Hey Friend,

My October has been extremely full, but it's also my favorite month, and every apple, mulled cider, and crisp morning brings me joy! I hope you're also finding joy (or at least contentment) in this fall season, and that you feel supported and loved in all the ways you need and deserve.

Today, I want to talk about defensiveness at work.

We've all gotten defensive at some point, and we've all also been on the other side of defensiveness. Someone gives feedback, raises a concern, directs a next step, or points out something that isn’t working, and the person on the receiving end pushes back, shuts down, goes quiet, or suddenly asks seventeen questions that feel like a cross-examination.

Usually, the person who said "the thing" walks away convinced that the other person is unreasonable and "the problem."

But in my experience, defensiveness is less a verdict on a person's character or capability, and more a powerful signal that we could all pay a lot more attention to.

When someone gets defensive, they are telling you (often without words and frequently without realizing it) that something feels threatened. Their nervous system has registered danger and responded accordingly and naturally.

They fight back. They run away. They beg for forgiveness. They freeze or shut down.

Whatever their tendency under stress or tension, they move into protective mode because the human brain cannot reliably distinguish between a predator in the wild and a difficult performance conversation. All this giant organ in our head knows is: I am not safe right now and I need to stay alive at all costs.

Understanding this makes a big difference in leadership because it means that when someone gets defensive in response to something you said or did, you can intellectually understand that they are not attacking you, that they are not a bad person, and that even if they respond entirely inappropriately, they are protecting themselves. That distinction changes everything about how we respond.

Here's what I wish more people understood: Defensiveness means someone is on defense. They're shielding themselves, attempting to prevent a goal/run/shot, or attempting to make it through the jungle without being eaten by a mountain lion.

In these situations, our goal is not to take an offensive position by pushing harder, getting louder, displaying frustration, or doubling down (even when that's our instinct). The harder, more skillful, and more effective move is to figure out how to get on the same team.

Nobody wins a game where both sides are playing against each other. In workplaces, it can't be us vs. them. We have to work together and ensure that everyone is protected.

The first step is to take a deep breath and recognize what's happening. Then, we have to seek to understand what the person feels they need to protect.

In my workshops, I teach a framework called BRACES, because defensiveness, at its core, is about bracing for a threat. Those threats almost always fall into one of these six categories with some pretty predictable inner narratives:

B — Belonging. “Do I (still) have a place here? Am I (still) wanted on this team? Does my authentic self fit in here? Is my membership to the group at risk? Are you with me or against me?”

R — Respect. “Am I being treated with dignity? Does this person actually see and value what I bring? Do you understand my effort, my experience, and what I bring to the table?”

A — Autonomy. “Do I have any say in this? Am I being micromanaged, overruled, or dismissed? Can I make meaningful choices? Do I have agency over what comes next?”

C — Clarity. “What exactly is being asked of me? What happens next? Can I trust this process?” Ambiguity is its own kind of threat.

E — Equity. “Is this fair? Would this be happening if I were someone else? Is there a double standard here?”

S1 — Status. “How do I look right now? Am I losing credibility or standing? Am I still who I think I am?"

S2 — Safety. "What actually happens to me if I get this wrong? Am I or something important to me in danger? ”

And then there are two amplifiers that make ALL of these worse and make us BRACE harder against threat:

Capacity. How stressed, burned out, or overwhelmed someone already is before the conversation even starts

History. The previous bad bosses, painful feedback moments, or past harm someone carries into the room with them, whether you know about it or not.

What I find most humbling is that none of these things are unreasonable to protect. Belonging, respect, autonomy, clarity, equity, safety — these are things every human being in every workplace deserves. Defensiveness shows up when someone isn't sure they'll get them. So our job is to look at it as a clue and an entry point to an intervention and response that has a chance of working.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

I recently facilitated a dialogue between a manager and a direct report who had been entrenched in conflict for years (yes, years). By the time I got into the room with them, both had built up so much history, so many grievances, and so many stories about the other person that meaningful communication had become nearly impossible. Every conversation reinforced the same dynamic, and it seemed that every attempt to address it made it worse.

