This week's Play: Run the feedback you have been quietly resisting.

Average leaders defend. Great leaders absorb.

In this episode of A Student of Leadership, Robert Adams returns to The Fork, the fourth element of the Place Setting Framework, with the harder question that takes its second pass. What do great leaders absorb that average leaders reject?

The leader who absorbs feedback is building. The leader who defends against it is preserving. Both happen quietly. The compounding difference shows up over decades.

In this episode:

- The personal story Robert has not told publicly before: what happened in the first week of his Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching certification in 2018

- Why over twenty years of "receiving feedback well" was actually a sustained performance of receptiveness with internal defense underneath

- The shift from feedback to feedforward, and why one is past-focused and the other is future-focused

- Three things average leaders reject and why each one feels reasonable in the moment

- Three disciplines that distinguish leaders who keep developing well into their sixties from leaders who plateau in their forties

- Why the explanation attached to a thank-you is always a defense

- Where AI helps with self-awareness and where it cannot replace the people who actually see your leadership

The three rejections to watch for in yourself:

01. Suggestions from someone you outrank

02. Suggestions that contradict a previous public commitment

03. Suggestions that imply you have a gap

The three disciplines of absorption:

01. Ask, repeatedly, with specificity

02. Thank without explaining

03. Follow up with what you tried and what happened

Referenced this week:

Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching methodology. Robert is a certified Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach. The feedforward methodology is documented across Goldsmith's published work and decades of executive coaching research.

Episode 68: How to Lead When You Do Not Have the Authority. Available now in your podcast feed.

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Share this episode with one leader who is ready to start absorbing instead of defending.

Real Leaders. Real Growth. One Table.

Robert Adams | A Student of Leadership