“Love feedback, hate feedback, feel sort of somewhere in the middle, it still creates this sense of anxiety for everyone around.”
Organizational psychologist Becky Westwood is an expert in social anxiety at work. And that gives her a unique persepctive on the situation guaranteed to created anxiety in ALL of us: giving and receiving feedback.
In her book Can I Offer You Something? Expert Ways to Overcome the Horrors of Organizational Feedback, she invites us to reject the grim reality of most workplace feedback processes and return to the original sense of the word: nourishment. It’s refreshingly human, and might just save you some lost sleep, not to mention relationships.
This book was named Short Business Book of the Year, and we talk about what length is the right length for a book, and how the answers come as you write, not before you start.
So start.
Becky’s site: https://monkeypuzzletraining.co.uk/
Becky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beckywestwood/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Link for submitting your clip for Episode 500: https://bit.ly/45RfpdY
Alison Jones: I am here today with Becky Westwood, who is an organizational psychologist, coach, a trainer and Chief Experience Officer at Monkey Puzzle Training, and she specializes in social anxiety and how it manifests in the workplace, and she’s also a champion of diversity and inclusivity. She’s the author of Can I Offer You Something? Expert ways to overcome the horrors of organizational feedback, I don’t think that’s too strong a word, which was named Short Business Book of the Year at this year’s Business Book Awards.
So first of all, welcome and well done, Becky.
Becky Westwood: Thank you very much. It’s great to be here and great to be talking about the book with you.
Alison Jones: Yes, and it’s such a great book. I’ve just been reading it again and really enjoying it and also enjoying that title, the horrors of organizational feedback. Let’s just speak to that for a moment.
Why is it so horrific?
Becky Westwood: Well, I think for me there’s, I think two key reasons for that. I think one is just the accumulative effect of people’s bad experiences over time with it. Trying to sort of, people do their best to give it and receive it. But you know, not quite hitting the mark, using things that are maybe too general a tool for it and things like that, which kind of leads to some uncomfortable experiences, I think, for both provider and receiver of feedback.
The other one for me that I think is probably more important is a lot of people nowadays, you know, what they do is not just something they show up to a building or an office and do, it’s very much part of who they are. And so I think the whole process of feedback can feel quite exposing because of that.
So, I think that also then amplifies when it’s not done well, sort of amplifies the impact and I think creates this very difficult moment for everyone involved really.
Alison Jones: It is, everybody will recognize that.
What really interested me, and it’s, I should have thought of this being a language geek, but you talk a little bit about the etymology of it and the fact that it’s, the metaphor is around nourishment. It’s so far from what it’s become.
Becky Westwood: It is, and it was fascinating looking at the etymology of the word and even the sort of journey of it becoming sort of used in engineering and then into organizations and things. But for me, you know, I think about, I’m not a nourishment expert, but when I think about nourishment through food, I think about, sort of, what you are eating, but how you are eating it, the experience that sort of it creates. And for me that was really interesting seeing that through the relationship to the word feedback and how, you know, it’s not just what you are consuming, but it’s how you are experiencing what you are consuming.
And again, for me, you know, we kind of prepare for what we’re about to give someone when we give feedback, but we don’t necessarily always think about the experience we’re trying to create or that we want to get from exchanging perspectives or feedback, whichever word you choose to use.
Alison Jones: And your point about it, actually at the root of it, it’s a conversation. It’s two people sitting down having a conversation. Yes, it’s about the task, but it’s also about the relationship. I thought that was really interesting.
Becky Westwood: Yes, absolutely.
And again, if you think about sort of that relationship to nourishment, again, it’s that sort of whole experience, you know, process of not something being transactional, not something being a sort of open the office door and throw it in and see what happens. But really a sort of a grounded experience for both people where they can talk back and forth. There can be question asking, there can be discussion, there can be reflection. It’s not a transactional moment.
Alison Jones: And alongside that sort of nourishment metaphor, I think one of the things that really struck me about your book is the fact that you’re coming from this sort of social anxiety research background and that sort of interest and it is, it’s the one time when we are all hugely anxious at work, isn’t it?
So tell me a bit more about that.
Becky Westwood: Yes, I think it’s interesting because, you know, while I specialize in social anxiety and that’s where the first piece of research sort of originated with that kind of group of people with those experiences. It really became clear quite quickly that to your point, you know, it’s the one time where whether people love feedback, hate feedback, feel sort of somewhere in the middle, it still creates this sense of anxiety for everyone around.
