0:00:10.3 Junior: Two of the biggest determining factors in what your team thinks about you and what others think about you generally are one, your emotional response to dissent, and two, your emotional response to bad news. Welcome back, everyone, to The Leader Factor. Good to be with you. I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Tim Clark, PhD in Social Science from Oxford, and I'm Junior, PhD in trying hard and making a lot of mistakes. So you're going to bring the credibility today.

0:00:42.1 Timothy Clark: No, you probably have a better curriculum than I had.

0:00:45.1 Junior: It's certainly different.

0:00:46.5 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:00:47.2 Junior: It's certainly different. But I think both perspectives will help the conversation today and what we're talking about. Since 2006, we've been coaching and training some of the most influential leaders around the globe. And so we've had front row seats to a lot of their patterns, a lot of the good patterns of the good leaders, the bad patterns of the poor leaders, and anything in between.

0:01:09.0 Timothy Clark: Unedited.

0:01:09.2 Junior: Unedited.

0:01:10.0 Timothy Clark: And we get to see the whole thing.

0:01:11.2 Junior: And we get to do that.

0:01:12.2 Timothy Clark: The bloopers, everything.

0:01:14.1 Junior: Around the world, across industry. So what do you think about our vantage point, Tim?

0:01:19.2 Timothy Clark: Yeah, I think it's... Well, as I said, I think we get to see everything in action. It makes me think of, in social psychology, we talk about the ABCs of social psychology, affect, behavior and cognition. And these three variables affect each other, right? And so that's exactly what we're going to talk about today, is your response to bad news and your response to dissent. So that affect, right? The display of emotion or emotions has an impact on people's behavior and their cognition, their processing capability and what they're willing to do. That's what we're going to talk about today.

0:02:00.8 Junior: Yeah. So for everyone listening, we're grateful to have you. We know that you could spend your time doing a whole bunch of different things. There are a lot of podcasts on the internet to listen to, so thank you for listening to this one. We promise you that if you listen, you'll take at least something away that will be useful to you. Our production team is going to take the nuggets, if you will, from today's episode, put them in a downloadable. The link will probably be in the show notes, I expect, right? Links are going to be in the show notes. So to begin, we want to do a little bit of table setting. And as we were preparing for this episode, we were thinking about what context would be important to share for leaders?

0:02:37.5 Junior: What is it that is important environmentally to discuss before we dig into the real meat and the emotional response of the episode, which is going to be the bulk. So the setup that I wanted to include is the fact that leaders today are under more scrutiny than ever before. And I think that this is something fundamentally different for leaders today that's often underappreciated. The first thing is that we're in the age of transparency. We have Glassdoor, we have LinkedIn, we have Twitter, X. A misstep gets shared to the internet in two seconds after it happens. That did not use to be the case. You could PR your way out of a lot of things. Not that you still can't.

0:03:19.5 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:03:19.8 Junior: But you have less room. What do you think about that?

0:03:22.3 Timothy Clark: I think that you're right. I think that the environment of transparency, Junior, cuts both ways. So, for example, on the one hand, there's more accountability. That's a good thing. So we have more transparency leading to more accountability. That's a good thing. But on the other side of it, it's less forgiving, right? It's, you're less able to overcome what you've done in the past because your life is documented. And so how do you expunge the sins of the past?

0:03:56.6 Junior: You gotta delete the internet.

0:03:58.4 Timothy Clark: Right? So it does cut both ways. There's more transparency for accountability, and we love that.

0:04:05.0 Junior: Yeah.

0:04:05.5 Timothy Clark: But there's less forgiveness. And I think we're dealing with the consequences on both sides.

0:04:11.9 Junior: Definitely are. Social media has a long memory.

0:04:14.7 Timothy Clark: It does.

0:04:16.3 Junior: Number two, cultural shifts. We can lump a whole host of things in here. Many things are going on in culture, not least is your social responsibility. And leaders often get poked at. We see this all the time with the clients we work with. They get poked at for acting too slowly, they get poked at for acting poorly, maybe it was too fast. It seems difficult to get it just right in the eyes of the world. And so you're responsible historically for profits. We want to create shareholder value, and that's what you're here for.

0:04:50.9 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:04:51.3 Junior: But now you're on the hook for workforce dynamics, culture, the earth. Your scope of responsibility has broadened.

0:05:01.4 Timothy Clark: It's broadened, to say the least. Yeah.

0:05:03.5 Junior: Yeah. Have you seen that in your experience with leaders?

0:05:06.2 Timothy Clark: Oh, it's unbelievable. Junior, I was just going back. In fact, I even printed this out. I have in my hands an article from the New York Times from September 13th, 1970. And this is an article that probably a lot of listeners have heard about. This was one of the original articles on the corporate theory of the... The theory of the corporation by Milton Friedman. A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. So it's so interesting because you go back to 1970 and you read Friedman and there's a very narrow scope of responsibility or stewardship associated with leaders in the corporation. May I read just an excerpt?

