S3E3: Leadership Hack: The Power of Feedback (feat. Elizabeth Koltz, EdM)

Rahul 

Welcome to Learning to Lead, a podcast about leadership, teamwork, and reimagining healthcare. This podcast is for learners, educators, and healthcare professionals interested in building leadership skills in a supportive community.

We are your hosts Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas, and Brooklynn Weber.

Together we bring you conversations with emerging and established leaders, deep dives and hacks to help you become the best leader you can be.

Brooke

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Learning to Lead. With us today is Elizabeth Koltz. Beth is the Senior Director of Instructional and Curriculum Design and assistant professor at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. Beth, what is your favorite tool or hack to become a better leader?

Beth

For me, my favorite hack is feedback. Leaders really need to appreciate feedback both to receive and to learn to give it. And in fact, giving feedback to employees, healthcare workers, students is really critical to improving things and ultimately for success. When you ask for feedback from people in an organization, you are really saying that you care about them, that you want to hear their input and that you really want to try to do something to improve yourself. But if you can teach your people, if students, faculty, healthcare workers can learn to give feedback in a way that's constructive, that allows people to improve, it's a gift. It's truly a gift. And so is it easy to receive feedback all the time? No, it's not. Sometimes it's hard to receive feedback, but when you get a constructive feedback that you can use to improve, it is a gift and you can receive feedback by asking for it.

In this way, you've opened up your own mind for receiving the feedback. It's easier to receive feedback if you've asked for it, and if you haven't asked for it and someone wants to give you feedback, one of the things that you can do to receive feedback is self-assess. Really thinking about what you can do, how do you think you're coming across and taking what that person is giving to you for feedback and then trying to apply it. So my hack is always feedback. It's something that people can use all the time, and if you have a trusted person to get feedback from, ask them and they would be able to give you that honest feedback and keep going forward with it.

Pete

Ooh, me. Hey, Beth, that's excellent. Because I have actually incorporated it into all my courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. Either they make a video because it's more personal and it's more difficult. People are more careful with their words if they're doing a video or in person. I've been selling it, if you will, as this is a way to help you as a person and to help the profession or even the industry at large if you can say, Hey, Maya, if you're ready for some feedback, I got some great things for you. And asking permission first usually is more helpful than just being like, oh my God, Maya. Right? You can't, yeah, don't drop it like a bomb, but share it. So I love that feedback is a great leadership hack. It's a great human hack.

Brooke

Yeah, I agree. Feedback can be such a tricky one too. I know there's one saying that unwarranted or asked for feedback is often perceived as criticism. So I feel like it's your point of asking or before you deliver it, kind of prefacing it for that person. Or it's even better, like you were saying, if you ask for it because then you're already prepared for it.

Rahul

Beth, I want to add to your hack with a specific perspective of getting feedback as a follower, especially while things have not gone our way. So when I think of the challenges with feedback and think about the Johari window, which tells us that we all have arenas that are known to ourselves, and then there's parts of our persona that are not known to ourselves. And if feedback is positive or affirming, a lot of times it's about the things we already know we're doing well, sometimes it isn't, but a lot of the times versus when the feedback is about something that hasn't gone so well, it might be about opening up a blind spot, which is why feedback is a gift. And it is also a conflict in that conversation because now we're getting to learn about something that we did not know about ourselves before or maybe we knew it and it's just being reinforced and is sinking in now.

And I think that the reason it can be a great hack as a follower is because some of the people I've worked with that I really remember are when I had to deliver news to them, maybe it didn't work out for them, a regret letter, and then they respond to me and say, thank you. And they may even go the extra distance and say, for the future, if you could give me feedback, what could I have done that would've made this stronger? And I'm thinking of it in my own life as well, that there's a recent scenario where something didn't go my way and the person who was in the decision-making capacity was kind enough to sit down with me and explore areas which I could strengthen so that the next time something like this came around, I would be so much stronger. And whether that happens in the same position or not, doesn't matter because now I can use that feedback and become so much better in so many ways. So I think it is a great hack and one has to recognize that blind spots are going to open up and this is going to be hard and be prepared for that.

Maya

It's Maya, if I can just add, I think this hack connects so nicely, and I hope our listeners will leap to our longer episode about growth mindset and that more maybe rigid or fixed mindset, because that's part of what accepting, being able to accept that feedback is about am I flexible enough to take it in and allow it to sit, or am I going to instantly be, no, I don't want this, or I'm going to take it, but I'm not going to do anything with it because I don't want to hear it right now. So it really connects nicely, I think, to what we've been spending some time together talking about around just how flexible or inflexible we may be.

Beth

And when you do receive feedback, that might be difficult. It's a good idea to have some coaching and that the person giving the feedback can provide more coaching to what steps can be taken and give a little bit more input on what can be done. Because to leave it as just feedback, some people can come up with the ideas themselves, others need help with coming up with ideas, and that's where coaching really can come in and help with that and make sure that there's improvement so that it can feel like a gift.

Brooke

Thank you so much, Beth, for sharing that hack. And thank you everyone for listening.

Brooke

Thank you for listening to our show. Learning to Lead is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio, in partnership with the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. 

Creators of this show are Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas and Brooklynn Weber.

The student producer is Brooklynn Weber, and the executive producer is David DesRoches.

Connect with us on social media @LearningToLeadPod or email us at LearningToLeadPod@quinnipiac.edu.