When Protecting Your Team Becomes Disempowering

Have you ever decided not to give someone feedback because you thought they would become defensive?  Or not told someone about an opportunity because you assumed they were already too busy?   Or avoided a difficult conversation because you didn't want to upset the other person?

It can feel considerate.

It can even feel like good leadership.

But what if, without realizing it, you're actually taking away that person's ability to choose for themselves?

As leaders, we sometimes make decisions for other capable adults based on assumptions about what they can or cannot handle.

We tell ourselves we're protecting them.

But in doing so, we may be taking away their agency, information, learning, and opportunities to grow.

And there's another side to this: we may also be taking away our own opportunity to grow as leaders.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How seemingly caring leadership decisions can unintentionally disempower others
• Why our assumptions about how someone will react can start to feel like facts
• The important difference between being responsible for how we communicate and trying to control someone else's reaction
• Why discomfort is not necessarily the same as harm
• How avoiding difficult conversations can prevent both you and your team members from developing
• Why empowerment requires trusting people with choices, feedback, opportunities, and sometimes uncomfortable truths
• A simple set of questions to help you recognize when you may be deciding what another adult can handle

Sometimes empowering someone isn't about giving them more responsibility.

Sometimes it's about trusting them enough to give them the information, let them experience their own emotions, and allow them to decide what happens next.

And trusting yourself enough to handle the discomfort that may come with it.

Watch on YouTube Here

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, everyone, and I think you're gonna enjoy this one today. It's quite an interesting thing that we tend to do, and we might not even realize it. And we not only do it to our teams or to our colleagues, but we can also do it to our friends and family. So in this episode, we're gonna look at the difference between protecting people and unintentionally disempowering them, and why sometimes the empowering thing to do as leaders is to stop deciding what other adults can handle.

So my name is Torrey, and welcome to the "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader" podcast. And I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I find myself even catching myself doing it,

and also I see my students doing it as well.

So perhaps you can identify with this, like if you've ever tried to give feedback and decided not to give it [00:01:00] because you were afraid the other person wouldn't take it well. Or maybe you didn't tell someone about an opportunity, for example, to help out with a project or a regional initiative, whatever it was, because you assumed they were already too busy.

Or maybe you avoided a difficult conversation, we probably all can identify with that because you thought it would upset the other person. It can feel considerate, it can feel like good leadership, but what if what you're actually doing is taking away their choice? And what if in trying to protect them from an uncontrollable experience, you're actually taking away an opportunity for both of you to grow?

So I want you to think about this, whether you've done something like this. For example, you don't send [00:02:00] someone an email because you think, "Mm, they're probably already overwhelmed. I'm not gonna bother them." Or you don't tell someone about an opportunity because you think, "Ah, they're too busy.

They don't have time for this," or, "They don't have budget for this." You don't assign someone a challenging project because you think, "Mm, they don't have enough experience yet." You don't give honest feedback to someone because you think, "Ah, they're gonna take this personally. They're gonna be mad with me.

It's going to upset them." And what's interesting is that in almost every one of these situations, we can tell ourselves that we're being helpful. We're doing it from what we think is a caring place. But I want you to notice something else. We've made a decision for that person, who is an adult, based on an assumption about [00:03:00] how we think they're going to respond.

And I find this so fascinating because it's so common. I know I do it sometimes. I have to catch myself, like I said. I see my students do it when we're talking about feedback and how to give and receive feedback in my course. And sometimes, yeah, we've already made a decision for someone else and taken away their agency by doing so.

We've decided they're too busy. We decide they aren't ready. We decided they can't handle the feedback. But we never actually involved them in making the choice for themselves So this is one of the reasons that I think our mindset is so important in leadership. Because very often something happens. We create a thought about what it means, and then we start treating that thought as if it were a fact.

So for [00:04:00] example, the fact might be my colleague has a lot going on right now, but then I add, "She's too busy to take on this opportunity," or, "She's too busy to answer my email," or, "They're too overwhelmed to, look at this new responsibility." And then from there I decide, "I'm not even gonna tell them about it."

