Leading when change feels threatening

0:00Brooke Weddle: If there's tension in a room, name it, because when you name it, you can tame it. And then take a deep breath, feel your feet on the ground, regulate yourself, and say, team, let's pause. Let's do a check-in. Am I the only one feeling the tension in this room right now? What are we not talking about that is important?

0:21Bryan Hancock: That's Johanne Lavoie. She's a McKinsey partner, and she's getting into our heads in the best of ways. Too often, teams have unaddressed conflict which can feed on itself, exacerbating tension and deteriorating our ability to work together. Joanne joins Brooke, Brian, and me to show how leaders can develop trust so their teams respond to change with more openness and create better outcomes. This is McKinsey Talks Talent. I'm your host, Lucia Raheli, with talent experts Brooke Weddle and Brian Hancock.

1:01Brooke Weddle: Joanne, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Happy to be here with you.

1:06Bryan Hancock: I'm Brooke and Brian. Welcome back. Great to see you as always.

1:10Lucia Rahilly: Great to see you.

1:11Johanne Lavoie: Great to be here.

1:12Bryan Hancock: Today, we're going to talk about performance under pressure and how to grapple with the rising societal and organizational stress that has become a sustained feature of our serially disrupted world. Organizational stress can mean very different things to different people and even at least stereotypically to different generations.

1:36Brooke Weddle: So let's start by level setting. Let me maybe give you an example. Often you'll have leadership team trying to do a high stake decisions together. And all of a sudden, you can feel it. The tension rises because there's no easy answer. And people start to, you start noticing that people are going into what we call reactive patterns. So some people will be extremely becoming more aggressive, interrupting, leaning in, asking for boldness, opposing each other. Some people will be retreating, withdrawing, going on the spreadsheet and the safety of the intellect and the number. And some people will be saying, no, more seeking harmony.

2:16Brooke Weddle: And we agree on this. They're trying to bridge. And in this moment, what you're having, even though it's a financial problem that's being discussed, what you're having is a psychological response where our brain and our nervous system in that moment is scanning for threat and perceiving it's not a threat to your physical survival, but it will be seen as a threat to my status, my credibility, my belonging, my competence. And in that moment, people get triggered and the reaction in that moment is rooted in our history. The reactivity in the moment, we tend to judge it, to blame it, to say, oh, that person is aggressive, if that person is this or that, versus saying, hey, Brooke, what's at stake for you right now?

3:05Brooke Weddle: What are you concerned about? And if I can meet people in the fear, as opposed to judging the behavior, then we're going to have the right conversation.

3:15Lucia Rahilly: Just building on that point, one of the most interesting parts of the piece is that, you know, people, you make the point that People don't resist change. And what you say is that what people are really reacting to is a fear of loss. How do you do that in the moment? How do you identify that? How do you take that step back, that mental step back as a leader? And how do you set the conditions for others to do that, to identify that loss and have a more productive conversation that is actually about the decision at hand?

3:49Brooke Weddle: as a leader, if I say, oh, I can't make this change happen because people are resisting it. Effectively, as a leader, I'm blaming them. I'm putting the accountability on them. They're resisting. It's not my fault. As opposed to saying, oh, I wonder what's the fear. I wonder what's the concern. I wonder what's underneath. And being able to address with people two things. First, I can say, before I say what's going to change, I can say what will not change and how will the change reinforce what we value and what's important to us. That's one thing I can do. Second, I can say as we change, you know, it will bring some risk and some, you know, unsettling moments.

4:35Brooke Weddle: Well, let's talk about that. And what do we need to be willing to let go? So I'll give you an example that is one of my favorite examples. One time I was talking about that with an executive team. It was in a hospital system, and we were working on their own fears. And at some point, we were talking about how what's important is to create space for that fear of loss, space for the loss that is involved in change. And one of the executives is a nurse by training. And she says, of course. And she shared with us that every month she does a funeral meeting. She calls it a funeral meeting. And I asked her, what's your funeral meeting?

5:17Brooke Weddle: And she says, well, it's a meeting where we talk about the projects that are ending, the things that we are stopping, the things that we are deprioritizing, the things that we're saying no to. And when we talk about these things, we're saying what we've learned from it, what we like from it, what we will bring forward with it. And for her, it was so obvious. She says, fear needs to be processed. If you don't create a space for it, it will go into resistance. So the funeral meeting was a place where they could process that loss and harvest the gift that they could carry for.

