Author: Judith E. Glaser

You walk into a meeting late and people are already in huddles. Colleagues glance over ever so briefly then turn back to their conversations. You sit down in a corner and use your smartphone to check email. Once the group discussion starts, you want to offer an opinion but can’t seem to get a word in. Eventually, you give up, take a few notes, check more email and wait for the meeting to end. You stay at your desk the rest of the day but don’t get much done.

Rejection, or the fear of it, is a powerful social trigger — and, at work, it can be a debilitating one. When people feel left out of or excluded from important circles of influence at the office, they can’t be productive, innovative, or collaborative because their brains’ neurochemistry has changed. They feel threatened. Cortisol flows in. Their executive centers shut down. Behavior shifts from trust to distrust. And the effects can last for hours. I like to say that rejection alters reality: we Reveal less, Expect more, Assume the worst, Look at the situation with caution, Interpret the context through fear, Think others are taking advantage of us and Yearn to be included.

But managers who understand this vicious pattern can break it — in themselves and their employees. Here are some conversational rituals designed to help the people on your team regroup, and become part of the group — to alter their inner, mental spaces by changing the outer, social environment.

1. Prime the room for trust. While long, rectangular conference tables promote hierarchy and give those at the head an advantage, round tables do the opposite, fostering inclusion. Meeting leaders can also explicitly point out that all colleagues at the table are equal. This should spur the production of oxytocin in everyone’s brains, ease fear of rejection and put people into a more collaborative state of mind.
2. Start with a shared reality. Whenever possible, send agenda items out before a meeting and ask people for their input. This signals “I care about what you think”, rather than “I control this”. Another way to encourage a common mindset is to give team members an article to read and ask them to find something inspiring in it; have them share these thoughts at a meeting and encourage the group to listen for common themes. This will trigger everyone’s prefrontal cortex mirror neurons, which enable us to connect with others’ emotions and opinions, enhancing empathy and our understanding of different perspectives.
3. Encourage candor and caring. Use open, non-judgmental language and listen with respect and appreciation in all conversations. Imagine that the words people use are like suitcases; you need “unpack” them to understand what colleagues are really thinking. Thank people for sharing, and make sure that there are no negative repercussions for doing so. Tell everyone you’re committed to a welcoming, collaborative environment, and that you don’t want anyone to feel rejected.

Remember, we all thrive on being connected to others. Don’t let your office become a place where people feel threatened by rejection. Instead, bring your conversational intelligence to work.

I’m sure it’s happened to you: You’re in a tense team meeting trying to defend your position on a big project and start to feel yourself losing ground. Your voice gets louder. You talk over one of your colleagues and correct his point of view. He pushes back, so you go into overdrive to convince everyone you’re right. It feels like an out of body experience — and in many ways it is. In terms of its neurochemistry, your brain has been hijacked.

In situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself — in this case from the shame and loss of power associated with being wrong — and as a result is unable to regulate its emotions or handle the gaps between expectations and reality. So we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him).

All are harmful because they prevent the honest and productive sharing of information and opinion. But, as a consultant who has spent decades working with executives on their communication skills, I can tell you that the fight response is by far the most damaging to work relationships. It is also, unfortunately, the most common.

That’s partly due to another neurochemical process. When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.

I’ve coached dozens of incredibly successful leaders who suffer from this addiction. They are extremely good at fighting for their point of view (which is indeed often right) yet they are completely unaware of the dampening impact that behavior has on the people around them. If one person is getting high off his or her dominance, others are being drummed into submission, experiencing the fight, flight, freeze or appease response I described before, which diminishes their collaborative impulses.

Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (at least in the context of communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Here are a few exercises for you to do at work to help your (and others’) addiction to being right:

Set rules of engagement. If you’re heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement. Have everyone suggest ways to make it a productive, inclusive conversation and write the ideas down for everyone to see. For example, you might agree to give people extra time to explain their ideas and to listen without judgment. These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider see how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.

Listen with empathy. In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other peoples’ perspectives, the more likely you are to feel empathy for them. And when you do that for others, they’ll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.

Plan who speaks. In situations when you know one person is likely to dominate a group, create an opportunity for everyone to speak. Ask all parties to identify who in the room has important information, perspectives, or ideas to share. List them and the areas they should speak about on a flip chart and use that as your agenda, opening the floor to different speakers, asking open-ended questions and taking notes.

Connecting and bonding with others trumps conflict. I’ve found that even the best fighters — the proverbial smartest guys in the room — can break their addiction to being right by getting hooked on oxytocin-inducing behavior instead.