But what do I actually know? How do I actually know that person is too busy? Most of the time we're making an assumption. Maybe she would say no, maybe we're right, but maybe she would actually say, "Actually, I've been waiting for this opportunity. I would love to do that. Let me see what else I can first move around," or, "Let me see how I can make time."

Or maybe it's, "I don't care. I wanna do it all." Maybe this opportunity is actually [00:05:00] more important to her than something she's currently doing. Maybe she'd say, "Not right now, but think of me next time." Or maybe she'd say, "You're right. I don't have the ability, I don't have the capacity right now." But here's the difference: She got to decide.

I didn't decide for her. And the same thing happens with feedback. The fact may be I have some difficult feedback I need to give someone. My thought is: "he's going to become defensive", and then my decision becomes, "I'm just not gonna give that feedback. I'm just not gonna tell him what's really happening here."

And again, by doing that, I've taken an assumption about what that other person might do and turned it into a reason to withhold information that could actually help them. One of the biggest examples of this happened to me years ago when I was [00:06:00] managing a very difficult project.

There was someone on the project, I'll call them John, and the situation was becoming very difficult, overly complicated. We were falling behind in the project. And John was in charge of the project, and I wasn't completely honest with John about how, just how bad things were falling apart.

And at the time, I had a reason for that. I thought he would become upset. I thought I was protecting him. I thought that giving him the full picture might cause unnecessary stress. But looking at it now, I see it very differently. I see that by withholding the information from John about what he could and couldn't handle, I robbed him of the opportunity to step up and to grow.

And sometimes I wonder what have, would have happened if I had simply had a more honest conversation with him sooner, because [00:07:00] eventually I had to let him go, and that was an even more difficult conversation. So if I had let him known sooner, maybe he would have made a decision to leave sooner, or maybe he would have started looking for another opportunity, or maybe he would have changed something.

Maybe he would have prepared himself differently for what eventually happened. Maybe he would have been upset. I don't know. But that's actually the point. I don't know what he would have done, and I didn't give him the chance or the opportunity to make that decision for himself. In trying to protect him from a difficult reality, I may have actually prevented him from responding to that reality, and that is something I think about very differently now.

It is actually one of the biggest regrets I have in all of my years as a leader. Now, I wanna be clear here. I'm not saying leaders should tell everyone everything, [00:08:00] right? There is a time where things need to remain confidential. There are safeguarding concerns, there are security concerns, legal obligations.

There are emergencies where the leaders need to make decisions quickly. But this isn't about just abandoning your judgment or responsibility as a leader, but it's about noticing something much more subtle. When am I making a decision for another capable adult, primarily because of an assumption about how I think they're going to feel or respond?

In other words, I'm afraid of their feelings. I'm afraid of their reaction that I don't even know they're going to have. And there's another question that's-- can be uncomfortable to ask, but is worth asking, and that is, what or who am I actually protecting? Let's say I tell myself, "I'm not going to give this feedback to this [00:09:00] person because they'll be upset."

Maybe that's true, but perhaps there's another piece of it. Maybe I don't want to experience him being upset with me, or I'm not going to have this conversation because they already have so much going on right now. Again, perhaps that's true, but maybe I'm also uncomfortable having difficult conversations, and this gives me a very compassionate sounding reason to avoid one.

It sounds so nice, right? I'm sparing their feelings. I'm helping them by not telling them. But sometimes what we call protecting another person is partly about protecting ourselves from discomfort, and I think that's worth getting curious about because

by protecting ourselves from how we think they are gonna react, we are protecting ourselves from how we think we [00:10:00] will react. So am I protecting them from discomfort? Or am I protecting myself from having to witness their discomfort? So we are responsible for how we communicate,

not for controlling their reaction. We are not responsible for other people's reactions or emotions. This is an important distinction. As leaders, we absolutely have responsibility to think about the impact of our actions. For how we communicate, we're responsible for being respectful. We're responsible for choosing an appropriate time and place for a difficult conversation, for communicating clearly, for listening.

But we are not responsible for controlling another adult's emotional response. Someone might be disappointed by a decision or may feel uncomfortable receiving feedback. They may be frustrated [00:11:00] during a difficult conversation or feel nervous about taking on a stretch assignment, and that doesn't automatically mean that we've harmed them. Because discomfort and harm are not the same thing.