You know, how will people react? What if I say something wrong? What if I upset the person? What if I react too strongly and I’m, you know, been told that I’m defensive or whatever it might be. And so for me it became a book sort of rooted in social anxiety, but not just for those with social anxiety. Because actually it’s the common feeling that everyone experiences and experiences not only before they do the thing, but for some people whilst they’re having that conversation and for some people hours or days afterwards.
Alison Jones: Especially at three in the morning. Yes.
Becky Westwood: At three in the morning when you’re thinking about, you know, have I prepped correctly? What’s my boss or my colleague going to say? And again, for me, you know, that anxiety doesn’t just sit with the person waiting to receive the feedback, but it also sits with the person about to give it.
And actually, there’s not a lot of information out there that brings those two audiences, if you like, or two participants together. And that was for me also a big driver for looking at that experience of anxiety through both those lenses.
Alison Jones: And actually bringing that research, bringing that background in anxiety is fascinating because there are people for whom social anxiety is much more of a feature of their lives. They’re very aware of it and they’ve developed loads of strategies around it. And for the rest of us who are just visitors to the sort of, you know, anxiety space, there’s a huge amount we can learn from that.
Becky Westwood: Yes, absolutely. And I think that, you know, a lot of people have developed some very clever ways to navigate their own anxiety, if social anxiety is a larger feature of their life. And there’s a lot of ways that that gets misinterpreted by people who maybe are less familiar with social anxiety experiences.
And so, again, for me, utilizing that knowledge and those ways of navigating and being able to share those with people whom, you know, might experience it momentarily through the week or the day or for it to come and go less frequently. But there’s a lot to learn from people who have those experiences and how that can sort of help others who might experience more mild anxiety or sort of less frequent anxiety.
Alison Jones: And I mean, I’m going to ask you for some examples here. I mean, you talk particularly about the physiological aspect of that, so just tell us the sort of thing that you mean.
Becky Westwood: So when people, I think experience anxiety, there’s this sort of mechanism I guess that happens. It’s almost this internal feedback loop that happens within us. And it’s this connection between thoughts, feelings and physiology and you know, so some people from a physiology perspective might notice things like their heart rate increases, they breathe more quickly.
For one person who participated in the research noticing that their legs would shake and sort of jitter around, for others I’ve worked with for many years, they experience what’s quite common, is a sort of a rising blushing that usually starts on the chest and kind of comes up. And so those physiological elements kind of play out.
And it’s those that I think are slightly more difficult sometimes to manage because some of them are very kind of unconscious and automatic. And so what a lot of people do is actually start to think about, well, how can I manage them differently?
And that might be through sort of interrupting the thinking that goes alongside those physiological responses with sort of affirmations and things like that. But there are a lot of breathing techniques, grounding techniques, ways to stay present in conversations that actually can help people to regain and sort of almost regain control, if you like, those sort of more automatic responses.
But again, it’s the misinterpretation sometimes of those things. You know, someone’s speaking fast, why is that? Someone’s legs are shaking, why is that? And if I’m not used to that, I don’t know what’s happening, I then can make meaning of that, that leaks into the feedback conversation. And that gets quite difficult, I think.
Alison Jones: So fascinating and the seeing it on so many different levels, the emotional and the sort of the rational and the physiological I think is really, really helpful.
There’s something really interesting as well. So, I mean this is a conversation that could just, we could just talk about feedback in the organizational workplace, and there’s a whole kind of meta level of feedback…
Becky Westwood: hmm.
Alison Jones: …when you’re writing a book, and I was really interested in that…
…I’m intrigued already, how that played out for you, because we’ve got this sort of love and hate thing. We want feedback and I was having a conversation with an author about this just the other day that, you know, she asked for feedback and when she got the feedback, she’s like, they have done exactly what I’ve asked. Why does this feel so awful?
You know? How did you navigate that?
Becky Westwood: Yes, it’s interesting because I actually made reference to that in the book, and, you know, one of the things I said for people who may not have read it was that, you know, being a psychologist who specializes in anxiety and writing a book about feedback and then being anxious about writing a book about feedback and the feedback I might get was actually to be honest, in a way sort of unsurprising. You know, unsurprising, but surprising. And I think to your point, the writing process involves so many opportunities for feedback. Some that you sort of know are coming because you are working with an editor or you’re working with your publishers and some, for me, that I actually went out to seek some perspectives from colleagues and other people in the field alongside that process.