5:56Johanne Lavoie: I wanted to pull on the example you have there of the funeral meeting and see how it links to the broader concept of psychological safety. How do you see the linkage between the broader psychological safety that may exist on the team and the ability of leaders to help metabolize a particular strain like the leader you gave the example of in the funeral meeting?

6:20Brooke Weddle: When you think of the broader psychological safety, what is psychological safety? is the ability to be able to take interpersonal risk in a team without the fear of retribution. And that's a fear, right? So anything you can do in a team that creates more safety, right? I'm using the term here, but safety is what, that's why we call it psychological safety. And it's addressing the human fear. So anything that you can do in a team to create an environment where people can show up more fully and know that who they are is okay, even though we have a disagreement on timeline deliveries, accountability.

7:07Bryan Hancock: Joanne, it strikes me that some of what we're talking about, at least, is fear of loss. But when we think about the headlines, restructurings and layoffs are like everywhere, right? It's a big headline topic right now. And so in many cases, leaders aren't just confronting the anxiety of anticipating loss, they're confronting actual loss. You just alluded to belonging, responding to Brian's question, belonging reduces the need for us to gird ourselves as reflexively. But how do you suggest creating a sense of belonging after a big restructuring?

7:51Brooke Weddle: I think that's a very important question. And things such as when people get restructured, how we navigate it is so important. how you navigate it, not only for the people who are leaving, and obviously how you navigate that conversation so that their self, their sense of worth can be preserved in the process, how you listen to them, how you make them feel valued still in the process. And then importantly, how do you work with the people who are left behind, who are then, you know, have heightened fear and just lost some important colleagues, some colleagues. And taking these moments where we're simply listening, where we're creating space where it's okay to talk about our sadness, about our loss, about our fears without trying to fix them, it's really important, without trying to problem solve them is so important because Does emotions, strong emotions, fear, loss, grief, heal in connection?

9:08Brooke Weddle: And that's so important. When I can connect with you in your fear, in your grief, in your loss, and be there with you, the energy will move. Recently, I got a really bad news. And I had two reactions by senior leaders. I had a really bad news, and I was so upset by it. And one senior leader met me just listening. and she listened for 20 minutes and she says, I hear you. It's hard. I know it's hard. She didn't unvalidate my feelings. She just listened. And then she says, when it's good time, let's talk more about it. That's it. The other person told me, oh, no, you shouldn't be disappointed about this.

9:50Don't feel, you know, I don't think you should be disappointed.

9:54Brooke Weddle: Let me explain to you. Which response helped me the most? The first one. The first one, right. Right. Because she allowed my emotion to move. She allowed my, she validated my emotion. And in that moment, I felt I belonged. The other one created more isolation and invalidated my inner experience in that moment.

10:18Johanne Lavoie: It actually sounds like parenting advice too. You know, when the bad grade comes in home, like if you instantly launch into problem-solving mode of, well, let me help you with the studying or the other things. Your kid may not feel met in the same way of, hey, I hear you say you're disappointed and just listening to them in the moment rather than kicking the problem solving. It is a much broader than just corporate application.

10:46Lucia Rahilly: Yeah, I guess it all makes sense, right? And it resonates, this focus on listening. At the same time, the world of, you know, going back to the term we were using, restructuring, is actually more dynamic than it's ever been because of AI. And many organizations are trying to grapple with how do I create a change narrative that balances this notion of abundance and growth, which the real fear that people have about this moment and what AI could potentially mean from the perspective of their job and their livelihood and their value. So how does this notion of listening really scale? How can we do that in ways that actually meet the intensity of the moment we're living in?

11:36Brooke Weddle: There's several elements, right? So that's why in the article, I think about the self, the relationship in the system, right? How do we create an environment where you can metabolize that strain and be more adaptable under stress? So one of the things that you just spoke about is creating stories, narrative. right how a leader can create constantly a narrative that brings meaning to the change is critical how do you create a narrative so painting narrative being able to create what i call in the article nest right how do you create a nest so i work with teams a lot and i say how can your team even though you're holding high accountability become a nest when you can come back and recharge.

12:23Because what you're saying, Brooke, the change is not episodic today.

12:28Brooke Weddle: We used to have change, then you could actually have a period and then another change. So we could manage the change. You can't manage the change today. The change is constant. So we need to build new competency. Listening doesn't need to be long. It's the ability to meet you with your stress, that I can perceive your stress, and I can regulate my own nervous system in that moment, and I can meet you in a more regulated way in your stress and say, Brooke, I hear you, and I know you're concerned about this. What do we need to solve for? I acknowledge the fear, and then I reframed it towards what do we need to solve for?