In fact, sometimes discomfort is exactly where learning happens, and sometimes being caring means being and creating situations that may not be so comfortable. So it's worth thinking about what might we be taking away from them? This is where I think the consequences become much bigger than the individual decision.

Because when we continually protect people from things that we believe they can't handle, we may be taking away much more than we realize. We take away agency. They don't get to decide for themselves. We take away information. They don't have all the information they need to make [00:12:00] choices about their own career, work, or situation, and we take away learning.

They don't get to experience something difficult and discover how they might respond. We take away growth. They miss the stretch assignment, the feedback, the difficult conversation, the chance to make a mistake and learn from it, the chance to be able to respond emotionally, and then maybe if they respond poorly, they might even become more self-aware and change in the future.

But the point is, it's their choice. So perhaps most importantly, by doing this, we can unintentionally communicate, "I don't trust you to handle this." And that's where I think this becomes particularly important for those of us who say we want to empower our teams. But there's another side of this that we don't talk about so much.

[00:13:00] What might we be taking away from ourselves? When we protect other people from uncomfortable situations, we may be robbing ourselves an opportunity to grow as leaders because maybe the growth opportunity isn't only theirs. Maybe it's our opportunity as well to have a difficult conversation we've been avoiding.

Maybe it's our opportunity to become more honest and transparent, to give more direct feedback, or be a better communicator. Or maybe it's our opportunity to learn how to stay present when someone else is experiencing a strong emotion without immediately trying to fix it, defend ourselves, or make that emotion go away.

So I have a really good example of this. I remember one time a member of my team became extremely upset with me because she believed I was favoring someone else over her. I didn't believe that was [00:14:00] true, and I could have immediately become defensive. She came into my office, and she started screaming at me and crying and making this huge scene.

I think the whole office could hear her. The other person also was sitting right there, so it was quite overwhelming, I think, for them. And I could have interrupted her and explained why she was wrong. I could have shut the conversation down because I didn't like the way she was expressing herself. But instead, I stayed silent, I listened, and she really let me have it.

Let me tell you, she was so angry. She told me exactly what she thought, and that was very uncomfortable as I was sitting there listening to all of this. But I had an opportunity in that moment to practice something as a leader. Could I allow someone else to be upset without making their emotion a problem [00:15:00] that I needed to solve, without making their feelings my problem?

So I decided to just sit, be calm, listen. I observed what was happening in myself, and I resisted the urge to defend myself. Eventually, something changed. She started to calm down, and once the emotion had passed, she was able to reflect differently on what had happened. Later, she actually came back and thanked me.

This is, the most unbelievable part, is that I never would have expected her to come back and thank me just for listening. But regardless of whether she had thanked me, I learned something very valuable from that experience. I learned I could sit with someone else's anger and be uncomfortable and be okay.

I learned that I didn't have to defend myself just because someone was upset with me. I learned that [00:16:00] someone else's strong emotional reaction didn't necessarily mean I had done something wrong or that I needed to make their emotions go away. And think about what happens if we're constantly avoiding situations because we predict someone else might become upset.

We never get to practice handling someone being upset, and so we stay smaller, right? As a leader, if we avoid giving difficult feedback because someone might become defensive, we never learn how to navigate defensiveness. We don't have that leadership skill developed. We become weaker in that area. If we avoid honest conversations because we think that they might become uncomfortable, we may never get more skilled at having those types of conversations.

If we avoid telling someone something because we're afraid of their reaction, we will become less honest, open, and transparent [00:17:00] in situations that might actually help us grow and the other person too. When we decide what another person can handle, we may be limiting their growth and also our own. And I think that's worth remembering the next time we tell ourselves, "I'm not gonna do this today because they will..."

Or maybe the question isn't only "what opportunity am I taking from them", but also "what opportunity am I taking away from myself"? So you can't empower someone while constantly deciding for them what they can and can't handle. We talk a lot about empowerment and leadership, especially in this podcast and in, in my course, and empowerment is a big part of the work I do with leaders.

