How A Threatening Situation Can Turn Leaders Into A**Holes (And What To Do About It)
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
Introduction
During times of change, especially when the change is threatening, the right response for leaders is to double-down on flexibility and problemsolving. Unfortunately, as researchers have discovered, CEO’s often fall victim to the “threat rigidity” effect. Under pressure, their utilization of information narrows, they revert to controlling behavior and they generally rely on things that used to work.
Lyft Share price
Source
Proposed Solutions
As I wrote about last week, a number of stories have surfaced about CEO’s having, let’s just say, less than stellar moments when faced with stress. Here’s another one –David Risher, the newly installed CEO at Lyft, facing pressure from an improved driver experience at Uber and other issues, issued a blank order for everybody to get back in the office, Pronto!
An understandable response to a big threat
Well, for starters, you are going to have everybody coming at you. Employees, (especially those surviving a layoff) are facing negative emotions and are looking to you to paint a hopeful picture for the future. Shareholders want to know the plan. Your leadership team is apt to be facing similar pressures. Politics can get out of hand. Reporters bug you with nasty questions. And on and on it goes. It’s only natural that facing the onslaught of communications you tend to fall back on what you know (which may not be relevant to the current situation) and try to shut down as much of the noise as possible (which can create blind spots). That in turn means the information available to you is restricted to what you think you can absorb.
Threats have their uses –mobilizing resources
Now this sounds bad, and it can be. But other streams of social science research suggest that sometimes the only way to free up critical resources is to articulate a threat – a call to action, a need to change. But you don’t want to wallow in the threat.
It’s worth repeating Bob’s advice here for those CEO’s who would like to avoid showing up in bad-boss-of-the-moment videos, taken from his book on surviving bad bosses.
1 Beware of contagion
2 Power tends to bring out bad behavior in all of us
3 You’re not doing anybody favors with overwork
4 Genuine apologies make a difference
5 Setbacks are a good opportunity for introspection
At a personal level – how do you avoid becoming toxic in a threat situation?
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