Our Tendencies Under Stress
While this topic has been around for a while, it’s critical to understand your own reactive tendencies as a leader so that you can avoid canceling out your own strengths and multiply the power of your leadership.
Reactive tendencies show up most often when leaders are under stress. Humans are wired to detect threats and move to self-preservation by protecting themselves.
“Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” – Jill Bolte Taylor
Our bodies are the first to notify us when we feel threatened. This is true when we pull our hand away from a hot stove, or super hot cup of coffee. We also react physically first, when we are under stress at work. Our body informs us of being nervous through the stomach, angry through the head, sadness through the heart. This is helpful because it provides clues for us to process and choose our response.
When we are reactive and feel threatened, we move to protect ourselves and feel safe again. We all do this. It’s very natural. We have a tendency to gravitate towards one of these 3 reactive dimensions
- Complying – moving towards; heart centered leaders (heart; feeling)
- Controlling – moving against; will centered leaders (action; gut)
- Protecting – moving away; head centered leaders (thinking)
Complying
Complying leaders lead with their heart. They are their relationships. Their core belief is that they are safe if they are liked, loved, and accepted.
These leaders are described as having strong people skills, easy to work with, team builders, and fostering collaboration. On the flip side, they tend to “play not to lose”. They give away their power, deferring to others and avoiding conflict. While complying protects them from not being liked it gets in the way of achieving results and leading with purpose. They can come across as wishy-washy, avoiding or changing decisions, and worried too much about what others think.
Controlling
Controlling leaders lead with their gut, or will. They are their achievements. Their core belief is that they are safe if they get results and are in charge.
These leaders are driven by willpower and described as being ambitious and driven. They “play to win” and are known for their achievements. They can come across as demanding, inflexible, and impatient and damage relationships in the process of “winning”.
Protecting
Protecting leaders lead with their head, or thoughts. They are their ideas, or smartness. Their core belief is that they are safe if they are smart and self-sufficient.
These leaders are seen as visionary, strategic, smart and passionate. They can also come across as distant, not team players, and arrogant.
So What?
Which of these dimensions best describes your leadership style? Awareness of your leadership style allows you to notice when you use it. What might trigger the most reactive version of this style? Knowing how you show up, what behaviors you exhibit and what triggers them is the first first step.
As a professional coach, I find it’s important to not just understand and convey these concepts to leaders, but also to have done the work on myself. Coaches cannot develop leaders without first developing themselves, so let me share my reactive style and how that’s shifted for me, personally.
My Reactive Recovery
The last time I measured my leadership effectiveness was the fall of 2022. I will share that it’s the best result I could have imagined, and it also showed some traces of where my reactive side still appears, albeit in a lesser form.
My highest reactive tendencies fell in the Protective domain and this shows up as Critical and Arrogant, two of the three sub-dimensions measured in that domain. Both were under the 35th percentile when compared globally with leaders, so it’s something to be aware of but not a big cause for concern.
For me, this made a lot of sense and I can only imagine how much higher this would’ve scored six years earlier. During that time, I remember having a strong sense of identity from my ideas and enjoyed synthesizing different concepts and integrating them together in my organizational and consulting work. Most of the course of my career has been spent as a consultant and consultants are expected to have solutions. Even going back as far as high school, I remember looking to stand out from my grades as much as anything. I wasn’t so driven that I had to be perfect, but I had to prove I was smart by taking some of the hardest classes and keeping my overall rank in the top 10%.
As I developed my thinking leadership style as a consultant, I put a lot of pressure on myself to understand things deeply so I could offer solutions. This helped me in lots of ways. At the high point, this has been and is a lot of fun when it’s collaborative, creative, and generative.
As my career evolved into Agile coaching, I took on more responsibility supporting large change initiatives in organizations with strong identities and cultures. My reactive style, Protecting, appeared at times when trying to set direction with other coaches. This was the land of opinions, and holding onto them strongly made forward progress hard. Misalignment was often a struggle despite the strong need to serve the client. The need to have the right answer caused me to double-down on learning more to have more options to offer, but still the need to be right and seen as valuable was strong. The funny thing was that “being right” is an illusion and seeking this is a fool’s errand.
A few years ago, I liberated myself from the need to be right, by becoming a professionally certified coach. The process of learning to coach was hard and transformational. It took a lot of courage and failure in front of others while I tore down old habits and built new ones instead. The shift for me was very powerful because it slowed me down on the inside, and allowed me to sit in the discomfort of my client and colleagues without feeling anything needed to be fixed. In order to coach someone, you have to believe your client is creative, resourceful, and whole. If you do not believe this, you should not be coaching them. Seeing people in this light allowed me to lead with more integrity and courageous authenticity.
Old habits die hard and when I’m in the creative space, some of my reactive tendencies still appear. My clients will still look to me at times to get another perspective or want a solution. I have to determine when I’m coaching and when I’m not and when it’s more helpful for my client to grow through their experience or leverage mine. Like most, I’m a work in progress and the work is helping.
The Way Forward Is Through
Identifying and understanding your reactive tendencies opens up a potential path to development as a more creative leader. Growth occurs when you stop key reactive behaviors and start more creative leadership behaviors. For instance, a Complying leader may be too passive and can grow with a strong purpose and vision that they stand behind despite uncomfortable reactions. They choose to act instead of defer, showing stronger will, or guts. By focusing on gaining alignment to that purpose, they can also leverage their heart centered leadership without compromising their commitment to purpose and strategy. This creates generative or creative leadership that moves things forward inviting others to participate. You don’t shrink from the moment in complying or exhaust yourself through force of will as a Controlling leader might.
I reach out to a lot of people about leadership coaching. One of the strongest themes I hear is that they are too busy to develop themselves as leaders. The timing is often wrong for them. What’s important to understand is you don’t develop yourself as a leader in a vacuum. Leadership development is not separate from strategy and execution. They are, in fact, closely connected. Your liabilities as a leader show up under stress. So the way forward to become a more effective leader is through. Through your busyness, stress, and high profile initiatives.
Whether you’re working towards promotion, trying to reduce stress, avoid burnout, or just scale your leadership, identifying and reducing your reactive tendencies will go a long way towards your goal.
If you’re already doing the work, either on your own, with a mentor, or with a coach, I congratulate you. It’s ok to give yourself permission to ask for help, to give yourself time and space to get better. When you do, others will notice and they will thank you. How you show up impacts yourself and everyone around you. Be the best you can be and do the hard work.
What’s stopping you?