0:06:01.9 Junior: Please.

0:06:02.6 Timothy Clark: He says that business has a social conscience and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution, and whatever else may be the catch words of the contemporary crop of reformers. Notice the sarcasm here. In fact, they are, or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously, preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Interesting. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades. Ouch.

0:06:49.0 Junior: That's soft, insulated language.

0:06:50.9 Timothy Clark: Yes. So it's pretty unbelievable. By anyone's reckoning, the stewardship, the responsibilities of a corporation and of leaders in an organization have broadened.

0:07:04.4 Junior: Yeah. And the breadth of that responsibility, whether that's good or not, is completely arguable. We're not making a statement there. We're just saying it's broadened.

0:07:13.0 Timothy Clark: It's broadened.

0:07:13.6 Junior: You're responsible for more now than you were in 1970.

0:07:16.5 Timothy Clark: Can I give you another example that's really interesting? Take a head coach of a D1 football team today. A few years ago, we had the coach and assistant coaches, and that was your staff and you go play and that's your job. Today, they've added, in recent, just recently, they've added a position now. So now we have a general manager, right? Because the role of head coach has broadened, now you have so many external constituents that you have to pay attention to, that you are answerable to in some way. So the position has become so much more complicated that one person can't do it. So that's just another example of the broadening that's going on with these positions.

0:08:12.1 Junior: Yeah. Breadth has increased. Generational differences, that's the next one we'll talk about quickly. You have to hire and develop millennials, gen z, gen alpha, different...

0:08:23.3 Timothy Clark: Is that possible?

0:08:24.2 Junior: I don't know.

0:08:25.5 Timothy Clark: Is that even possible?

0:08:26.6 Junior: It might not be. We should throw our hands up. Well, it's certainly different.

0:08:31.6 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:08:32.1 Junior: They come with advantages and disadvantages like any generation. There are some things in which they're super strong.

0:08:39.2 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:08:39.6 Junior: And we're seeing that in our own organization as we hire and develop talent.

0:08:41.4 Timothy Clark: Yeah. That's right.

0:08:44.1 Junior: It's fascinating to see the generational differences in the way that people approach problems. There are some liabilities with your generation, there are some liabilities with mine.

0:08:53.1 Timothy Clark: Really?

0:08:54.5 Junior: And so that's something that isn't necessarily different. Over time, generations have differed, but I think that the gaps between them have become wider in shorter time. If you look at the difference between a boomer and gen alpha, that's different. That's a different few decades than 1900 to 1930.

0:09:17.1 Timothy Clark: I'll grant you that.

0:09:18.5 Junior: Yeah. I think it's self evident.

0:09:20.7 Timothy Clark: It's really true.

0:09:22.0 Junior: You've got hybrid work, you've got to manage not only a local workforce potentially, but one that's international, multiple time zones, virtual, on site. You have less insight into the work that's actually being done. It's difficult that way. So work environment. And lastly, technology. Pace of change has increased and now almost everyone listening has to figure out how to incorporate AI into what they're doing, which is an episode we will talk about later.

0:09:51.2 Timothy Clark: I was just thinking about, we had a meeting like a week ago, the team, and we were just talking about the tech stack we use and how many applications we use.

0:10:03.3 Junior: Yeah.

0:10:03.9 Timothy Clark: It's unbelievable.

0:10:04.9 Junior: Yeah. I finished a software audit maybe two weeks ago and I can't remember how many rows there were in that sheet, but it was something like 50.

0:10:15.8 Timothy Clark: It's incredible.

0:10:16.0 Junior: So we're using 50 individual pieces of software to run an organization much smaller than a lot of our clients.

0:10:23.2 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:10:23.9 Junior: And that was interesting to me to look at and say, okay, how did this happen so quickly? What each of these pieces do and we need them all. That was after the audit, after we'd cut everything that we wanted to cut.

0:10:39.5 Timothy Clark: Right. So you do the audit and you say we still need all of these things?

0:10:43.5 Junior: Yeah. Yeah. That's different. So how many leaders are going to be able to look at 50 line items of software and understand what they do?

0:10:51.4 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:10:52.6 Junior: Few.

0:10:53.2 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:10:53.5 Junior: And yet that's something that you're now responsible for, some but many.

0:10:58.7 Timothy Clark: And then the backdrop for all of this complexity, Junior, is speed.

0:11:05.1 Junior: Yeah.

0:11:05.7 Timothy Clark: Right? The compression of time frames. This is what we're dealing with.

