Rob Dobi
“I feel set up,” said the CEO of a professional services firm, breaking the long silence after his presentation. The transformation he had envisioned — and his executive team had championed and worked on for three years — had failed to deliver returns, and the hope that his leadership had once inspired had soured into blame. We witnessed that scene toward the end of a four-year study of the leadership team that strategized and implemented that firmwide transformation. It was the anticlimax of a drama that we have heard many executives recount.
The script of that drama goes like this: The future is uncertain. Trends in the world, the market, or the industry call for radical change. Executives craft a vision of transformation centered on adopting new technology, new structures, or new ways of working. Plans and people are drafted; projects are put in motion. Those initiatives generate enthusiasm. Over time, however, tension and exhaustion ensue. Then resentment emerges, leading to disengagement and, in the worst cases — as in the one we studied — to the organization’s demise.
Analyses of such cases often highlight that transformations fail because people lack the awareness that change is needed or the motivation to pursue it. They may point to the absence of strong leadership, sound strategy, committed employees, or the right process. Our work, in this study and beyond, has made us wary of such explanations. Transformations fail even when awareness and motivation are as abundant as leadership, strategy, and commitment. An urgent issue, or a crisis, provides a burning platform that leaders use as a bonfire to gather people around. But the fire starts to spread, and eventually people flee or burn out.
Our research uncovered what fuels that fire. It is anxiety, an emotion that can be mobilizing at first but becomes paralyzing if it is neglected and uncontained by leaders. As we saw in the case we studied, it may then be organized in ways that keep everyone busy while the status quo endures.
Change may be the only constant, but anxiety is only human. When leaders lose the capacity to name, share, and manage anxiety, their efforts to organize change, and the work of people in the organization, can get co-opted to keep anxiety at bay. This covert function sabotages the overt aim of transformation. We call that process defensive organizing. Below, we describe its unfolding and outline how leaders can avoid it by learning to work with anxiety. We begin by discussing the roots of defensive organizing because people must recognize how easy it is, as leaders and followers, to be taken down a defensive route. Only then can they stop, get to work, and set a different path.
Fear of the Future
Two conditions lay the foundation for defensive organizing. First, one or more executives identify with their organization. Second, the workforce trusts those executives’ competence and benevolence. Those conditions make leaders feel responsible and followers feel reliant.
Leaders who are responsible and trusted are vigilant and agentic, attentive to turbulence in their environments and eager to steer their organizations through it. To do that well, they must make sense of what is happening around them; understand their own reactions, fears, and impulses; and act according to their sense of what must be kept running and what needs to change. However, that capacity often eludes them just when they need it most: When uncertainty rises, they care, and anxiety follows.
It can happen to leaders, we observed, when their organization’s performance flounders. When leaders care, those dips challenge more than their reputation. They threaten their sense of self. Performance anxiety morphs into existential anxiety (a concern that one might not be the leader that one aspires to be) and social anxiety (a concern that one might not be the leader others believe and expect them to be).
In the professional services firm mentioned at the beginning of this article — we’ll use the pseudonym “Recco” — we observed that as its growth slowed, executives acknowledged those worries privately but would not share them with one another. As one confided, “I don’t want to look like a chump because everyone can deliver … and I can’t.” We have heard similar concerns in our executive development work. People in leadership roles often feel uncomfortable or, more precisely, embarrassed to admit anxiety — even to themselves.
Sometimes the reason is personal: A work predicament may trigger anxiety tied to particular sensitivities. More often, the reason is cultural. In many organizations, admitting anxiety is disqualifying for leaders; a common reason executives seek coaching, we have observed, is to discuss their anxieties in private. Such cultures estrange anxiety from leadership, turning a normal, common, and often useful human experience into a problem.
Leaders with a modicum of humanity are bound to worry on occasion that they might fall short or let others down. If simply experiencing that worry feels like a failing, leaders may lose the capacity to modulate and make sense of anxiety, and it can become overwhelming. If leaders believe that their job is to ooze confidence and align people behind a vision of change, that becomes their coping strategy. Anxiety then shapes the vision and the choices that flow from it, and defensive organizing is on its way.
Tracing the Path of Defensive Organizing
Defensive organizing follows a route that begins with senior leaders and spreads across the organization as more people are drafted into the effort to keep anxiety at bay. Our research allowed us to draw a road map of sorts that will help you recognize the signs that you are being led down that route and find the exits at different points.
The comforting vision. Defending against anxiety often takes the form of adopting a reassuring narrative. The first step of defensive organizing therefore requires leaders to convince themselves that performance is ailing for reasons unrelated to them and that they can do something to reverse course. In our study, Recco’s CEO concluded that the firm’s hub-and-spoke structure was too rigid for a fast-changing market. At a strategy retreat, he proposed breaking down silos, operating as a shared leadership team, and championing collaboration across the organization. We watched the word “collaboration” generate a ripple of excitement that seemed to make the palpable worry about the firm’s performance vanish.
