At a recent keynote, I received a fantastic question that I’m eager to share. Someone asked, “I love all these productive conflict ideas and I want to do all those things, but I find that when someone disagrees with me, I get really defensive. What should I do?” What an amazing question, and what a great chance to be vulnerable and say that we all get defensive at times. Here’s how I handle defensive behavior in the workplace.
Notice Defensive Reactions
The first step in dealing with this is to recognize when you’re reacting defensively and ask yourself what’s going on. A helpful way to understand what is going on is to identify where it’s going on. What do you notice first? Do you notice your palms getting sweaty? Do you notice your stomach flipping? Do you notice you’re raising your voice, getting angry, or leaning into the table? Do you notice the urge to get up and walk out? Or do you notice an inner narrator, is it a very cerebral thing where you’re judging or defending that little voice inside your head?
Understand the Cause of Defensiveness
Once you’ve identified where and what is going on, you can start to understand why you’re being defensive. What’s causing it, what’s triggering your defensive reaction? At its most basic level, defensiveness often arises when something that’s important to you feels threatened. This can manifest in a number of ways.
If you value being perceived as smart and being right, for example, you might become defensive when someone disagrees with you or implies that you’re wrong. In that case, your defensiveness stems from a desire to maintain your image as someone who knows what you’re doing. Or maybe your defensiveness is a result of focusing on a stakeholder other than the other person in the conversation. You may find yourself defending a position or advocating for someone you feel is being overlooked or ignored. This shift in perspective can trigger a defensive response as you try to maintain what you think is right or important.
Acknowledge Your Defensiveness
Once you’ve identified the what and the why, it’s time to share these insights with those around you and openly acknowledge your defensive reaction. You might say, “I just realized I started raising my voice,” or “My stomach churned when you mentioned that.” Tell them what behavior makes you realize that you’re feeling defensive. Then you can respond with what you have learned about why that is happening. You might say, “I think what’s going on is I feel like we’re questioning whether we’re even going to do this campaign—and I feel so invested in this campaign that I’m reacting to even the thought of questioning whether or not we’re doing it.”
The amazing thing about doing this is that when you show everyone in the room that you’re in touch with what you’re feeling, that you’re willing to interrogate those feelings to find out where they’re coming from, when you actually help people understand what this is about for you or what’s at stake, that kind of self-awareness and honesty can be transformative. It can enable you to have a positive and constructive conversation.
Apply the Approach to Others and Yourself
The interesting thing about my answer to this person about what to do when you get defensive is that I was actually just modeling what I would recommend when someone else gets defensive. The strategy is to ask questions to help them articulate their thoughts and figure out what they are reacting to and how they see the situation playing out. The goal is to get them to think about and be really open and be honest with you about what’s causing their defensiveness, so that you can help them figure out an approach, a next step, an action that might work based on the things that are important to them.
What I was doing, in essence, was giving that person this same advice and saying, “But just do it on yourself.” If you find yourself getting defensive in an interaction with someone:
- Start by identifying where that reaction is happening. Taking even a few seconds to think about that can help you say, “That’s not really me. That’s a feeling, and I can figure out where it is and what it is.”
- Then, ask yourself what might be triggering it for you. “What story am I telling myself that’s making me that something is threatened? How do I feel about that? And is it true?”
- Once you have a sense of what might be going on, share these insights with the other people involved in the conversation, so that you can actually work together with all the information.
It’s a really effective way to deal with someone else’s defensiveness, but it’s also critical for managing your own.
Are Your Emotions Getting the Better of You?
How to Deal with a Defensive Person
Video: Conflict Resolution in the Workplace: Interpersonal Conflict