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Leadership
How to process feedback without getting defensive
You need feedback to fuel leadership growth, but it can feel hard and awkward to receive. Here are four essential tips to turn input into opportunities to learn and grow, without getting defensive.
It’s part of your remit as a leader to give the clear and structured feedback your people need to grow, to identify and fix things that hinder progress and to feel ownership and engagement with their work.
Receiving feedback from others – from your direct reports, peers and senior leaders – is also a core leadership necessity. As a leader, you too need to be able to understand what you are doing well; how effective you are in driving strategic objectives, in supporting your team and making the space for autonomy, for expertise to surface, risks to be taken and learning to happen effectively. And you need to know where you might be falling short.
Getting feedback as a leader is a positive thing. Asking for it can build trust and transparency. It can signal to others that their perspectives and input are important and valued. Even so, feedback can be hard to receive – very hard. Feedback can make us feel defensive, embarrassed, or worse, it can fuel self-doubt. Even when it’s constructive and offered with positivity and good intent, receiving other people’s feedback on your performance is often a difficult and potentially emotional experience.
So what can you do to check your all-too-human defensive mechanisms, and get to the good stuff – all the important and necessary insights, criticisms, observations and assessments that your leadership needs to keep on you on track and growing?
In my work on leadership and with decision-makers, I’ve identified four steps that can help leaders and managers more adept at receiving feedback positively and converting moment of discomfort into a lasting source of growth. Because the leaders who learn fastest aren’t those who get the most feedback—they’re those who receive it well and consciously act upon it.
Let’s get into it.
1 – Know what you’re getting and ask questions.
When you’re on the receiving end of important feedback, it’s critical to understand what kind of feedback you’re getting. We know from the work of two researchers, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, that feedback can be roughly divided into three chunks: evaluation or where you stand; coaching or how you might improve; and appreciation or what others value in your performance. In real life, of course, you may be on the receiving end of all three – and simultaneously. It’s common for anyone giving you feedback to mix evaluation, coaching and appreciation: “You’re doing great but be more communicative.” The problem here is that mixed messages can make you feel confused at best, or defensive.
What can help here is getting some clarification on the kind of feedback you are getting. Try asking: “Is your goal to help me improve, or to let me know how I’m doing overall?” or “Can you tell me which part you’d like me to focus on first?” Clarifying intent reduces anxiety, brings down barriers and helps you listen out for the right signals.
Now, it might not always be possible to ask direct questions in the moment. Let’s say you are having a formal review with a senior leader, where questions like these could come over as defensive or prickly. What will help here is separating two things: reception and response. Try this. Acknowledging the feedback you are receiving with composure by saying something like: “Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to share this.” Instead of responding or questioning the intent of the feedback, take notes on what is being said – this shows your engagement with the process and buys you thinking time. When the conversation is over, make space to process and reflect on which parts of the feedback were evaluation (judgment), coaching (development), or appreciation (recognition.) Once you’ve had time to figure this out and process what’s been said, you will be in a better position to follow up with care on those areas of evaluation where you’d like to have more coaching: “I’ve been reflecting on your feedback about X. To make sure I’m improving in the right way, could we discuss what effective performance looks like in that area?”
Knowing what you’re getting and asking questions demonstrates two things. It shows you have respect for the hierarchy and the process. And it shows you’re taking ownership of understanding. You demonstrate professionalism and learning intent –without challenging the person giving you feedback in the moment.
“To allow feedback to penetrate these in-built defences, you first need to calm your body.”
2 – Make sense of emotion.
Receiving feedback can feel threatening because it touches of sense of competence or belonging, regardless of how sensitive or stoic our personality might be. Feedback collides with our personal identity narrative. According to Stone and Heen, even constructive feedback typically activates a threat response: the brain interpreting criticism as a sign of social risk that might endanger our standing in a group. Their research pinpoints three “triggers” that can make feedback hard to hear and hard to receive:
- Truth triggers: You believe the feedback is mendacious or just wrong.
- Relationship triggers: You question the source or the person who is giving the feedback.
- Identity triggers: The message conveyed in the feedback challenges who you believe you are.
Your innate threat response can throw up these three emotional responses that stand between you and your ability to receive and leverage feedback. Then there are basic human heuristics: certain biases and deep-rooted, often subconscious psychological mechanisms to which leaders – and high-performing leaders in particular – can be highly prone. Among these are:
- Confirmation bias: This is a tendency to filter information for messages that confirm rather than challenge the things you believe. As a result, you focus more on the feedback that supports your view of yourself– especially if you’re confident in your abilities—and less on anything that feels contradictory.
