Women Leaders Psychological Safety: Real Feedback Guide
Women's Leadership Success
Kerry Siggins shares her transformative experience receiving harsh feedback that she was 'erratic' and difficult to work with, revealing how
Key takeaways
- Feedback that stings often contains a kernel of truth worth examining.
- Psychological safety and accountability are not mutually exclusive—they can reinforce each other when managed intentionally.
Main topics
- Psychological safety in leadership
- Real feedback vs. personal attacks
Notable quotes
"If something stings, there's probably some truth to it."
Conclusion
True leadership growth begins not in rejecting feedback but in examining it with
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Okay, think about the last time someone gave you feedback that really stung. You know the kind. You replayed the conversation on your drive home. You thought about what you should have said. Maybe part of you was angry, and maybe another part of you wondered. What if they're right? Because feedback that hurts isn't always an attack. Sometimes it's information. But that doesn't mean every criticism deserves a place in your head. So how do you tell the difference? How do you know what to learn from and what to let go? Hey, it's Sabrina, and today we're going to figure that out together. Speaker 1 (1:09) no matter if you're a manager, CEO, or entrepreneur. Join Sabrina for coaching and no-nonsense advice to improve your career and bottom line. Welcome back. Speaker 2 (1:19) And if this is your first time here, I'm so glad you found us. I'm Sabrina Brahm, Executive Leadership Coach and host of Women's Leadership Success Podcast. This is where we have honest conversations about what it really takes to lead at the next level, especially when the stakes are high, the conversations are uncomfortable, and you don't feel completely ready. In our last episode, I sat down with Kerry Siggins, CEO of StoneAge and author of Talk With Trust, How to Own Feedback, Spark Growth, and Build Stronger Teams. We talked about her SHARES framework, a practical way to have difficult conversations you may have been avoiding. If you haven't heard that episode yet, go back and listen after this one. You'll want both parts of this conversation. Today, Carrie is back, and this time things get personal. Several years ago, Carrie's COO, one of her closest colleagues, sat her down and told her something no CEO wants to hear. She was erratic, and she was genuinely difficult to work for. Ouch. Imagine hearing that from someone you trust. Do you defend yourself? Dismiss it? Question their motives? Or do you stop long enough to ask, is there something here that I need to see? That's the story I promised you in our last episode, and today you'll hear what Carrie did next. Because this episode isn't really about one painful conversation. It's about what happens after the feedback lands. How do you separate a meaningful signal from someone else's opinion? What do you do when the feedback feels unfair? And how do you take responsibility for what's true? without absorbing everything other people say about you. We also talk about something many women leaders know all too well, the double bind. Be direct and someone calls you aggressive. Be warm and someone questions whether you're strong enough. Carrie has faced this at the boardroom level, and her answer isn't to shrink, soften, or become someone she's not. It's to become more intentional about how she leads. One quick note before we begin. Partway through today's episode, I'm going to ask you to take just 30 seconds to complete our listener survey. One person who completes it will receive a complimentary coaching session from me. And more importantly, your answers help me understand what you're facing right now so I can create episodes that genuinely support your leadership and career. When you hear the invitation, please take a moment and share your voice. Now, if you've ever received feedback that hurt and you couldn't decide whether to believe it or brush it off, this conversation is for you. So here's my conversation with Keri Siggins. Well, welcome, Keri. So happy to have you here today. I'm Sabrina Braum, and this is Keri Siggins, and she's just written a book called Talk with Trust, which is a wonderful, wonderful book. You'll find out more about it as we keep talking here. But Keri, tell us a little bit about your background. Speaker 2 (5:24) So I Speaker 3 (5:24) live in Durango, Colorado. I'm the CEO of a company called StoneAge. And we manufacture what's called high-pressure water jetting equipment. So basically high-tech squirt guns on steroids. And our products are used to clean the dirtiest applications in the world, refineries, chemical plants, food processing plants, anywhere you'd use ultra high pressure water to clean. This is significantly higher pressure than your pressure washer that you use at home to clean off your sidewalks or your driveway. But you get the idea. And never in a million years did I imagine that I would be spending my career in industrial cleaning. But, but I absolutely love it. My company is employee owned. So I'm Speaker 1 (6:10) a Speaker 3 (6:10) huge believer in teaching people how to think and act like owners and, and, and sharing in the success and the wealth creation that happens when you are building a company with my employees, the people who are bringing the value. And, and I love to. I love to inspire. I love to help. I love to disrupt things. And so I have this really cool career, this amazing life where I get to build this great company and write and speak and try to just make a positive impact on the world. Speaker 2 (6:49) That's incredible. And your topic is so wonderful. This whole week I've been thinking about trust and how little trust so many people have. So I'm really glad we're going to dive deep into this. But you had an interesting story at the beginning of your book. You were telling us that somebody told you you were really difficult to work with. Can you tell us what happened? Speaker 3 (7:15) Yeah, this is the best piece of feedback that I've ever been given. And I'm so grateful for it. But it was also probably some of the most painful feedback that I've ever been given as well. So I had been working side by side with effectively my COO. He was my right-hand man. And we have very different personalities, very different ways of seeing the world. But it worked because I am like this inspiring, let's go like. you know, get people on board for changing the world. And he was the person who said, okay, here's how we're going to actually go do that. But as you can imagine that that can cause some, some conflict. And he had been building resentment over, over a period of a year, but he hadn't shared it with me. And it came out in a very dramatic and emotional way. We were having a discussion about his role in the company and his growth path in the company. And all of a sudden he just said, you know what? You think you're this inspiring CEO that you disrupt the industry, but really what you are is erratic and you're really hard to work for. You're the problem. And I was shocked because I've spent. hours and hours and hours having deep conversations with this person. And he had never shared how he was feeling until it just blew up. And, um, and I had to pause because I wanted to tell him to get out of my office and I was going to fire him because I was so angry. But I didn't because I don't want to react in the moment. And I went home and I really thought about the feedback and and tried to see it from his perspective. And I said, OK, what can what can I take from this feedback? What is true about this feedback? And so I focused on the word erratic. And I realized that my. fast pace and my love of new ideas. And at that time, my fear of missing out on an opportunity could feel like I was changing directions too often. And I wasn't really clear about in connecting the dots to how my ideas and the direction I was going was tied to this broader vision. And so I decided at that moment that I was going to be cool, calm, and collected, an unflappable leader, and make sure that I was leading with this presence rather than this drive to do more. And it changed the way that I led. And so I'm so grateful for the feedback. But I will say this, that the way he delivered it, it broke down trust. And even though we... are still friends today, it damaged the relationship beyond repair. And, and so he had to move on from the company. And, and, and, and so I learned so much from this. How can you take the good from a piece of feedback and do something with it to change your life? And how destructive feedback that's given poorly can be in destroying trust. Like I couldn't trust. that for a year this had been building up and he didn't talk to me about it. Like, how did we recover from that? So it was the foundation for writing this book, Talk With Trust. Speaker 2 (10:30) So how could a person tell the difference between feedback that's really, really valuable and helpful and stuff you should ignore? How do you feel like you can do that? So Speaker 3 (10:42) what I always tell people and what I do with myself is if something stings, there's probably some truth to it. So how do I dig into that? So, for example, I just went through something that was really tough and a person said that I was disingenuous. I know that I am not a disingenuous person at all. That was a story they were telling themselves because