Episode Transcript
I was at Cisco leading one of the best teams I’d ever been part of. Super smart people, real trust, meaningful work because we were tasked with growing Cisco Networking Academy, which is an education platform used by people in something like 195 countries. And then the company announced it was laying off around 4,000 people.
I had to let go of some of my closest colleagues, people I genuinely cared about. And those were some of the hardest conversations of my professional life, but what I noticed in the weeks and months after those layoffs was how much those layoffs changed, how I showed up. And how much the people around me changed too.
I stopped taking any kind of risk whatsoever. I had ideas, real ones about innovative changes that I believed could set us up for the future better, but instead of pursuing them, I just optimized quietly. I played it safe. I focused on what was measurable, defensible what no one could question. And I started asking for feedback from my superiors more than ever.
Even though I didn’t actually believe they could help me grow or even wanted to, a lot of it was kind of performative. I wanted to be seen as hungry to grow, hoping that would protect me from the next wave of layoffs. Some of my colleagues went the other direction. They seemed to ask for feedback less than ever.
My guess, and I think it’s a pretty good one, is they were performing too. Performing competence, performing certainty, because in a toxic environment, showing vulnerability can get you on layoff lists. Here’s what’s interesting. In 1981, researchers Barry Staw, Lance Sandelands, Jane Dutton published a landmark paper in the Administrative Science Quarterly called Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior.
And their core finding was that when individuals, groups, organizations face a serious threat, they tend to restrict and revert to their most well worn familiar behaviors. Threat, in other words, makes us rigid. We get into defensive mode, and here’s the part I keep coming back to, that rigidity often shows up most acutely, I think, in how we relate to feedback.
Because it requires a kind of openness, a kind of vulnerability that feels genuinely dangerous when you’re already operating under threat. So some folks either perform their way through it, asking questions they really don’t want answered, or they shut down entirely to project a kind of confidence. Either way, creativity and growth can stall. And the cruel irony is that a threat environment, the exact moment when accurate feedback might matter most is often the moment we become least able to receive it. So if you’re in a season of pressure right now, a reorg, an upcoming performance review, even a relationship where the stakes feel high, it might be worth asking yourself, am I actually open to feedback right now or am I just going through the motions?
If you are protecting yourself, ask if you really need to be. Threat rigidity operates at the organizational level, but it’s also a deeply human response. Noticing it, I think, is the first step toward not being ruled by it. You might still decide to act how it wants you to, but you’ll be acting from a conscious choice rather than being pulled along by your subconscious.
See you next week.
Show Notes
Don't Just Keep Up.
Define the New Rules.
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