Marcus Buckingham wrote in his 2019 HBR article The Feedback Fallacy that feedback systems pushed people toward someone else's idea of "good”. That competency models and feedback systems are quietly shaping you into the company's ideal person, not yours.

Spend five or more years inside any organization, whether a startup, a larger company, even a country, region, or sports team, and you will start to unconsciously mirror its values. We like to think we’re independent actors. But we are deeply social beings. We evolve toward the standards of our imagined communities.

Which means the most important navigation tool you have isn’t the feedback you receive. It’s understanding the reason for your reaction to it. That’s what we’re exploring in the third and final post on our feedback series (check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already).

How do you know what’s yours?

When Feedback Doesn’t Compute

No matter how senior and successful you are, feedback is always a minefield of emotional complexity. And the most common question that comes up from those I coach is after they receive some constructive feedback from a manager or peer: How should I act on this, without changing who I am and what I thought made me a strong performer?

I coached a senior, high-performing, female executive who received feedback that she came across too competitive to peers. While this drove strong results for her, and her team, some peers felt she wasn’t collaborative. It shook her. She’d heard a version of this before. She had worked on it. And she thought she’d moved past it. The examples her manager shared didn’t compute for her either. She felt like she was being asked to be “liked”.

Before we discussed what to do with the feedback, I asked her one question. What, if anything, in this feedback do you actually believe to be true?

She paused for a long time. “I think I know how to compete and when. I just don’t think this team knows what to do with it.”

That was her compass. Clear, calm, and buried under the noise of wanting to “fix it” and fit into the mold of the ideal performer at this company.

Know Your Species

In the Habitat Fallacy framework we explored a few weeks ago, she was a Mangrove. Mangroves process externally. They address friction through debate. They build by pushing outwards. Pushing against ideas, against resistance, against the current. They don’t view this as aggression. It’s simply how they grow and spark growth for teams.

The feedback she received wasn’t asking her to refine her edges. It was asking her to become a different species entirely.

Understanding that didn’t mean ignoring the feedback. It meant she could evaluate it clearly. And decide on the most effective path forward. Asking a Mangrove to stop pushing outwards will not just reduce their risk of being seen as “aggressive”. It will result in a reduced drive for results.

She didn’t need to become less competitive. She needed to channel her branches more effectively. Instead of addressing the feedback by doing the opposite of what was she heard (e.g. “To appear less aggressive and competitive, I will avoid pushing boundaries and be mindful of when I speak up”), we aligned on three ways she could move forward, by building on her strengths:

3 Species-Centric Growth Strategies

#1: Name It, To Tame It

Mangroves are often misread. Especially in written communication, where their natural urgency lands without the context of tone or body language. For her direct reports, she needed to bolster her communication with clear context. She told her team directly: “I push hard because that’s how I grow best. Tell me when my pushing lands wrong so I can evolve how I do it; I’ll ask you for feedback in our 1:1s. You can expect me to keep pushing, but adapt how and when I do it.” Unapologetic self-awareness is a leadership tool.

#2: Shoot To Win, But With Better Aim

Competitive energy directed at peers can often read as a threat. Research suggests inter-org competition results in a 40% decrease in idea-sharing across teams, and hurts the bottom line. She was never intending to compete with her peers, neither was she very specific in her competitive strategy. So she channeled her competitive energy to beating external market benchmarks, to beating deadlines, to improving products that weren’t universally loved by customers etc. Her competitive drive was no less fierce, and produced results. It was simply directed more effectively.

#3: Focus on Support From 1-2 Trees, Not The Forest

As a recovering people-pleaser, she had a drive for people to like her. This is a common bias I see, especially among women I coach (I can very much relate). But a tree that bends to every wind never grows to its full potential. She didn't need the whole forest to understand her. She needed one or two peers who did. People who could translate her across the organization and champion her work. Building that small, intentional root system meant she stopped spreading herself too thin trying to be understood by everyone.

Trusting Your Compass

Trusting your inner compass doesn’t mean ignoring feedback. Nor does it mean dismissing the feedback giver. It means knowing yourself clearly enough to evaluate why what you’re hearing is hitting a nerve. And then deciding how to move forward, with intention and respect for your unique growth species.

How Well Do You Trust Your Inner Compass?

Think about a piece of feedback you’ve received that caused friction. The kind that sat wrong in your body.

• Did you act on it? Did it make you more effective, or just easier for others to be around you?

• The harder question: Did the feedback ask you to grow into yourself, or away from yourself?

Your compass knows the difference. Trust it to grow to your full potential.

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Learn: Years to save for a home by US State. Montana surprised me.

2. Listen: In a driverless world, who loses and who wins? Part 2 of an excellent deep dive into the history and future of driverless cars.

3. Travel: 5 Scenic US Road Trips Worth The Drive. That Kauai one is on my list.

4. Watch: How To Do Every North American Accent. Fred Armisen breaks it down for us. So good.

5. Read: Ever wondered why there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute? Pretty crazy that we’ve kept this up for millennia.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.