Leading in Difficult Situations

Have any of these happened to you?

• You have to lay off 20 valuable people.
• Your cross-functional teams are refusing to work together.
• You have to take responsibility for a major setback.
• You have to give constructive feedback to a difficult director.
• An employee you personally like continues to expense inappropriate charges on their business account.
• Someone made an offensive remark about you in front of their team.

What do you do when faced with a difficult situation at work? As a leader, your response sets the tone for the culture of your team- all of your actions impact trust, safety, and communication causing a direct influence on team performance.

The key to productively managing difficult situations is in your response. This is where true leadership shines, but it’s not always comfortable.

Notice how I asked what you do when and not if you experience a difficult situation. Avoiding difficult situations or challenges is impossible. If there is one thing to be clear about in effective leadership, it is this:

Leaders who are not clear on their values and struggle (or maybe even out of touch) with their thoughts, feelings, and emotions are more likely to

• avoid or fail to manage difficult situations and conversations
• enable unproductive behaviors, leading culture down a toxic path
• experience more stress, burnout, or anxiety

Building Leadership Character Using Choice Point

The truth is the most effective leaders are mindful and take action in ways that align with their values. Enhancing your leadership ability by practicing Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT)’s Choice Point approach can help you move through barriers that keep you from showing up in meaningful ways.

The Choice Point means we can move away from or closer to what matters most. If you value being a thoughtful, honest leader then it’s important to be mindful enough in how you respond to situations that take you closer to being thoughtful and honest.

Take a moment and think of the most recent difficult situation you faced at work.

How did you respond? Did you avoid the situation altogether? Or perhaps you sent a passive-aggressive email and stewed on it over the whole weekend? What was the outcome of this response? Did it resolve the issue or make it worse?

Instead of reacting in ways that lead to negative or unhelpful results that don’t match your values, let’s explore what many great leaders already do- respond with depth and courage even in discomfort. Act leaders with integrity and courage:

1. recognize their underlying feelings and thoughts to understand how this influences their behavior before reacting.
2. respond with intention, honesty, clarity, and compassion.

Here we will explore this process, starting with understanding what drives our initial reaction- thoughts and feelings. Please know this takes a lot of practice. At first it can be tough. However, the more you practice the easier it becomes and the payoff- rewarding.

Dealing With the Barriers

As mentioned, some of the barriers to our ability to lead with our values are emotions, feelings, and thoughts. Perhaps you have heard of the fight or flight response? In the wake of a difficult situation, maybe you noticed the sensation of adrenaline running through your body? Shallow breaths, racing heart, sweating, trembling. Maybe it’s negative thoughts you’re believing as complete fact. Regardless, these experiences get in the way when we allow them to stop us from acting instead of reacting.

False Alarm

When humans are faced with a threat, our internal alarm system in the brain sends the message to our bodies that something is wrong and we need to either fight off the threat, flee from the threat, or freeze up in order to survive. This is a wonderfully effective response if we are in a real danger. However, when we are sitting at our desk across from a colleague or boss, it’s not so helpful- it’s a false alarm.

Defensive Armor

This alarm system is set off by our brain’s perception of threat… In the workplace, perception of threat may be more about underlying fears or thoughts and not true danger. As a leader, there may be more intense pressure to lead confidently and competently. This pressure can cause you to feel a sense of threat or fear that others may not perceive you in a positive, competent light. Therefore, creating even more discomfort that may feel too uncomfortable to deal with effectively. Perhaps this leads you to avoid the situation altogether, yell, lie or tell-half truths, or say hurtful things to protect or preserve your sense of being a strong leader. These behaviors are your defensive armor.

Amor Hinders

Despite what we want to believe, our defensive armor does nothing more than shield ourselves from temporary discomfort, leading to disconnection, poor communication, and unhelpful leadership behaviors. These reactions ultimately impede our effectiveness at work and lower our chance at success. Relationships likely suffer, creating an environment far from genuine where others may not feel comfortable approaching you or sharing new ideas. We must train ourselves to recognize our alarm system may not be as accurate as it feels, so maybe we don’t really need as much defensive armor.

Learning how to recognize our thoughts and feelings when this occurs will help us remove our defensive armor and work through what’s going on below the surface. From there, we can respond in a way that is productive to the situation and creates a space for impactful leadership to emerge.

3 Steps to Removing the Armor

To start, let’s think of ourselves as icebergs- a large structure of ice floating icy waters. Above the water we only see the tip of the iceberg. It’s dangerous to assume that’s all that is there. However, below the water keeping us afloat is the mass of the iceberg.

