When They Push Back | Staying Clear and Calm With the Defensive, Unhappy, or Insubordinate Employee

Speaker A: All right, I've got my green tea in hand. No, I do not have an Alani new shocker, but I want to pick up right from where we left off last time. But this time, we're going to throw a little twist in there that I think is the part that nobody prepares you for. Last episode, we talked about finally having the conversation. We talked about getting clear, naming the standard with love, walking in prepared instead of avoiding it for another few months. And maybe you did it. Maybe you're about to do it. So let me ask you the question that keeps leaders up at night. What happens when you do everything right? You're clear, you're kind, you're fair. And they push back anyway, because they will. Sometimes you will sit down having prayed about it, having prepared, having led with care, and they will sit there across from you with their arms crossed and say, it's not fair, or, that is not my fault, or, well, nobody else gets talked to like this. Or they'll go quiet and cold. And then you find out three days later that they've been venting to half the team in the break room or on teams. Defensiveness, excuses, insubordination. The slow poison of an unhappy employee who. Who would rather recruit allies than change. That is today, Part two of our Clear and Protected series. How to stay clear, calm, and steady when the other person does not. Because here's the truth, my friends. Your clarity is going to get tested. And the test is not whether you can be clear in a calm room. The test is whether you can stay clear when the temperature rises. So let's get into it. Well, hey, welcome back to Leadership Clearly. I'm Julie Wagner, and this show is where we clear the noise so you can lead from your real voice with clarity, conviction, and with Christ at the center of it all. This is the same disclaimer as last episode, because it matters even more in this one. I am a leadership coach. I am not a lawyer. I am not your HR department. The moment we start talking about insubordination, a genuinely unhappy employee and what to do when pushback escalates, we are walking right up to the edge of real employment law. So I will flag it every time we get close, and I will always tell you to reference back to your HR team or an employment attorney. So here is the map for today. This is what it's going to look like. First, why do people push back? What is actually happening underneath the defensiveness? Because if you misread it, you're going to most likely mishandle it. Then, uh, the most important skill in this whole episode, how to stay non anxious when they get anxious or angry. Then we're going to talk about the water cooler problem, the game of telephone problem, the unhappy employee who spreads the gossip. And then we're going to combat that with what scripture says about that specifically. Then the line between pushback and insubordination and what changes when you cross it. And then, of course, we're going to hit your one thing for the week. So go grab your note taking device or your journal, grab your drink, whatever you're drinking today, and then let's go. Uh, and I want this to stay at the top before we dive in a little deeper. This is the episode I most needed when I was a younger leader, but nobody taught it to me. Everyone will teach you how to give feedback. Almost nobody teaches you what to do in the four seconds after the feedback lands wrong and the other person's face changes. Those four seconds is where most leaders either find their spine or. Or they lose their nerve. And it's almost entirely a matter of whether you have learned to stay steady when someone else does not. So that is what we're building today, not how to win the argument, how to stay clear and kind when the room gets hot. Okay, first, let's understand what is actually happening when someone pushes back on feedback. Because I think our instinct as leaders is just to read it as defiance. They're being difficult, they're disrespecting me, they're refusing to take responsibility. And sometimes, uh, let's call a spade a spade. Sometimes that's true. But most of the time, especially in that first moment, pushback is not a defiance. I think it's a fear. Think about what it feels like to be on the other side of that desk, the other side of that team screen. Someone with power over you and your livelihood is telling you that you're not measuring up. Your income, your reputation, your sense of competence, maybe your ability to pay your mortgage. All of it just got called into question. That can feel really threatening. And when humans feel threatened, we do what every threatened creature does. We protect ourselves. Defensiveness is armor. Excuses. They can be armor. Even the cold silence can be armor. Underneath all of it is probably just a scared person trying not to look as scared as they feel. Why does this matter so much? Because how you read the pushback determines how you respond to it. If you read defensiveness as an attack, you read will defend back. And now you're two people in armor swinging at each other, and nothing good is ever going to come from that. But if you read defensiveness as a possibility of fear, you can respond to the fear, you can lower the threat, you can steady the room and get back to the actual issue. Same behavior from them, but completely different response from you, depending on what you decided it meant. Now, hear me clearly. I am not telling you to excuse bad behavior. Understanding why someone is defensive is not the same as letting defensiveness run the meeting. You can have a deep compassion for the fear and still hold the standard like a rock. In fact, that combination, soft heart and a firm standard is the entire skill that we're building today. You're not choosing between compassion and clarity. You. You're learning to carry both into a hot room m at the same time. I'm going to give you a real example of how reading it wrong can actually make it worse. So, early on in my leadership, I gave a