As leaders and team members rise in organizations and take on expanding responsibilities, one factor has an outsized influence on their promotability: how defensive they are.
Highly defensive people overreact when others disagree with them or when they receive unfavorable news and feedback.
This can be a career killer.
People respond defensively in many ways, usually to protect themselves from evaluation, criticism, rejection, or loss of control.
Among the common expressions of defensiveness, the most annoying are making excuses, arguing every point, denying responsibility, and overexplaining decisions.
Minimizing their own missteps, blaming others, and deflecting criticism with sarcasm or mockery are equally uncomfortable and irritating.
Those leaders and team members who overreact to small criticisms, need to talk insignificant matters through, and confront over trivial issues waste time and frustrate their colleagues.
And they destroy their reputations in the process.
Frequent defensiveness is among the chief reasons people are overlooked for promotion.
Without fully realizing how often they act defensively, these self-protective leaders and team members gradually erode the trust and confidence others have in them.
That’s because, in addition to being exhausting to deal with, leaders believe defensiveness impedes learning, restricts the likelihood of receiving candid feedback, and reduces accountability when things go wrong.
More importantly, defensive team members are viewed as less coachable and thereby less able to coach and develop others.
Constant excuses, rebuttals, and overreactions compound over time, making those with this affliction much more difficult to work with and harder to stomach, no matter how smart they are or how much value they add with their work.
Unfortunately, many people who are regularly defensive never receive strong feedback about their dysfunctional style.
Or if they do, the feedback is typically aimed at a specific episode rather than at an overall pattern.
This makes defensiveness a silent derailer.
The label commonly caps advancement, especially into senior leadership roles.
Yet people aren’t told that is what has curtailed their progression. Ironically, telling a colleague that they have a defensive posture and style is likely to elicit a defensive reaction, so leaders often keep the feedback to themselves.
A defensive style makes others uncomfortable, and that discomfort has a much bigger impact on how the defensive person is perceived for future roles and responsibilities than many realize.
Defensiveness comes with a cost to relationships and careers.
It is often the unspoken reason high-performing team members and leaders are bypassed for the next role. How defensive are you? Is defensiveness your go-to language?
Remember, defensiveness is career self-sabotage disguised as self-protection. It doesn’t just block criticism. It destroys influence.
