KEY SUMMARY

Feedback often carries a second workload: managing how the authority behind it will be perceived. Preparation helps until it obscures the message. Clear standards reduce the need for constant interpersonal translation.

THE BRIEF

  1. 01

    Feedback often carries a second workload: managing how authority will be perceived.

  2. 02

    Preparation is useful until it obscures the message.

  3. 03

    Clear standards reduce the need for endless interpersonal translation.

Leadership is interpreted before it is evaluated. The same decision can register as decisive, abrupt, cautious, or collaborative depending on who delivers it and what the room has learned to expect from her.

The second workload

Organizations tend to measure the visible decision while overlooking the relational preparation that made the decision possible. Women leaders are often asked to produce both: a clear outcome and the conditions in which others can accept it.

Authority is exercised and interpreted through the expectations already present in the room.
  • Name the decision that only the leader can make.
  • Separate productive resistance from resistance to the person delivering the message.
  • Notice which relationship work is essential and which work has become an invisible tax.

SOURCES / FURTHER READING

  1. 01

    PLG analysis. Observations on feedback, interpretation, and authority.