Have you ever been in a meeting where you’re presenting and your boss or some other influential person derails or undermines your work publicly? I’m sorry to say this has happened to me, and even more sorry to say that as a woman having spent the last 24 years in business, people taking me to task in meetings is a pretty common occurrence. More concerning than the reason why this happens is the impact that it can have on the confidence and empowerment of the individual members of a team, their trust and respect for one another and for their leader, and their ability to collaborate and work together on future projects. Despite the decades of attempts to keep emotions out of the workplace, we now know that human beings work better when their work environments allow them to be whole and fully actualized people, emotions included. So these attacks of frequently premature or unsolicited feedback where a person is forced to confront the immediate conflict of a negative emotional display in a public setting can be not only triggering, but damaging to the organization’s overall success.

Why leaders lash out in this unproductive way?

I’ll revisit this in another post, but the only true motivations for peoples’ behavior are love and fear, or otherwise stated, the desire to increase happiness, positive feeling and connection, or to minimize suffering, and avoid negative feeling and consequences. Through my years of observing leaders behave this way, here are a few of the reasons I’ve found to be true:

• Ego - the need to feel or seem important…

• Control - the need to have the last and final say on what’s happening…

• Uncertainty - the need to slow down the process because of a lack of understanding…

• Insecurity - the need to put a stop to anything that can make them irrelevant…

• Meanness of Spirit - Sometimes they really are just being an a**hole…

• Poor Leadership - And sometimes despite appearances and really terrible delivery, they truly are trying to be helpful.

So what to do? In my experience, you can never go wrong with unconditional positive regard and the assumption that the person, however disruptive and toxic, really is trying to help. This is one of my key ‘coaching up’ skills when I’m working with a leader whose title and authority outpace their experience. Of course, there are limits to this practice and no one in any workplace ever should have to tolerate disrespectful, discriminatory, exploitative, harassing, or inequitable behavior. If you are encountering any of these unprofessional, inappropriate, and highly actionable behaviors, I would encourage you to contact HR immediately. Barring these terminable offenses, however, that still leaves a lot of room for business colleagues and leaders to rain all over your powerpoint parade.

Maintaining Unconditional Positive Regard…

A therapeutic approach may seem far afield from the corporate high rises of the modern tech industry, but people are people, and if everyone truly wants to stop feeling so afraid, and to feel more loved, creating a conducive environment for trust and growth feels like a fine place to start in curbing unproductive behavior. Unconditional Positive Regard is a personal commitment to think well of a person regardless of their behavior. It is an exercise in acceptance, and it has been a life saver to me in countless moments of corporate leadership shenanigans. The concept came into being in the 1950s when humanist therapist Carl Rogers developed a human-based approach to counseling built on the three pillars of empathy, authenticity, and unconditional positive regard. He found that approaching people with understanding, honesty, and assuming the best of them allowed his work to be effective. He described unconditional positive regard as a warm and genuinely caring acceptance of a person without condition. For me, the key to embodying this benevolent feeling starts with the understanding that we are all walking our individual paths, and we can’t know anyone else’s journey. Even when it doesn’t seem like it, we are all doing our best in any given moment. We can’t know what another person is going through in their life, and so we can’t really have any expectations of their behavior. None of us really owes anyone anything, and all of us are worthy of love.

So how does it work? By rewriting the story through the lens of positive intention we reclaim our confidence and self-regard. There is very little we can control about other people’s behavior. Everything we wish were true about someone else’s behavior is at best a desire or suggestion. So what if we suggest that the person providing the feedback was really trying to be helpful? If everyone in the situation was doing their very best and coming from a place of love or, in professional terms, wanting to bring about the best possible outcome for the team, how would the interaction play out differently:

1. Ask yourself what could have been a positive motivation behind the feedback given.

2. Replay the words back with the positive motivation in mind.

3. Take note of anything helpful or useful in the feedback.

4. Consider if there is anything unspoken - any need the person given the feedback may have been trying to express.

5. Check in with yourself if you have any clarifying questions you need answered in order to proceed.

6. Prepare to have a conversation and close the loop on the feedback.

Once I have the story rewritten in my mind, and I feel good about it, I look for the next one on one or meeting where I can have a follow up conversation. It’s been my experience that by rewriting the story and ascribing a helpful intention to the person giving the feedback, I can create a story where I feel whole, my needs are met, and anything useful from the feedback gets addressed, while all the unnecessary and unhelpful emotions thrown at us by the perpetrator of the mini-tantrum just melt away. And by sharing my interpretation broadly, I can make sure this is the story that takes root. I might say something like:

“Hey, thanks for the feedback in the meeting earlier. I made some notes, and will definitely make sure the items you brought up are addressed before we move forward with the next phase of the project. I did have a couple of questions though…”

What would happen if you said something like this to your leader? Now they can either disagree and say outright they were not trying to be helpful and you clearly missed the point, or, they can choose to stay basking in the positive light you’re shining on them. If they choose the latter, they might get to soak up some of that feeling of value or importance they were previously lacking, and which likely caused them to lash out in the first place. Being that we all like to think well of ourselves, and especially those people in positions of power, they’ll likely go forward with your version where they get to be the hero. And now that they’re happily enthralled with their own beautiful reflection of leadership, you can get back to the work of slaying that project dragon.

💖