The unquestioning enthusiasm of a group coalescing around an idea that affirms their leadership is the first sign of defensive organizing. It is a sign of idealization, a defense mechanism that protects us from the conscious experience of anxiety by crediting something — a principle, a process, a product — with having the potential to restore a bright future. In companies we have worked with, we have seen ideas like digital transformation or customer centricity serve as that rallying point. These mantras then spread through the organization, mentioned in every town hall, strategy document, and performance review.
Not every bold idea is a form of idealization. The sign that idealization might be taking hold is that people avoid asking for evidence that the idea will work. At Recco’s strategic retreat, no one challenged the CEO’s diagnosis or asked what sharing leadership would mean in practice. This lack of inquiry reveals the real purpose of many a strategic vision: to give leaders a story about the future that makes the present feel manageable.
At Recco, the idea of collaboration was plausible and the leader reasonable. The company’s rigid structure indeed limited its agility, and the CEO had a record of being a thoughtful and responsible boss, which made it harder to question his thinking. That silent participation is a form of unconscious collusion with the emerging defense. It is a scenario we have witnessed many times. The future is uncertain, a leader feels pressured to come up with a vision, and their team becomes relieved when they do. It is a plot twist everybody expects — the leader showing that “we can do something,” whether it is introducing a new focus on customer centricity, reorganizing to flatten a hierarchy, or making a large investment in artificial intelligence.
Idealization short-circuits sensemaking by locating the organization’s problems not in the competence of its leaders but in the structures that confine them. A fervor for planning without real action is another symptom. For months, Recco’s leadership team met to strategize collaboration initiatives while making very few changes to the way they ran their business.
The convenient foe. In the second stage of defensive organizing, leaders must find a reason for their vision’s failure to transform the organization’s fate — a reason that is, again, beyond them. That reason is usually found in other people’s lack of competence and care. Others, usually with less power, are drawn into the defensive drama to become targets of blame.
Growing uneasy about the lack of substantive progress, the Recco leadership team identified a group of “future leaders” among their direct reports to form project teams. On the surface, it looked like a textbook change process, thorough and participative. The teams were assigned transformation initiatives and tasked with presenting analyses and recommendations. But the more they took up their work, the easier it seemed for the leadership team to critique them.
The reason was that the data kept pointing back to the leaders’ work. While they championed collaboration, each executive held on to control. When one project team uncovered fierce competition between divisions for new recruits — with vice presidents cherry-picking the best candidates before others could see them — the leadership team attacked the messenger, with one even calling for a senior manager to be fired on the spot. The mirror the project teams were asked to hold up to the leaders presented an unflattering image, and the leaders declared it faulty.
This rise of intergroup tension is the second stage of defensive organizing. The mechanism underpinning it is projective identification, a defense in which one group, usually more powerful, unconsciously attributes to another group qualities they wish to disown in themselves. In Recco’s case, leaders anxious about their competence came to see others as incompetent and then acted in ways that undercut those others’ competence by putting obstacles in their paths, stoking frustration, or setting them up to fail.
We have seen this pattern repeatedly, and the result is resentment for the wasted effort and lack of appreciation. In this case, the leaders’ pushback was overt and intense, and the project teams soon reciprocated their acrimony. “I’m not prepared to put my head on the block for this,” said one team leader. “We are running around doing all this work and getting pushback. It’s not acceptable.” As the pattern continued, the teams stopped caring.
The empty ritual. As intergroup friction keeps everyone from learning, people get tired of conflict and tune out. They let the embers of embattlement smolder under the ashes of disillusionment and go through the motions of initiatives they barely believe in.
At Recco, the recognition that momentum was stalling, and the ongoing unconscious effort to deny having caused it, led the firm’s leaders to launch an internal communication campaign. All managers were asked to gather their teams for regular Monday meetings meant to reengage employees by reaffirming the strategy of collaboration and soliciting ideas to speed up its implementation. In another company going through a transformation lull, teams were cajoled to document small wins in short videos shared internally. Both initiatives had the appearance of change management best practice. In informal spaces, however, people were cynical and complained about the extra work.
This tension between public commitment and private disillusionment is often described as “change fatigue,” but it would be more accurate to call it “change initiative fatigue,” since what drains people’s energy is not actual change but dissonance. The rift between what people say in the engagement meetings and record in the videos, and what they feel and say in the corridor, is costly: for individuals, for their relationships, and for their organizations.
