What leadership feedback misses about our automatic responses, and why understanding comes before change.

Imagine you’ve just come out of a difficult meeting.

You knew your science. You’d prepared carefully, thought through the questions you might be asked and felt reasonably confident about the discussion ahead.

But somewhere along the way, things didn’t go as you’d hoped.

Someone challenged your interpretation of the data, questioned your recommendation or pushed back on a decision you’d made.

You felt yourself becoming defensive. Perhaps your voice became sharper, you started justifying your position rather than listening, or you found yourself struggling to articulate something you understood perfectly well.

And afterwards, when the pressure was off, you thought of all the things you wished you’d said.

Then came the feedback.

You need to be less defensive.

You should be more assertive.

You need to stop taking things so personally.

And perhaps you nodded, because you could see their point.

But you also felt that familiar sinking feeling.

Because you already knew.

You were there. You experienced it. You knew you hadn’t handled the conversation in the way you’d wanted to.

And being told what you should have done differently didn’t necessarily help you understand how to do it.

An observation isn’t an explanation

This is something I’ve been thinking about a great deal in my work with women scientists in leadership.

We often give people feedback about their behaviour as though identifying the behaviour is enough to change it.

And to be fair, the observation may be entirely accurate.

Perhaps you did become defensive. Perhaps your colleagues experienced you as aggressive, or perhaps you became so quiet that your expertise wasn’t heard.

That matters. Our behaviour has an impact on other people, regardless of our intentions.

But identifying what happened doesn’t explain why it happened.

And it certainly doesn’t tell us what needs to change beneath the surface for a different response to become possible.

As scientists, we understand the importance of distinguishing observation from explanation.

If we observe a result, we don’t assume that describing it has told us everything we need to know about the mechanisms that produced it.

We investigate.

We look for patterns, examine the conditions and ask what might be driving what we’re seeing.

Yet when it comes to our own behaviour, we can be remarkably quick to stop at the observation.

I was too defensive. I need to stop doing that.

As though the solution were simply a matter of deciding to behave differently.

Why knowing better doesn’t always mean doing better

When we experience something as threatening, our nervous system responds.

And the threat doesn’t have to involve physical danger.

For a woman scientist in leadership, it might be the possibility of being exposed as not good enough, having her expertise questioned in front of colleagues, or confirming someone’s doubts about whether she deserves her position.

Those concerns don’t appear out of nowhere.

They may have developed through years of experience: being the only woman in the room, having to defend her competence more frequently than others, receiving contradictory feedback, or learning that showing uncertainty carries a cost.

Over time, certain situations can become associated with threat.

When that happens, our responses can become fast and familiar.

For some people, that means pushing back forcefully. For others, it means going quiet, becoming hesitant, overexplaining or trying desperately to find the perfect answer.

These responses aren’t necessarily deliberate choices. They’re often learned patterns that have served a protective purpose.

And when we’re under pressure, the physiological and attentional changes associated with a threat response can make it harder to access the flexible thinking, curiosity and considered judgement we would normally bring to a discussion.

Which helps explain something many women find deeply frustrating.

They know how they want to behave.

They can describe exactly what a better response would look like.

They may even have practised what they want to say.

But in the moment, they find themselves responding in the same old way.

And afterwards, they blame themselves for not trying hard enough.

When feedback adds another layer of pressure

Imagine being told that you need to be more assertive.

You take the feedback seriously. You decide that next time, you’ll speak up earlier, challenge more confidently and make your position clear.

But you’ve also been told, perhaps by the same person, that you can come across as aggressive or defensive.

So now, before you even enter the meeting, you’re trying to manage a complicated set of expectations.

Speak up, but don’t dominate.

Challenge, but don’t sound confrontational.

Be confident, but don’t appear arrogant.

Don’t become defensive.

And whatever you do, don’t let anyone see that you’re nervous.

You can end up spending so much energy monitoring yourself that it becomes harder to engage fully with the scientific conversation in front of you.

And if the situation already feels threatening, that additional pressure may make your familiar reactions more likely, not less.

Which is why I don’t think telling someone to be more assertive or less defensive is necessarily the most helpful place to begin.

Not because the feedback is always wrong.

