Rob Dobi
“I feel set up,” said the CEO of a professional services firm, breaking the long silence after his presentation. The transformation he had envisioned — and his executive team had championed and worked on for three years — had failed to deliver returns, and the hope that his leadership had once inspired had soured into blame. We witnessed that scene toward the end of a four-year study of the leadership team that strategized and implemented that firmwide transformation. It was the anticlimax of a drama that we have heard many executives recount.
The script of that drama goes like this: The future is uncertain. Trends in the world, the market, or the industry call for radical change. Executives craft a vision of transformation centered on adopting new technology, new structures, or new ways of working. Plans and people are drafted; projects are put in motion. Those initiatives generate enthusiasm. Over time, however, tension and exhaustion ensue. Then resentment emerges, leading to disengagement and, in the worst cases — as in the one we studied — to the organization’s demise.
Analyses of such cases often highlight that transformations fail because people lack the awareness that change is needed or the motivation to pursue it. They may point to the absence of strong leadership, sound strategy, committed employees, or the right process. Our work, in this study and beyond, has made us wary of such explanations. Transformations fail even when awareness and motivation are as abundant as leadership, strategy, and commitment. An urgent issue, or a crisis, provides a burning platform that leaders use as a bonfire to gather people around. But the fire starts to spread, and eventually people flee or burn out.
Our research uncovered what fuels that fire. It is anxiety, an emotion that can be mobilizing at first but becomes paralyzing if it is neglected and uncontained by leaders. As we saw in the case we studied, it may then be organized in ways that keep everyone busy while the status quo endures.
Change may be the only constant, but anxiety is only human. When leaders lose the capacity to name, share, and manage anxiety, their efforts to organize change, and the work of people in the organization, can get co-opted to keep anxiety at bay. This covert function sabotages the overt aim of transformation. We call that process defensive organizing. Below, we describe its unfolding and outline how leaders can avoid it by learning to work with anxiety. We begin by discussing the roots of defensive organizing because people must recognize how easy it is, as leaders and followers, to be taken down a defensive route. Only then can they stop, get to work, and set a different path.
Fear of the Future
Two conditions lay the foundation for defensive organizing. First, one or more executives identify with their organization. Second, the workforce trusts those executives’ competence and benevolence. Those conditions make leaders feel responsible and followers feel reliant.
Leaders who are responsible and trusted are vigilant and agentic, attentive to turbulence in their environments and eager to steer their organizations through it. To do that well, they must make sense of what is happening around them; understand their own reactions, fears, and impulses; and act according to their sense of what must be kept running and what needs to change. However, that capacity often eludes them just when they need it most: When uncertainty rises, they care, and anxiety follows.
It can happen to leaders, we observed, when their organization’s performance flounders. When leaders care, those dips challenge more than their reputation. They threaten their sense of self. Performance anxiety morphs into existential anxiety (a concern that one might not be the leader that one aspires to be) and social anxiety (a concern that one might not be the leader others believe and expect them to be).
In the professional services firm mentioned at the beginning of this article — we’ll use the pseudonym “Recco” — we observed that as its growth slowed, executives acknowledged those worries privately but would not share them with one another. As one confided, “I don’t want to look like a chump because everyone can deliver … and I can’t.” We have heard similar concerns in our executive development work. People in leadership roles often feel uncomfortable or, more precisely, embarrassed to admit anxiety — even to themselves.
Sometimes the reason is personal: A work predicament may trigger anxiety tied to particular sensitivities. More often, the reason is cultural. In many organizations, admitting anxiety is disqualifying for leaders; a common reason executives seek coaching, we have observed, is to discuss their anxieties in private. Such cultures estrange anxiety from leadership, turning a normal, common, and often useful human experience into a problem.
Leaders with a modicum of humanity are bound to worry on occasion that they might fall short or let others down. If simply experiencing that worry feels like a failing, leaders may lose the capacity to modulate and make sense of anxiety, and it can become overwhelming. If leaders believe that their job is to ooze confidence and align people behind a vision of change, that becomes their coping strategy. Anxiety then shapes the vision and the choices that flow from it, and defensive organizing is on its way.
Tracing the Path of Defensive Organizing
Defensive organizing follows a route that begins with senior leaders and spreads across the organization as more people are drafted into the effort to keep anxiety at bay. Our research allowed us to draw a road map of sorts that will help you recognize the signs that you are being led down that route and find the exits at different points.
The comforting vision. Defending against anxiety often takes the form of adopting a reassuring narrative. The first step of defensive organizing therefore requires leaders to convince themselves that performance is ailing for reasons unrelated to them and that they can do something to reverse course. In our study, Recco’s CEO concluded that the firm’s hub-and-spoke structure was too rigid for a fast-changing market. At a strategy retreat, he proposed breaking down silos, operating as a shared leadership team, and championing collaboration across the organization. We watched the word “collaboration” generate a ripple of excitement that seemed to make the palpable worry about the firm’s performance vanish.
The unquestioning enthusiasm of a group coalescing around an idea that affirms their leadership is the first sign of defensive organizing. It is a sign of idealization, a defense mechanism that protects us from the conscious experience of anxiety by crediting something — a principle, a process, a product — with having the potential to restore a bright future. In companies we have