0:11:10.9 Junior: So leadership in many ways has never been more difficult, it's never been more complicated. The reason I wanted to start out with this as setup is to commiserate a little bit with people out there. I often feel like leaders feel isolated because much of the world doesn't see the burdens that are on the shoulders of leaders to just start the day.

0:11:36.6 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:11:37.1 Junior: Regardless of what's happening internally in the organization, there's all of this weight that's on the shoulders of leaders that many people don't see, recognize or care about.

0:11:46.4 Timothy Clark: So this episode, there's some therapeutic value here.

0:11:49.4 Junior: Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully. But I say that because we do understand the landscape, we understand what leaders are dealing with. And the reason that this has anything to do with emotional response is that every single one of these variables is a straw on the camel's back. And you get pretty close to breaking the camel's back without adding too much. And in the patterns that I've seen in watching leaders, two of the straws that often break the camel's back are the two that we mentioned at the beginning, which right here I'll move to slides for just one second.

0:12:25.9 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:12:26.6 Junior: A leader's two main emotional triggers, we have dissent and we have bad news. So if you add the social responsibility, the workforce, you add all of these elements, and then you add dissent or you add bad news, often you trigger an emotional response from that leader that can be really damaging. What do you think about these two categories?

0:12:51.2 Timothy Clark: Well, I think that they are the ones that provoke very, very strong emotions, bad news and dissent. And it makes me think, Junior, about the research that we do around emotional intelligence and how we collect data on 30 skills. And I was going back and looking at that data in our global normative database, and the lowest mean score, if you look at all those 30 skills, the lowest mean score is for what? None other than impulse control. That's the lowest mean score worldwide.

0:13:30.7 Junior: Down there at the bottom we have stress tolerance too.

0:13:32.6 Timothy Clark: And stress tolerance was second to the lowest.

0:13:34.7 Junior: Yeah. So what do you think those two things tell us?

0:13:38.1 Timothy Clark: I think that they tell us that, well, we already know that leaders are under tremendous pressure. You've made the case for that. And so we... But we also know that we can do something about this. We can help ourselves. It's a learnable skill.

0:13:53.7 Junior: As we were crafting the layout for this episode, we had the option to just lump everything into emotional regulation, but I felt like that was too broad. We're always looking for better leverage, we're always looking for the 80/20 rule. And so for me, if you can solve for your emotional response to dissent and bad news, you're going to get the majority of the benefit.

0:14:16.2 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:14:16.8 Junior: So if everyone listening can figure out how to do these two things, I think you're going to make tremendous progress and you're going to get the bulk of the benefit regarding emotional response generally.

0:14:29.0 Timothy Clark: I agree.

0:14:29.9 Junior: So let's move into dissent. What is dissent? Dissent is the expression or holding of opinions at variance with those previously, commonly or officially held. It's fancy for disagreement. Do most leaders want disagreement?

0:14:47.5 Timothy Clark: They say they do verbally, but then they betray that non verbally.

0:14:54.1 Junior: Yeah.

0:14:54.5 Timothy Clark: How's that, Junior? That's what happens.

0:14:55.4 Junior: Well, and some don't even say that verbally. Some will say like, no, no disagreement.

0:15:00.7 Timothy Clark: Yeah. But you know what? I think these days, not too many will say that.

0:15:02.9 Junior: You pay lip service?

0:15:03.8 Timothy Clark: Yeah. So I think the vast majority of leaders will say the official line publicly. They'll say, absolutely we want dissent, we want disagreement, we want divergent thinking, we want you to challenge the status quo. We're all about that.

0:15:18.8 Junior: Yeah.

0:15:19.9 Timothy Clark: Non verbally, they're often saying something entirely different.

0:15:23.4 Junior: Yeah. So if we look at the difference between say, do, what do they actually do after they say that they want dissent? Here's what they do. Most leaders optimize to minimize dissent. And there are two ways that they do this that I've seen. The passive or the ignorant approach is to assume alignment. So if you approach this topic passively or you're ignorant to the fact that this is even an issue, then you're going to assume that everything's okay inside the team. You assume, yes, we're on the same page, we're all working toward the same goal. I'm going to stay out of the fray, I'm going to do my stuff, they're going to do their stuff. And by so doing, you're really not inviting much dissent. You're not going to get a whole lot if you're as uninvolved as that. People are at a distance, you're really not involved in the day to day. And so the passive approach ends in no dissent much of the time. Out of that, sheer passivity or ignorance.

