How to de-escalate a defensive employee.
When the reaction doesn’t match the severity of a situation.
When your reaction doesn’t match the severity of a situation, know that you’re under the influence of a natural, biological response.
It’s called an amygdala hijack.
And it usually happens when we’re receiving feedback.
Running late recently, I was on edge.
Reversing down my driveway, I thought, ‘everything needs to go perfectly to time’.
Of course, it didn’t. A car was blocking my exit.
Something took over. What I wanted to do was slam my foot on the accelerator and ram into that car. I screamed silently and threw my fists on the steering wheel.
A few moments later, a stranger passed by and offered to help.
Soon after, the once blocked exit was in my rear view. As I sped away, I started to breathe out.
What just happened?
I had an amygdala hijack.
The amygdala (ah-mig-dah-lah) is the part of the brain that detects threats. When the amygdala perceives a threatening situation, it sends a signal to other parts of our brain to keep us safe. This happens regardless of how actually threatening it might seem in real life.
What happens next is an automatic, physiological, stress response: fight, flight or freeze.
In the driveway, I was in ‘fight’ mode. Already worried about being late, the parked car registered as a threat. When adrenaline surged through my body, I felt physically mad.
What’s an amygdala hijack?
An amygdala hijack is an immediate, overwhelming emotional response that takes over from rational thoughts. Three things happen in this mode, according to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence.
We experience a sudden, negative emotion (e.g anger, fear, anxiety, panic).
It’s very strong, almost overwhelming (e.g. feel unable to control it).
You do something you regret later (e.g. lash out at someone).
Emotion takes over, logic goes out the window, we act like a jerk and regret it afterwards.
The amygdala has incomplete data, but gets the job done.
The amygdala, as powerful as it is, doesn’t know the difference between a life threatening situation and a small inconvenience. But to be safe, it sends the signals to alert the rest of the brain.
What this looks like is an outburst that doesn’t match the severity of the situation.
My reaction didn’t match reality.
A car blocking a driveway, isn’t a threat, on paper. But I was already operating on low energy reserves before that car came along.
My therapist had recently told me my sympathetic system was overworked. The sympathetic system is our body's operating system that regulates our fight or flight responses.
As a result, I was more susceptible to an amygdala hijack. The car could have been anything that inconvenienced me.
Then the hijack comes to work.
Because we’re at work for much of the week, we need to know how this stuff works.
At work, the risk is actually pretty high of an amygdala attack. This looks like freezing when receiving feedback, getting sick the day you have to do that scary presentation or shutting someone down in a meeting.
If you find yourself or others behaving in ways that looking back didn’t seem to match the severity of the actual situation, know it’s not personal. I mean, it’s not nice, but isn’t it helpful at least to know that it’s a biological response?
What prompts a hijack at work?
Anything we deem a threat (big or small) puts the amygdala on alert. For example:
High stakes/little room for error. We’re naturally on edge, scanning for anything that could get in our way. For example, a project needs to go well, a stakeholder needs to approve a project or the CEO is relying on you.
Fear that something out of your control could compromise reputation/position. There’s nothing more infuriating than someone, knowingly or not, impacting the work. For example, a colleague delays a project or a peer blames you for an error.
You don’t trust the person giving you feedback. As a result, your instinct is to protect yourself. Defences are up and a hijack typically isn’t far away.
The person you are interacting with doesn’t have credibility. Defences are up. Whatever they say, you’re already discounting it.
You are in shock. This is often referred to as ‘feeling blindsighted’. New information challenges your authority, identity or sense of self in some way.
Fatigue. You’re too tired to think productively. Hijack is not far away.
As one leader who had a recent outburst at work put it, “sometimes, I’m just too tired to listen to what the other person is saying”.
When we have feedback conversations, the risk is higher.
If we believe that we have been treated unfairly, our defences are up.
Why? Neuroscience tells us that five elements motivate behaviour in the workplace (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness). This is called the ‘SCARF Model’. What this translates to at work is when someone receives new or surprising feedback on their performance, they will instinctively want the opportunity to respond.
Knowing this, we can update our duty of care as leaders to include giving the person a right to respond.
What does this look like?
As we learned in last week's newsletter, we would happily forgo food, intimacy and money in order to be heard. This is one of the tangible ways we can make people feel heard at work.
The quickest way to give someone the experience of fairness is to give them their day in court. To be heard. In a feedback conversation, this means saying your part and then … stopping talking to hear how they have interpreted and understood it.
It gives you feedback on whether what you’ve conveyed has landed. It also gives the other person the experience of being able to process and eventually respond.
Maybe their amygdala is hijacked. Maybe they respond thoughtfully. But by planning ahead for any variable, you’re giving them, as best you know, a fair go.
I know this from personal experience, having attempted a ‘feedback dump and run’.
I thought I was doing the right thing by giving a short, specific and direct observation. I shared the observation, then moved on. What I failed to consider was to make time to hear their perspective, to process and an opportunity for a considered response.
They didn’t talk to me for a year. The message was received, but was it understood and processed? We’ll never know. I realise now, that I did only half of my job: saying the observation. A great lesson I’ll never forget.
What to expect when on the receiving end of a hijack.
Receiving feedback instinctively puts our survival instinct on notice. As a result, we can expect some feedback conversations to go a certain way.
They might stop listening. Their eyes might glaze over. They might say yes without being fully present. If you can condense what you say to five minutes, chances are, they’ll hear you sooner.
