As he stared at me with glaring eyes, I knew the project manager Bart was about to make a bad decision. My problem? I couldn’t find the words to interrupt the freight train of his plans. We were in the middle of the biggest of the many change projects we had going at the bank where I worked. Mergers, new software systems, reorganizing how we approached clients. All these changes and more were colliding as we watched our coworkers get fired or moved or demoted. Some were mysteriously getting promoted as well. But for what?
Questions circled constantly about who was next to get good or bad news. Important work was falling through the cracks and clients were leaving in droves. No one was sheltered from the change. The heat was on.
Somehow, I found myself in a semi-advisory role, charged with much of the training on new systems and approaches, and, ironically, teaching leaders how to lead change in a changing environment. We were in a meeting to plan critical dates and milestones for rolling out the project. As with any good project manager, Bart was nailing down dates and creating urgency with deadlines. He had not been in the field. My colleague Mitch and I had been out taking the temperature of the people being impacted, and we had called the meeting to update him on the status. Our intention was to lower the heat a bit to give people who were feeling very unsafe a chance to regain their footing.
Bart was having none of it. He was a hard charger. If he had a mantra, it was “suck it up buttercup.” While he blathered on about adding more to the already full plates, I searched for the words to reach him.
This meeting was happening at a time when I had been confronted with my own hard charging ways. Thanks to some tough 360 feedback, my team had started showing me that I didn’t listen well (okay, I didn’t listen at all) and that while I was a good cog in the wheel, I wasn’t much of a true leader. I was mostly a messenger for upper management. Ouch. One of the consultants I worked with offered some coaching to me about recognizing the consequences of my style. People feared me, but they didn’t respect me. They certainly didn’t trust me, and frankly I didn’t trust them either. I didn’t even understand the concept of trust. I did find it somewhat offensive that people I didn’t trust were being trusted to give ME feedback. Looking back, I can now see how my mental tools were not greater than the pressure of the feedback.
At that moment, I was just coming to terms with the fact that our culture was driven by fear. That’s what made me decide to speak up in the most wrong way possible.
After Mitch finished outlining the status throughout the different regions, all of which were behind schedule, Bart asked “What do you think is going on?”
I answered in a collegial tone “Well, you know that any time we are making this much change, there will be fear in the organization. We should probably…” At that moment, Bart held up his hand and stopped me. He picked up his pen, as if to make a list. He said, “Who’s afraid?” and waited, pen over pad. I assumed he intended to take names.
That’s when the “cat got my tongue” as the saying goes. I felt hot and my stomach tightened into a ball of nerves. My hearing disappeared and my vision narrowed to a tiny tunnel. This was not going as I planned. Mitch jumped in and said a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t hear as I tried to recover my bearings. I didn’t trust myself to say another word. The pressure of the moment reduced my repertoire to exactly one move, which would have been socially unacceptable: run out of the room! So I totally shut down.
Much later, I came to recognize that part of a culture driven by fear is that the fear itself is unspeakable.
Meetings like this one were happening hundreds of times daily, and decisions to press on kept creating the fallout Mitch and I set out to avert that day. While the culture of fear didn’t kill the organization, it certainly left a lot to be desired for everyone involved.
For many years, I blamed Bart and the leadership of the bank for creating an unsafe culture.
What I missed at that moment was that there is another side to the tightrope of trust.
While I was busy looking for others to fix my trust problems, I failed to recognize that I had not learned to trust myself.
The deeper I’ve looked over the years, the more I’ve come to realize that half the work of trust is internal. Can I trust myself to repair a relationship that is broken? Can I trust myself to speak truth to power? Can I trust myself to find another job if I lose this one? Can I trust myself to stay in the heat of the moment, when things don’t go as planned? Can I trust myself to be okay if someone else is mad at me, or thinks what I just said is stupid? Can I trust myself to hold my ground when someone goes on the attack because they can’t handle the truth? (Yes, I went there. Thank you, Jack Nicholson.)
Dancing the tightrope of trust has two sides. One is the external. If someone lies to me repeatedly, I will quit believing them. If someone is consistently late, I will quit expecting them to be on time. If someone shows they can’t do the job, I will give it to someone else. (Or choose to do it myself, which is a whole other can of worms.)
But isn’t all of that life? Can we ever expect everything to go according to plan? How much do I shrink my world when I get upset and shut down when things don’t go my way?
The other side of the tightrope is internal. What is going on inside of me is just as important as what is happening on the outside. I can build my inner strength, by reaching for my “invisible tools” when the pressure is high. Curiosity, observation, listening, timing, feel.
In the moment Bart picked up his pen to take names, he hit my mistake button. (The mistake button is my shorthand for that little ping of ‘something’s off’ that I’ve learned to interpret as I must be doing something wrong.) When I felt that sensation, instead of being curious and asking him a question, I went into my fear of failure and being rejected. In a culture of fear, those who wield fear use it to get others to do things they might not otherwise do. My mistake button bought into the fear, telling me “If I get this wrong, they will fire me and then I won’t find another job and then I’ll be broke and living on the streets. I better get in line.”
My goal was to stop the feeling instead of learning more about what Bart was thinking when he picked up the pen. I could have simply asked, ‘What will you do with the names?’ but I didn’t trust myself enough to stay in that conversation. I wonder how differently things would have gone in that meeting if I had trusted myself to stay with the pressure of the moment and ask questions.
I’ll never know. Bart quit trusting me that day, and he kept his foot on the gas in that project. That decision had a lot of fallout. I tell the story in Dancing the Tightrope of all the ambulances leaving our buildings with people suffering heart attacks or panic attacks. It was not a healthy environment.
Changing a culture of fear is incredibly difficult, especially when fear drives any talk about fear underground. We tend to trust our fear more than we trust ourselves to handle the pressures of life.
Trust on this side of the tightrope is built by pressure, mistakes and failure - not by things going “right". What matters most is the recovery and the repair, which become the building blocks of confidence so that we can take risks, speak up and stay grounded, even when the stakes are high.
Where in your life are you trusting fear more than you trust yourself? If you fully trusted yourself to handle whatever happens next, what might you say or do differently there? When your own “mistake button” lights up, how do you usually respond—do you get curious, or do you shut down? What invisible tools (curiosity, listening, timing, feel, etc.) are already available to you that you tend to forget under pressure?