Carla Miller 00:00
Feedback, we need it to be able to succeed in the workplace. But what I've been learning more about is why women are not getting the feedback that we need to be able to develop effectively in our careers.

So I've recently been reading up about feedback. And I've come across three interesting articles that each highlight the differences between the feedback that men and women receive, and the impact of that. So this episode is going to be super useful for anyone who's giving feedback because it's not just male leaders are making these feedback mistakes, women are doing it too, and also sharing some advice on what to do when you're on the receiving end of some of these feedback mistakes.

Welcome to the influence and impact podcast for female leaders. My name is Carla Miller, and I'm a leadership coach who helps female leaders to tackle self doubt, become brilliant at influencing and make more impact at work. I've created this podcast to help you to become a more inspiring and impactful leader. And I want to become the leadership BFF you didn't know you were missing until now.

Now, before we get into the episode, I've got a couple of exciting announcements for you what they're exciting for me anyway. So the first is a new charity partnership. Now we have started. So I've been wanting to give back through the business for some time. And I have been doing that to emergency appeals and sponsoring people. And a couple of years ago through tiny tickers, which is the charity for babies with heart problems that I was chief exec for, for a while, we funded a couple of pulse ox machines that when went into a hospital in London, which was fantastic. But finally the business is at a point where I can not stress about being able to pay my bills. It's only taken about 10 years to get to this point where I can try and build some philanthropy some giving back into the business because I am all about impact. And I hope that we make lots of impact through the courses that we run through the podcast. But I would also like to make a broader impact than that.
So we now have a new charity partner, for our be bolder confidence and assertiveness course. So every time someone joins one of our open be bolder courses, we are going to donate 47 pounds to a charity called G F S, which stands for girls friendly society.

So GFS is a feminist charity that has spent almost 150 years supporting girls and young women, they run volunteer led weekly groups for girls where every girl is is is valued for exactly who she is. And their groups aim to create a space where every girl is able to learn about herself, and learn to say she is proud of who she is, she can try again, if she has a setback, she can achieve her hopes and dreams. And she can speak up about the things that matter to her.

So essentially, it's about giving confidence and self esteem to girls. And I don't know about you, but I certainly struggled with my confidence and self esteem when I was a girl much prefer being an adult, quite frankly. And I just thought it was a really, really lovely synergy between the two. So it costs approximately 47 pounds for a girl to attend a session at her local group. So every time someone joins people that we are going to fund a girl to attend a session at at her local GFS group. So really, really excited about that. And if you haven't heard of GFS before, do go and check them out. They're an amazing little charity, and they need all the support that they can get. So really, really excited.

That's announcement number one. announcement number two, is that we've got International Women's Day coming up on the Eighth of March. And the theme for that is embracing equity. Now. I like that as a theme. I don't love the photo opportunity that goes with it. To be honest, I never love the photo opportunities that go with International Women's Day. They always seem mega mega cheesy. And this one is ridiculously cheesy in that they're encouraging people to take photos of themselves giving themselves a hug for embracing equity. Okay, so we're not gonna be doing any of that. I am not going to be encouraging people to give themselves a hug and take a picture of it. To be fair, actually, you Lisa, there's not a bad idea. But we don't need to do it for embracing equity, I don't think it really furthers the cause, much in terms of the credibility of women in the workplace. However, we do all need to embrace the concept of equity and the actions that we can take to create equity in the workplace.

So as well as giving a talk, and I'm lined up with quite a few organisations to give a talk on International Women's Day, I've also created a little toolkit that organisations can buy, which is really aimed at helping men, managers and leaders be better allies to women in the workplace. So it's five mini videos, each of them is under two minutes, they're animated, and they share some really, really practical things that people can do. So for example, there's one on interruptions how often women get interrupted by men, and the impact of that and how it costs the organisation in terms of losing our ideas and our valuable input. But also senior women are leaving the workplace at the fastest rate ever. So it talks people through those statistics, and then it shares what you can do if you've interrupted someone by accident, if you've been interrupted, if you're chairing a meeting, or if someone else in the meeting has been interrupted. So you can find those on our website.

If you are in the people team, the HR team, if you're in any way responsible for International Women's Day, you'll find those super interesting and very cost effective and much cheaper than having a speaker and I think, really, really actionable. If you have a look, and there's a couple of sample videos on there and think, yes, we need these in my organisation, then send the link on to the HR people team, whoever is responsible for International Women's Day in your organisation, I'm really hoping that that will be a practical way of showing them how can they how they can more effectively be allies, not just on International Women's Day, but across the year. So those are the exciting announcements.