Their hijack might interrupt you. Defensiveness, closed mindedness, and excuses for not being able to meet. As a result, you could need a circuit breaker to regulate your own emotions. Learn how to create yours here.
There is no perfect conversation. You might lose your patience. Because excessive focus fatigues our brain, you both might need a minute afterwards. Be kind to yourself and remind yourself that for every new hard thing you do, you may need down time to recover.
People process differently. Not dissimilar to the grief cycle: bargaining, denial and anger. Reflective thinkers like to think. Verbal thinkers like to chat. Others prefer to rage about you after work. If people have time to process, their likelihood of understanding what you’re saying is higher.
Accept you could be on the receiving end of some pretty blah communication. Unhelpful conversation is a part of the stress response and is really just temporary until their logical brain has a chance to digest, rest and assess.
You don’t have to like it, but don’t take it personally. You’re the messenger. And as we know, sometimes people shoot the messenger.
Giving people time to process increases the likelihood of a better result.
For both of you.
This is called ‘sensemaking’. Sensemaking is how we assign meaning to experiences. (We do it when we teach, write, talk, reflect, and discuss events with loved ones).
Sensemaking works because studies show that analysing a scenario creates distance from an event. This both minimises the perceived difficulty, and separates our behaviour from our identity. As a result, we’re more likely to see our actions (the feedback) as separate to our self worth.
As a result, we see feedback more likely as it is intended: as an observation. Not a personal critique, but a comment on a behaviour that is getting in the way of the work.
What does this look like in a feedback conversation?
You have two jobs in a feedback conversation: sharing an observation and giving the person time to make sense of it. Spend more time giving them space to process.
This looks like:
Regulate yourself. If you’re nervous, that’s okay. If you’re heated, it’s likely you’re on the way to a hijack. In those cases, you need a circuit breaker.
Saying what you need to say in as short a time as possible and staying in the room for the response.
Avoiding the temptation to ‘win’ or be right. You’re not having a ‘right or wrong’ conversation. You’re sharing an observation based on facts. There’s no benefit in escalating how you feel about it - facts are facts.
Expecting someone to feel at least some element of surprise and acting unusually or unhelpfully at first. Ignore the unhelpful ramble, and stay long enough to hear the helpful gems.
Give someone time to process, and understand what they’re hearing. This might be in the room with you, out of the room with a trusted friend or weeks later, once they’ve had a chance to vent about it to their friends and then come back to their own version of what they’d like to happen next.
Outline options in the room. A tenant of trauma informed facilitation is that you outline people's choices and that they have agency to make their own decisions. Be beyond explicit that you understand they might like to think about it and come back in a few weeks to figure it out together.
We all process things differently. By actually saying less, and listening more, we meet the hijack where it is, and give it time to settle down before going deeper.
As one mentor said to me, “people don’t need to have an aha moment with you in the room. What you say can help them start the process.”
“But this person has been hijacking for years.”
It could be that you could give the most flawless feedback observation and the person is unable to hear what you have to say. In these instances it can be useful to remember two things.
The way this person is acting is benefitting them in some way. It might not be advantageous for them to take your observation seriously.
Each person has a different belief system about what it takes to be ‘successful’. They might believe they are being successful behaving the way they are.
When someone acts poorly, it might be their personality or a hijack. But giving someone a little grace, a bit of time and an observation rather than an accusation, can help them make sense of what others might see. What they do with that is their choice.
Something I have found personally useful when interacting with people who communicate unhelpfully is, ‘there is a reason this person learned to interact with people this way’. It’s not for me to know that reason, but knowing there is a reason, helps me appreciate that everyone is doing their best with the tools they’ve been given.
It is not my job to teach other people tools, nor lecture them about what I think is right, but rather, to use the tools I am familiar with, in the hopes that it provides an example that there is a universe where we both get what we need - without friction.
Someone needs to make the first move.
We can lose our minds and our patience getting frustrated about how so and so acts, or it’s not fair that so and so does this.
You can’t control others, but you know what you can influence? How you regulate your emotions. Once you've mastered that, you actually have the capacity to give someone else the space to manage theirs.
If you find it hard to muster the energy for feedback conversations, that’s helpful data.
There could be some work for you to discover creative ways to manage and regulate your emotional energy. The pros do it, I do it, and if your boss is having helpful constructive conversations, they’re doing it too.
When I train teams on emotional regulation, I teach them specific techniques for spotting whether they’re in, or at risk of, a hijack. For example, they learn to notice signals in their mind and body, and are then given specific phrases and words to use with colleagues to either protect themselves with some time out or ask for support. If you’d like to give your team the tools to manage hijacks, learn more here.
My mum always taught me that someone needs to start a positive interaction.
It doesn’t matter who, but someone needs to start it for it to be productive.
If you have capacity, and have a toolkit for managing your own hijacks - why couldn’t that be you?
The hijack toolkit for conversations.
If you are hijacked, you need a circuit breaker. Remove yourself from the situation by asking for space and time. Learn how to create yours here.
Source feedback first. If you have a track record of taking on feedback you’ll have more credibility giving it.
Practice on low stakes feedback. Give your brain a chance to practise how to behave on something that is inconsequential before going into larger conversations.
Practice saying when you notice someone is not mentally present. For example, a leader used the phrase “are you in the room with me?” It got instant attention!
Expect it to take multiple conversations. This helps us plan our conversations in advance, as opposed to waiting until an unhelpful behaviour accelerates.