0:16:24.0 Timothy Clark: I want to add a point to this, Junior, and that is that the leader begins in a deficit position. It's not a level playing field. Why? Because take a look at the big five traits, right? Big five personality traits. One of those is agreeableness, remember? Right? Agreeableness. What is it? What does that mean? People have a bias toward agreeableness. They want to be agreeable. So if you come in as a leader to an environment and you're discussing issues, people naturally want to be agreeable. You have to overcome that agreeableness bias that most people have before you can even get into constructive dissent. So if you know that you have that obstacle and then on top of that you are displaying, you have an emotional reaction to dissent or bad news, you've compounded the problem. So you just have to know that you have a bias coming in, an agreeableness bias.

0:17:30.1 Junior: So that's passive or ignorant approach. The second approach is the active or the toxic approach, which is punishing attempts when you see them. So if there's dissent in the environment, someone raises their hand and pushes back on something, you actively punish that. That's a stupid question, right?

0:17:46.7 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:17:47.6 Junior: Why are you asking that right now? Hey, now is not the time. Those types of responses where people feel that and they say, oh, got it. Okay, now I understand the environment a little bit better. That's not welcome here, so I'm just going to retreat, I'm going to stay quiet. And then is there subsequent dissent? Often not. If you punish it hard enough the first or second time, they'll usually back off or they'll leave.

0:18:12.3 Timothy Clark: Well, you iced the room.

0:18:14.8 Junior: Yeah.

0:18:15.2 Timothy Clark: You move people from offense to defense. Now they're in a mode of threat detection. It's going to take a lot to get them back.

0:18:24.0 Junior: So that's how they do it. It's either passive or it's active. Now, why do they do it? In the case of passive, maybe they don't know or they want to stay agreeable. There are some reasons. In the case of active, there are a whole host of reasons. Maybe you want to stay the expert, you want to be seen and perceived as in charge, you want to retain as much authority as possible. Maybe you are inept, you're ineffective and you don't want people to find out. And so you're not going to go toe to toe with somebody.

0:18:55.2 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:18:55.5 Junior: You are going to punish, you're going to retreat and hide behind your title.

0:19:00.2 Timothy Clark: No, that's very true. So there's a multitude of factors, but they all go back. I'd say most of them go back to insecurity as a leader, right?

0:19:12.4 Junior: Say more.

0:19:13.5 Timothy Clark: Well, I just think that if you're insecure, you're not going to want people going toe to toe with you. If you're insecure, you're going to be hiding behind title, position and authority, right?

0:19:24.2 Junior: Yeah.

0:19:24.5 Timothy Clark: If you're insecure, you want to be the expert, you want to be the oracle, you want to be the repository of answers. So dissent is not something that you like, even though you may be publicly and verbally saying, oh, yes, we need that, right? We need to have constructive dissent.

0:19:46.2 Junior: So the point here is that many leaders optimize for no dissent. So what happens if we get no dissent? Then the status quo never changes. If the status quo never changes, then we get into an obsolescence cycle, organizationally and personally.

0:20:04.0 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:20:04.5 Junior: Nothing's going to change, no one's going to get better, and the organization's going to fail as consequence. And so either you get dissent and you move forward, you improve, you adapt, you overcome, or you get no dissent and you stay where you are. It's stasis for everyone and eventually you're obsolete.

0:20:19.0 Timothy Clark: Yep.

0:20:20.5 Junior: That's what's at stake. That's why dissent is so important. Now let's get into bad news. We covered dissent. Bad news is inevitable. The choice is how you respond. And the pattern that we've seen and are deciding to include is that many leaders emotional response to bad news is poor. What have you seen in leaders who have had poor responses to bad news? What do they do? How do they behave? When I come to you and I say, hey, we missed the goal. Hey, so and so is turning over. Hey, whatever the case may be.

0:20:58.5 Timothy Clark: Well, they get agitated, they get irritated, they attack the messenger. All of these things that we've seen over and over again. Again, the unintended consequences is that you're creating, you're pushing compliance. And then what do you get? Eventually you get the group think, you get the homogenization of thought, you get the echo chamber. And as far as unintended consequences go, they're very costly. You're... It's like levying attacks on an organization. That's what's happening.

0:21:35.5 Junior: Unregulated responses cause so much harm.

0:21:39.4 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:21:40.2 Junior: Recently I was watching a football game and one team won, one team lost. And I watched the athletic director in a press conference after the game. That's always interesting. You know what I'm talking about?

0:21:54.0 Timothy Clark: I do know what you're talking about.

0:21:56.2 Junior: Yeah, this ended in a fine. But the athletic director or AD gets up and vehemently goes after the officiating crew, the referees, those who are enforcing the rules of the game. And in almost any sport, the referees can have an influence on the outcome of the game, either intentionally or unintentionally. And in this athletic director's mind, it was intentional and he made an interesting display. After the fact, the ripple effects were far reaching and immediate. This is one of those immediacy transparency things we were talking about before.

0:22:39.2 Timothy Clark: Yep.