Because I think for me, one thing I was really keen to get some feedback on during the process was I really wanted readers to feel like they were having a conversation with me when they were reading the book and the only way to get that kind of perspective was to let people I know have access to the manuscript.
And so in a way, I think that was slightly easier feedback to get, because they’re people that know me, they sort of know my style. They understood, I guess, the deeper why behind the book from many more angles.
The feedback I got from publishers, I do admit, the first round of edits I got took me a few days to just to read it, get over my emotional reaction to it, reground myself and sort of realize that actually, really leaning into one of the things I truly believe about perspectives, which is not everything has to be actioned.
And that’s the thing that really helped me was to say, this is an expert of publishing. This is an expert of editing who is offering me their expert guidance, and I don’t need to action everything that they are referencing. And that for me was a really nice synergy between one of the key messages of the book that I really do believe in from a perspective sharing point of view.
Alison Jones: And that does become so much more valuable, doesn’t it? This is great, I have all these perspectives and now I get to choose. I get to choose what I do with that information.
Becky Westwood: Yes, absolutely and I had another great one. You know, I worked with a fantastic team of people at the publishing company and there was a moment that we were all talking about titles and I wanted the word horror to be in the title, but even that, we had a little bit of back and forth about, you know, was that a good word to put on the front cover of a book.
And even that, being able to really engage with that as again, experts sharing perspectives rather than this is something that you have to do or is, you know, feedback in its traditional sense that maybe you’re not sure if you have to or don’t. That was also really valuable for navigating that sort of process as well.
Alison Jones: And I’m glad you won that battle. I like it a lot.
Tell me about writing, Becky. Do you love it? Do you hate it? Is it somewhere in between? What do you get out of it?
Becky Westwood: It’s honestly somewhere in between. It’s one of those things where I think if you are an expert of anything, writing a book, some of the things come so naturally to you. You know, I’ve spent 20 years doing this kind of work and so trying to explain concepts without going sort of too far into the detail, which I could have gone down lots of different academic rabbit holes with some of the content. Trying to land it with real purpose and share some of those ideas, that I found quite tricky to begin with.
And also, you know, finding the time to write alongside a full-time job and other commitments and things. So that was also quite tricky. I think the thing for me that’s rewarding is just seeing the feedback I’ve had on the book about feedback from people who have loved the fact that the word horror is on the front cover.
People who have said just in that one title, you’ve encapsulated everything about how I feel about feedback. And most, you know, meaningful for me is there are companies I work with who have renamed their feedback processes perspective processes and are really putting everything into practice.
And so, that for me makes that whole sort of journey of writing very, very rewarding.
Alison Jones: That is lovely because I think one of the great things that you can do as a business book writer is give people new language that changes the way they see things, which is brilliant about your perspectives.
The feedback that you get when the book’s published is wonderful and you don’t have access to it when you’re in the throes of it.
So, you talked about the difficulty of finding time. Every single person listening to this is nodding their head right now because you know, that’s the thing about business books is they’re written by practitioners. They’re written by busy people.
How did you do it? Give us some practical tips.
Becky Westwood: Yes, I think, so, I travel a lot with my job and so I sort of, less of a tip, but one thing I did embrace was actually utilizing the time, so 11 hour flights on planes come in quite handy to just sit and write. So really, I, firstly, really thought about how I could use some of those more downtime moments to write.
I think the thing for me, the biggest tip I can offer, and it really worked well for me because of the nature of what I do, was I feel much more comfortable expressing myself talking than I do writing. And so I actually used a lot of dictation tools and things, to, you know, when the mood took me and I had something interesting I thought could go in the book, I would take a voice note of it or dictate it into my phone and then pull it into to the manuscript after I reviewed it.
And that allowed me to get a lot of my thoughts out early and find a real structure and tone of writing very quickly that I don’t think I would’ve found if I went straight to writing on paper or typing on paper as I did.
Alison Jones: And that point about it sounding like a conversation with you. I mean, that’s absolutely, it literally is your voice.