And then just a reminder, we have to open programmes at the moment. So we have a cohort of be bolder, our confidence and assertiveness course, coming up in March, we're not going to run that again until October, November. So if you want to be more confident before the summer hits, then join this cohort. And we also have the three month version of influence and impact that's running in April. That's up to 20 women, so an opportunity to work closely with me in a small group with other senior women. So it's anything from kind of mid management upwards. And that starts in April.

Okay, so let's talk about feedback. Now, I'm going to structure this as by really sharing the three articles that I came across and some of the key insights from them.

So the first article I came across is in Forbes, and the title is personality based performance reviews are fine to give to women, as long as men get them to and the author of the article is Rebecca Bastian. So she's basically sharing that feedback on personality traits. And how we show up in the workplace can be a tricky area because women are often penalised for many of the same characteristics that are valued in their male counterparts. And she quotes a study by the CEO of Textio. That found that negative personality feedback showed up 76% of the time in reviews of women last only in 2% of men's reviews. And I think this is a really interesting idea, the fact that when we demonstrate the same behaviours as men do, we are judged harshly for them, and they are celebrated. for them. It's the ultimate double bind for women in the workplace.

And one of the things I try and help people do is to find a way to navigate that confidently without having to show up like a man. But I do think is absolutely worth challenging these biases when they come up. And Rebecca has given some brilliant examples of some of the differences in feedback that men and women get.

So one of them is that what is sometimes seen as arrogance in women is described as confidence in men. So society still has this view that women should be mica than men less self emoting others put others needs first. And so when women show up and confidently ask for what they want, sometimes we can be shot down for it. Men on the other hand when they're confident about their abilities or confident about asking for what they want it seen as a wholly positive attribute. And, and it's a really tricky one, obviously I train people on confidence. But I also encourage them to work in workplaces where their confidence is valued rather than judged negatively. So that's one area of feedback that we get labelled as arrogant, whilst with men, it's called confidence and it's really positive.

Another difference is that when it comes to decision making, some people take a slower approach. They're more thoughtful whilst others make decisions really quickly. As I've talked about before, there's no right or wrong way. Some of us are just reflective thinkers. But the article points out that when a woman takes her time making decisions in a workplace, she's more likely to get feedback that she's indecisive, whilst a man is more likely to be described as thoughtful.

Another one is abrasiveness versus assertiveness. So abrasive is a word that is almost entirely levelled at women. So there was a study. In fact, it's the same study I mentioned earlier, that found of 75 reviews of women that were analysed 17% contain the word abrasive. Now, any company wants a little bit of healthy debate within an organisation someone that can create challenge and any company wants someone who can do that without belittling others. But being abrasive is or calling someone abrasive really can cut to the core because often people are not trying to be abrasive they probably just being direct. Now studies show that if a melon demonstrates the same behaviour, they're called assertive where we are called abrasive. So if assertiveness is a trait that is valued in the organisation, it needs to be equally valued in women as it is in men. We need to get rid of this language that is so negative about women.

So yep, the abrasiveness versus assertiveness is one and then the final one she shares is bossiness versus leadership skills. So she says in situations where men may be applauded for their leadership skills, similar behaviours from their female counterparts are sometimes labelled as bossy or controlling. And one thing she points out is the organisation needs to be clear on what it expects of its leader, leaders and what values it hope wants it leaders to show and also just be clear that leadership does not necessarily just look like one very masculine way of leading. So bossiness is another of those words that very, very rarely gets applied to men or boys, but does get applied to women a lot more. And so, you know, we can question is that bossiness? Or is that leadership that you just don't feel that comfortable with? I'm not saying you would necessarily use that phrase, with someone giving that feedback. But when you ever hear those conversations, then I think you can call people out on that language.

So there's nothing wrong with giving feedback on someone's personality on how they're showing up and interacting with others, as long as it's done well, as long as it is done fairly and equally. And as long as it's really clear what people can do to change it and why that's important because if a woman receives a performance review that tells her to be less abrasive and arrogant and then looks around and sees men being rewarded and promoted for being assertive and having leadership skills, then they're going to end up demotivated, and that's not good for anybody in the organisation. So that's the first point in terms of how we get different feedback from men. Our personality based performance reviews are often more challenging and negative than Menzel.

