Expand, Don't Shrink
Insert a step between receiving feedback and acting on it — then answer it by adding tools, never by getting smaller.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Vora's response to career feedback — particularly the style-focused, contradictory feedback she and other senior women receive — has two parts. First, a deliberate triage step between hearing feedback and acting on it: you can act as directed, look for the deeper theme and act differently, or accept the trade-off and keep operating as you are. Second, a rule for how to act at all: expand your toolkit rather than shrink yourself. New keys unlock new doors; making yourself smaller just makes you smaller.
Origin
Vora's own, learned the hard way. Mid-career at Facebook she received repeated feedback — from many people she trusted — that she 'could be the smartest person in the room but it doesn't matter if people don't like you'. She acted on it by shrinking: less aggressive, less opinionated, more unobjectionable, even wearing earth tones for two years to fade back. It worked, until she had to lead and her team asked what she thought — and she had trained herself out of having opinions.
Core principles
- 01Receiving feedback does not obligate you to act on it in the exact way it was given.
- 02There is usually a kernel of truth even in badly delivered feedback — extract it without swallowing the delivery.
- 03Style feedback disproportionately lands on women, and often arrives contradictory (be more directive / be less directive; move faster / move slower).
- 04The legitimate goal behind most style feedback is being able to work with a broader range of people — and that goal is reached by adding tools, not by subtracting yourself.
- 05Choosing not to act is a valid option, provided you own the trade-off and give people context on why you operate as you do.
- 06You cannot be the next anyone. Everyone can only tell you their own story.
How to run it
- 1
Receive it without reflexively complying
Hear the feedback and stop. The step between receiving and responding is the whole framework — without it you become a function of whoever spoke last.
Watch out Contradictory feedback is common, especially for women: be more directive so people know what you think, and be less directive so people reach their own conclusions. Complying with all of it is a tightrope with no landing.
- 2
Look for the theme, not the instruction
Ask what the feedback is really about. 'People don't like you' usually decodes to 'you can't yet work with a broad enough range of people' — a real, addressable problem.
Pro tip Weight the source. Vora took hers seriously because it came from many different places and from people she genuinely trusted.
Watch out Style feedback often says more about the giver's preference than about your role's content. Check whether the content of your work is even in question.
- 3
Choose your response explicitly
Pick one of three: act on it exactly as given; look for the deeper theme and act on it differently; or say 'this is who I am, I understand the trade-offs, and I'm going to keep operating this way'.
Pro tip If you choose option three, do the accompanying work — give people much better context on the decisions you're making and why you're choosing these trade-offs.
- 4
Answer by adding tools
If you act, build new tools rather than removing existing ones. More lenses, more keys, more styles you can operate in. You do not make yourself smaller and you are not any less of who you are — you become bigger and more expansive.
Pro tip This is how Vora now delivers the same feedback to others: 'you need to be able to work with a broader range of people, and the way to do that is to expand your tool set'. Same end outcome, opposite mechanism.
- 5
Never dampen the strengths
Whenever you hit a problem, add to what you can do, the tools you have, and the ways you can express yourself. Keep adding and growing; don't shrink.
Watch out Shrinking works for a while — people are more likely to work with you and say nice things. The bill arrives when you need to lead and discover you've trained the opinions out of yourself.
In the wild
Told repeatedly that being the smartest person in the room didn't matter if people didn't like her, Vora went out of her way to be more likable — less aggressive, less opinionated, more unobjectionable. She wore earth tones for two years to fade back. It worked: people were more likely to work with her and say nice things.
→ Then she took a leadership job and her team asked what she thought. She had spent years being told not to have an opinion, and it took real work to get back to 'I have a lot of opinions, and my team needs me to have them.'
Rather than discard the feedback or repeat it as given, Vora reformulated it. She now tells people: you do need to work with a broader range of people, and the way to do that is to expand your tool set — new keys for new doors.
→ Same objective (work with more styles of people and more styles of problems), reached by becoming bigger and more powerful rather than smaller.
Common mistakes
Treating feedback as an order
Getting feedback doesn't mean you immediately need to respond to all of it. Without a triage step you become an average of everyone's contradictory preferences and end up with no self at all.
Complying by subtraction
Shrinking is the fastest way to be more likable and the surest way to hollow out your leadership. Vora had to rebuild the capacity to hold an opinion after years of training it away.
Treating 'find a mentor' as the answer
Vora calls this a hot take: we tell women to find a mentor and a sponsor — someone who made all the same life decisions, whom you look up to, and who has an hour a month to be an oracle. It's another hoop and another weight. She had enormous generosity from many leaders and never had that mentor; she just didn't recognise the help she was getting because we describe it differently.
Is it for you?
Best for
Senior operators — especially women — receiving heavy, contradictory, style-focused feedback and trying to work out what to do with it without losing themselves.
Not ideal for
Feedback about the substance of your work — a genuine skill or output gap — where the correct response is simply to fix it.
From the transcript
“there is there's a step in between where I can choose is this feedback I want to take action on in this exact way”
“you're not going to make yourself smaller you're not going to be any less of who you are but you are going to build new…”
“I wore earth tones for like two years because I was just like I gotta fade back a little bit”
“don't dampen who you are and your strengths just continue expanding whenever you run into a problem just add more to the things that you…”
From the episode
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity
Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)