0:22:40.0 Junior: So didn't regulate his emotions. Said some things that he probably shouldn't have said or objectively just shouldn't have said.

0:22:46.5 Timothy Clark: Well, he said that the ref stole the game.

0:22:49.2 Junior: Yeah, yeah. This is such an interesting case study.

0:22:54.0 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:22:56.4 Junior: Anyway, the athletic director does that and it tarnishes the whole image of the institution, the whole organization, not just the team...

0:23:06.5 Timothy Clark: The university, the football program and the personal reputation of the AD.

0:23:12.4 Junior: Yeah. In two minutes.

0:23:15.4 Timothy Clark: Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:17.5 Junior: So that was really interesting to me, an example of an unregulated emotional response. And then, you know, we got the apology after the fact and we try to make up and make nice, but the damage...

0:23:32.7 Timothy Clark: I'm a little surprised by this though, Junior, because you go to AD school 101, right? Athletic director school 101, first semester, first week, first day, first lecture, you don't take the referees on in a public forum in front of the media.

0:23:54.2 Junior: Yeah.

0:23:54.9 Timothy Clark: What part of that do you not understand?

0:23:56.5 Junior: Yeah. But to be fair and to give him his due, he's dealing with a whole bunch of stuff, right?

0:24:04.2 Timothy Clark: I know.

0:24:04.8 Junior: He's thinking, well, the winningness of the team and our playoff potential and all of these elements, not just football, but the university and money and donors and he's dealing with all the stress that we talked about before. His scope of responsibility is super broad.

0:24:22.2 Timothy Clark: It is.

0:24:23.0 Junior: And it's no excuse but we do have to understand that if you are loaded up with the stress of all of those things and then something like that game happens, there's opportunity for you to go one of two ways. You have that unregulated emotional response, which is the natural path, I might add.

0:24:40.8 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:24:41.2 Junior: Or you have the unnatural path of creating some distance. And we're going to get to solutions in the back half of the episode and talk about our recommendations, the patterns that we've seen in the highest performing leaders and what you can do to improve. But that is really the culmination, I think, of an example of an unregulated emotional response that was really damaging.

0:25:00.8 Timothy Clark: I do want to add one point, Junior, and that is that dissent will come out. The question is, will it come out above ground or below ground? It's going to come out, right? So if you're creating an environment where people can express constructive dissent and you can deal with that and manage that and navigate that, then that's the healthy processing of dissent. If you can't, if you block that, if you repress that, does that mean the dissent just doesn't... There is no dissent? No, it'll come out. It'll come out below ground. You're going to drive it underground, and it'll come out in the sidebar conversations, and people will hold their kangaroo courts, but it will come out.

0:25:55.0 Junior: Yeah. The dissent, I mean, stay tuned, everyone, for an article about dissent, maybe, that may or may not be coming out in a publication that kind of sounds like preview.

0:26:08.5 Timothy Clark: Yes.

0:26:08.7 Junior: We'll see.

0:26:09.4 Timothy Clark: That's... It will be.

0:26:11.4 Junior: So reframe dissent as an opportunity. We're going to get into the solution piece, and I want to talk about this slide right here, optimize for dissent. So we're going to spin the disincentive for dissent and say optimize for dissent. We don't want to discourage it, we don't want to mute it. We don't want to have it happen in places unbeknownst to us.

0:26:34.2 Timothy Clark: Drive it underground.

0:26:35.5 Junior: We want to have it happen right in front of us. And we have an opportunity to do that based on our behavior and our emotional response to dissent, bad news. So we have to first reframe dissent as an opportunity. This is something that I would put in leadership 101 and AD 101. Winston Churchill said, courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

0:27:01.2 Timothy Clark: Oh, I like that.

0:27:02.5 Junior: Yeah. Dissent should be followed by listening, which takes courage, because there's a temptation to get defensive and angry, which is the emotional response, which is the natural path.

0:27:13.0 Timothy Clark: We don't normally equate courage with listening.

0:27:16.8 Junior: No, we don't. We often associate the getting up and the being loud and the taking a stance and planting a flag, but that's why I like this quote so much. And that's, I really feel like it has a lot to do with dissent because the first thing you have to do is just sit there and listen. And that is not the natural path.

0:27:36.2 Timothy Clark: No.

0:27:37.0 Junior: How have you seen leaders use listening to overcome an emotional response? Have you seen it?

0:27:45.5 Timothy Clark: I have, and I think it does two things, Junior. First of all, if the leader listens, then it gives them... That listening time is also time to, for them to compose themselves, right? So that they can maintain their equanimity at the same time they're listening. And so it allows them to deescalate personally and think, right? Suspend, you know, create space between stimulus and response and then think and let their cognition be in charge, not their affect.