Did you know it was going to be a short book when you started? I mean, it’s not tiny, tiny, but it’s, you know, it’s if you are watching this on YouTube, you can see it. If you’re not, you’re just going to have to imagine it.
It’s a sort of normal sized book, quite slim, readable, doesn’t sort of make you think I can’t manage this. But did you have that kind of clear sense of how long you wanted it to be, or did that evolve as you?
Becky Westwood: That actually evolved as I was writing. I didn’t have a sort of intention of it being a particularly short or long book as I was writing. The goal for me was really to make it accessible and to make it practical. And again, knowing my own sort of rhythm with time, wanting to make sure that people could pick it up and not have to read it cover to cover to understand some of the concepts.
So, I sort of always knew that there would be quite a number of structured, practical chapters, with some background, the sort of structure was clear, but the length wasn’t. it emerged over time. And actually I’m really happy that it became the length it did. It allows people to, you know, listen to it, if they’re listening to the audio book somewhat quickly. It allows them to read it usually, you know, quite quickly and immediately put things into practice, which was really the goal for me.
Alison Jones: Yes. Brilliant.
I’m being a bit greedy here because you have just given us brilliant tips, but I do always ask my guests for their sort of the single tip that if people take nothing else away from this conversation. What would you like somebody who’s maybe at the start of this journey to know.
Becky Westwood: It sort of sounds a bit obvious, but I think just start, I mean, I was really hesitant to write a book. I didn’t have that necessarily intention, but I think so many great ideas get lost in the self-doubt between actually doing the first words and sort of ruminating in our heads.
So for me, I would say start whether that is dictating, whether that is having a conversation with a publisher, whether that’s writing a few words on paper. And I think that for me, really helped me have the confidence I needed to write it was, you know, starting and having some conversations with people and with only relatively few words of description to them seeing their excitement of going, yes, I’d really like to read a book about this topic.
So, that’s what I would say start in some way. And I think the rest comes somewhat easily.
Alison Jones: Cautiously said, I like that.
But you know, it’s so true, isn’t it? You can’t steer unless you’re actually moving. And, you can sit in the parking lot for years, and people do.
Becky Westwood: Yes. Yes. One of my favorite phrases is we’re all beginners until we begin. And, I think it’s that, you know, we are all new authors until we put those first words down and then, you know, on we go with the journey. And for me, that’s, I think to your point, we can’t steer if we’re not sort of out of park, out of neutral and out of the parking lot.
Alison Jones: Yes. Amazing. You do it by doing it. That’s another great phrase…
Becky Westwood: yes.
Alison Jones: …isn’t it? Yes. Yes. Brilliant.
And I also always ask my guests for their recommendation. So what business, well, it doesn’t have to be a business book, it can be any book. What would you like people listening to to have an access to, if they haven’t already accessed it?
Becky Westwood: Yes, I think one for me is a book called Rest. Practise. Perform, and it’s a book about what organizations and leaders and teams can learn about finding sustainable working rhythms from the world of elite sport.
And so really thinking about, you know, wellbeing is such a huge topic. Resilience is a huge topic in organizations and businesses, and this really kind of approaches it from a very different angle. You know, how do you translate elite performance from those actually doing elite performance? How do you take those lessons and translate it into your business or your team?
So for me, I would say that’s a great book to have a look at.
Alison Jones: Who was the author again? I missed it.
Becky Westwood: Oh, it’s by John McLachlan and Karen Meager
Alison Jones: Brilliant. Thank you. Great recommendation. Hadn’t heard of that. Love it when I get a new recommendation. Thank you.
And Becky, if people want to find out more about you, more about the work that you do, where should they go?
Becky Westwood: Yes, so people can have a look at monkeypuzzletraining.co.uk. That’s our website. And it talks about all of the different things that we offer, the different books that some of our team have written. And it’s where people can learn about the new things we’re working on, particularly from a research or book perspective.
There are some things in the works on that front.
Alison Jones: Ooh, that sounds intriguing. Okay, go immediately to the website. I’ll put the links up on the show notes @extraordinarybusinessbooks.com.
Well, congratulations again on your Business Book Awards success, very richly deserved. It is a terrific book and you can just see that it’s going to be out there making one of the most horrific experiences of the workplace just a little bit better.
So thank you for writing it.
Becky Westwood: Thank you. Thank you for having me on to talk about it.
