Podcast: Download
Katie and Carol talk about Tips 14 and 15 from Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership. The advice contained in these tips does not conflict, even though it may not be obvious at first glance.
Tip #14 Don’t ever get defensive at work. Even if you have to bury it, don’t EVER show it.
Women are more likely to be sensitive to the people issues at work. And when it involves ourselves, the sensitivity heightens. Business issues can be interpreted as personal, and that leads to an increased likelihood of becoming defensive.
When we coach leaders through their challenges, this issue is a tough one. An overblown reaction to any interpersonal dialog immediately puts everyone on eggshells. The potential for success takes a nosedive. Budding partnerships regress.
Think of it this way. At the heart of our defensiveness is some level of insecurity. But instead of working through it in a way that develops it into a growth opportunity, we are throwing chaff out there as a diversion technique and killing the potential for achieving change.
Listen to yourself. Manage yourself. Manage your passion.
Tip #15 Stick up for yourself.
A bit opposite of the previous tip but do not let people push you around! Can you do this without getting defensive? You will have to. It takes professional composure and occasionally “sleeping on it” to maintain that composure, but this is critical when building your professional image.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Hello and welcome to the Skirt Strategies podcast, the podcast to help you get the support, validation, and skills you need to accomplish your goals and really succeed in a male-dominated world, all without having to give up your incredible female strengths.
It’s another podcast of Skirt Strategies for women in leadership.
Katie: We’re bringing to you female leaders, a tip through this episode, coming from Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership, the book.
Carol: Available on Amazon and in Kindle.
Katie: So now we are kind of at the tip of the iceberg here. The tip of the tip.
Carol: Tip number 14, right, and 15.
Katie: We put 14 and 15 together and why don’t you read what those two are.
Carol: Okay. So the first one, 14 is don’t ever get defensive at work even if you have to bury it, don’t ever show it. Tip 15 is stick up for yourself. So how do you not get defensive but stick up for yourself?
Katie: Well let’s talk about tip number 14 first.
Carol: Okay. Don’t ever get defensive at work even if you have to bury it, don’t ever ever show it.
Katie: This should understand somewhat contradictory so our war cry of always be yourself.
Carol: You can’t always be yourself and in this case, really you look weak if you get defensive.
Katie: I this so too because at the heart of it is some fear. There are really two ways we can look at this. For this discussion, number one is, what is it if you are doing it, and number two, might be what do you do when others are doing this and what are some ways of handling it?
So let’s talk about the first one. Do you ever get defensive Carol?
Carol: Me? No, never.
Katie: That sounded a little defensive. I maybe have seen you defensive. I know I do.
Carol: I don’t so much. I’m trying to think. It’s not something I show anybody else.
Katie: Okay, so you are good at burying it.
Carol: I am.
Katie: Does it happen at work?
Carol: Yes.
Katie: More likely at home?
Carol: Way more likely at home.
Katie: Why is that?
Carol: Because I’m more comfortable with the people at home, you know? I’ll get defensive in front of them and with them. At work I won’t because I don’t think it’s appropriate.
Katie: Okay. You can keep it on a business level at work. That’s true and it can be a personal level anywhere else so now it’s because somebody says something and you get defensive, now it could be more about who you are.
Carol: Right.
Katie: So here is one area of hearing something come at you and we talk about conflict and negative feedback. When somebody gives you negative information that might be the trigger, I tell folks that if you are having a conversation about tasking, you are not likely to get defensive.
If it’s about how we are working together, you are not likely to get defensive.
If it’s a comment about who you are, that’s out of bounds for the level of what’s acceptable in a business conversation.
So does somebody intend to be sending the message or are we hearing it that way? Are we hearing them say something and we get defensive because it’s –
Carol: – sometimes it’s our filter.
Katie: – It’s our filter so we don’t see things the way they are, we see things the way we are. As our friend Dr. Kruger often says, we don’t see things the way they are, we see things the way we are.
An example: Let’s say I work with you and you are working on a new workbook for an employee handbook or something and it’s kind of a big deal. It’s a little project and you take pride in it.
If I give you some feedback around – by the way this highly depends on the way I say it, if I give you some feedback around, “It doesn’t look like it’s organized in the way I would have expected,” and you get defensive and it might be – listen to the difference between intent and perception.
