Jackson Bates

When feedback is wrong

In my first year of teaching, a parent called the school to complain that I was picking on her son.

I wasn't. I had a genuinely warm relationship with that kid — he was funny, curious, and a bit of a handful in the best possible way. The complaint was, as far as I could tell, completely without basis. I remember feeling a mix of indignation and mild panic, the way you do when someone accuses you of something you're confident you didn't do.

My instinct was to rebut it. To make the case. To be right.

My mentor Dave pulled me aside and said something I've thought about a lot since: "It doesn't matter if the complaint is wrong. Something made her pick up the phone."

That reframe took me a while to fully absorb. Because on its face, it sounds like it's asking you to accept blame you don't deserve. It isn't. It's asking you to treat the complaint as data, not about what happened, but about what was perceived.

The parent didn't call because everything was fine. Something in the dynamic — a comment I made, a look, a pattern she'd picked up on from her son's retelling — had registered as a problem. My job wasn't to win the argument. My job was to figure out what was actually going on.

I'd wager this applies well beyond the classroom.

Correcting the record isn't the same as fixing the problem #

When someone gives you feedback that's inaccurate, genuinely and demonstrably wrong, there's a very satisfying path available to you. You gather your evidence, you make your case, and you are vindicated. The feedback was incorrect. You were right. Move on.

But here's the thing: that process doesn't touch whatever it was that generated the feedback in the first place.

Correcting the record and addressing the underlying cause are two separate things. Most people only do the first. You defend yourself, win the argument, and walk away with the problem intact, just now slightly more entrenched, because the other person feels like they weren't heard.

The more clearly wrong the feedback, the worse this trap gets. Being obviously right gives you permission to dismiss the signal entirely. And that's exactly when you should be paying closest attention to it.

The signal underneath the noise #

I think about this now when I receive feedback as an EM, from engineers, from stakeholders, occasionally from peers, that doesn't land right. The instinct is still the same as it was in that classroom: this isn't accurate, and I can show you why.

But before I do anything with that instinct, I try to ask a different question: what would have to be true for someone to feel this way?

Not what is true. What would have to be true from where they're standing.

Sometimes the answer is: they're missing context I haven't given them. Sometimes it's: I've been communicating in a way that creates a false impression. Sometimes it's: there's something in the relationship that's off, and the feedback is the symptom, not the diagnosis.

Occasionally the answer really is that they've got it wrong and there's nothing I could have done differently. But that's rarer than the vindicated version of you wants to believe.

The parent complaint turned out to be about something else entirely. Her son had been struggling in general and he was hoping a little misdirection would take the heat off him at home: I was a convenient target for some of that. Once I understood that, the conversation we had was completely different. I stopped trying to defend myself and started trying to understand what was going on with him, and could frame with the parent how I'd continue to support him.

It went better.

Wrong feedback is still feedback. The question is just what it's actually about.