There are somehow multiple organizations that have managed to made me mad recently so I'm venting and explaining how I view the responsibilities of an organization's leadership at the same time. It primarily has to deal with how they respond to and take feedback, or usually, criticism.
First has to do with what the follow up interactions should focus on. The feelings of the leadership in this case definitely should not be the focus, nor should it even come into the conversation. If you actually are in leadership, your concern should be with your members and what you can do to help them. Don't talk about how you were surprised by this, or if you'd like the feedback in a different form. Leadership should be happy to get it in any form, otherwise that gets close to tone policing. There's also the fact that there's a power dynamic at play here, most complaints aren't going to get to leadership just because of that. So anything that gets through is precious indeed.
Typically the reaction should be an attempt to get to some kind of compromise. If there isn't a good response, explain that and maybe offer alternatives. What the response shouldn't be is "well this was our thought process and this is fine." That becomes gaslighting of the members, and doesn't exactly encourage them to come forward with more feedback. If actions aren't taken to respond to and address complaints, they will stop complaining and stop participating as a whole. Members do need to feel valued (because they are) and reacting and discussing next steps is an important part of that.
Additionally what often gets overlooked is the method of receiving feedback. If someone submits anonymous feedback, then that feedback should stay anonymous. Only reason I can think of to try and figure out who it was from is to discredit the member who submitted it somehow. This thinking has its roots in the idea that some voices are taken more seriously than others which should not be the case. If the opposite is true, this is someone who supplied their name, then there should be a response to the individual person. If this person sent a message to the whole board, then the response can be generated from the entire board and can be considered more official. If though, the member just sent a message to an individual person, then they're probably looking for a more informal response from an individual board member. If these aren't matched, then that'll result in either being overly dismissive, or impersonal. If someone messages the whole board and gets a response from one of them, that appears to dismiss their thoughts without really considering it. If someone messages an individual and the whole board responds, that sounds like a crisis response and an impersonal method of dealing with it.
There's a lot of nuance to this, and many people get it wrong. I think that's because of the first point that I made, where they want to make it all about their feelings because now they feel bad. But that's just not relevant. And then the proceeding actions I think also say a lot about the organization, which is the rest of the post. But if I were to make one point, it would be to care more about the members, and less about the leadership. They volunteered for this, and they should behave responsibly.
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