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Preparing to Deliver Difficult Feedback
6 May 2025
Allison enjoyed teaching Setting Expectations and Giving Feedback and found herself making a list of her favorite resources for helping people to prepare for their hardest conversations.
Tags: allison read, communication, conflict, listening, management and supervision, thoughtful candor
Last week I taught our course, Setting Expectations and Giving Feedback, to a group of fabulous folks from many different organizations in Charlottesville and our surrounding counties. I covered our standard content on how to be an active listener, set and reset expectations, deliver and receive positive and negative feedback, and manage the anxiety difficult feedback often creates. If you’re curious about our point of view on those topics, you can get a flavor of the Allison Partners approach by reading these blog posts written by different members of our team about our favorite communication book, Crucial Conversations.
Additionally, the Center for Creative Leadership’s model, Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI)™, and these five questions can help you to prepare to deliver difficult feedback to another person in a constructive way. If you find navigating these kinds of conversations to be stressful, this short video I recorded earlier this year explains a technique that can help you stay calm and be courageous as you attempt to share thoughtful candor.
As you work to become a more well-rounded communicator, don’t underestimate the importance of learning how to accept difficult feedback and when necessary apologize in a meaningful way. We all make mistakes and how you say, “I’m sorry” matters. Whenever I need help making sure that my apology is both sincere and paves the way for relationship repair, I turn to this advice written to help children apologize. As is often the case, what’s good for kids is also good for grown-ups!
We spend much of our time at Allison Partners listening to our clients tell us about situations where people didn't meet expectations and helping them to figure out how to give that feedback. Very often we find ourselves asking, "Have you told them?" It's human nature to wonder if other people are disappointing us on purpose and to imagine they will never change, but more often than not I think most people are going about their days trying to get stuff done and assuming other people are doing the same. I'm pretty sure you aren't actively trying to disappoint people, so you've got to assume the same is true for others and find a courageous way to either share the feedback or let it go. If that feels too hard to do on your own, give me a call and I'll try to help you find your words.
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