You Asked for Feedback. Were You Actually Ready to Hear It?

I have observed leaders inviting feedback, encouraging people to be honest and share opinion.

Then the feedback arrives.

They explain why the other person does not have the full context. They defend the amount of research already completed. They point to their experience. Or they acknowledge the comment politely, then proceed exactly as planned.

Technically, they asked.

But did they listen?

When collaboration becomes a performance

Consider two composite situations.

In the first, a leadership team asks for an external review of an important proposal. The reviewers identify several practical problems: errors in the calculations, inconsistencies in the document and a few issues that can be corrected immediately.

Those comments are accepted.

Then someone questions a prominent creative decision. The response changes. The team explains the thinking behind it, the research they conducted and the contextual factors the reviewer may not understand.

The feedback that corrected the execution was useful. The feedback that challenged the thinking was judged.

In another organisation, employees are invited to review a new positioning statement before it is launched. A few people point out that parts of the language overstate what the business actually delivers. The feedback is received warmly. Everyone is thanked.

The final version launches unchanged.

Neither example necessarily involves bad intent. The leaders may genuinely believe they are being collaborative. But the decision was already emotionally closed, even if the conversation was still officially open.

Why we accept some feedback and resist the rest

Feedback is easiest to accept when it does not threaten our authorship, expertise or judgment.

Correcting a typo does not challenge our professional identity. Questioning the strategy we developed, the concept we championed or the language we approved can feel very different.

Research by decision scientist Ilan Yaniv describes a related tendency as egocentric advice discounting. We naturally give more weight to our own position because we have access to all the reasoning, effort and information behind it. We do not have the same access to the other person’s reasoning. Yaniv also found that the further advice sits from our original opinion, the more likely we are to discount it. ps explain a familiar leadership response:

“I have spent far more time thinking about this than they have.”

That may be true. But time invested is not proof that the conclusion is right. Sometimes, it simply makes us more attached to it.

Marshall Goldsmith identifies both passing judgment and not listening among the behaviours that can limit otherwise successful leaders. Not listening is not always visible as interruption or distraction. It can also look like listening long enough to prepare a defence, classify the other person as uninformed or explain why the feedback does not apply. ning does not mean agreeing

The solution is not to implement every suggestion.

Leaders remain accountable for making decisions. They may hold information others do not have. Some feedback will be poorly informed, impractical or incompatible with the wider strategy.

Listening means giving invited feedback a fair evaluation before deciding what to do with it.

You can listen carefully and still disagree. The difference is whether you reached that disagreement through examination or reflexive defence.

A useful test is:

Could I explain the other person’s concern in a way they would recognise as accurate before I explain why I disagree?

If not, you may not have understood it yet.

The OPEN approach to receiving feedback

Before your next feedback conversation, try four practices.

O: Outline what is genuinely open

Tell people what can still change.

Are you looking for new ideas, testing an existing direction or checking for execution risks? Which decisions have already been made? What constraints must be respected?

Asking for broad feedback when only minor changes are possible creates false expectations.

P: Pause your defence

When you hear something you disagree with, do not immediately explain the history, research or rationale.

Ask questions first:

• What specifically concerns you?

• What might a customer, employee or stakeholder interpret differently?

• What consequence do you think I may be overlooking?

• What would you suggest instead?

  
  

Your first responsibility is to understand the signal, not protect the original decision.

E: Evaluate against criteria, not authorship

Separate the quality of the idea from who proposed it and who created the original work.

Return to the agreed objective. Which option is clearer, more accurate, more useful or more aligned with the audience?

The question is not, “Who understands this better?”

It is, “Which decision best serves the outcome?”

N: Name what happened next

Close the loop.

Explain whether the feedback was adopted, adapted or declined, and why. People do not expect every suggestion to be accepted. They do need evidence that speaking honestly was worth the effort.

In a study involving 3,149 employees and 223 managers, James Detert and Ethan Burris found that managerial openness was consistently associated with employees speaking up. Their research also connected that relationship to psychological safety. ndson’s foundational work describes psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. When people learn that disagreement will be dismissed, defended against or quietly ignored, they become less likely to take that risk again. uestion leaders should ask themselves

Your team may continue attending feedback sessions. They may nod, contribute cautiously and tell you the work looks good.

That does not necessarily mean they agree.

It may mean they have learned which kind of feedback you are willing to hear.

The leadership question is therefore not only:

“Do I ask people for feedback?”

It is:

“What have people learned happens when they tell me something I do not want to hear?”

At Elevance, I work with executives and leadership teams to examine patterns like these through individual executive coaching and facilitated leadership workshops. The aim is not to make leaders agree with everyone. It is to help them create conversations where challenge improves the decision instead of threatening the decision-maker.