Now, the second interesting point is that men get more actionable feedback than women do. So there was an article published in Harvard Business Review and they research was done. And the article was written by Elena dal door, Madeline Wyatt and Joe Sylvester. And it was based on feedback, not feedback about what had happened in the past, but feedback focused on how employees should change and grow as leaders in the future. So they explored the gender differences in selection of written feedback for 146 mid career leaders. And that feedback was provided by more than 1000 to their peers and leaders was taking part in a leadership development programme. And then they also got a more independent rating about their performance so that they could kind of compare the two and see, okay, so what is their actual performance, like compared to the feedback that they are receiving?

Now, there's some really interesting points come out of this. But the overall theme is that men receive feedback that prepares them for leadership, that specific women tend to receive feedback, which is much vague and doesn't prepare them for leadership.

So if we look at something like vision, men are encouraged to set the vision to focus on being visionary to think big picture. They're given feedback, like forget the details and look to the long term think strategically rather than operationally. Women, on the other hand, are given feedback to focus on delivery, focus on operational tasks, execute other people's vision and develop expertise in narrow specialisms. So you can see how those two sets of feedback are sending people in a different direction, because one is encouraging men to basically prepare to step into those big picture visionary C suite roles.

The other is encouraging women to be really great at actioning other people's vision. Now, the next area they looked at was political skills or influencing, as I call it, so men were encouraged to leverage politics to anticipate internal politics and proactively influence a network upwards. So some of the feedback they received was brought build broader alliances with those who hold power, develop the skill of influencing and politics as a language. Women, on the other hand, were given feedback, telling them to cope with politics to toughen up to reduce tensions to network horizontally rather than upwards.

Feedback, like, more resilience is needed in dealing with the nasty, nasty or political types, or she's letting others get to her. Now this goes back to the whole emotional debate that if women show any form of emotion whatsoever, we're judged negatively for it. And I saw a great meme on Instagram basically saying, isn't it brilliant how men have basically rebranded anger, so it doesn't count as an emotion in the workplace. And in fact, when they show anger in the workplace, they can sometimes be positively rewarded for it.

Now the third area was asserting leadership. So men were encouraged to claim their space to be assertive in pursuing leadership ambitions, to be given more responsibility and take more prominent roles. Women were encouraged to get along, be cooperative, be deferential and exerting leadership, become more tolerant of people who weren't good at their jobs. I mean, it makes me really angry. Just reading this. You know, it's crazy. And it's why I think it's really important for us as women to understand this, because we can be giving this feedback and taking it on board and thinking, thinking, why can't I win? Why is this so hard? Why am I not getting promoted to the next level, and it's because we are literally getting feedback that is holding us back.

And then the final one was confidence. So men were encouraged to display more confidence, so develop confidence in specific skill sets and display it and for them confidence was seen as a fixable issue. Women were encouraged to be more confident of female leaders lack of confidence was described as an inherent general floor without any actionable advice. So they got feedback, like needs to be a bit more confident and have a bit more self belief. I'm gonna get on my soapbox again. Now, do you think there's any chance that we might be struggling with confidence because we are constantly receiving feedback that isn't how awful to us, because we are facing gender bias on a daily basis because we are interrupted, he peed it because we call up the air space in meetings. You know, the lack of awareness around some of this feedback is ridiculous. So what we can do when we're receiving this kind of feedback is ask for really specific, actionable feedback. So you could say, Can you give me an example of when you didn't think I showed up in a confident way, and what it would have looked like to show up confidently, and if they do give you an example of something where actually it would be alright, if a man did it, but not if a woman did it, then you can have that discussion with them. Now, one thing that the research says is, it's important to know that all of these messages were generally framed as positive.
And it's possible that the people providing this feedback genuinely believed in the potential of these women to reach senior leadership roles. But providing them with equally positive feedback doesn't mean that that feedback is free of gender bias. And the overall themes were that the feedback provided to women tended to be less actionable, and less useful for Leadership Progression, and made it harder for women to advance to more senior positions.

