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In this Traps and Tricks episode of The Experimental Leader, Mel Rutherford and Melanie Parish explore how leaders fall into the traps of “just weathering criticism” and avoiding strong emotions, and share practical ways to treat criticism as data, listen with empathy, and create healthier, more honest teams.

 

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Traps and Tricks: Criticism & Emotions

Welcome to the Experimental Leader Podcast. I’m Mel Rutherford, McMaster University’s first transgender department chair, and the co-host of the Experimental Leader Podcast.

Hi, I’m Melanie Parish. I’m a master certified coach, an author, and the co-host of the Experimental Leader Podcast.
Today we’re having a special episode of the Experimental Leader Podcast, our Traps and Tricks episode. We’re going to talk about some common challenges that leaders face and give you some practical solutions for those for those problems, and. and there you go,

All right. Well, what are you thinking about today?

So yesterday I was having a conversation with some leaders who brought up a topic that I’ve heard several times. I’ve heard leaders talking about the fact that when you’re in leadership, you just have to weather the criticism. When you’re a leader, people are going to be critical, no matter what you do. You can’t get it right, no matter, no matter which decision you make. Somebody’s going to complain about your decision. And I think that this is a trap, because of two things. One, it’s dismissive of the criticism you’re hearing from the people that you’re leading. I think that that this conversation leads to, you know, I can just carry on doing exactly what I’m doing, because no matter what I do, there’s going to be, there’s going to be criticism. I just have to put up with it, but the other thing is that it denies the fact that leaders have leverage, leaders have impact. You can actually make some decisions that lead to less complaining. It really is a denial that anything a leader does could lead to more complaining or less complaining.

 

 

That’s interesting, I I’ve been thinking about the trap. I think it’s just a general trap of humans, but I think it gets amplified in leadership, and that’s that when people have strong emotions, which is kind of all people have emotions, and you don’t know what to do with it, you being the leader, then it might lead to you not doing anything, and so, like, acting as if there are no emotions, I think that’s the trap, and I think that ignores the possibility of creating stronger relationships through empathy, or actually just skilling up, like, like, like, people have switches. I feel like they have a switch when there’s emotions, they go, I don’t know what to do with the emotions. I will do nothing, and kind of like when too many questions are in an email. Oh, I will do nothing. People have the same response as leaders. It’s amplified more than just any person going about their life when they are met with emotion and they decide to do nothing
interesting. Yeah.

Well, I think you should come back after this break, and we will talk about what do you do about these things.

We’ve talked about a couple of common traps, and now we’re back with some tricks.

Or at least they can talk about what to do about these things. So you were talking about, like, what leaders do with criticism, which, what could they do, or what are the possibilities when, when a leader gets criticism? I will say, I mean, it’s interesting. I’m going to pull John Gottman in here, because he talks about blame and criticism as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in his research on relationships, meaning that it sort of breaks relationship, which I think is really interesting in this context, because there is something that happens, you have to do something with criticism, like you can, you can accept it, and then you go, oh, I did something wrong, so you apologize, or or you block it, you stonewall, and go, yeah, whatever, and so those are both reactive behaviors. You can be defensive, like, oh no, I didn’t do that. So all of these are sort of reactive behaviors, or like contempt is the other thing, and some of your examples actually have a little bit of content. Well, no matter what I do, as somebody, I can’t. Make everybody happy, so there could also be contempt. So, it’s like it’s interesting how blame and criticism pulls out the other three horsemen in Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or in the teamwork idea we call them team toxins.

Yeah, I think one of the most useful things you can do if a team member has a criticism is to take it on as information and to think about if you know if if there’s something that you might be doing better if there’s a different decision to make if you’re hearing a lot of voices that that are advocating for a particular path, then it’s probably really important information. Last, in one of our more recent episodes, I talked about some research that I did about people with different levels of power. When you’re in more power, it’s actually cognitively more difficult to understand what’s going on in the minds of people with less power than you, and again, I think that when you’re in a leadership position, you have to be deliberate about listening. You have to, it’s work, you have to recognize that listening is work, and so you have to be deliberate about creating strategies and creating processes. So, if you’re hearing a lot of criticism from the people that you lead, there may be information there that you need to act on.

I one other thing that I want to bring up when we’re talking about this is organizational structure, and there can sometimes, especially like in middle management, be a leader who part of their role is actually to be a buffer for criticism, so in that case they may not have the power to change, and they may be the brunt of the organizational criticism because they’re actually in that role, so it’s their job to implement the solutions that the more tactical level doesn’t like, and they like it’s actually part of their job, and and I don’t know, I’m curious about what we think they could do in that case, because it’s like if they’re not allowed to change the structure, if they can’t change, then does empathy help, or does it? Does it just create sort of a sense of false friendship or something?

Well, and it’s problematic if the organization is protecting the highest leaders from hearing the information, and I, I definitely think that happens. I think sometimes the people in the highest level of the organization are surrounded by staff people who maybe fix little problems or silence voices as they come in, and then the leader doesn’t even know there’s a problem.