13:13Brooke Weddle: That can be quick, But if I can't regulate myself, if I'm hyperactive, that's why we're going to accumulate the strain, right? Because there's no recovery between the change. So you just accumulate and accumulate and accumulate. And then what do we do? Well, let's put a well-being activity on top of this. That's not going to fix it, right? You're just putting something on top. We need to fundamentally rethink the leadership competencies. competencies. That's why we're saying leaders today need to be storyteller, paint narrative. They need to be able to recognize patterns, right? Because like I'm an electrical engineer, my training is systems.

13:59Brooke Weddle: When you look at complex system and there's a piece that is not working, right? The decision is not happening well. It's not because of the person. It's not because of the element. It's because of the relationship. There's a dynamic in that systems that's creating that problem. So you need to look broader and say, how is it that we've created a condition right now where we can't make decision? Well, what's the meeting agenda? How do you approach it? How did you frame the decision? The whole kind of, what's the systems that creating the results that we're having right now? And how do as a leader, I become a system designer?

14:38Brooke Weddle: So it's not about fixing the problem. It's about designing the system that will create the outcome that you want. And if you want a system to be resilient and learning, you need to have team rituals. You need to have pre-mortem, post-mortem. You need to be able to teach people to regulate their stress. And there's many ways to do this quickly once you learn to do it. You need to have a nest where teams can actually come back together and have time to process. You need to have storytelling. It's just, you know, that's why we say leaders need more emotional intelligence and pattern recognitions and systems thinking and storytelling in a world of AI.

15:24Brooke Weddle: Because AI is not going to do it for you.

15:26Bryan Hancock: Joanne, you're talking about competencies that leaders need at a high level, which is obviously vital. I think you're also talking about, like, you're saying that there's a physician heal thyself element to leading in the throes of this kind of ongoing unpredictability. And I'm wondering, you know, suppose I'm a leader and I'm confronting conflict on my team. What should I be thinking about in the moment vis-a-vis self-regulation?

16:01Brooke Weddle: I think one of the biggest, what are great questions, right? Because I can blame my team and say, what do I need to address? But first, I need to start with myself, right? What currently are the stories I'm making about my team? Because I form judgments and my judgment can trap me, right? So an example, leader says, well, that person is creating too much tension on the team. She's advocating, she's being too aggressive, she's resisting change. So it's about that person. That's an example. I'm working with this person. I said, okay, first, I'll come back to the personal, like learning to regulate myself and look at what's in me.

16:49Brooke Weddle: What part am I playing in this? But I asked her the question, do you know the story of that team member? Do you know how they grew up? No. Don't know anything about that person, how they grew up and how they know about their, you know, if they have children, if they are married, what activities do they do? They know that stuff, but they don't know their stories. And we did an activity that I always do with every team I work with is a storytelling dinner. It's a dinner where we just share childhood story. How did we grow up? And what event have shaped us, right? I always find life, I always say life as a way to apprentice us.

17:30Brooke Weddle: Each one of us have been apprenticed by life through the events that have happened in our life and have shaped our strength, our resilience, and our patterns. so we do the storytelling dinner and what becomes obvious is the person that if you want the bad apple on the team is a person who grew up in a culture where women are thwarted where women do not go to school and in our family that was the expectation she wanted to go to school and she has incredible will and drive so she went and she um she went to school and she broke down the rules in her family. She faced the authority of her parents, and she was shamed for it.

18:16And

18:16Brooke Weddle: she was reminded how much she was bringing shame to the family, how much it was not the tradition, how much blah, blah, blah. So she tells that story. The team leader comes from a story of growing up with a very English background, with nobility and Victorian, like, you know, You follow and there's things that you respect from the past. So the two, when they're interacting, this is a fast growth company, super, super fast growth, exponential. So the person, the team member is wanting to bring change in systems and in process. The team leader responds by saying, yeah, but you need to understand why we're doing things the way we're doing now.

18:59Brooke Weddle: She's telling her why we can't change things and why these are the rules. And when I pointed to her, do you see what you're doing right now? The way you're approaching her is triggering every childhood pattern that this woman has. And at the same time, this woman is probably one of the person who has the more will, the more drive on your team, is going to be your best change agent. But if you make her the bad person, you're never going to be able to lead her. If you understand her story, first honor her before you tell her what is wrong with her idea. and tell her and then bring her into a coaching mode of what would we need to solve for?

