Are you being defensive?
Trainer and Conference Speaker Frank Newberry looks briefly at people who are ‘defensive’ at work. He explains the negative aspects of being defensive at work, and how people could easily spot when he was being defensive - even when he had no idea.
Frank concludes by suggesting ways we can reduce our defensiveness at work.
What are defensive routines?
A defensive routine is anything a person says or does that helps them cope better with their fears. The fears and threats we seek to calm include fear of embarrassment e.g. I will look foolish in front of others at work, fear of failure e.g. I will not succeed at my work even when success is expected of me, and fear of rejection by others e.g. people at work will stop liking me and/or respecting me anymore.
To protect ourselves from these negative outcomes, we adopt a number of defensive behaviours or routines at work to neutralise the threats. For example, the threat of changes at work that might lead to reduced hours, transfers, redundancies etc.
These defensive routines might include:
1. Being cynical, sarcastic, negative etc. These behaviours when subtly applied imply that there is nothing to worry about ‘we have heard it all before’ and ‘nothing ever changes’.
2. Making light of things, making a joke. These defensive behaviours when applied are designed to get you to worry when people are saying ‘don’t make me laugh - everything is fine’, and that we should carry on as we are doing. Even when there is danger, or a real threat is present.
3. Blaming, negative stereotyping, and intellectualising to suppress true feelings. These behaviours are directly defensive and are designed to suggest that anyone who entertains ideas of a threat to success at work may in some way be hostile to others at work; even when there is a genuine threat that employers and employees should take seriously in order to protect their livelihoods.
A whole repertoire of defensive routines
4. For myself, I had no idea I was adopting a whole repertoire of defensive routines at work. Particularly when, as a middle manager, I should have been helping others to be more open, more self-critical, maybe even become ‘whistle-blowers’ at work so that they, and people around them, could expose the complacency, the indifference to customer service and quality standards that had become entrenched.
5. My three main defensive routines were that, under pressure; I would make jokes, be sarcastic about senior managers and not confront people about their complacency. For example, I would not encourage self-criticism in others and showed very little of it myself. True, no one else did much in the way of self-criticism or even held meetings to discuss their own defensive routines. This made not challenging people even easier for me.
What can you do about defensiveness at work?
6.
6.1 Well you could check if people are in denial about the problems at work.
6.2 You could calibrate the level of complacency (as in ‘all is well’ – when it is not well),
6.3 You could identify the threat presented by the economic situation, e.g. ‘Cost of Living Crisis.’
Your mission in life
7. It may not be a comfortable ride at first. For myself – people avoided me, accused me, lied to me, blamed others - especially for their own mistakes and missed opportunities – like promotions, better kit etc.
8. They also made light of things, rationalised, dramatized, blamed fate, blamed karma, got angry, got ‘depressed about things’, got negative and changed the subject as soon as they saw me coming!
9. But if you have a yearning to improve yourself, and maybe even others around you, then you are in for a treat. Your job could become your mission in life.