When Your Actions Surprise People — and Provoke Blowback

Chris, who worked on a service delivery team at a large NGO, was well liked for his optimism and great sense of humor. But Chris was finding it hard to keep things light when his team submitted its semiannual performance summary a month late for the sixth straight time. He pointed out that the late reports reflected poorly on the entire team. His colleagues responded by accusing him of losing his sense of humor. Dejected, and a worried they were right, Chris did not know how to proceed.

When you try to raise a concern about the way your team is functioning, you may find that instead of starting a new conversation, you have provoked a defensive response where people dismiss your message and focus instead on you, the messenger. Perhaps they’ll question your commitment, attitude, qualifications, or authority. In any case, the conversation stops, and you’re left feeling wounded and worried.

These dynamics are destructive and way too common. As a teacher, consultant, and coach, I have worked with hundreds of aspiring change agents who underestimated how challenging and provocative their observations would be. There are no easy fixes or solutions for overcoming defensive reactions to constructive criticism. But you can learn how to depersonalize what feels like a personal attack. The key is to identify and analyze the dynamics at play.

Understanding Why People Get Defensive

They may feel implicated.

When people feel implicated in a problem that you’re raising, they themselves may feel blindsided (because you’ve stepped outside your lane) by what they see as an attack (because you’re questioning something they’re invested in) and will often try to protect themselves by firing back. Once you understand that, it’ll become easier not to respond defensively yourself and redirect attention back to the issue.

Your formal role comes with a set of expectations, and raising a concern may run counter to them.

For example, when Min, a project manager at a biotech firm, began to see how she and other project managers were compromising quality to meet KPIs, she began to question the KPIs. While Min’s intentions were fully in line with the organization’s values of rigor and integrity, Min’s supervisors did not take kindly to her suggestion. Instead they defended the KPIs and questioned her competence. Min said she was “sick with regret” for raising the issue and considered finding a new job to escape the situation she had created — which would have been a big loss for her organization.

The blowback that Min experienced was a function of her disappointing others’ expectations of her. Min assumed her efforts to focus on quality and purpose would be rewarded, but she failed to understand that her managers viewed her role purely in terms of meeting the KPIs that they had spent a lot of time negotiating. They were invested in those KPIs and Min’s purpose, in their view, was to ensure that the team met them. That’s why the managers responded so defensively.

Once Min was able to grasp why they were so hostile — because she’d failed to meet their expectations of her role — she better equipped herself for the kind of personalized attacks she can expect next time she questions business-as-usual.

In addition to the formal role you fill, you likely play an informal role in the lives of your colleagues.

For example, you may tend to play a peacekeeper role, helping smooth over conflict. This was the case with Chris, who routinely injected a sense of fun into the team’s work. But when Chris spoke up because he cared about outcomes, his teammates’ message back to him was, “Mind your own business and be funny.”

It’s also vital to understand that there’s more to your “self” than the roles you play at work; your other roles may include parent, partner, sibling, friend. In fact, the more distance you can create between your work role and your other roles, the more strength you can draw from each to help focus on the issues that matter to you, regardless of the context.

Copyright 2024 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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