Let’s stop being permanently on the defensive!

Sometimes we see red at work.

During a meeting, a presentation, a seminar… And immediately afterwards – quite naturally – we go on the defensive. Yet there’s nothing better at stifling your collaborative spirit than a posture centred on self-protection. That’s the premise of Jim Tamm, a former judge and law professor who specialised in conflict mediation. Now an adviser on collaborative working environments, he wrote the book Radical Collaboration which champions the spirit of collaboration in business. For Jim, when problems crop up in a work situation, people can feel vulnerable and naturally adopt a defensive stance. Thinking then hardens, and reflection seizes up. How can we unpick this dreadful chain reaction? How can we escape it?

Why do we go on the defensive?

The question is worth asking. Especially when you read Columbia University’s white paper, which describes overly defensive individuals as being perceived as less effective by their managers, and this across various areas of competence. Among those cited are communication, flexibility and the ability to achieve one’s objectives. Since the bill is a steep one, the behaviour deserves to be understood before it’s countered. Where does this leaning towards a defensive stance come from? According to Jim Tamm, the defensive stance is an unconscious response to three broad kinds of fear, each associated with a different feeling: - A sense of one’s importance, which reflects how included we feel within a group. Here we’re talking about the fear of being ignored or forgotten. - A sense of one’s competence, which relates to how involved we feel in a group’s decisions and actions. Here we’re talking about the fear of not being understood and of feeling embarrassed. - A sense of one’s “likeability”, which reflects how liked we feel by the group. Here we’re talking about the fear of not being liked, or even of being rejected. In other words, when things get stuck, we need to work on these feelings.

How can we overcome our fears and avoid a defensive stance? 

Our defensive reflexes are hard to change, chiefly because we struggle to become aware of them in the first place. Indeed, Jim Tamm’s first piece of advice for avoiding this failing is to picture that defensive behaviour so as to better recognise our capacity to change it. Once you’ve identified that moment when you “catch fire”, Jim invites us to slow our breathing to relax. To support this work of chipping away at our defensive state, two further inner levers can be pulled. The first is putting some distance between ourselves and our thoughts. We sometimes harbour an excessively critical voice tucked away at the back of our minds. That voice can at times be toxic, even violent. Yet we can remain entirely critical, but in a more constructive and positive tone. It’s simply a matter of calmly thinking through a way to get past a difficult situation. The second is to avoid taking personally the difficulties triggered by a thorny situation. Our capacity to attach ourselves personally to a problem – and to its solutions – is extraordinary and terrible in equal measure! Detaching ourselves from a problem will give us more flexibility to solve it.

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To dig deeper into the subject, do watch this talk by Jim Tamm at TEDx Santa Cruz, given a few years ago, in which he explains at greater length how to minimise defensive behaviour.