piece of feedback to someone, and this employee came back hard. That's not fair. You're singling me out. You have no idea how much I do around here. And I read it as an attack, okay? So I attacked back. I started listing evidence, building my case, proving I was right. And do you know what happened? She dug her heels in harder because now she was really under attack by me. The whole thing turned into a fight that took weeks to recover from. Looking back very candidly, hindsight is 20 20. That first that is not fair from her wasn't defiance. It was a scared, overwhelmed person who felt unseen. If I had heard the fear instead of the challenge, I could have said something steadying, and we would have gotten to the actual issue in, like, I don't know, five to 10 minutes. Instead, I matched her armor with my armor, and we both lost. That mistake is most of why I can teach this today. So let's talk about the most important skill, how to stay non anxious. If you take one thing away from this entire episode, my friends, take this. The single most important thing you can do when someone pushes back is to manage your own anxiety before you try to manage their behavior. Your calm is the most powerful tool in the room. And here's why. Emotions are contagious. When the other person gets agitated, every instinct in your body wants to match them. To get defensive, to raise your voice, to get tense and clipped, or to crumble and start apologizing for having the conversation at all. And the moment you match their anxiety, you have lost the thing they needed from you, which was a steady presence. Two anxious people cannot solve anything. But one calm person can lower the temperature for both. And this is exactly where scripture is breathtakingly practical. Listen to this. A, uh, gentle answer deflects anger. But harsh words make tempers flare. That's Proverbs 15:1 NLT version. A gentle answer deflects anger. It's almost a physics principle for human conflict. The energy someone brings at you does not have to bounce back at the same intensity. Your gentleness can absorb it, deflect it, take the heat out of it. But the second half is just as true and just as important. Harsh words make tempers flare. If you meet their heat with your heat, and you are not putting out the fire, my friend, you are pouring the, uh, gasoline and the fuel on it, you become the second problem in the room. So what does a gentle answer actually look like? When someone is saying it's not fair, it's not caving? Okay. Gentleness is not weakness. A gentle answer might look like. I hear you. That you feel it's not fair. And I want to understand that. But I also need us to look together at these three specific things and then go from there. I, uh, I want you to see what that does. It lowers the temperature. I hear you. Without surrendering the standard. And then you go into the next part. And we still need to look at these three things. Soft tone, firm, content. This is the whole move, okay? This is the whole vibe that we're going for. I want to underline that combination because most people collapse into one or the other. Some leaders think that gentle means soft on the standard. So when someone pushes back, they fold. Oh, you know what? Maybe you're right. Let's just forget about it, guys. That's not gentleness. That's abandonment of the very clarity walked in to give. Other leaders think firm means harsh, so they hold the standard by getting cold, hard, and clipped. That is not firmness. That is just adding heat. The skill, the genuinely hard and genuinely Christlike skill is to be warm in tone and unmovable in substance at the same time. Think about how Jesus dealt with people. Endlessly gentle with one person, never once compromising the truth. Soft on the human, clear on the standard. That is the model. That's what we're going after. So let me give you a few practical ways to stay non anxious in the moment. Because feel the calm is not an instruction that anyone can actually follow. Okay? So first, slow down. Anxiety speeds up everything. When you feel the heat rising, I want you to deliberately slow your speech, even pause before you respond. A calm pause is a leadership act. A calm pause is a leadership act. Second, lower your voice. Instead of raising it, people escalate to match volume. If you go quieter, they often follow you down. Third, do not take the bait of every provocative thing. They say you do not have to respond to all of it. Pick the one thing that matters and let the rest go by. And fourth, the one underneath all of them. Remember that their reaction is not an emergency. A, uh, defensive employee is not a crisis. You do not have to fix their feelings in this meeting. You just need to stay steady and clear that reframe alone. It really does take the panic out of all of it. And here is the faith piece underneath the skill. Because this is not just a, uh, technique, my friends. The reason I can be a, uh, non anxious presence is not that I'm naturally calm. Guys. I am not. I am going a million miles an hour, a million directions an hour. I am not a calm person. I'm just not. I'm not a patient person. It's that my sense of security does, uh, not actually depend on this person liking me. Or if the meeting's going smoothly. When your worth is settled in. Christ, you, you can walk into a hot room without needing it to be warm. You are not managing your own survival skill in there. You're free to just be steady because the thing that holds you is not at risk in this conversation. That's what lets you be the calm one, not the technique. It's the security. Okay, now let's dive into the water cooler problem. We are going to talk about the version of pushback that does not happen to your face. And I am going to preface this. I absolutely loathe gossip on my teams. Gossip is not tolerated. It is always talked about and addressed. If I hear gossip happening, right? And that is, that's same. That same goes for my team that I lead at church for worship team for my day job, for my team of sellers, like. And if I hear people gossiping