The tip of the iceberg are things we can see and readily access- observable behavior (our reactions). Below the water, are our underlying thoughts and feelings that motivate our behavior. The majority of our behavior is driven by what is going on below the water. Many great leaders know this, using self-awareness to slow down and examine what’s going on within before acting.

Step 1 – Behavior: The Tip of the Iceberg – Armor

The first step is to describe the situation and your behavior. What happened? What were the behaviors you enacted in your response? How did you behave, what did you say? How did this behavior impact yourself? How did this behavior impact others? What were the results of this behavior?

Try it:

• Write down what you did as a result of this situation and the outcomes of this behavior.

Step 2 – Thoughts and Feelings: Below the Water – Under the Armor

This step involves developing awareness of our own emotions and thoughts. This is not something we commonly talk about in the workplace, or life for that matter, so it requires practice. It takes a lot of courage to acknowledge what we are really thinking or feeling. Being honest with ourselves will help us work through difficult thoughts and feelings.

Once we have identified these thoughts and feelings, we can celebrate ourselves for being human. These feelings you have identified may be uncomfortable, but they do not equal facts. We can learn to sit with the uncomfortable feelings while we examine and test our thoughts to see if they are as accurate or terrible as we initially believe. Despite thinking or feeling these ways, we must find a way to courageously face them and address the problem at hand to most effectively respond.

You may even ask yourself if these thoughts or feelings truly fit helpful beliefs and values that you hold.

Try it:

• Thinking about this stressful situation further, reflect for a moment and notice any feelings or thoughts that emerge.
• Take a moment to write each thought and feeling down. Were you fearful of a negative outcome? Were you worried how others would perceive you? Were you nervous someone would spot a weakness of some type? Were you afraid your idea would be rejected?

Step 3 – Responding With Courage: Deep Dive – Remove The Amor

In the heat of the moment, it’s easy for your beliefs and values to fly out the window. Slowing down to complete these steps can help you realign your behavior with what really matters in your leadership.

This step requires you to explore what a more helpful response would look like. What outcome do you truly desire by responding or confronting the situation? What are the actions necessary to effectively enact this response for a more desired outcome?

Try it:

• Reflect on your values and beliefs. Do you value honesty, integrity, safety in the workplace? How might you bring these into how you would prefer to respond?
• Use Socratic Questioningto challenge your negative thoughts. Ask yourself: What is the evidence that supports this thought being true? What does not support this thought being true? Am I basing this on fact or feelings? Could I be misinterpreting the evidence or making assumptions? Could this be an exaggeration of what’s true? Is this based on a likely scenario or are there other possibilities?
• Identify more realistic or helpful thoughts. Even though I feel uncomfortable, what is a more helpful way to think about this situation? What is a more realistic thought about myself or the situation?

1. Example: Even though I feel embarrassed that I do not know the answer to my employee’s challenging question, it does not necessarily mean I cannot handle this situation or find the answer. I feel embarrassed but I know this feeling will pass. I am able to let them know I do not have the answer but will invite them into the process to finding the honest answer in an appropriate amount of time.

• Identify the new, helpful response. What would you say, what would you do? How will you do this?

Genuine Leadership in Action – Try Today!

Practice, practice, practice. This is not always easy, but the results will eventually show. Practicing this over time will make an impact on you and your team. Modeling healthy behaviors when managing difficult situations creates a space for your team members to trust in your genuine leadership.

Use difficult situations as an opportunity to open the door of connection and discussion.

“Yes, this is scary, yes that was hurtful. But this is what we can do….”

With your team. You can even start leading with less armor and icy tip of the iceberg reactions today. Next time you are presenting a new idea, communicating a change, or providing feedback use a quick check in. Share what might be happening under the armor or below the surface, then asking others to share themselves. From there, you may start a discussion of acknowledging what’s happening below the armor (acknowledging the thoughts and feelings) while introducing what might be helpful for an effective resolution.

I instruct many of my clients to keep a notebook or journal to continuously track and challenge these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to work on establishing more helpful responses leading to better outcomes. Start one for yourself, you might be surprised at what you find!

Are you struggling with difficult situations or conversations at work? Is the stress or pressure of leading perfectly something you frequently battle? Do you have a great relationship with your team but want to create an even more connected relationship to improve performance?

Stop wasting time struggling with difficult emotions and behavior at work and spend more time effectively managing the projects that really matter. Contact Elizabeth today to learn more about how leadership coaching can help you lead with genuine confidence.