0:28:27.4 Junior: Yeah.

0:28:28.2 Timothy Clark: So it just gives them a little time to do that. And at the same time, they're processing, that's all good. And good consequences come out of that.

0:28:37.2 Junior: Yep. So a couple practical tips or notes. Many leaders understand when dissent is going to come based on the first... Based on the intro to conversation from the other person. So if the other person says, hey, and they sound like this, too, hey, I've been thinking about something, right? What do you know is coming? Either dissent or something provocative, right? You can tell in the intonation.

0:29:02.5 Timothy Clark: Yeah. Not agreement.

0:29:03.5 Junior: Right? Or if they don't tell you what they need time about, but they ask you for time, right? Hey, do you have 15 minutes tomorrow? Right? Yeah, what do you need? Right? Oh, we'll just talk about it then. Okay. Well, I know something's coming, right?

0:29:16.4 Timothy Clark: Sure.

0:29:17.2 Junior: So reframing in that moment and saying, okay, whatever comes, be it dissent or otherwise, therein lies an opportunity. So whatever they're going to tell me, if it's bad news, if it's dissent, if it's something else, there's some gold in there. There's some opportunity that I need to watch out for, so I'm going to listen, I'm going to sit back so that I can then take advantage of it. Reframing dissent as opportunity is one of the first things we have to do. The last thing that I'll say to this point is that if you get dissent, what does that mean? Means that your team is engaged. They're actively participating in what's going on.

0:29:51.7 Timothy Clark: They care.

0:29:52.9 Junior: They care.

0:29:53.0 Timothy Clark: Yes.

0:29:54.2 Junior: So look at it that way. Hey, so grateful that this person actually cares enough to say anything about the thing. If they didn't care, if they were completely unengaged, the easiest path for them is to not risk anything and just keep doing what they're doing, right?

0:30:09.0 Timothy Clark: Right. Junior, reminds me of the statement by Mary Parker Follett, the mother of management, and she said, all refinement comes from friction. So as a leader, friction is not your enemy.

0:30:28.0 Junior: Yeah.

0:30:28.8 Timothy Clark: It's your friend, but you've got to learn how to deal with it, manage it, harness it, harvest it. You got to learn how to do that.

0:30:38.8 Junior: Yeah. I had here earlier...

0:30:40.4 Timothy Clark: Don't turn it away.

0:30:41.4 Junior: No, I know. The best decisions are a product of heat and friction. If you have an idea and it hasn't been through that process, it hasn't been through the refiner's fire, it still has its impurities.

0:30:56.4 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:30:57.4 Junior: Without the dissent, you're not going to have a polished idea, a polished path forward. It's going to have too many rough edges. Okay, next one, normalize and prepare for bad news. This one is somewhat hard to do because bad news often takes you by surprise. But it's something that's possible and something that I think if you practice enough, you can actually become quite good at. So bad news, you have to see it, again, it's a reframe. It's not personal failure, it's an opportunity to course correct or to improve. Bad news is information. And the way that I think about this as a leader, in my own personal management style, what I've tried to incorporate is this idea that all information is good information.

0:31:47.2 Timothy Clark: Good information.

0:31:48.1 Junior: There's no such thing, I mean, it can be irrelevant, but it doesn't inherently tilt one way favorably or unfavorably. It can present opportunities, it can present risks. But the best decisions are informed by information. The more of it you have, the more high quality relevant information you have, the better. If you don't have high quality relevant information, which is what you'll get when you discourage it, you're going to make worse decisions. So if bad news happens to be information important to your decision making, why would you not want that information? It might be difficult to hear at first, you might feel a certain way about it, but why would you not like to have it?

0:32:36.5 Timothy Clark: Because it's painful.

0:32:38.0 Junior: Right. But okay, what are you sacrificing?

0:32:40.4 Timothy Clark: Yeah, but what's interesting, Junior, is that the consequences, you, it's really an emotional response to bad news, and often even dissent, is just a form of denial. That's all it is. You're pushing it off and it's a way to kind of self medicate a little bit, but you can't deny the consequences. You may be able to defer or delay them a little bit, but ultimately you got to deal with them.

0:33:12.0 Junior: Yeah.

0:33:12.4 Timothy Clark: So you may as well deal with them with poise upfront rather than create a problem and then deal with them after that because you're going to have to anyway.

0:33:26.0 Junior: Yeah. It's like getting an IRS letter and throwing it in the garbage, right?

0:33:30.4 Timothy Clark: That's Right.

0:33:30.5 Junior: Like, does the problem go away?

0:33:32.2 Timothy Clark: No.

0:33:32.4 Junior: No. So you may as well just open the envelope, stare the problem in the face and see if it actually is a problem.