about each other, I'm gonna be like, hey, guys, stop. Just stop. Right? Because gossip is poison. It's a cancer that literally will turn everything to black and kill it. It's just absolutely horrible. So I want to preface with that, the unhappy employee who doesn't argue in the meeting. Or maybe they do argue, by the way. They nod, they leave, and then they take it sideways. They go to the break room, they go to the group chat, to the water cooler. I'm putting that in quotations if you can't see it. And this one I want to take seriously because I'm, um, I'm telling you, like I said before, that one person can literally quietly poison. They can poison an entire team. And scripture saw this coming over 3000 years ago. Proverbs 26:2021 says, Fire goes out without wood and quarrels disappear when the gossip stops. A quarrelsome person starts fights as easily as hot embers light charcoal, or fire lights wood. Look at that image, because it's perfect. A fire needs fuel. Take away the wood and the fire goes out on its own. And then verse 21 names the person who is the wood, the quarrelsome person, the one who fights as easily as embers light charcoal. There are people who, wherever they go, add wood to the fire. Okay, the discontent is not a one time complaint. It's a steady supply of fuel that keeps strife, uh, burning across your entire team. And here's what I really want you to see in this. Discontent is contagious and it spreads faster than almost anything on a team. One genuinely unhappy person left unaddressed by does not stay one unhappy person. My friends, they recruit. They're good recruiters too. They find other frustrated folks, they'll validate each other and they build like this little coalition of grievance and anger. And then before long, you have a culture problem that started as one person's unaddressed feedback. The water cooler is where small discontent becomes organized discontent. And that is why you cannot just ignore the person who takes it sideways and hopes it blows over unaddressed guys. It does not blow over. What it does is it builds. And I, uh, I want to be fair and careful here, okay? Because there are two different things that can look similar from a distance. There is a person processing a hard week, venting once to a friend, blowing off steam, the normal stuff that we all do. That's not a water cooler problem. And if you treat every frustrated comment like sabotage, you will become a paranoid leader that nobody can breathe around. The water cooler problem is a pattern, the steady, ongoing campaign of discontent. The person who is constantly the wood on every fire, the one whose unhappiness has become a project basically, that they're actively spreading. One is a moment, the other is a method. You are watching for the method. So what do you actually do? A few things. Grab your notes. First, you're going to address it with the person directly, not through the grapevine back at them. You name what you see, of course. Be kind and clear. I've heard there's some frustration. I would so much rather love to hear it from you directly than secondhand. So let's talk that single move, inviting the direct conversation that takes A huge amount of wood off the fire. Because, again, gossip thrives in the dark and dies in the open. Right? Second, you protect your culture by not participating in it yourself. You would be amazed how many leaders unknowingly feed the water cooler by venting about their own employees. You cannot ask your team to bring concerns directly to you if you're modeling the opposite. And third, you hold the line that on this team, we take our concerns to the person who can actually do something about them, not to the people who can only commiserate. That's not silencing people. That's teaching them the difference between processing and poisoning. So here is one of our legal safety flags for this episode. I want you to be careful here because this is an important line. Many employees in many places have legal protections to discuss things like their payments, their working conditions, their workplace concerns together. And you can't police all of that as gossip. Wanting to protect the culture is good. Accidentally violating someone's protected rights is a real risk. Before you set any policy about what employees can and cannot discuss with each other, just run it by your HR team or an employment attorney. This is not a place you want to improvise. So let's dive into when it crosses into insubordination. Because guess what? You're gonna run into that at some point in your career if you haven't already run into it, like, a couple times before. So far, we've been talking about pushback, right? Defensiveness, excuses, unhappiness. But there is a line, and on the other side of it is something different. Insubordination. And you need to know the difference, because they call for different responses. Pushback is about feelings. Insubordination is about refusal. Bushback says, I don't like this. I disagree. I feel this is unfair while still ultimately operating inside the relationship. Right? Insubordination, though, is a refusal to do a legitimate, reasonable thing. You have clearly asked, basically, an open defiance of their role. There is a world of difference between an employee who argues with you and then does the work and the employee who looks you in the eye says, no, I will not. I don't have to listen to you. That first is a hard conversation. The second, though, that's a different category of a problem. And here's why this distinction matters so much. If you treat ordinary pushback like insubordination, you become a tyrant. And I know that's a heavy word, but it's true. You punish people for having feelings, and you teach your team that honesty is dangerous. But if you treat Genuine insubordination, like ordinary pushback, you let your authority and your standards quietly erode and your whole team watches you do it. So you have to be able to tell them apart and respond to each for what it actually is. With ordinary pushback, you stay in it, okay? You