So in organisations, when we're giving feedback, we want to make sure that we are embracing both both of traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine traits. So if, for example, in your organisation, it's good to be assertive, and collaborative, then encourage that in both men and women. So encourage any employee to develop both of those qualities. And that may mean that you're having to have more conversations with men about developing collaboration skills, if you're seeing a gap, there are more conversations with women about Developing assertiveness, if you're seeing a gap there, but just being as specific, as possible.

And you can also, and I'm not going to be doing a whole article here, but I never signpost you to the article, there are also some really tangible things you can do to counterbalance some of that feedback that you might have been giving in the past.

So you can encourage women to think in a visionary way, for example, by asking them how can you involve others in developing this vision? What's your personal vision for the team equally, you'd encourage men to think more operationally and think about the expertise that they need to develop, you can encourage women to develop their influencing skills and to spend time building those strategic relationships upwards, which is something we talked about within influence, and impact. And you can encourage men to network more appear level, you can encourage women to talk about leadership and where they want to go in terms of leadership and what kind of leader they are and what kind of leader they want to be an encouragement to talk about collaboration, and how they can develop those skills.

And then you can talk to women, when you're talking to them about confidence, then you can talk about specific behaviours you'd like to see in specific situations, and what skills they might like to grow their confidence in. So I think that's such an insightful piece of research.

And then the final piece of research is a really interesting one as well, which is basically that women get nicer feedback than then and it holds them back. Now, to me that slightly contradicts the earlier research on how 76% of women get some negative feedback on personality traits. But this piece of research, which was by Lilly gamble, and Anita Ratan and Elizabeth Bailey Wolf, found that even if male and female employees performed exactly the same levels, managers tended to prioritise kindness more when they were giving the feedback to women than when they were giving the see same feedback to men. So this was kindness in terms of the tone, but also in terms of the content. And they think the reason for this is that there's a common stereotype that women are warmer than men. And when we see someone as warm, we're naturally inclined to be kinder and more sympathetic towards them. Now, I'm certainly I'm certain that there's some women listening to this. And I would be thinking,

Well, I've certainly had some unkind feedback in the past. But that stereotype means that women are generally receiving Kinder feedback, but as a result, it's less specific and it can be masking some of the things that they actually need to change. Now, the study said there was no evidence to suggest that managers were trying to hold women back so it wasn't being delivered by it wasn't being driven by a belief that women were less competent or a worry about Feeling prejudiced towards women or a fear that women will be less able to handle negative feedback. They simply thought that it would be more helpful to prioritise kindness when talking to women. And as the author say, of course, kindness isn't a bad thing, but giving feedback differently based on the gender of the recipient creates projects creates problems for everyone.

So inaccurate, unhelpful or unclear feedback, even when it's motivated by the desire to be kind, can end up obscuring and distracting from critical growth opportunities, which then can cause women to be less likely to get important job assignments, raises or promotions. Equally, a lack of kindness and feedback to men can harm their well being and contribute to our workplace culture with toxic gender norms. So the suggestion is that managers prioritise giving feedback that's both accurate and unkind, no matter who they're talking to. So they suggest that before a feedback conversation, write out the specific actionable points that you need to get across, as well as opportunities to exhibit kindness while you're offering those constructive critiques.

Be intentional about sprinkling kindness throughout the conversation equally, whether you're giving feedback to a man or a woman. And after you've given the feedback, ask the recipient to repeat back the key takeaways to make sure your kindness hasn't obscured the content that you're trying to convey. Another thing I would say is just check yourself and think would I give the same feedback to a male colleague? Organizationally, an organisation can audit written feedback to look for patterns in the tone and content that people are using for feedback so that it can highlight any bias that's there. So that's just something to think about as well, are you being overly kind in your feedback. And particularly, I guess, if you've had some feedback that's been challenging, it can be really easy to go to the other end of the extreme and be so kind that actually your feedback isn't as helpful as it could be.

So we've covered the three articles. And what I wanted to do is just just to give you a summary of some of the tips for giving feedback, and also a summary of some things you can do when you're on the receiving end of some of these feedback mistakes. So if you're giving feedback, first of all, I've done a whole podcast episodes, specifically on giving feedback and some structure and models for that. And we'll link to that in the show notes. Because I think that's a really great place to get a refresher on good ways to give feedback.

