I’m lucky that none of my direct clients try to “motivate” their team members through fear—or at least, not intentionally. Many employees experience some level of fear just from being part of a power hierarchy or because they know life would be more difficult if they were to lose their job. But even though my clients don’t try to frighten or berate their teams to greater achievement, I still hear about leaders who think it’s fine if their team’s apparently successful short-term results are the outcome of fear. Sometimes these threateners are screamers; sometimes they apply quiet, cutting insults or disparagement. So long as they get the output they want, these threateners seem satisfied with their success, no matter the human cost.
I know plenty of senior executives who tolerate threatening leaders like this—leaders who reliably deliver revenue or operational targets but whose employees turn over more frequently than in the rest of the organization, or who complicate or halt organizational collaboration altogether with their “my way or the highway” stances. In turn, some of these leaders’ team members can be hard to work with because they behave either like martyrs or get tough themselves.
The willingness to use threats may allow a leader to rise within an organization; alternatively, this type of leader is sometimes unknowingly hired—who doesn’t want a “results-driven” person on their team? In any case, by the time a senior exec realizes that the organization is being damaged by a threatening leader, the negative behaviors are usually ingrained habits, and it’s very difficult to get these leaders to change.
Threatening Leaders Are Often Afraid Themselves
Surprisingly, it doesn’t really help to express your own anger with the way these leaders behave because they’ve made themselves immune to other people’s feelings. They’ve had years of people being angry with them—even if that anger has “only” come from their subordinates—so they’re used to it. So, think of them as having originally adopted threatening tactics because they were afraid themselves and wanted to look strong, or they thought being tough was the only way not to fail, or someone else rewarded them for acting like a mob boss.
Since these people understand threats, you may be able to threaten them back, at least to get some short-term changes on the public front, by being clear that their current behavior will not be tolerated. Unfortunately, though, they may still exert their negative behaviors in private one-on-one or departmental meetings. The only way to help them change significantly is to pull them closer to you and show compassion for them and acknowledge where they are. Otherwise, they’ll have to resist you as a way of saving their own egos—and if that happens, you’ll get no movement.
Occasionally, when no change occurs, the senior leader may fold because they want the output or they just can’t deal with the situation. Often the only way to create real change in behavior is to move the threatener to a role where they no longer manage people. Or you might even need to remove the person altogether if the threatening behavior has become an engrained habit.
How to Meet a Threatener Head-on
How do you, as a senior leader, decide whether to take action? One useful signal is if you find yourself cringing when you observe the threatener blowing up at or demeaning others. Feeling a sense of shame—“I would never treat people like that!” or “I don’t want to see people being treated like that!”—might be your tipping point. Or you may hear persistent complaints from others, even outside the threatener’s department, about how difficult they are or how their people can’t collaborate without express permission, and then you’ll know you need to act.
It is possible to reprogram a threatener but only if they don’t feel forced to defend their approach, which will only cause them to cling to it more. For example, threateners often vent their spleen by making unkind jokes or comments about anybody who doesn’t deliver the way they want. Start showing your displeasure about that, just by stating, “Oh, that’s not funny.” You’ll probably need to up the ante, so you can make more pointed comments like, “What did you mean by that?” and tell them plainly that you don’t consider that kind of behavior or language acceptable.
This puts them on notice that they can’t behave this way around you, and that you’ll be changing the quality of the conversation one interaction at a time. It’s also crucial to make declarations about the kind of behavior that is not acceptable in your culture—so that threateners understand the standards you’re holding them to.
Don’t Wait for a Crisis to Occur
Unfortunately, in most cases when I’ve worked with organizations in which someone operates in this negative way, the leadership doesn’t address the situation clearly until there’s some kind of crisis. There may be plenty of acknowledgment that a certain individual is difficult to work with, and lots of fussing about how to deal with them, but little action takes place unless the impacts are very disruptive, as when the level of turnover or burnout gets too high or the operating results diminish.
Don’t wait for that to happen. If you’re hearing murmurs or find yourself cringing inside during meetings and notice that it feels uncomfortable to present a united front, don’t avoid the situation. Explore it, investigate it, and take steps to correct it before the organizational damage becomes too great.
Onward and upward—
LK