The mechanism underlying this stage of defensive organizing is the production of a secondary problem, where the very principle, process, or practice once idealized comes to be regarded as an obstacle. At Recco, this was collaboration, which soon began to draw blame for the company’s inertia. Leaders complained that involving more people slowed them down. Senior managers resented the extra demands it placed on them. Worrying about the downsides of collaboration became a substitute for confronting what truly ailed the firm.
This is the moment when the purpose of defensive organizing is revealed. It does not produce any substantive change. It produces a shared problem of the organization’s own making. Anxiety stays covered, positions stay intact, and everyone feels justified in looking inward.
The reckoning. Failure to make substantive changes — and the depletion of both the energy and the meaning that keeping the status quo entails — eventually endangers the organization, eroding its ability to deliver. When that occurs, we found, people may resort to a defense of last resort: scapegoating. The leader whose vision had ignited hope becomes the lightning rod for everyone’s blame.
At Recco, as performance continued to falter and disillusioned employees put little effort into the transformation projects, pressure mounted among executives. The CEO set up a change oversight group to prioritize initiatives. It made no headway, however, and the leadership team gave the work back to the CEO, asking him to prioritize the initiatives alone. At their next meeting, he presented a spreadsheet scoring 16 initiatives against seven criteria. The team stared in bewilderment. Thirteen were identified as high priority. “So we are prioritizing everything,” one vice president said flatly. “How does that work?”
A long silence followed. The CEO broke it with emotional honesty, at last: “I feel set up.” He had been, and he had been an active if unconscious participant in that setup. The effort that had begun three years earlier with a room full of hope ended with one man holding a spreadsheet that his team openly mocked. Shortly after that, the firm was acquired and the leaders lost their jobs. The tragedy they quietly feared eventually came to pass.
The Recco story is not unique. Nokia’s mobile phone business, for example, followed a similar trajectory between 2005 and 2010. As Timo Vuori and Quy Huy have documented, Nokia’s senior leaders became caught up by worries about competitors’ smartphones while middle managers worried about the leaders’ opinions. Those unacknowledged worries led the executives to abandon a promising internal platform and bet on the Windows Phone operating system, with little pushback from their skeptical direct reports. Windows Phone never took off, and Nokia’s mobile phones are mostly a fond memory for those who owned one before the iPhone launched.
Defensive organizing distorts leaders’ sensemaking — that is, the effort to interpret what is happening and act accordingly. Sound sensemaking requires paying attention to strong signals and weak ones. Strong signals are visible and urgent: the performance gap, the warring teams, the stalling initiative. Weak signals are subtler and easily ignored: the worries that no one shares, the barely disguised cynicism, the feelings of going through meaningless motions, the sheer exhaustion. Defensive organizing makes leaders focus on strong signals and ignore weak ones. People are more likely to fall prey to it when they cannot admit to, share, examine, and process the anxiety that comes with living and that leading only amplifies.
The Anxiety of Leading
Our research was a study of failure. We documented a leadership team defeated by anxiety. However, much work in clinical psychology and organizational behavior offers useful pointers for countering defensive organizing. Dealing with anxiety productively, that work suggests, does not require strategic or structural changes. It requires changes in mindset and relations. Leaders must stop estranging anxiety and begin to befriend it instead, turning anxiety into an inevitable and even informative experience that is best managed by sharing it with others.
Working well with anxiety requires three capacities that leaders must cultivate within themselves and demonstrate around them: the courage to recognize anxiety, the curiosity to inquire about it with others, and the care to see and soothe distress. Each of those capacities counters one of the stages of defensive organizing we described above, whereas a capacity’s absence helps that stage take hold. What follows is a brief guide for cultivating and demonstrating those capacities.
Brave the worry. The first exit from defensive organizing involves challenging the heroic stereotype of leadership. In our study, executives on the leadership team acknowledged their anxiety in private, but they did not share it. Like many leaders we have worked with, they saw their worries as shameful weaknesses that a strong leader should keep under control.
As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux discovered, however, human brains are not designed to control anxiety. Our worries are too useful for survival. It is anxiety that can hijack our brains. When anxious brains belong to leaders, we found, anxiety hijacks organizations, too.
While anxiety can hardly be controlled, it can be managed. Doing so requires a different kind of courage than the one featured in heroic leadership portraits — the kind for which scholars have borrowed John Keats’s poetic term “negative capability.” That is the courage to be with one’s experience: to recognize without judgment or reaction when and how one gets anxious. Perhaps it manifests as difficulty sleeping, drinking more than usual, or feeling restless and ill at ease.
Reframing anxiety from a personal failing or a dire prediction to a simple signal that requires attention and interpretation, like all other data, makes it easier to demonstrate courage too. You might say, for example, “Before I share my vision for what we might do, I want to say that I find our situation worrying, and I wonder if others do too.” Then invite a conversation about why we worry and what that signal says about the team and its circumstances.
