Article
People still have strong views about your leadership—but fewer feel it’s worth the risk to share them directly. Overcoming feedback censorship requires a healthy dose of curiosity. Curious leaders proactively ask for feedback, stay with it long enough to understand it, and turn it into visible behavior changes. This improves your odds of unearthing the truth about how you really show up to others.
Now that you’re a CxO, your reactions carry more weight and your decisions can affect careers. For people providing feedback, the cost of being seen as “difficult” starts to feel higher than the benefit of being candid. So, feedback about your leadership often arrives stripped of the detail that would make it easy to act on. Perhaps you’re told you’re hard to read. That you move too fast. Or that people feel hesitant around you. When feedback is vague like this, it’s easy to brush it aside or take it personally. Neither instinct is entirely helpful.
Getting to the truth as a C-suite leader is one of the most important parts of your job. When you approach feedback in the right way, you gain access to a treasure trove of information that will help you become a better leader. The unvarnished truth, while sometimes uncomfortable, will make your decisions sharper, help you build stronger teams, and earn even greater trust.
That’s why, when I work with CxOs, I encourage them to approach feedback with curiosity—to treat feedback as something to prize and worth exploring. Sometimes this can go against instincts or habits built over decades. Of course, that is never easy. But it turns feedback into a competitive advantage you can use to lead better.
To solicit more accurate, actionable feedback, you first need your team and peers to trust you. People are more candid when they believe two things to be true: that their input will be taken seriously and that it won’t cost them.
As a CxO, you shape those beliefs through your everyday behavior. Pay attention to how you respond when someone challenges you in a meeting. What happens when a direct report raises a concern or when a point of view runs against your own? Whether you meet dissent with curiosity or close it down can send a signal. Over time, these signals accumulate and teach people what’s safe to say—and what’s better left unsaid.
Building trust is about steadiness and predictability. When people trust your response, they’re more willing to share what they really think—and that trust becomes the foundation for more candid feedback over time.
When you receive feedback, especially feedback you don’t agree with, the instinct to explain is immediate.
You want to provide context, clarify your intent, and correct what feels inaccurate. In my experience, when I sometimes share feedback with leaders, the first response is: “Who said that?” or “Did that come from a particular person or team?” or “Is that an outlier?”
As soon as these questions surface, I know we need a reset. The answers won’t help you act on the feedback. The impulse comes from wanting to do something constructive about it—but by that point, you’ve missed the opportunity to truly hear it. I'll often explain that the feedback is thematic. Several people have raised it. It doesn’t matter who is saying it, but what does matter is that in the moment, you’ve already started to resist hearing the feedback.
I often encourage leaders to think of feedback as a gift. If someone left a thoughtful present on your doorstep, without a card attached, you wouldn’t reject it simply because it was anonymous. You'd likely appreciate it for what it is. The same is true of feedback.
This is the hardest part for most of my clients. Senior leaders often hear feedback, understand it, see its value, and even agree with it—yet stop short of turning that insight into behavior others can clearly see. And at the C-suite level, change only counts if it’s visible.
Saying you’ll “communicate more” doesn’t land unless people experience something different in the weeks and months that follow. Saying you’ll “be more approachable” doesn’t really help unless your behavior actually changes in the room.
In my experience, some leaders find it works well to choose one or two specific behaviors that clearly respond to the feedback they’ve heard—and stick to them. After all, it’s often impossible for you to implement everyone’s feedback all at once, especially as some of it will no doubt be conflicting. But small, consistent shifts matter, particularly when they address a common theme you’re hearing time and again.
If the leaders I work with are really stuck, I might make them ask something even more specific and also to first disclose their goals, so “I’m working on being more clear in my communication with the team, can I get your feedback on how I’m doing it in a couple of weeks?” In other words, ask a colleague to specifically observe the behavior you’re working on and then ask them to provide feedback that is very targeted and recent. This changes the direction of the whole conversation for both parties.
Throughout your career, you will have likely relied on standard check-in points to gain feedback, perhaps mid-year or year-end reviews. But in the C-suite, feedback isn’t something to schedule once or twice a year or outsource to a survey. For example, 360-degree feedback is only a snapshot of how you’re showing up today—it might not be relevant six months down the line.
You need to treat feedback as a daily discipline, built through consistent check-ins with your teams and direct reports that signal you’re genuinely open to hearing what’s working—and what isn’t. If the feedback is regularly offered and is candid, it’s a clear sign that you’re doing something right as a leader.
Emmy Melville is a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates. She is based in Atlanta.
ja-JP
ログイン