But when we're talking about the things that have come up in today's episode, firstly, be conscious of your language and ask yourself, would I give this same feedback to a man? Now what can help you with that is to write it down, and then look at that language and go Are any of those words, words are only applied to women and are not applied to men. And there are a whole list of those words. And some of them are really quite insulting. Now, the second thing you can do is make sure that your feedback is specific, and actionable, and prepares women for leadership. And the third thing is to recognise that feedback is an opportunity for growth, being too kind and your feedback can actually hold women back. There's absolutely a place for kindness, but use it equally, whatever the gender of the person you're giving feedback to, and don't let it dilute messages that they need to take on board to be able to grow.

Now, how about if you're on the receiving end of the some of this feedback? Well, firstly, I think you can challenge any language that fuels gender bias. So if someone uses language to describe you, for example, that would not be applied to a man, then you can say, do you know that phrase is generally only applied to women? What word would you use if you were talking to a man? And I'm not talking about doing this in a challenging way, I'm doing this talking about doing this in a way where you're asking for clarity, and in a curious way. So rather than calling someone out and calling them in and saying that word just doesn't, it doesn't help me and it, it shows that there's gender bias in that feedback. Let's see if we can make this feedback, more constructive. Secondly, if someone's giving you that vague feedback or feedback that isn't preparing you for where you want to go, ask for specifics.

Ask for examples. Again, tone is important because you don't want to be seen as super challenging, but I think you can just use a professional tone that says that's really interesting. Can you give me an example of that, please? And, again, you can dig into Whether that feedback would have actually been given if a man had acted in the same way, some time to change only happens if we challenge the status quo. And only you can judge how safe that is to do if you've got a manager who is hard to deal with, I wouldn't go down that route. But actually, if you've got a really receptive manager that you know, is trying to be a great manager and leader, and they're providing you with feedback that isn't helpful, then I think they probably be really open to hearing that as long as they think that you are taking on board what they're trying to communicate and not pushing back, just because it feels like a form of criticism.

And then finally emphasise the need for accurate actionable feedback. So if you get feedback, like I could be more confident, or you could be more confident, then you can say, Okay, well, what were confidence look like? Can you give me an example of what confidence would look like? What you'd like me what you'd like to see me doing? What specifically would you like to see me start doing or stop doing in order to become more confident? And also just say, Well, what does confidence mean to you, because I want to make sure that we're on the same page, and we're working to the same definition.

Okay. We've covered a lot in there. I personally, I think it's really, really helpful to uncover this gender bias where it exists, even if sometimes, in some situations, we might not be able to do anything with it. I mean, I hope that's not the case with this episode, because there's lots of actionable stuff coming from it. But even just understanding that it exists. As women, I think we can be put in a box very easily with some of the language that's used to describe us. And it feels to me like it is time to start breaking out of that box. And, you know, women are just as likely to be leaders as men. So we aren't giving this feedback as well. There's no research that says it's only male leaders giving this feedback to women, we are all buying into the same stereotypes. And so if you're a woman leader, listening to this, then check yourself and see what you can do to improve the feedback that you're giving to the women that you work with. And alongside. So that's it for today. Good luck putting that feedback into pro into practice. And do let me know if this resonates. If you are not already subscribed to the podcast, please hit subscribe, it means that it will arrive in your podcast app regularly every week. And if you're finding this useful at all, I would love it if you would leave a review. It helps more people to discover the podcast. I think we are in about 7000 downloads last month alone, which was amazing. And I would like more than 7000 people to be benefiting from these insights. So please do spread the word subscribe and leave a review. Thanks very much. And I'll speak to you in a couple of weeks. If you've listened to the podcast and you want to know more about how we can work together, here are a few places you can look. First of all, I've got a couple more freebies. I've got a free PDF on increasing your leadership impact at work. And I've also got a free masterclass on becoming a more influential leader without letting self doubt holds you back. So head on over to the website to book yourself a place on the masterclass or to download that PDF. There are my OPA programmes influence and impact for women at management and leadership level and be bolder a four week live assertiveness and confidence course for women at any level. You can preorder my book closing the influence gap, a practical guide for women leaders who want to be heard. You can also work with me one to one particularly if you're a senior leader, and you can hire me to work in house to do talks for awareness weeks, one of workshops, a series of workshops or to run my influence and impact programme or be bolder programme in house as a women's leadership or women's empowerment offering. If you want to talk about any of those on my website, you can drop me an email or you can also book a quick 15 minute chat so we can talk about what you need and how I might be able to help you or your organisation so I look forward to chatting to