This is not about being vulnerable; rather, it’s about showing the bravery to normalize acknowledgements of anxiety. Doing so can be framed as a sign of strength. “I do not want us to be the kind of leaders who jump into reckless action because we are too scared to think,” you might say. “I am confident that we can figure out what we are concerned about, share it with each other, and take care of it.”
The courage to be the first to say what everyone else is thinking is the antidote to idealization. It signals that no one needs to perform confidence they do not feel by feigning certainty they do not have. If covert anxiety hijacks sensemaking, emotional honesty frees it up again.
Find your truth tellers. In our study, the leadership team defensively dismissed feedback from senior managers who knew them well and were close to operations. But those people are a leader’s best allies to stress-test a vision.
Cultivating curiosity begins right after you find the courage to acknowledge your anxiety. Once you have a good understanding of what worries you, as discussed above, find allies you trust to share your anxieties with and to challenge you, your team, and the viability of your vision. Tell them that you care about their views and that you hope they care enough to tell the truth.
You are not asking for criticism or appointing a devil’s advocate; those only trigger more anxiety. You are asking for robust support. You are imparting the same emotional honesty that, ideally, you have cultivated and demonstrated with your team. You might seek feedback in two areas: What would have to change in the way you work, and the way you work with others, for the vision to succeed? And what would have to change in the way the business works? Then listen carefully. Pay attention to insights that you find unfounded or unpleasant. If the feedback seems inaccurate, ask yourself what data you could share to make it more precise. If it seems inconsiderate — that is, fails to recognize your own efforts and the difficulties you are facing — ask yourself whether you have shown how much you care.
Curiosity, like courage, requires one to suspend judgment. When you notice contempt for another group’s competence or commitment, ask not “How do we fix them?” but “What is this judgment protecting me from?” That question will help you avoid projecting onto others what you fear in yourself and will foster collaborations that modulate anxiety and unlock change.
Care visibly. The third capacity that helps leaders work with anxiety is care: giving it and receiving it. Cultivating care toward oneself, through mindful practices and supportive relationships, is essential to demonstrating care toward others. Leaders cannot care if they do not have energy, and they are seldom capable of showing care in ways that they have not experienced themselves.
Leaders who can acknowledge and investigate their own anxiety are likely to realize that others feel it too. One senior executive we know was aware that his anxiety sometimes made him initiate change, and that change became a source of anxiety for others while old ways were being dismantled and new ones were still works in progress. “If others help reassure me by going along, I need to reassure them by being there,” he noted. That comment captures what it means to work with anxiety — to care rather than defend against it.
During a long change process, a gap will often open up between public commitment and private concerns, between what is said in meetings and what is grumbled about in the corridors. You might be tempted to try to close that gap by pushing people to speak up about the actions they will take to accelerate change. What we found, however, is that those pushes ring hollow because they let people avoid a conversation about what they are feeling.
If you take time to genuinely care what people are feeling, you will find out what is working, what is not, and who needs what. The organization we studied failed to do this. It only needed its leaders to acknowledge that they had lost the plot and that they cared about their employees’ exhaustion, not just about their productivity. Instead, the leaders invested their care in devising a performative ritual to reengage the crew.
Better care can take two forms. One is interpersonal. It begins with asking, “Whose efforts are being ignored?” and showing them gratitude, or, “Who is feeling forced to pretend that they are OK when they are not?” and letting them know that they can stop. Another is institutional. It begins with asking, “What is working, and what is not?” and directing resources toward the former while pruning the latter. Both forms of care show that leaders are committed to supporting an ongoing change process, not imposing a change initiative.
Taking care to develop a culture where people can share their worries and what might be causing them is the best antidote against anxiety festering into a collective feeling that nothing matters, no one can be real, and the safest choice is to hide and wait. A culture that estranges anxiety constrains not only leaders but everyone from working productively with anxiety.
The Only Constant
When we say that anxiety is only human, we mean that it is inevitable in the life of an organism that can forge attachments and imagine the future. As people do both, they come to worry about loss — of face, of people, of activities that give them meaning, and of life itself. This is especially so when events remind them that loss is possible. Anxiety in the face of uncertainty, then, is not a leadership failure. It is a leadership condition. Our research and our work with leaders show that when they acknowledge uncertainty but deny anxiety, the latter becomes overwhelming and distorts how they deal with the former. It pushes people to make and to fall for empty promises, to blame others for their own failures, and to eventually withdraw.
When we look around in the workplace and beyond, we see those defensive patterns more and more. They draw energy from the shame of acknowledging anxiety. This article is an attempt to make anxiety less unthinkable or unspeakable, and less shameful. Anxiety can be informative and humanizing. If you meet it with courage, curiosity, and care when it emerges within you, you will be able to show the same capacities to people around you. You will grow into a more connected leader, and your organization will grow more adaptive for it.