So my intent was saying, “Well I’ve seen a workbook like this before and it was completely different so this was not what I expected.”
And what might your perception be?
Carol: You don’t like my work.
Katie: Uh-huh or you did it wrong.
Carol: Stupid.
Katie: Or you are incompetent or inadequate. Your self-talk can go downhill really fast. And that’s what leads to defensiveness.
So dear listeners, there is the core of those of you who feel like you might get defensive. There is a core of why am I interpreting it different that they might be intending it?
Carol: That’s true and the other thing is, there are people out there who have bosses who do this to them constantly. They overcorrect their work. They tell them they are not doing well. You just can’t do anything right.
Katie: And they are intentionally intimidating or you don’t know their intent.
Carol: You don’t know their intent. Their intent may just be to get your work to look like exactly what they are thinking in their head.
Katie: Is there ever a time when you getting defensive works at keeping them from doing it more?
Carol: Oh I can think of people who have made a business of making defensiveness work.
I have examples. I have people who work with me and if their work is not up to par and I mention it, the defensiveness comes out and I just have to say, “Thank you for your input. This is the way I want it done.”
Katie: Bluntly.
Carol: There is a standard and I try to coach things in terms that it’s going to be, “Love what you’ve done here. Can we move this to the other side so everything matches up?” Or whatever it is I want.
I do try to coach things in terms that aren’t going to be offensive so somebody has to go on the defensive but if you are going to go on the defensive, just as a reaction to any time I’m correcting you, there is no place for it. I have no patience with it.
Katie: So what do you do? Do you just roll over it?
Carol: Most of the time. Every now and then I call them on it.
Katie: That’s actually the tip that I tell leaders. If you have somebody you are working with that becomes defensive, this is category number two, which is what do you do with people that are defensive is you just roll over it.
So if you are the person that’s being defensive know this: you’ve just shut down communication. Know this: you are having an emotional response and remember what we say about emotional responses? When you start using your amygdala, your fight or flight defense mechanism, you have stopped talking.
Carol: Thinking.
Katie: Thinking, thank you. You have stopped using your neocortex, your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain that is the executive logical thought. So you are not really thinking clearly. You are emoting.
Carol: You are being a reptile. Quit.
Katie: You are being a reptile. And you have to have a certain level of emotional intelligence to pull yourself out of it. So because we all are in that situation, when you see yourself in that, don’t ever get defensive at work.
When you see yourself in that situation, go internal. Stop talking. Stop doing whatever it might be. This is why we say, bury it. Get yourself composed back to where you are thinking with your real brain and then think through it. Take a big breath.
Carol: And in this tip and you’ll see it in the show notes, listen to yourself, manage yourself and manage your passion. Come back to it later if you have to but do not allow it to blow up into a situation.
I have to tell you I used to have a waitress in my life that – she didn’t understand the difference between that kind of personal defensiveness and the professional defensiveness and so she would get defensive in a way you would get with your family at work.
It’s very interesting because this doesn’t often happen where somebody doesn’t have that emotional intelligence to tell the two apart and when you have that in the workplace where somebody is – they go off like you were one of their family members and I’m not talking about employee to employee not really boss to employee but you would see this happen and it was very disturbing and I had to step back from it and say what’s happening here? And I realized that she didn’t have the ability to realize that you don’t do that behavior at work.
Katie: Inappropriate. She didn’t know the level of inappropriate.
Carol: Totally inappropriate to have that kind of behavior at work and I don’t care if that guy does remind you of your older brother that bugs the heck out of you, you don’t take that to work.
Katie: Oh there are some people in the workplace that are just, “inappropriate” is the best word I can think of because they don’t get it or they bring something to the table that’s almost outside of the realms of the rules of leadership. Then it’s like, “I don’t know what to do with this. They need to be in therapy or something.” Or they need to grow another ten years.
Carol: When you are in a workshop or something and they are bringing up their emotional issues or whatever.
Katie: And I’ve heard a coaching client speak about a situation – it was a group call we were doing some coaching on and somebody brought to the table a situation and how she handled it and it was just like, that’s not coaching. You almost have to pull the person aside and say alright, let’s go back to the fundamentals. Where are you coming from with this? So that makes it difficult.
