that was a learned response to getting surprised a few times by being told that not only was I doing my job poorly, but that I'd been doing it poorly for months.

That moment is a real killer when it comes to professionalism. We tend to believe that others are watching our backs and will let us know when they see a sign that we're missing things, and coming to realize that it's not happening will turn you bitter, paranoid, and if you let it get bad enough, will cost you any confidence you may have had in yourself or your peers.

I was given the opportunity to attend a team building exercise with the Executive Team this year, and there was a conversation there that radically altered how I look at that experience. We talked about the difference between being “nice” and being “kind”. Being “nice” is behaving in a way that makes people feel good. Being kind is behaving in a way that we believe people actually need, even if that behavior could cause bad feelings. When a doctor sets a bone, it's not nice, but it is absolutely a kindness. Telling me when you see it that I'm dropping balls on the job isn't nice, but it absolutely is a kindness.

Nice behavior tends to come from wanting to make yourself feel better. Kind behavior is an effort, usually at some personal cost, to help others be better.

And that brings us to giving Feedback. I won't name names, you know who you are, but I've held some of you accountable for talking about someone disappointing you but not telling them. That is neither nice nor kind. Giving feedback should be viewed as an act of kindness, of making sure that we don't do to others what we don't want done to ourselves. “But Jesse,” I hear you saying, “I don't have to use Perform Yard to do that. I could just say something. That feels mean, like I'm tattling.”

You're looking at this the wrong way. We offer feedback to help people be better. Recording feedback gives that person a chance to later show that they've become better.

Think about it for a second. When I walk into a review, I may be working the kind of role that doesn't tend to get big flashy goals; maybe my role is a maintenance function, and so when review time comes, my job was keeping the lights on. Saying that they stayed on doesn't give me much room to talk myself up. But if I had three feedbacks, and I not only used them to be better, but expanded on them to boot, well.. now I have something to brag about. And isn't that what you want, when review time comes?

Or to put it another way, we very often avoid filing feedback out of sympathy. We believe that the person is just so underwater in their job function that filing feedback feels unfair. “They're just so busy, the poor soul.” They may very well be, but have you ever considered the reason that they're so busy is because no one's bringing the fact up that the work isn't getting done? Like I said a while back, silence means everything's fine, so if we're slowly drowning someone in expectations that are too high, a bunch of feedbacks about how that work isn't getting done may be the very lifeline that person needs to get help.

“That never happens,” you might say, and you'd be wrong. It happened to me. I had a PEM type role, back before we invented that title, and I was drowning. I got “written up” because I was falling behind, and when I went on a PIP, and tracked my time, my boss immediately saw the things that were piling up on me, and the problem got fixed. I can't remember who it was who wrote me up, but they did me an act of kindness that very likely saved me. (If you're still here, thank you.)

If you're filing feedback, you're throwing a punch. Remember that, and choose your words with some care to soften the blow. If you can't show that you care about the person you're writing to, you're saying it wrong. We know you do; if you didn't, you wouldn't take the time to write to them at all.

Everything I've said so far is about giving feedback. Everything I've said so far is just as much about taking one.

When I was ten, my father taught me how to take a punch. He said, “lean into it.”

That's scary, the first time you do it. It's going to hurt, and every instinct says you back up. But when you lean into a punch, you give that fist coming at you less distance to travel, which means it builds less velocity. The first few times you do it, it's a hard thing to force yourself into, but it does get easier when you realize the benefits of it.

Perform Yard feedback's the same. Lean into it. Treat it as the gift that it's meant to be.

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." - Albert Einstein