Early in my time as a superintendent, a school board member pulled me aside after a meeting and said something I still remember word for word: "You run a good meeting, Dave. You just don't listen to the parts you don't want to hear." I laughed it off in the hallway. I did not laugh it off in the car. By the time I got home, I'd rehearsed four different rebuttals, none of which I ever delivered, because somewhere around the third rebuttal I realized he was right.
I had spent years building a reputation for being approachable, for running an open-door office, for saying things like "I want your honest feedback" in every staff meeting I ever led. What I hadn't noticed — what I genuinely could not see about myself — was how selectively I heard that feedback. Compliments landed. Concerns about my blind spots got quietly filed under "this person doesn't have the full picture." I wasn't lying to anyone. I was lying to myself, which is a much harder habit to catch.
We Train Leaders to Give Feedback. Almost Nobody Trains Them to Take It.
Walk into any leadership seminar and you'll find a breakout session on delivering difficult conversations, giving constructive criticism, having the crucial conversation. I've taught several of those sessions myself. What you almost never find is a session on how to sit still while someone tells you what's wrong with your leadership — and not defend, explain, or quietly reclassify the person as unreliable the moment it stings.
That's a strange gap, because receiving correction well is arguably the rarer and more valuable skill. Giving feedback poorly costs you one uncomfortable conversation. Receiving feedback poorly costs you every future conversation, because word gets around. People stop bringing you the truth long before they stop bringing you problems. By the time a leader notices the silence, the silence has usually been building for years.
"Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but whoever hates correction is stupid." — Proverbs 12:1 (ESV)
That verse used to bother me, honestly — the word "stupid" felt harsh for something as human as flinching at criticism. I've come around on it. The writer isn't calling the emotional wince stupid. Everyone flinches; that's just a nervous system doing its job. What the verse is naming is the deeper pattern of building a permanent aversion to correction — arranging your whole life so the truth about yourself has fewer and fewer ways to reach you. That's not a feeling. That's a strategy, and it's a foolish one, because it guarantees you'll be the last person in the room to find out what everyone else already knows.
What Thirty Years in Front of School Boards Taught Me
Marcus Aurelius kept a version of this discipline in his own journal, which is really what Meditations is — a Roman emperor, a man with more unchecked power than almost anyone alive at the time, reminding himself daily not to become unreachable. "If any man can convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change," he wrote, "for I seek the truth, by which no man was ever injured." An emperor wrote that to himself. Not because it came naturally. Because it didn't, and he knew it.
I've sat through a lot of school board meetings where someone stood up during public comment and said something about my leadership that I didn't want to hear. Early in my career, I answered those comments. I explained. I contextualized. I made sure everyone understood the nuance they were missing. What I was actually doing, underneath all that composure, was defending my own comfort at the expense of learning anything.
Somewhere around year fifteen, I started doing something different. I started writing down, that same night, the single truest sentence inside whatever criticism I'd received — even the ones delivered badly, even the ones that came from people who clearly had an axe to grind. Especially those, actually, because an axe to grind doesn't mean the axe is wrong. I'd separate the delivery from the content, keep the content, and let the delivery go. Most nights there was at least one sentence worth keeping.
Let's Be Honest About What's Really Happening When We Flinch
Here's the thing I don't love admitting: my resistance to correction was never really about the correction. It was about what the correction threatened — a version of myself I'd built and needed other people to keep confirming. Every piece of criticism felt like a small referendum on whether that version was still standing. No wonder I defended it like my job depended on it. In a sense, in my own head, it did.
Adam Grant's research on "rethinking" makes the same point in modern language. He found that the people who improve fastest in any domain — surgeons, forecasters, executives — aren't the ones with the highest confidence. They're the ones who hold their own conclusions the way a scientist holds a hypothesis: firmly enough to act on, loosely enough to abandon the moment better data shows up. Most of us hold our self-image the opposite way — loosely enough to talk about growth, firmly enough that we quietly resist any evidence requiring an actual update.
"The most dangerous person is not the one who criticizes you, but the one who agrees with everything you say." — a line I heard from a mentor decades ago, and have never stopped testing against my own staff meetings.
A Practice, Not Just a Posture
Here's what I actually do differently now, and what I'd tell any leader trying to build this muscle:
I wait twenty-four hours before responding to hard feedback whenever I can. The instinct to defend fires fast. The ability to actually evaluate what was said arrives slower. Almost every gracious response I've given to criticism was written the next morning, not in the moment.
I ask one question before any other: "What's the one true thing in this, even if the rest is wrong?" Nearly every piece of criticism I've ever received, however poorly delivered, contained at least one sentence I needed. Looking for that sentence, specifically, keeps me from dismissing the whole message because I didn't like the tone.
I thank people for correction before I explain myself. Out loud, in the moment, even when it costs me something. "Thank you for telling me that" — full stop, no "but" attached — before I ever get to my side of it. The "but" can come later, if it needs to come at all. Leading with gratitude changes what people are willing to bring me next time.
I'm not naturally good at this. I don't think anyone is. But I've watched what happens to leaders who never build the skill — the slow erosion of honest counsel, the inner circle that shrinks to people who only tell you what you want to hear, the surprise on their face when something finally breaks that everyone else saw coming for years. I'd rather flinch in front of people than be the last one in the room to know the truth about myself.
When was the last time someone corrected you — and did you thank them, or did you explain?