To the first part of this whole tip is the major part of it, the managing of yourself. Listen to yourself. Manage yourself. Manage your passion. What are you going to do when it happens to you and what do you do to kind of grab yourself and shut up and taking negative criticisms sometimes – or criticism – because all criticism is negative.
Carol: Well and we have a whole tip on this and if you missed it we’ll just go over it really quickly is that use the criticism to better yourself. So take it as a gift.
Katie: Feedback is a gift. So let’s flip over to this. Let’s say now that we are a leader and we have somebody that constantly gets defensive like the example you were showing. And you do exactly what I have said in a previous blog and it doesn’t sound like it’s an empathetic thing to do but it’s actually the most effective thing to do and that is to treat them as if they are not getting defensive and you just roll right over it because otherwise they are truly shutting down the conversation. What they are doing is affecting you and it’s making a difference.
Carol: And if they are effective at it they will continue to do it.
Katie: Exactly.
Carol: They can use that as a mechanism to deal with you. If I do this she’ll – that’s why I don’t always shut down because sometimes I want them to know there is going to be pushback here and that can’t be your defense mechanism with me just because you know I want to avoid conflict.
Katie: And as a leader we can often go into the conversation with them around why did that hurt your feelings? Why did you see a reaction when I said this? They might say, “Well because you are always criticizing my –“ and then that’s a great opening to where your intent is in giving them feed back or in giving them something that’s going to push them over the edge.
Carol: And you have to understand that not everybody understands your intent the way you intend it.
Katie: We don’t have bubbles over our head.
Carol: We don’t have bubbles that say, “Carol meant that to be really nice. I can’t believe it came off that way.”
Katie: At the heart of defensiveness is some level of insecurity. I think of that. This is what helps me bury it. At the heart of defensiveness is some level of insecurity so when I see myself getting defensive, it’s like, “I do not want somebody to see that.”
Carol: It’s always ugly in a work situation. Even if it’s not an employment situation and I’m trying to think of a situation where I’ve seen it usually if you are paying for somebody to do something for you they are not going to get defensive on you.
Katie: Because you know you need to stay professional.
Carol: Yeah, I would think.
Katie: Well I always think how it always puts everyone on eggshells. It creates a whole environment of everyone being a little bit edgy.
Carol: So as a leader you do not want to make people feel edgy. You do not want to make everybody in the office fearful when you walk in the door. I think that’s a big misnomer. I think that’s part of our whole message. That’s something that is very male, that kind of –
Katie: Leading by fear is very male?
Carol: Yeah I think so and I think we need to get over that, get through that, I think people are much more motivated when they are not led by fear. When they are not afraid of what you are going to tell them but they are working with you in a collaborative way. You get so much out of people if they are collaborating with you rather fearful of your reactions.
Katie: How can you set up that as kind of a ground rule or an expected behavior in a workplace? Anything you do?
Carol: Interesting. I think I do have that relationship with most of my employees that we are in this together. Let’s get this done together. But I don’t know what the expectation I set up for that is. Do you? Do you have a good idea?
Katie: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ground rule or a guiding principle that said we won’t be defensive at work because that’s kind of focusing on an outcome rather than an intent but I think you can have a workplace of compassion, mutual understanding, mutual respect.
Working right now with a lot of leaders on values and organizational values and personal values, and there are so many that are should’s that I kind of cringe when I see organizations that come up with their top three being, respect, productivity, and customer service – or something that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with it as long as it really came from something that you meant and if I were to parachute in and spend a day watching you, do I see those three in action.
So your guiding principles are setting up an environment for compassion or teamwork or supporting one another or something that’s a little bit more about how we interact and connect and support each other and say positive things, then you are less likely to get those defensive behaviors.
Carol: I do like that thought.
Katie: It’s hard to switch – we’re also talking about in the values work that I’m doing right now, the deference between a culture and a climate, and an organizational culture being more the sacred cows and what’s really inherent and it doesn’t necessarily mean those values that are on the wall. It’s really what’s an action and I’d like to say that those are in alignment but sometimes they are just should’s that are on the wall.
And then the climate is more along what’s it feel like on a day-to-day basis? And you can always change that because if you are the boss, and you walk in and you are in a sour mood, the whole room’s become a little cloudy.