- Success and self-efficacy: This is where past performance and success can set you up for blind spots about areas you still might need to work on or improve.
- Overconfidence from success: Similarly, earlier achieve can drive an inflated sense of your capabilities and can stymie how open you are to receiving feedback around anything that might require you to recalibrate your self-view.
Emotional triggers, heuristics and deep-rooted psychological beliefs can create emotional barriers, making you selectively deaf to important corrective signals. On top of that, neuroscience suggests that feedback – and critical feedback in particular – can activate the same brain circuits as physical pain. So, what can you do?
To allow feedback to penetrate these in-built defences, you first need to calm your body. Try this: Label your emotion before you react or respond. explore your emotions. Ask yourself: Do I feel defensive? Naming your emotions can reduce their intensity and help re-engage the rational part of the brain. Now this might be hard. It might be exhausting. Be aware that emotional regulation demands significant cognitive effort, so be deliberate about maintaining balance.
Don’t schedule or engage in heavy feedback exchanges when you’re already depleted—late in the day, after back-to-back meetings, or during high-stress periods. Your capacity for non-defensive listening is finite. If you feel too reactive, ask to revisit the discussion later. Taking time isn’t avoidance—it’s is sign of strong professionalism and emotional intelligence.
A smart approach is to separate legitimate signal from background noise by determining what is factual, what is perception, and what is actionable.
3 – Extract the signal.
Feedback is rarely all right or all wrong—it usually contains at least a kernel of truth. That said, research suggests that feedback often says as much about the giver as it does about the receiver. Up to 60% of performance ratings reflect the rater’s personal bias rather than actual performance differences. So where does that leave you?
A smart approach is to separate legitimate signal from background noise by determining what is factual, what is perception, and what is actionable. This requires you to do two things: sift the feedback purposefully without dismissing it outright or overreacting. And here it’s helpful to bear in mind that feedback should be less about judgment and more about awareness: the goal is to surface blind spots that are clearer to others than to you. Ultimately, what you’re looking for is a mirror that enhances your self-awareness and sustains your effectiveness.
Try this: Distinguish impact from intent.
Say you meant to be decisive, but the other party experienced you as dismissive. Rather than explaining or defending yourself, ask: “I hadn’t realized that’s how it came across. Can you tell me more about that?” And request specifics. If your feedback is to be more “strategic,” why not ask: “Can you give me an example of when I was too tactical?”
Try this too: Separate content from interpretation.
If someone tells you, say, you’re too cautious, be aware of how you interpret the content – don’t just assume that that person loves risk-taking.
Look for patterns across multiple sources and triangulate by comparing feedback with your results and others’ observations.
This kind of curiosity not only yields better data—it shows emotional maturity. We know from work on psychological safety and growth mindset, that curiosity can transform feedback into collaboration rather than conflict. Even when you disagree, acknowledge that there is usually some truth in what others are trying to tell you. Effective leaders don’t dismiss feedback; they pause, reflect, and learn from it.
Aim to use feedback as data for dialogue, and prioritize clarification, testing and then acting on the themes or topics that recur.
4 – Close the loop.
Remember: Feedback only matters if it leads to change.
When you have received feedback from someone, a good approach is to summarize what you have heard and check in with your interlocutor: “So, if I’ve understood right, you are suggesting that I involve the team earlier?”
Then act on one specific behavior and circle back a couple of weeks later: “I tried doing this to bring the team on board, did you notice a difference?”
Aim to use feedback as data for dialogue, and prioritize clarification, testing and then acting on the themes or topics that recur. By following up on feedback, you close the loop and send important signals to others that their input leads to meaningful change. That way, they will also be more likely to share candid and helpful insights in the future.
Receiving feedback well isn’t about being humble or agreeable—it’s about creating the right conditions for truth to reach you. Leaders who grow most don’t react faster; they think smarter. They pause, regulate, clarify, and act.
In the end, what distinguishes truly effective leaders is coachability. It’s about demonstrating a willingness to listen, learn, and adapt – and an ability to understand, process, extract and close the loop. And that’s how to make feedback work for you, and not on you.
As Stone and Heen put it: “Receiving feedback sits at the intersection of two human needs: the need to learn and grow, and the need to be accepted just as we are.”
Great leaders are those that can master that balance and transform moments of awkward feedback into critical opportunities for growth.
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