absorb, you steady, you clarify. You keep the relationship intact while holding the standard. But when it crosses into genuine refusal or open defiance, guys, that, that conversation changes. It is no longer about performance. It is now about whether this person is willing to operate within the basic structure of this role at all. And that is a more serious conversation with more serious takes. And it's exactly the kind of moment where you should not be winging this alone. I will preface this before I dive into our next little legal safety flag here. Please document everything. Document, document, document. If you need to have teams calls recorded or zoom calls recorded or whatever. Even if it's just a transcript, guys, protect yourself, but also you're protecting the person on the opposite end as well. So it just again, clarity. It's a beautiful thing. So here's, here's the legal safety flag for you. Um, genuine insubordination, formal discipline and anything heading towards termination are squarely in employment law territory. And the right steps are going to vary by your location, your company policy and the specifics. Don't handle true insubordination, situation off the cuff loop in your HR team or your employment attorney early before you act, not after, so that whatever you do is both fair to the person and sound for the company. Getting the process right protects everyone, including you. And let me name the safety piece directly here because in rare situations, pushback is not just difficult, it is a warning sign. If an employee ever becomes threatening, intimidating maybe, or makes you or anyone on your team feel physically unsafe, that is no longer a performance conversation at all. That is a safety situation. Trust that instinct. Do not try to coach your way through a moment that has now become about safety. You need to get HR involved, involve security, and involve the right authorities. Your job is not to absorb a genuine threat. Clarity includes being clear eyed about when a, uh, line has been crossed. I feel like this is so serious today. Okay, I'm going to pause for just one moment because this episode connects directly to something I have built for you. Almost everything we covered today. Staying non anxious, holding a standard while a room heats up, not needing the other person to be happy with you. All of it flows from one source, A settled, secure place to lead from. And that is exactly what my flagship course, the leadership clearly foundations course, is Built to give you. It's a five day course built around my proprietary Leadership clearly method. And it starts by clearing the internal noise so you can be the calm, clear presence that your team needs. Especially when things get hard. Hard. You cannot be a non anxious presence for others if you're not settled yourself. And the foundations course, that's where the settling happens. So it's there. We launch in August if you're ready. Link is in the show notes. You can also find it at Julie wagner co or leadershipclearly.com so back at it. Okay, I want to close this out to today. I didn't want this to be too long today, but I want to give you your one thing for this week because again, if you've listened to my podcast at all, I don't like to give you guys too many things to work on because my gosh, number one, we're busy. But number two, sometimes going after like five things can get really, really frustrating. And then we procrastinate and then we put it on the shelf and we totally forget about it. So that's where I'm just going to challenge you with one thing this week before you walk into any hard conversation. And honestly, I hope you don't have to have any hard conversations this week. I hope it's a really good week for you in the near future. Possibly. When you walk into a hard conversation, whether it's a planned one or that one person like snags you in the hallway and kind of ambushes you, practice becoming the non anxious presence first. Here is the actual practice. Okay, before the conversation, take 1 minute, 60 seconds. Remind yourself, first of all, do some breathing exercises if you need to, but remind yourself that their reaction is not an emergency, that you do not have to fix their feelings in this meeting, and that your worth is not on the table no matter how the conversation steers. Okay? Settle yourself first. Then walk in clear, calm and kind and let your steadiness do the heavy lifting that your arguments never could. And now if you're dealing with a water cooler version right now, someone taking their discontent sideways, do the one brave thing this week. Invite the direct conversation. I would rather hear it from you, then secondhand. Take the wood off of the fire. Because here is the truth about this whole episode. You cannot control whether someone pushes back. You can only control whether there are two anxious people in the room or one steady one. Your calm is not passivity, my friends. Your calm is leadership. A, uh, gentle answer really does deflect anger. Not because it's weak but because it's the strongest, most settled thing in the room. On our next episode, we're going to finish this three part series with the part that protects it all. Why? Clear, documented communication is not cold or corporate, but it's actually how you protect your people, your team and yourself. So I will see you there. One quick sec before you go. If this episode helped you, the most valuable thing you can do is leave a review. It's how new leaders find this show on Apple podcasts. Open up the Leadership clearly show page, scroll down past the episode list to ratings and reviews, tap the stars to rate, and then write a review to leave a few words. It takes about 30 seconds and it genuinely helps. And I'd love to stay connected outside of this podcast. Come and find me on Instagram at Julietomas Wagner, all, uh, one word. Or on TikTok at leadership clearly. Send me a message and tell me what landed with you today. I read them and I actually respond. My friends, clarity is an act of love. I will see you next week.