To Fast-Track Your Growth, Try ‘Positive Triangulation’
Getting clear feedback from people you trust is one of the best ways to improve as a leader, friend, and spouse.
One of the best things you can do to turbocharge your growth is to work with what I call ‘positive triangulation.’ While triangulation in the traditional sense refers to an unhealthy involvement of other people in your business, with positive triangulation, you bring the miracle of relationships (your closest confidantes) into your personal growth work to accelerate your results.
How does it work? You invite a small, select group of credible (this is key!) people to give you constructive feedback and help you get a more clear picture of reality beyond your own limited lens and perspective. This helps you to become aware of your blind spots and to determine what patterns, behaviors, or situations might be standing in the way of your ability to fulfill your goals and intentions.
There are a few components to getting this right—let’s explore.
The Purpose Of Positive Triangulation
Awareness is the first step in real, lasting change. The more accurate our awareness, the greater our chances of changing in the ways we want. By incorporating constructive feedback from credible people in your life, you can create the most accurate map possible to get to where you want to go. Without their input, you can have a destination in mind but there is a good chance the map is bogus and your odds of success become lower.
Don’t get me wrong—one-on-one personal development work is extremely valuable, but you’re often dealing with a very myopic view of what's happening. When you try to examine your life, or you work with a coach or a therapist without external feedback, you’re likely to be analyzing your life in a way that’s incorrect or incomplete. (As many practitioners know, no client is a completely trustworthy narrator of their own life story!) When it comes to self-analysis, sometimes we’re a little incorrect, but often we’re a lot incorrect.
We use positive triangulation to course-correct and create the most accurate possible map to help us reach our goals. If you don’t seek out external feedback and/or do group personal development work that incorporates positive triangulation, I’d say you're leaving a lot on the table.
Who In My Life Is Credible?
First things first: Let’s select the right people. So what constitutes a credible person? A credible person is someone who you can count on to be accurate, factual, and insightful—someone who is reliable and has your best interests at heart. It’s someone who has integrity and possesses qualities that you respect and honor. You want feedback from these types of people because they’re likely to give you a perspective that is accurate and can actually help you improve. This could also include people who aren’t necessarily close with you but are willing to shoot you straight. It goes without saying that in this process, you're not turning to someone who you don't respect, lacks integrity, or doesn’t have your best interests at heart, because you want to be confident that the information you’re working with is accurate and useful.
The goal here is to seek out trustworthy people, ideally, ones who know you well and who have seen you when you're in the muck and going through your hardest times. As a leader of a business, this could include your executive team, your board, your investors, and your partners. It could also be your spouse, your parents, your friends, or even your children if they're old and mature enough. What you’re looking for is honest, insightful people who know you well.
The 360 Review
I’m a big fan of the 360 Review. During this process, a coach will talk to at least six of your closest people and interview at least 12 using an online survey. These people should be above, below, and at the same level in your work and life, including board members, investors, partners, spouses, and direct reports. The coach will ask these people pointed and direct questions about your strengths, and weaknesses, as well as what annoys you about that person, where they are at right now, and what would be a real breakthrough for them. Essentially, you’re giving these people an anonymous opportunity to speak the truth about their experience of you and what’s actually happening right now. As an executive coach, I encourage the 360 Review if the client can afford it. In my opinion, it is the best tool out there to create a reliable map of the terrain you need to traverse to become a better leader because it is dictated by the exact people you are in connection with and leading.
This process yields a statistically significant amount of data for an accurate picture of your strengths, weaknesses, and current situation. What you’re getting is likely the truest and most honest map you can get your hands on. Now, the client can quite confidently say, “Here's what's going on, here's how I’m actually showing up, and here are the main things that I need to work on.”
This is very different from a one-on-one coaching session, where we essentially take our best guess at what you need to look at. You can still make tremendous progress this way, but it’s not as potent as getting the direct playbook from your closest people.
Balling On A Budget
There are many ways to achieve this effect without the cost of a formal 360 Review. There is nothing stopping you from creating your own 360. You don’t need to necessarily pay for your downloads, it just requires some courage and intention on your part. Tomorrow you could sit down with your closest people and ask for constructive feedback. After a meeting, turn to someone you trust and ask for an honest take on how the meeting went. Take a walk with your spouse and ask how you can better show up for them. Be a leader who welcomes the liberal flow of constructive feedback in all directions. When we make it safe and welcome for others to share feedback, we open up a doorway to grow in the right direction.
Get Into Great Groups
In addition to receiving a 360 from my own coach, I’ve experienced positive triangulation when doing couples therapy work with my wife, when doing men’s group work with some of my closest friends, and when playing team sports. In these environments, I am afforded many a-ha moments: Turns out I’m not anywhere as close to perfect as I thought I was. Turns out people think I’m really good at these specific things and I should do more of that. Turns out, I have a hidden superpower that almost everyone values that I was hardly aware of. Turns out I’m not doing so well in this area that I thought I was succeeding in. When we get in groups where feedback is encouraged, we can build much greater awareness of how we are showing up.
Invite People To See You In Action
One of my clients, for instance, told me that she was comfortable giving feedback and having difficult conversations with her employees—but I strongly sensed that this wasn’t the case. It wasn’t until she invited me to attend some leadership team meetings that I could observe how shaky and uneasy she felt with confrontation. She shied away from delivering her truth in key moments out of fear of being too much. Simply by having me there to witness her in action uncovered the real issue, and we were able to immediately address it and create a better map to help her become the leader she wanted to be. Had I not sat in on the group meeting, this pattern may have continued undermining her success for years to come.
How Do You Know The Feedback Is Good?
I know the feedback is good when it feels like a truth bomb punching me right in the gut. At first, the truth stings. It hurts and it can touch on some deep emotional triggers. But then, it can set you free if you’re willing to work with it in a non-judgmental way. It can be hard to receive, but it is invaluable for building self-awareness and growth. If you can hang in there, these downloads can change the game completely.
I believe that life happens in relation to other people. The closest people in your life are the best ones to give you the playbook on how you can show up better in this highly relational world. With this information, you can start to change the game in terms of how you show up and how you're treating the people closest to you. This will accelerate your personal growth work more than you can imagine.
I encourage you to conduct an audit of your personal growth work to see if you are incorporating positive triangulation. This can include men’s and women’s groups, 360 Reviews, circling, group coaching, parenting, conflict resolution coaching, and couples therapy with your spouse. Leverage the magic of human connection and your closest relationships to grow like you’ve never grown before.