19:38Brooke Weddle: How would we do this? Like engage her will and her drive. And that's what the team leader did and the relationship shifted. But if she didn't understand the story and made the person bad, that's why I'm saying leaders today being informed helps you scan differently. You react differently when you see what we call bad behavior.

20:00Bryan Hancock: And there are probably a confluence of factors that contribute to not knowing individual stories. You talked about a high growth environment, for example, that could be one. It strikes me that another might be that a lot of us interact virtually now versus in person. Do you think virtual interaction makes it more complicated for leaders to read the semiotics of stress?

20:30Brooke Weddle: If you're leading teams, if you're in a virtual environment, it's even more important to have team rituals, to have team check-ins, to have teams like, and you can use all kinds of things like starting a meeting by doing a quick check-in on where am I finding you right now?

20:49Lucia Rahilly: Building on what you're talking about, you've talked about nesting and nesting grounds. Actually, I think you even described them as a kind of a performance infrastructure. Yeah. Is there any, like, how do you think about potential tension between creating nesting grounds, which sound quite accepting, quite inclusive, they are nesting, right? Versus holding people accountable. And is there a tension there? Or is that a false tension that I'm pointing out? How do you balance between those two things as a leader?

21:24Brooke Weddle: to me it's a false tension it's a paradox of the both end the more you have psychological safety the more you can hold somebody accountable in a way that would lead to learning and performance versus anxiety it's like when you build a muscle right if i go to the gym i want to put strain in my muscle and i want to relax it if i only pump it up i'm gonna be brittle right so it's the boat It's the paradox. It's the polarity that needs to be brought in. And so the more you turn on the heat, the more you need psychological safety. One of the CEOs I work with said to me, he says, Joe, if you want to build, if you have really high aspiration, you need a depth of foundation of trust that would hold the height of your aspiration.

22:12Brooke Weddle: I love that.

22:14Johanne Lavoie: And Joanne, when I listen to you, what comes through is just the intense practicality. of what you're describing in terms of, okay, we've got a team. We're going through something that's challenging. Let's have a dinner and tell the childhood stories. Or let's at the beginning have a check-in. Or let's go around and talk about how we... I mean, these are very tactical ways to make some of the concepts that you have here come to life. If somebody is listening to this saying, this sounds interesting to me, but I'm not really sure how it might fit in my organization. Talk us through, like, practically, like, how do you bring this theory and some of the practical examples you have, you know, to any organization, you know, going through some pretty significant change?

23:01Brooke Weddle: First, I'm not a big fan of team building for the sake of team building. And then you do team building, and then we work together. And those are two separates. To me, you build the team as you work together. And if I'm working with a team, there's three axes that I think about. First is, do we have a shared understanding of our current reality? Right? So being able to take any, take the McKinsey one, take any one team kind of diagnostic, where you say, hey, team, what are our top three greatest strengths as a team? And if we could focus on three things that hold us back, what would that be? Do we have the same version of that reality?

23:44Brooke Weddle: That conversation helps us focus. Do we see, do we experience our team in a shared reality? Or do you actually feel there's a lot of tension? I don't feel there's tension. So being able to set a baseline for us as a team to know where we focus our attention is one thing. Creating a shared narrative. So yes, often we'll say, well, no, we're super aligned. Like I have executives who tell me, Joe, my team is very aligned. We have our goals. We have our metrics and all that stuff. We're all aligned. And then I ask them to describe to me their vision of success. How do you know that we're going to be successful?

24:22Brooke Weddle: From the perspective of the stakeholders you create value for, and they have a different view. So don't tell me you're aligned. So you're aligned on numbers. You're not aligned on how you get there. So being able to have these conversations with your team, that's the storytelling. What's the story? What are we writing as a story right now as a team? What chapter are we in? That will create a shared narrative for your team, but it will bring alignment, which is really strategically performance-wise important that your team is aligned, not just on the number, but how do we get there, our ways of working.

24:53Brooke Weddle: And then you want to do things that will build psychological safety and trust. So that could be you're in the midst of a decision making. And at some point you feel the tension and you see reactivity. You can pause in that moment and say, hey, team, pause. What feels at stake in this decision? Let's just talk about the concern we have related to that decision. So now I've made a move in this moment to build trust. because I create more openness and more acceptance. And I bring the conversation that is underneath the table that nobody's talking about. And I allow it to be seen on top of the table.

