Feedback is someone else’s experience of you, and it doesn’t always come with words attached.
Sometimes it’s expressed directly, in a conversation or a performance review. Sometimes it arrives in writing. Sometimes it shows up in body language, in the energy in a room, in whether people lean in or pull back. Sometimes it’s simply in the way people treat you.
All of it is data. And all of it is filtered through the lens of the person giving it, their history, their story, their internal operating system. Every person in the room may experience you a little differently. That’s important to understand before you do anything with what they’re showing you.
What feedback gives you is a clue about how you are showing up, in this moment, in this relationship, in this context. Taken together, those clues become a picture worth paying attention to.
The leaders who use feedback well approach it with discernment. They get curious before they draw conclusions. They separate the information from the interpretation. And they decide, deliberately, what to do next.
The source matters as much as the message.
A performance evaluation is formal and structured, look for patterns across cycles, not just this one. One eval is a moment in a longer story that you are still writing.
A peer sees you up close and brings their own pressures and context to what they observe. Their lens is real and worth considering.
A cross-functional colleague outside your immediate world often gives you the most candid signal. That distance gives them a view you may not have access to on your own.
Feedback from your supervisor carries real organizational weight. Understand what’s being said and the context it’s coming from.
The coach approach: get curious before you conclude.
A coaching lens on feedback means you ask questions before you make meaning. Try these:
→ Does this resonate or is it landing hard because it already felt like a tender spot?
→ What is this telling me about how I’m showing up, and is that the leader I intend to be?
→ Is this a pattern, or a single moment in a difficult season?
→ What’s genuinely worth learning here, even if the delivery was imperfect?
→ What’s at stake, for my role, my relationships, my trajectory?
→ Where do I want to pivot, and what would that actually look like?
→ What story am I telling myself about myself right now because of this, and is that story true?
Don’t make it your identity.
Feedback is a point-in-time experience, someone’s experience of you, right now, in this context. It is not a permanent verdict on who you are as a leader.
Difficult feedback from a performance review, a hard conversation with your manager, a peer who read you wrong, those are moments. They are information about a season, not a definition of your future.
The most grounded leaders hold feedback firmly enough to examine it and lightly enough to put down what doesn’t belong to them. They ask: what do I want to take from this and what am I choosing to leave behind?
When you are clear on your values and the leader you are becoming, feedback stops being a referendum on your worth. You get to decide what’s signal and what’s noise. And you get to move forward on your own terms.
With you,
Gretchen
