I’ve written a lot recently about collaboration, and there’s a recurring theme that comes up in most of those articles: defensiveness. It’s a topic we rarely talk about in business circles, but one I’m convinced is vitally important if we want to build thriving, innovative organizations that are capable of making the impact they believe is possible.
The purpose of this article is to take those scattered bits and pieces of information about defensiveness and combine them into a fuller picture for you. My hope is that by the end, you’ll be as certain as I am that starting the conversation about defensiveness at work is essential to doing business better.
Collaboration is a crucial factor for increasing productivity, fostering innovation, and keeping team members engaged. And even with an inspiring vision and progressive organizational practices, its effectiveness can be threatened by good old human behavior.
I look at defensiveness through the framework of Radical Collaboration, a well-researched methodology that has a track record of quickly and dramatically improving effectiveness in collaboration.
After decades of experience working with organizations like the United Nations, NASA, Toyota, Boeing, the US Army, and countless others, the founders of Radical Collaboration, Jim Tamm and Ron Luyet, concluded that “maintaining an authentic, nondefensive presence is the single most important thing in turning conflict into collaboration.”
When we think about conflict, what comes to mind is usually something hostile and aggressive. But that’s not the only way conflict can show up, especially at work. It can also be passive, felt but never clearly communicated, or hidden under attempts to appear nice and professional.
Conflict avoidance hinders collaboration just as much as open hostility. For example, if team members have trouble voicing negative feedback, or certain people never share their opinion unless prompted, that’s a sign that collaboration isn’t as effective as it could be, and a huge potential for growth is being lost.
Unresolved interpersonal tension and a lack of productive conflict can both stem from people’s defensiveness.
When our brain perceives something as a threat to our safety, it prepares us for one of three options: fight (engaging in conflict), flight (avoiding conflict), or freeze (completely disengaging from the situation). We get defensive in order to protect ourselves.
If you are wondering what this has to do with not collaborating effectively at work, I get it. In a comfortable office with bean bags and team lunches, there wouldn’t seem to be much to feel threatened by.
To answer that question, I invite you to recall the last time you said something or acted in a way you later regretted. It could be a time where you said yes to something even though you really wanted to say no, one where you felt unable to respond, or one where you suddenly blew up and the wrong thing came out of your mouth. Any situation where a different behavior would have produced better results.
We often think back to these situations like “I wasn’t thinking straight”, or “I have no idea why I did that, I should’ve known better”. We might also try to rationalize them by things like “I was right and they were wrong.”
Responses like these are defense mechanisms developed in childhood. The emotional part of our brain, the limbic system, gets activated faster than our higher brain centers responsible for rational thought. This is why, when our brain perceives something that is similar to a stressful event from the past, our capacity for reasoning gets distorted and we become terrible problem-solvers. We react automatically instead of consciously choosing the behavior that will produce the best long-term results.
Another negative effect of this is that getting defensive invites everyone else in the room to also get defensive. And suddenly you’re not only dealing with the issues at hand, but this interpersonal layer of the situation as well.
The most important thing to realize here is that defensiveness is always based on fear. In our modern world, it’s rarely a fear of being chased by a tiger, and is instead more like feeling incompetent, insignificant, or unlikable. Nonetheless, the same physiological process takes place in the body.
So when someone has an idea at a meeting but decides not to share it, she might be protecting herself from the uncomfortable feeling of her idea getting rejected.
When someone gets a piece of constructive feedback and immediately starts to look for blame in something else, he might actually be fighting his fear of feeling incompetent.
When someone never shows up to optional team building events, it doesn’t necessarily mean she doesn’t care, she just might be avoiding her fear of not being important to her colleagues outside of her job title.
As much as we like to think we have a separate, professional persona reserved for the office which leaves its emotions at home, that’s just not the case. These defensive reactions are rarely conscious, yet they control us and our performance at work much more than we might realize.
By becoming aware of them, we can learn to choose better, more effective behaviors that will actually get us the results we seek. And through the process, we automatically become better collaborators.
As a leader, recognizing that every interaction within your organization will have this emotional embeddedness is crucial when you’re looking to solve issues at their root. After all, your business might be built around structures and processes, but those always depend on the people who are meant to uphold them.
If you can learn to look at situations through the lens of defensiveness and how it plays out in interpersonal dynamics, you will be much better equipped to come up with solutions that go beyond the surface level.
In the case of the person not sharing ideas, you can work on increasing psychological safety in the team and model sharing your own half-formed, crazy-sounding ideas. If someone is known to get defensive over receiving negative feedback, rather than forcing them to take a communication course, you can make sure they know you value their expertise and contributions.
Of course this isn’t to say people aren’t responsible for their own ineffective behaviors. Self-awareness at work is a personal responsibility. But we need to be able to discern between situations where it’s not the intention to do better that’s lacking, but the skill or the supporting structures. The latter two are where your job as a leader lies.
Because our defensive reactions are automatic, we are usually unable to recognize them as they’re happening. Even after the fact, we might feel justified in our response because we’re so emotionally hooked on the familiarity of our patterns. Self-preservation overrides the collaborative intention.
There is good news though. While we all have triggers that activate our defensiveness, stopping ourselves before we act out our usual patterns is possible. To do this, we need to create an early warning system that alerts us whenever an old fear is resurfacing and we are at risk of reverting to ineffective behaviors.
In Radical Collaboration, there are over 40 signs of defensiveness that can help us increase awareness of our own defensive patterns.
Some of the most common ones include:
We might not recognize that our fear of feeling insignificant gets triggered when someone cuts us off in the middle of a sentence, but we can learn to notice that our stomach clenched and we didn’t say another word in that meeting.
It’s hard to become aware of our feelings as we’re feeling them, but becoming familiar with how we usually behave in certain situations is much easier. We can use these signs of defensiveness as clues to the fact that our rational mind has left the room and we’ve entered into a defensive state where we are probably being ineffective.
And once you know what’s going on, you can support yourself to get back to that authentic, nondefensive presence I talked about earlier. From there, you can make the choice to choose a behavior different from your usual one and open the door to radical collaboration.
If you can acknowledge that our emotions get the best of us more often than we might be comfortable admitting, the first step to improving collaboration in your organization is identifying the ways defensiveness shows up in your people.
The true power of this lies in team members getting to know each others’ triggers and defensive signs. When people learn these things about their colleagues, it not only strengthens their relationship, it also helps to avoid a lot of misunderstandings that could lead to tension down the road. It will also lead to more productive meetings.
In this article on building a psychologically safe work environment, I wrote about how to get started having these conversations in your team, and also shared a list of practical steps you can take to put your learnings into action.
You can also learn more about the true cost of defensiveness to your business and how to combat it from this talk by Radical Collaboration co-founder Jim Tamm:
Ready to bring the conversation on defensiveness to your organization and build a culture of radical collaboration? I’d love to design and facilitate the process for you in a way that addresses your unique context and needs. Reach out to me at kata@katamorocz.com and let’s have a virtual coffee.
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