0:33:39.0 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:33:39.2 Junior: Because it may not be, right? You may have in your head, like, I'm getting audited and this is going to be a bad deal.

0:33:45.2 Timothy Clark: Yeah. Just think about anything that you've pushed off that you don't want to deal with.

0:33:48.4 Junior: Yeah. It went away, right? Yeah, it just resolved itself. No.

0:33:52.4 Timothy Clark: And we've all done that.

0:33:53.4 Junior: No. If anything, it gets worse, right?

0:33:55.4 Timothy Clark: That's right. Yeah. Compound.

0:33:57.2 Junior: It compounds.

0:33:58.2 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:34:00.2 Junior: Okay, let's go to the next one. Control immediate reactions. This one covers a lot of territory. It's one of the most important. What I'll say here is pause before responding. And here's a talk track for you. Hey, thank you for bringing this up. Let me think about this for just a minute before I say anything and then just sit there for a second.

0:34:25.9 Timothy Clark: People should probably use that statement more often than they do.

0:34:28.4 Junior: They totally should. I should. And you can just turn gears for a second because if you immediately just respond, it's probably not going to be as good, as healthy, as on point a response as it would be if you gave it even 15 seconds, right? Because you can hurry and do the calculus like, okay, well, this is what I want to say. If I said that, what would happen? That wouldn't be good. So let's not say that. Let's say something more amenable, right?

0:34:56.4 Timothy Clark: Well, and I think there's another kind of historical bias where leaders think that they need to fill the airwaves.

0:35:04.5 Junior: Yeah.

0:35:04.9 Timothy Clark: And they can't tolerate silence. I've seen that a lot, especially with executives. How many executives have you seen who can tolerate some silence, sit there, process, listen. Doesn't happen very often.

0:35:26.3 Junior: Yeah, yeah. You want to get put in a hypo group? Do that with your boss. They're going to be like, whoa. Right on.

0:35:33.9 Timothy Clark: It's a good point. Good point.

0:35:35.0 Junior: This person knows their stuff. Here's a cool example. Abraham Lincoln, he wrote what? I don't... He probably didn't call them this, many people do now. He wrote hot letters. And a hot letter is a letter that you write and don't send, right? That's often emotional. So there was an opportunity he had to write and send one of these letters to General Meade after he failed to pursue the Confederate forces following Gettysburg. So this is like a high stakes, high emotion situation.

0:36:06.6 Timothy Clark: Meade didn't do what he was supposed to do.

0:36:08.3 Junior: No.

0:36:08.9 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:36:09.6 Junior: So he wants to immediately send the message and berate him.

0:36:17.0 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:36:18.0 Junior: He knows what that will do to morale. So what does he do? He leaves that letter in his desk. And he did this across multiple occasions. I think about that, he had some advantage in that he had to send a letter, right? Couldn't call him on the phone, couldn't send him a text message, couldn't shoot him an email. I think that that's part of the disadvantage to us, is we have opportunity to respond immediately to almost anything.

0:36:43.4 Junior: But imagine that you didn't, that you had to write a letter or create some space, right? How do we translate that creating some space into what we do today? I think that it's just that, waiting to respond and even doing that explicitly, as we said, that's not going to... That's not weird. It might seem a little bit unnatural. The person can wait 10 seconds, right? And they're probably going to appreciate the better response that's going to come after the fact.

0:37:11.5 Timothy Clark: Well, the hot letter allowed Lincoln to vent by himself.

0:37:17.1 Junior: Yeah.

0:37:17.9 Timothy Clark: And process by himself.

0:37:20.3 Junior: Yeah. Yeah.

0:37:22.3 Timothy Clark: And then you could edit the letter, you could write a different letter, you could send no letter. But it gives you time to come to balance, think through everything, calm down. It's good strategy.

0:37:35.5 Junior: And I'm going to add something off outline right here. What you also don't want to do is even if you're not immediately responding to the person who gave you the bad news, don't immediately go back channel it to somebody else and, like, get all upset. Right? Part of your job as a leader is just absorbing that.

0:37:54.4 Timothy Clark: That's true.

0:37:55.4 Junior: Right? It's not your job to go and whine and moan and complain about the situation right after the fact to, like, your buddy. Right? Part of what it means to be a leader is getting that bad news, getting the dissent and owning it, absorbing it. And if it's an emotional thing that doesn't have any practical implications moving forward, just absorb it and let it die with you.

0:38:18.0 Timothy Clark: And protecting other people's reputations at the same time.

0:38:21.5 Junior: Yeah. Like, what are you going to do? Go ruin somebody else's day?

0:38:23.0 Timothy Clark: Right.

