Is Your Team Talking About You Instead of To You?

At the end of year long leadership development program, I run an exercise called “closing the loop.”

Everyone in the room shares what should have happened differently. What didn’t work. Where the program let them down.

My job is specific: listen openly, validate what they’re raising, own the part our organization played. No defending. No “well, actually.” Just receive it.

Here’s what doing this year after year has taught me. You cannot absorb a room full of criticism while protecting your competence at the same time. Those two things are mutually exclusive. Pick one.

If I walk in protecting how good I am at this, every piece of feedback becomes an attack. I’ll feel the sting of fault, of not being enough, of disappointing people who handed me a year of their development. And I’ll get defensive in about four seconds, no matter how much I want to seem open.

So I don’t walk in protecting that. I walk in with one question doing all the work: how can we be better? Not “was I good enough.” Not “is this fair.” Just: what’s true, and what do we do with it.

From there, something shifts. The exact same words that would otherwise land as blame stop stinging. I’m not contracted. I’m expansive. Curious instead of cornered.

Here’s where this stops being a story about a workshop.

If your team has started talking about you instead of to you, this is almost certainly why. Somewhere, they brought you something hard, and you weren’t standing in that expansive place. You were defending. Maybe you didn’t even notice. You just explained, justified, found the reasonable exception.

They noticed. They always notice.

Going around you became safer than going through you. That’s not a verdict on their loyalty. It’s a verdict on what they learned from watching you receive the truth, once.

Most advice here stops at “create psychological safety.” That’s a slogan, not a shift. It doesn’t tell you what to actually do in the four seconds after someone says something hard about you, or about a person you trusted.

What to do is this: decide, before the moment comes, which place you’re going to stand. Cornered, protecting your competence. Or expansive, in partnership with whatever’s true.

You don’t have to wait for them to bring it either. Ask directly. Request the version of feedback they’ve been trading with each other instead of you.

This week:

Where would you have to stand, psychologically, to hear hard feedback as information instead of indictment?

And what’s one thing you could ask your team this week, that invites them to bring you the truth directly, instead of waiting for them to decide you’re ready?

In your corner,

Allison