You can change the climate of the area that you influence right now, right today. That would be a great task for you. Walk away and say the next group that I interact with, I want to be – what? Fill in the blank. I want to be positive. I want to be optimistic. I want to be forward thinking. I want to be strategic. I want to be sunny and shiny when I walk in. What is it that you want to do to affect that climate?
Carol: Very good. I like that.
Katie: And then everyone feels a little bit more safe around, they know where you are at unless the answer to your fill in the blank is I want to be condemning and difficult to work with then you are going to get a few more defensive people at work.
Carol: Good luck with that too.
Katie: Nobody’s ever going to come up with that.
Carol: No they are not going to come up with that but if that is how you present yourself it will be your culture. It will be. In the food business we have a saying, “a fish stinks from the head down.” So if you have a problem in your culture it’s probably –
Katie: It’s the head of the fish. Well let’s leave it with this.
Carol: So I’d like to come back actually with manage yourself. The three tips here are listen to yourself, manage yourself, and manage your passion. That’s what this is all about. Don’t ever be defensive at work.
Okay so now we’re talking about Tip 15: Stick up for yourself. How do you do that after you have not been defensive?
Katie: Well as we mentioned in the book it sounds a little bit opposite of the previous tip, but we are not saying use your defensiveness as an argument for a passion. Do you know what I mean by that?
I am feeling defensive therefore I must be right. But I’m also not saying because you feel a certain way means that you ignore it. Your feelings are your feelings and that you should always acknowledge those but with defensiveness, the feeling comes from possibly some insecurity. So we don’t want that to be out there.
So this tip if it’s not an insecurity, and it’s not a defensiveness, it’s an area where we want you to just lean in a little bit.
Carol: So lean in is good but I think in our show notes it actually says sleep on it and I think that’s really critical. Not to come back at this during a reactionary period. We talked about the amygdala– your reptilian brain, which is what you do when you are defensive – you are reactive.
So this is saying look at your defensive reaction, spend some time with it, if it’s really something you need to stick up for, then come back to it and have the conversation when you are not in a reactionary mode. Right?
Katie: That’s exactly what it is saying. Are you good at this?
Carol: I’m good at it at work, I’m better at it at work than I am in my relationship at home.
Katie: And I beat up on myself a little bit about this because in the heat of a moment when I got defensive, I had a good argument but I couldn’t articulate it because I was reactionary. So this is perfect for me because now it’s okay that you got defensive but you didn’t do anything about it. That’s good. You managed your self-control but the next day, you have to decide do you want to go back and dig it up again and say, “You know?”
Carol: Is it worth going back? And really struggle with that in yourself. Is it really worth going back and telling your boss that I put this paper together this way because and defending why you did what you did. Now that’s not being defensive because you are not doing it in a reactionary mode but it is defending and sticking up for yourself and what your original intent was. So sometimes that’s worth it. Sometimes it’s not. Be careful is all I’ll say.
Then we go back to a tip very much previous to this and it had to do with how does it make you feel when you have that thought? Is it worth all of the things that you are going to do.
Katie: Might I say that it’s a great skill, communication still when you decide to go back and not address it because you don’t want people to push you around and maybe it’s on the fly. Maybe you haven’t got defensive it’s just stick up for yourself whenever. To be able to put it out there as something that is not going to offend other people or make them defensive, but also just really states in a non-emotional way where you think, where you stand, and maybe a little bit of emotion is okay.
Carol: Well and I’m going to tell you, I had a situation a couple of years ago that – somebody was publicly saying detrimental things about my organization and they were within the organization too and I took it personally. I took it very personally because I thought all of those things were pointed at me, all of those criticisms were pointed at me.
I did take a step back. I did take a deep breath and I wrote a letter.
Katie: Handwritten?
Carol: No because my handwriting is bad. But I took the step back. I wrote the letter. I reread it again and again and again. I rewrote it. By the time it was done, it was about defending the reputation of an organization and my own reputation at that point and I felt like I could send it and feel good about it.
Katie: Good.
Carol: But it really did – I was sticking up for myself and the organization and it was important for my reputation and the reputation of the organization to do that and I was hell bent on making that happen. Now when it happened in the thick of it, did I go into my amygdala, my reptilian brain and want to get defensive and scream at somebody and yell at somebody? Yes I did. Did I do that? Absolutely not.
Katie: That’s emotional intelligence. You are emotionally intelligent.
