Managing Defensiveness In Feedback.
How do you have a conversation when the other person is defensive?
We all have a fear someone will have an adverse reaction to feedback.
And statistically, they will.
Why? Whenever we feel the need to defend what’s important to us (our jobs, status, competence, autonomy, how we behave), our brains produce a stress response.
If we don’t have the skill of knowing how to discern feedback and process hard feelings during feedback conversations, defensiveness skyrockets.
In other words, defensiveness is a physiological response to feeling nervous.
It’s in your DNA. It can happen to you, and it will absolutely happen in your feedback conversations.
Have you ever felt your gut go funny when someone asks for a ‘quick chat’?
Maybe you feel the need to inexplicably throw up when your boss pings you on Teams?
If you didn’t have the tools to press ‘pause’ and take a breath, you’d spiral into defensiveness.
Now consider this.
How many of your colleagues take a minute to pause and take a breath, before responding? How many people just … react?
When you give someone feedback, their instinct is to defend themselves.
It takes a minute to stop and practice discernment when getting feedback.
You know, to ask yourself whether the feedback is from a credible source, whether it’s true, whether it’s something you want to take on, whether it benefits your career, and then to depersonalise the feedback to figure out what the ‘gift’ really is.
You have to train yourself to think like that.
What’s more likely is the person you give feedback to is defensive. It’s just the shorter path.
When someone is defensive, they don’t have the skill to slow down yet.
They have to learn it. So you need a way to know how to slow it down for them, and witness the defensiveness, without getting defensive yourself.
It’s quite the art form. Let’s look at some ideas to navigate it.
Why do people feel under ‘attack’ when getting feedback?
When your brain sniffs that something you value is under threat, it goes into overdrive.
When you believe something you value is at stake, your amygdala, the part of the brain whose job it is to keep you safe, is on alert. It then sends a signal to other parts of your brain to act to protect yourself.
What happens next is an automatic, physiological, stress response.
The person experiencing it will then decide whether to apply discernment to the feedback.
If they don’t have that skill, or they have a blip because it feels high stakes/they’re just really tired, they’ll probably do one of four things:
Fight = defensive. e.g. word salad, blames others.
Fawn = overly agreeing. e.g. everything you say is perfect.
Freeze = zone out. e.g. face blank, slow blinking.
Flight = exits the convo. e.g. leaves, avoids eye contact.
Learning how to discern, and make sense of feedback is a really hard skill. It takes time.
Before then, most people … just get defensive. It’s more common than we like to think.
Why feedback seems so ‘high stakes’ to someone who’s defensive:
There are five distinct ‘threats’ going through their mind, when making sense of your feedback:
Omg … is my job safe? (Security)
Is this going to change how others see me? (Status)
Is this going to affect my pay? (Financial security)
Am I going to have to have more restrictions or responsibilities? (Autonomy)
Is this going to impact relationships I value and need? (Relationships)
Can you see why some people have a tough time during feedback?
The threats feel very real due to the amygdala’s signals, and uncertainty puts it on notice.
Five principles for making sense of defensiveness.
There is no perfect delivery.
You can have the perfect script, key message, and environment, and someone might still pass out, fight with you for a bit, or even walk out the door.
But that’s not actually yours to manage. Your job is to prepare two simple sentences and make sure it’s a two-way conversation. Your job is to be clear, and basically say as little as possible. Meaning more time for them to process it.
Anticipate a poor response.
Because it’s a biological response to stress, give them grace to freak out for a bit. Don’t take it personally. It’s their biology and psychology making sense of the situation.
Think of defensiveness like a balloon in the room that slowly needs to deflate.
The quickest way to fast-track defensiveness is to not let them have a say. Give the balloon time to deflate so you can get back to the real conversation.
The moment will pass and it can be safer if you stay in the room to help that person process.
It can be multiple feedback conversations.
You don’t need to ‘nail it’ in one chat. You can come back if the other person needs some breathing room, it’s not productive, or it just isn’t going in.
Give them time to go and process with their people, or family and friends. Give them a minute to get their head around it to lower feelings of being ‘blindsighted’ or ‘attacked’.
The ‘aha’ moment doesn’t need to happen in the room. By giving them time to process, you’re helping them make sense of the conversation after you’ve both left the room.
The more time to have their say, the better.
It can be painful listening to someone defend reasons for their poor behaviour. What’s really happening is they’re processing.
A sense of unfairness is one way defensiveness loves to make a cameo. Make it fair. Hand the mic.
Talk for 20% and listen/workshop for 80%. The more they have a chance to remind themselves they’re safe, the more they’ll be able to have a rational conversation.
Do your leaders need the skill to handle defensiveness?
In our live workshop, Giving & Receiving Feedback, learn how to prepare for a feedback conversation.
Given employees are statistically 3.6 more likely to perform better with higher quality feedback, the return on investment is unbelievable.
“The most valuable part of the workshop was strategies when someone gets defensive.”