But because it may be addressing the visible behaviour without understanding what’s driving it.

Lifting the lid and looking beneath

When I work with women scientists who find themselves repeatedly responding in ways they later regret, we don’t begin with a list of behaviours they need to correct.

We begin by getting curious.

What is happening in those moments?

What is it about a particular person, conversation or room that feels threatening?

What have previous experiences taught them about what happens when they disagree, challenge someone, admit uncertainty or make a mistake?

And what do they believe would happen if they responded differently?

Sometimes we discover that a behaviour which now feels unhelpful once served a very useful purpose.

Perhaps staying quiet helped someone avoid criticism.

Perhaps preparing an unassailable argument was how she learned to protect her credibility.

Perhaps pushing back forcefully became the only way she felt she could make herself heard.

Understanding those patterns doesn’t mean the behaviour is always helpful today.

But it changes the conversation.

Instead of asking, What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this? we can begin asking, What have I learned that makes this response feel necessary? And is that still true?

We lift the lid and look beneath the behaviour.

Because understanding what drives a reaction gives us somewhere meaningful to begin.

Understanding doesn’t mean you have to change

There’s another part of this process that matters enormously to me.

Once you understand your behaviour, you get to decide what you want to do with that understanding.

You might conclude that the feedback is fair, that your response is affecting your relationships or effectiveness, and that you’d genuinely like to change it.

You might discover that you’re trying to meet expectations that don’t align with the kind of leader you want to be.

Or you might recognise that change is possible, but that the personal cost feels too great right now, or that you’re simply not ready.

None of those decisions makes you immune to consequences.

Other people will still experience your behaviour in particular ways. Your choices may influence your relationships, opportunities and career.

But there is an important difference between automatically reacting, feeling ashamed of yourself afterwards and promising to do better, and understanding what’s happening well enough to make a conscious decision about how you want to proceed.

To me, that’s where agency begins.

Not in being able to control every physiological reaction or respond perfectly in every difficult conversation.

But in developing greater awareness of your patterns, understanding the choices available to you and taking responsibility for the decisions you make.

Including the decision not to change.

And if you do want to change?

Then we can begin the work of developing a different response.

Not through another promise to yourself that next time you’ll be calmer, more assertive or less defensive.

But through recognising the situations that trigger familiar reactions, understanding what you’re anticipating or protecting yourself against, and practising different ways of responding.

Gradually.

Intentionally.

In many different rooms.

Sometimes you’ll handle a conversation better than you expected.

Sometimes you’ll still find yourself falling into an old pattern.

And sometimes you’ll walk out of a meeting feeling rather wobbly, only to discover that other people thought you handled it remarkably well.

That’s part of learning.

The aim isn’t to eliminate discomfort or uncertainty. It’s to build the capacity to respond more intentionally, even when those feelings are present.

And the more experiences you have of doing that, the more evidence you begin to gather that a different way of leading is possible.

What kind of leader do you want to be?

I think this is a question we don’t ask women scientists often enough.

We tell them to be more visible, more assertive, more confident and more influential.

We point out where their behaviour isn’t meeting expectations.

And sometimes that feedback is useful.

But we also need to help them understand themselves well enough to decide which expectations they want to meet, which behaviours they genuinely want to develop and what kind of leadership they want to practise.

Because the goal shouldn’t simply be to become better at performing someone else’s version of leadership.

It should be to develop the freedom to lead in a way that reflects your own judgement, values and intentions.

Feedback can tell you how your behaviour is being experienced. But it doesn’t necessarily tell you why it’s happening, how to change it, or whether changing it is the right choice for you.

That’s where the deeper work begins.

And it’s part of the thinking behind At Home in the Hardest Room, something I’m developing for women scientists who want to navigate high-stakes meetings and conversations with greater confidence, without overpreparing, second-guessing or losing themselves in the process.

Because you don’t have to become someone else’s idea of a leader to make a meaningful impact.

And you don’t have to feel completely confident to begin leading differently.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Have you ever received feedback about how you should behave in a difficult meeting, while still feeling completely stuck about how to actually change it?

Or have you discovered something about your own reactions that changed the way you approach those conversations?