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s in a quintessential, like in the perfect organization, all the data is flowing well, like through all the layers. It’s almost a sign of dysfunction if you have to have a person in the middle to take, you know, to bring things down from on high and accept the criticism going up like it’s a sign that there’s dis-ease in the organization and not good flow.

yeah, and the trap that you were talking about was emotions and what a leader does when they’re feeling emotions, and that some of the, some of your comments were kind of tying into this, you know, people come to you with criticism, your response might be emotional.

I was actually thinking, not so much about, like, I was thinking, what do, what is the leadership role of being with emotions, like from any direction in the organization, but also including our own. I think sometimes, sometimes like how we care for the people around us, like life happens, especially in long-term relationships, I think. one thing that I think about in terms of emotion is that we should never be trying to extract value from our, like, we’re not a, we’re not a factory, we shouldn’t be extracting value from our employees, we shouldn’t be just trying to get more out of them without seeing them as human, and I think when people have really human responses to life, whether it’s like I think sometimes people have really strong emotions that it’s not even fair to the organization that they have them and. Them, and we have to figure out how we are with that as leaders.

What would you like to see a leader do when there are emotions in the workplace?

Yeah, I think it’s complex, but I think I think to name them, like, you know, I, I see that you have a lot of emotion right now, like not even to decide what it is like to allow the employee either to share or not share, because I think we also need to give people privacy in their emotions, but not to just like go, well, okay, what’s our agenda for today? Like, wow, I see that you have a lot going on in your life, you know, or they disclosed to you that something’s going on in their family, and you just say, wow, I bet you have a lot of emotions right now, like I think a phrase like that, I bet you have a lot that you’re feeling without asking them about them, because there’s there can be a lack of consent about those emotions, but acknowledgement of the emotions, and also saying, is there anything that you need from me right now in this time that’s difficult? You don’t have to give them everything they want, it can be a negotiation, like, oh, well, I need to be at home for the next six months. Well, I think that would be a conversation with HR, and I’m happy to set that up for you. So it’s not that you’re saying no, it’s not that you’re saying yes, you’re actually responding to the thing that they’re saying, you’re giving them an opportunity to say what they need, and then there’s an organizational way to deal with that, but in the moment you are with them on the journey they’re on. I don’t know, what do you think?

Yeah, interesting, just thinking about an example that I experienced last week, I was describing a situation at work, and somebody said to me, “Wow, that must be really difficult, and it made me think a lot about what I was projecting, because I, I didn’t think I was describing something that was particularly difficult, and so I, so then I thought, “Oh, am I.. am I being perceived as complaining, or am I being perceived as having a reaction that I was just.. I thought I was just being descriptive.

Well, I think also that noticing that, like, people deal with strong emotions, and they might have other things that sort of leak out, like if they’re having a lot of feelings, they may feel defensive in ways that don’t make sense in the workplace, like if they’re, you know, if they’re overwhelmed, they may, it may look like anger or frustration, but it may actually have nothing to do with anger or frustration, and, and not.. I’ve, I’ve seen people who.. and there’s some skilling up, like, for that person to do when they respond with skill and frustration about everything, but it’s probably a sign that they need to learn some collaboration skills, or that they need to learn to say no, or need to learn to ask for what they want, like I really think there’s a skilling up when we have a lot of strong anger, frustration, emotions leaking from employees, it’s a, it’s a super big sign for me that there’s some learning work to be done.

Interesting, so Mellie and I both came in with some traps, and then ended up finding some connections between the two issues we were talking about.
Yeah, I think. I mean, so it’s interesting how criticism and emotions are linked more than I would have thought they were at the beginning. It felt like two really different topics, and and yet often criticism, I’m of course it’s true, often criticism comes from having emotions, like people have emotions, and their response is to criticize, to be frustrated, not to necessarily ask for what they want, or and so I mean, I think it’s interesting to think of that as, as part of the when you meet, when you’re met with criticism, to be curious about what somebody’s feeling is just like, oh, what’s underneath that, like, what are you feeling about that, that’s really interesting.

Right, and and as an experimental leader, you can get curious about this as data and get curious about how you might be more systematic about collecting data on a particular topic.

Right? So there might be even like pre work to be done if like before somebody gets frustrated. You could ask for response before they’re in a reactive mode, and you might get cleaner data about what they were hoping would happen, or I will say that sometimes I still think there’s this place where, like, in a reorg, or if you’ve had layoffs, or you know, people have real loss, you may not want to amplify the emotion, you may want them to deal with their emotion privately and not with you as the leader, because there’s some way that the transfer of it to your knowledge somehow makes it your responsibility, or at least I think that’s what we’re afraid of, a little, and, and so to show compassion proactively rather than individually may be useful.

Right? And then tie back to your idea that sometimes emotions are private, and you know, eliciting them in the workplace might not be appropriate because somebody might want to deal with them on their own time.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and if you ask somebody how they’re feeling about, you know, layoffs, and they actually tell you, like, I feel unsafe, I feel that actually might have long-ranging consequences for them about how you feel about them when you’ve solicited the information, and then they’re honest with you about how they feel, you don’t want to put your employees at more risk for the future because of how you feel about them, because you’ve proactively asked about their emotions.

Yeah.

I think it’s complex. I think it’s really interesting.

It’s complex and interesting.

It’s been nice being here with you today. Go experiment.

Go experiment.

 

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