How do we empower others? How do we give them a voice? How do we get people to be more confident, more proactive, [00:18:00] and step up and become more high-performing? We want our teams to take ownership. We want them to make decisions for themselves.

We want them to solve problems and be more confident and grow. But think about that contradiction if, at the same time, we want those things, we're also constantly deciding what they can and can't handle. And it can be so subconscious, those decisions. It can be so subtle. We don't even realize we're doing it.

And that is why this episode is so important for you today.

For example, situations where we say, "I want you to take ownership, but I won't tell you this because I don't think you can handle it," or, "I want you to grow, but I don't want to give you this a- assignment because I don't think you're ready," or, "I want you to develop, but I'm not gonna give you honest feedback because I think you'll become defensive."

I want you to make decisions, but I've already decided that you're too busy for this [00:19:00] opportunity." That's not empowerment, because empowerment requires trust. And sometimes that means trusting someone with something that may be uncomfortable. It means trusting them with difficult feedback, trusting them with an opportunity that they might choose to turn down, or trusting them with information they may not like. Trusting them enough to let them make a decision that might be different from the one you would make for them. And trusting that even if they don't handle something perfectly, they are capable of learning from the experience.

Because here's the question I keep coming back to: If I keep protecting someone from situations because I don't believe they can handle them, when exactly do they get the opportunity to learn that they can? So I want to give you something very simple to [00:20:00] pay attention to this week.

Notice whenever you hear yourself thinking, "I'm not going to blank because they will blank. I'm not going to tell her because she'll worry. I'm not to give him feedback because he'll get defensive. I'm not going to offer her the project because she'll be overwhelmed. I'm not gonna bring this up because he'll get upset."

When you hear yourself thinking about something like that, pause and ask, "Do I actually know that's true, or am I assuming it?" And then ask, "Is there a legitimate reason that I need to make this decision for this person as their own adult?" Maybe there is. But if there isn't, "Can I give them the information and allow them to decide?"

And then ask, "What opportunity might I be taking away from this person or myself by trying to [00:21:00] protect them?" Maybe it's an opportunity to grow for both of us. Maybe it's the opportunity to make a choice or learn how to have an honest conversation. So I think sometimes without realizing it, we can start treating the adults we lead a bit like children.

We filter information, we soften reality, we remove choices, and we try to prevent uncomfortable feelings, and we do it because we care. But caring about someone doesn't mean deciding for them what they can handle. Sometimes caring about someone means giving them the dignity of making their own choice, and that doesn't mean we stop supporting them, quite the opposite.

We can say, "Here's what I see. Here's the information I have. Here's what I'm concerned about. Here's the feedback I think you need to hear." And then, "What do you think? What do you want to do? What [00:22:00] support do you need?" This is a very different kind of leadership. We're not abandoning someone to figure out something on their own.

We're standing beside them while still allowing the decision and the growth that comes with it to belong to them. And at the same time, we're allowing ourselves to grow alongside them. We're learning to have the conversation, tolerate discomfort, not have to manage everyone's emotions, and learning to trust.

So before you finish this episode, I want you to think of one person you lead. Maybe there's something you've been holding back from them, a feedback opportunity, a difficult conversation, a decision you've already made on their behalf. And ask yourself, "What have I decided that this person cannot handle?"

And then ask, "What evidence do I actually have that that's true?" And perhaps the more uncomfortable [00:23:00] question, "am I protecting them from their discomfort, or am I protecting myself from mine"? Because we talk a lot about empowering people, but empowerment is not about only delegating or giving someone else decision-making authority.

Sometimes empowerment is about trusting another adult with a difficult truth. It's trusting them with feedback or an opportunity that they might choose to turn down. And perhaps it's also trusting them enough to let them experience discomfort, disappointment, or frustration, and believing that they are capable of handling it and deciding what to do next.

And perhaps it's also trusting ourselves that we can handle it too.

Sometimes one of the most empowering things we can do as leaders is trust another adult enough to [00:24:00] let them experience, decide, and grow for themselves, and trust ourselves enough to grow alongside them. Until next week, keep evolving. Bye for now.