Carol: I am.
Katie: I am convinced we can teach people to be more aware of it and then they can be better at it because there are so many people that are difficult to work with because of their lack of emotional intelligence.
Carol: Is it really something that can be taught?
Katie: Yes.
Carol: Okay I’m glad you have faith in the human condition. I’m very happy to know that.
Katie: Well we talk a lot about positive psychology and there are some great books out there. There is something called learned optimism, so you can learn that. You could become –
Carol: Is there a book on that?
Katie: Uh-huh, it’s called Learned Optimism. It’s by Seligman. Maybe you are not an optimist?
Carol: Oh I’m a big optimist but I have people in my family that are not that need help desperately.
Katie: Most of the self-management skills that are taught, because emotional intelligence is self-management – recognizing your own emotions and reactions and recognizing it in others. So the key to that is awareness. I’ll use this person as an example that I play tennis with, not very often he drops into a clinic and when he plays it’s like he’s in a different world.
Carol: Good or bad?
Katie: Bad and he’s not a bad person. I’m not saying that. I’m trying to measure my words here. Watching him play tennis – you know tennis is life – there are so many parallels with how you do something under pressure and you have to perform and you have to make something do something else and there are other people involved and there are all these kind of dynamics and you also have the whole physical part, which is secondary.
But this person is a scientist, which I think contributes to the way that he thinks. I’m guessing very left-brained but when it comes to having to improve, he doesn’t have an awareness of his bodily self. So to me he’s an example, it’s kind of a physical example of what happens to a lot of people with their self-awareness and if you don’t know you are doing something you don’t know to correct it.
To me that’s what sticking up for yourself – that’s what emotional intelligence is, is being aware of what you are doing, and then it leads to correcting it. So many of those self-management skills come down to awareness first.
Carol: Right. If you are not aware of it you don’t even know you have to correct it which is the danger when you get into this defensive piece, the danger is you don’t know you are reactionary so you go ahead and act on something when you are just being defensive.
Katie: You just react, yeah it’s very ugly, painful to watch. When I see myself do it I just say, “Oh I hate this. I hate that I’m reacting this way.”
Carol: Well then I want to get into it a little bit more on how to deal with people who are defensive. Me, as a boss, somebody comes in and says, “So and so did this to me and I want you to do something about it.”
“Oh, okay, let’s talk about it a little bit more. What do you think happened? What do you think their intent was and do you really think they intended to take your commission or whatever?”
“Well, maybe not but –“
And I can tell that this person is reactionary at this point.
“And I want you to bring them in the office right now and talk to them in front of me.”
“No, I won’t do that. That’s not the way I work. I will talk to each of you individually. We will come down to something and I will let you know that the other one has been talked to.”
So you really do need to break that defensiveness up. Be careful and don’t let it explode in a building, you know? Because I have lots of women working for me and we can get very defensive. That’s my stapler.
Katie: There is one thing that I would add to that and that is the technique of empathy. In fact, in many of these, one of the approaches for somebody that is defensive is just kind of roll over them as if they are not behaving that way because you don’t want to stop communication. You just keep communicating as if they weren’t behaving that way. And maybe it saves face a little bit for them too because it looks like you’re not noticing that I’m not getting defensive so maybe that’s good and I can come back and have a little bit of self-preservation tomorrow when I have to be in front of you again.
So rolling over them is one thing but if you really want to delve into like somebody’s in your office and you are going to have to delve into it that statement about, they’ve said what the situation is that, that statement about, I can see how that can be perceived as confrontational or territorial or predatory, all those are perfectly fine and what that’s going to do for the person that’s getting reactive is it will unplug that just a bit. It will get them to feel like at least she’s listening to what my emotional reaction is because we all want our emotional reaction to be justified.
Carol: Very good. I love that point because that’s true and it’s not something I do well so I needed that – you do need to tell people, “Is this what you are saying? Am I understanding you correctly? I can see how you would feel that way. Now this is how I am going to deal with this.”
All right, so you can stick up for yourself but you can’t be defensive. Listen to yourself. Manage yourself. Manage your passion.
(Music plays)
That’s it for this episode of the Skirt Strategies podcast. Thank you for joining us and please be sure to leave a question or comment at Skirtstrategies.com. Remember that success comes when you lead using your natural female strengths.
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