I noticed almost immediately that both of their BRACES were up from the moment each of them entered the office (and honestly, probably even before).

The manager’s biggest triggers were Status and Respect. She felt perpetually undermined, like her authority and experience weren’t being honored. Every pushback from her direct report felt like a challenge to her credibility, and every snarky comment made her feel like her effort was being ignored.

The direct report’s biggest triggers were Autonomy, Equity, and Respect. He felt micromanaged, held to standards that felt inconsistently applied across the team, and like his perspective was never really heard. Every directive felt like a direct assault on his agency, and every attempt at accountability felt like he was being told to change who he was at his core rather than his behavior.

Neither of them felt like they were being treated with dignity. Neither of them felt like there was a path forward. Both of them were fully braced for a fight and to protect their own interests at every moment of every day.

Throughout our time together, I helped them both name and understand their own BRACES, and then begin to see the other person’s. That's when things started shifting incrementally from Person A vs. Person B to Person A&B against a common problem. As we talked, the manager began to interrupt the story that every pushback was insubordination and pausing long enough to get curious about what was underneath it.

Similarly, the direct report started interrupting the story that every directive was an attempt at control and pausing long enough to get curious about the pressure his boss was navigating.

A conversation that had been circular, exhausting, and rooted in defense vs. offense for years became two people on the same team understanding why the other's defenses were up and deciding to work together. That’s the potentially powerful outcome when we stop playing against each other.

***

That conversation was possible because we slowed down long enough to understand what was driving the behavior before anyone tried to address the behavior itself. That step gets skipped more often than you’d think.

So many times I am brought in after someone has been put on a performance improvement plan for emotional dysregulation. Their boss has documented the defensiveness, the pushback, the difficult behavior, and the behaviors disrupting the team. Sometimes that is the right and necessary step. You all know how much I believe in compassionate accountability.

But I want to make sure we don’t skip the step of understanding the root cause of behaviors before moving toward official accountability. This is NOT about excusing inappropriate or misaligned behavior. The behavior still matters and needs to be accounted for.

But the right intervention depends entirely on what’s actually driving the behavior. A person who is defensive because they don't feel respected needs something different than a person who is defensive because they’re burning out (capacity) or because a previous manager damaged their ability to trust feedback (history), or because they genuinely don’t understand what’s expected of them (clarity).

The PIP usually does a good job of addressing the symptom, but doing the hard work of understanding BRACES helps you find the cause.

And change really only happens when we go there first.

So what do you do with all of this?

Get curious before you get frustrated. When defensiveness shows up, ask yourself: which of these threats might be activated right now? What is this person trying to protect?

And then, without abandoning the accountability the moment requires, see if you can address the threat before you address the content.

“I want to make sure you know this isn’t a reflection of your value on this team.”

“I’m not trying to take this out of your hands or take away your independence. I want to think through it together.”

“I want this to feel like a conversation, not like I'm judging you. Can we slow down?”

The expectations still matter, and the feedback still needs to be heard. But when someone is feeling threatened, the last thing we want to do is confirm the threat. We must at least attempt to get on the same team. Everything else stems from there.

If you want to go deeper on any of this, including learning specific strategies for lowering someone’s BRACES in real time, de-escalating a defended conversation, and knowing when to push forward and when to pause, I offer a full workshop on Managing Defensiveness at Work. Check out our full catalog here or reach out and let’s talk about bringing it to your team.

***

This work is messy, complex, and layered, but helping leaders and teams get underneath the surface of conflict and defensiveness to find what’s actually going on (which is almost never what they think it is when they first call me) is some of my favorite work. If your team is stuck in patterns that keep going in circles, I’d love to help.

​Book a connection call or just hit reply.

Cheering you on always,
Marissa