0:38:24.5 Junior: Yeah. So just own it. Okay. Practice constructive communication. This is the last one that we're going to go into. I like this one a lot. Again, these are broad categories. We could fit a lot of things in here. But here is... Well, we'll give two things you can do here. Aim first to understand, not defend. And so in that response, whenever, even if it's 20 seconds later, we want to explore. We want to approach whatever came to us with curiosity, not contempt. We don't want to get defensive and we don't want to lash back out. The idea is not to just win the argument, whatever it is, we want to understand what's going on. Maybe there's more context we need. So often responding to dissent or bad news with a question is a really nice way to do a couple of things. Practically, you're giving yourself time to think. Right?

0:39:17.0 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:39:17.5 Junior: And two, you may get actual new information that you didn't have at the first approach.

0:39:23.4 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:39:24.3 Junior: So what would you say here about ask clarifying questions?

0:39:27.3 Timothy Clark: Oh, I think that this is probably the best single practical piece of advice that you could give, is, okay, pause, we talked about that. But then come right back with questions. As you say, questions give you time to think through things, gives you an opportunity, learn, come to balance. I think it's the best single piece of practical advice, I really do. Come back with questions. And when you move from advocacy to inquiry, when you shift to that mode, it changes your emotional state almost immediately.

0:40:11.4 Junior: Here's another talk track. If somebody comes to you and says, hey, something bad happened, we missed the whatever, we both know this wasn't the outcome we wanted. Let's figure out where we go from here. It's softer, it's more neutral, it's an acknowledgment that, hey, it didn't go as we wanted, but there's the future, there's every moment past now, and we can use every one of those to figure out what we do. So I like that one as well. Very last point after these five. And we, I talked about this just a second ago.

0:40:48.2 Junior: But you're the one responsible, and so you can't always just deflect the dissent. You can't deflect the bad news. You have to own that, and that's part of your role. It's part of what you signed up for. And so if you as a leader are saying, I really like my job, I just don't like the part of it where there's dissent and bad news, I don't know what to tell you. Like, you're gonna have to go find a different job.

0:41:11.5 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:41:11.9 Junior: Because that is so much of what this is about, and it's a huge pattern. We've had just direct line of sight into this going on so many times in so many different organizations. They get dissent and they punish it. They get bad news and they lash out, and it doesn't help anybody. It punishes the organization, it hurts the team, it hurts the person's credibility as an individual, and it hurts their reputation moving forward.

0:41:38.2 Junior: So if you can learn how to do these things, even though it's hard, we mentioned at the beginning, the deck is stacked against you. You have all of these things going on, and it only takes a little bit of dissent or a little bit of bad news to ruin your day, you can have an unregulated emotional response and just wreck the whole thing. So in acknowledgement of the fact that it's not easy, it's possible. And if you can do it, you manage your emotional response to dissent and bad news, you got 80% of it figured out.

0:42:07.5 Timothy Clark: Junior, I was sitting around a conference table the other day with a bunch of leaders, and the senior leader, won't name names or organizations, really jumped on one of the leaders in the room and emotionally lashed out a bit. It wasn't overly dramatic, but it was inappropriate. And it was not, it just wasn't professional, not appropriate. And we could all see it. We were all there, we could all see it. He didn't apologize. He didn't acknowledge what he did.

0:42:49.8 Timothy Clark: So here's my last point. If you do something like that in a public forum, in the presence of others, you need to apologize as soon as you recognize what you've done and you need to do it publicly, that will go a long ways. It means that you recognize what you did, you acknowledge it, you apologize. You've got to do that. He did not do that. We all walked away. That's a character issue if you can't own that in the moment.

0:43:26.4 Junior: Yep. I appreciate that you brought that up because every single one of us is going to misstep. We're all going to fall into this trap.

0:43:33.6 Timothy Clark: Here and there.

0:43:34.0 Junior: And people often, we don't know everything that's going on behind the scenes, which is why we tried to spell out some of it. There's a lot going on, and so we need to give each other a little bit of grace. And when we do make mistakes, we need to own them and apologize.

0:43:49.9 Timothy Clark: We do.

0:43:50.3 Junior: I appreciate bringing that up.

0:43:50.8 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:43:51.7 Junior: Okay, everybody. So that's the emotional response to dissent and bad news. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please leave us a comment. Please like and subscribe, share the episode with someone who you think might find it valuable. They might think that that would be interesting since it's about emotional response. So maybe preface it so they don't think that you're calling them out. Hopefully you found something useful in this episode and we'll catch you in the next one. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.

0:44:26.5 Jillian: Hey, Leader Factor listeners, it's Jillian. If you liked the content in today's episode, we've compiled all of the concepts and slides into a downloadable resource for you. Click the link in the description or visit leaderfactor.com to explore our full content library. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll catch you in the next episode.

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