25:35Brooke Weddle: And that's a move of trust building, psychological safety, when people can name their concerns. So the more you do these things, the more they become like common practice. You see tension. If there's tension in a room, name it. because when you name it, you can tame it. And then take a deep breath, feel your feet on the ground, regulate yourself, and say, team, let's pause. Let's do a check-in. Am I the only one feeling the tension in this room right now? What are we not talking about that is important? And then you go around. This is simple, but it will lead to much higher performance because all of a sudden the real problem will surface, which is often not in the number.

26:19Brooke Weddle: It's in a relational dynamic. It's see if we make this decision, what does that mean for my P &L? What would you say is the role of the CEO in creating the conditions for an organization that metabolizes strain at scale? It's interesting. I was just talking to a CEO a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about how our role is evolving from driving the results and ensuring accountability, you know, like driving the results to creating the environment that will deliver the results. And I think that CEOs need to spend way more time on what in our current system is creating the results that we're having and how do we engage their executive team on that question is more important.

27:09Brooke Weddle: That's how we make decisions, how we create accountability system, what needs to evolve, because the system currently is creating more stress and more resistance. And that's not what we want. So first, you need to pay attention to the system. CEOs need to be the master storyteller.

27:28Lucia Rahilly: You and I, Joe, worked with another iconic CEO. And one of the most powerful things we saw him do was share that change narrative with his top leaders and then pause and ask for feedback on it. And you'll remember, I'm sure you'll remember that session. It was incredible. And he got some challenging feedback in the room. And the way that he internalized that and actually looped back to it following that interaction was a huge unlock for the dynamics of that group.

28:01Brooke Weddle: Yeah, and I think that what you're pointing to is what I call disciplined humility. CEOs have strong ego and they need to. But your strong ego, which is important, right, a well-shaped strong ego, goes with disciplined humility. And that CEO would happen at some point, he answered a question to a person of color in a wrong way. And what did he do, Brooke? He came back the next day to publicly apologize. That's disciplined humility. He earned so much loyalty from that executive and from the entire team. So I think that that self-awareness, that self-regulation, that ability to walk with that discipline and humility in an environment where nobody has the answer right in the playbook right now is more and more important.

28:50Brooke Weddle: And unfortunately, many of us as busy executives don't take the time to get to know ourselves. And so the reason why I do the work that I do is that I say not everybody takes the time to actually go and retreat and do all this self-development work. We live in a world that is so unpredictable and brittle and disorienting. It will trigger human emotion. AI is not going to solve that for us. So we need to be able to work with these as our superpower because what differentiates decisions from a choice is the fear. If there's no fear involved in a choice, you make a choice. I'm going to have a coffee.

29:35Brooke Weddle: I'm going to do this. I'm going to invest in this. That's a choice. It becomes a decision when there's a fear, a fear of a risk. But yet we never talk about fear, right? We'll talk about data and we want the data to solve the answer. It's not going to solve the answer.

29:51Johanne Lavoie: One of the things that was striking in reading the article and in talking with you is that the military is the source of some of our best practices here. And you quote, you know, someone from the U.S. Navy in the article, the other things. And when people think about the military, they don't necessarily instantly think of leaders going on retreat to understand and work on their inner selves. You know, what can we learn from kind of that dynamic within the military in terms of how they've brought some of these concepts to life and how it might work with organizations where some of the language around trauma-informed or some of the other things may not resonate as much, but the underlying concepts are needed.

30:33Brooke Weddle: Yeah. And it's interesting because for the research, we spoke to two of the ex, if you want, CEOs of the special force. It's told Navy SEALs. And when you think about a high stake environment where they push themselves to the extreme, I mean, they have much bigger budgets than most organizations, but they have a slew of resources around for spiritual, mental, emotional, for the family, for the, and that's what, you know, both of them told me is that if you want these people to perform at their best, you need to invest in their mental, physical, emotional, spiritual health and support. And that includes their families.

31:17Brooke Weddle: So that is integral to the training of these people. And it's embedded. And it's also one of them that at some point I said, how do you communicate when you want, you know, a special force team to go into a mission that is really high stake with nonlinear outcome? How do you communicate that mission? And he looked at me and I said, Joan, you don't communicate. My job is to enroll them in the mission. And that is different. And I got to grab their hearts. so that they have the confidence to go in a mission that has nonlinear outcome. AI has nonlinear outcome right now. How do we enroll people? How do we create that psychological safety so that we can turn on the heat without having a brittle environment that will break?

32:11Brooke Weddle: And to me, that becomes an imperative, a superpower. And that's not team building. that is different leadership practices every day. Joanne, Brooke, and Brian, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you.

32:28Lucia Rahilly: Great conversation.

32:29Bryan Hancock: Thank you.