Fight, flight, or freeze
They say that most of us, when faced with difficult conflict, tend to fight, flight, or freeze:
- Fighters are energized by the conflict and dive in to hash it out directly
- People who take flight disengage at the first sign of discord, trying to avoid the conflict entirely
- Freezers become mentally stuck, unable to take action while waiting for the conflict to pass
For most of my life, I've been a fighter. As an adult, I've had to work to channel that instinct into something productive.
Fight, flight, or freeze: The Press Send problem
Scenario: Someone sends you a problematic email or Slack. If there's a big audience, it's even worse. You're a fighter, so you type back furiously to give the person a piece of your mind. Before you can think better of it, you Press Send.
Or maybe you've struggled with the inverse. Someone sends you something inflammatory, and you can hardly look at it, let alone send a reply. You let your response sit for hours, days, or even longer. You freeze. You can't bring yourself to Press Send.
In a perfect world, workplace conflict would always be purely intellectual and grounded in data. But here in the real world, that's not always how it goes.
This started me wondering: Given that none of fight, flight, or freeze is ideal, which one is most damaging in professional environments?
Enter the Thunderdome!
To better understand fight, flight, or freeze, this week I looked at a Slack leadership community with 10,000+ members. Despite the community size, more than 90% of the messages are sent by just 100 people. Like a lot of similar communities, it is largely theater: a few actors and a large audience.
Most of the active posters aren't especially incendiary. However, four of them regularly make controversial, trollish, and insulting comments designed to elicit a reaction; let's call them Trolls. Some people love to throw grenades.
To understand the impact of fight, flight, or freeze, I looked at how people respond to the grenades.
Leadership scoring
First, I assessed leadership seniority for the four Trolls and 20 other active posters who do not regularly troll; let's call them Reasonable Participants. I scored each of them on a 0-6 scale. I gave each person two scores:
- Title score (up to 3 points): I looked up everyone's job title. I assigned 3 points for a C-suite title, 2 points for VP, 1 point for Director title, and 0 points for Manager.
- Tenure score (up to 3 points): Using LinkedIn, I looked at everyone's total years of professional experience. I assigned 3 points for 15+ years, 2 points for 10+ years, 1 point for 5+ years, and 0 points for anything less than 5 years.
Combining the above, each person can get a maximum leadership score of 6.
Surprisingly (to me), the Trolls and Reasonable Participants have about the same seniority. But pay attention to the leadership score distribution among Reasonable Participants below. We're going to use that later.
Comment scoring
Over the last 30 days, these 24 participants have sent 91,122 public messages. Purportedly, they all have day jobs too, so that's a lot of extracurricular chitchat, even if it is professionally relevant. I classified the comments and identified 118 cases where a Troll tossed a grenade designed to elicit a reaction from a Reasonable Participant.
In this analysis, I wasn't especially interested in the Trolls; they're probably mostly fighters anyway. I was more interested in how Reasonable Participants reacted to the grenades. In particular, would I see a relationship between someone's seniority and their tendency to show fight, flight, or freeze?
The more senior the leader, the more likely they are to fight
In the context of Slack, I defined fight, flight, and freeze (as well as a behavior I called "mature engagement") this way:
- Fight: Responds back assertively (within 24 hours)
- Flight: Doesn't respond to the troll's comment within 24 hours, but continues to participate elsewhere in the community (suggesting they saw the comment and are choosing to ignore it)
- Freeze: Doesn't participate at all in the community for 24+ hours after the troll's comment is posted
- Mature: Responds to defuse the situation quickly (within 24 hours)
Yeah, I know. I am waving my hands wildly. Like maybe someone wasn't freezing, maybe they just had a deadline at work. Also, this is a really small data set. It is definitely not holding up in a peer-reviewed study. But as a long-time fighter over the internet, I find it directionally fascinating anyway.
As you might expect, Reasonable Participants respond with maturity a lot of the time. But somewhat to my surprise, the more senior the leader, the more likely they are to fight.
When the least senior Reasonable Participants (leadership scores 0-3) respond to Trolls, they are mature a lot of the time. The rest of the time, their reactions are split between fight, flight, and freeze.
But when the most senior Reasonable Participants (leadership scores 4-6) respond to Trolls, they are much more likely to fight than flight or freeze. In fact, the more senior group fights back 2x as often as the less senior group!
The bottom line: I'm a fighter from way back, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this data. But I was. Granted this is focused specifically on engineering leaders (more contentious than average?) who like having conversations by typing on the internet (definitely more contentious than average).
Even among this group, mature reactions are the most common. But this tiny data set begins to suggest that, when it comes to toxic behavior patterns, fight may get you further than flight or freeze.
Kieran
The best teams rarely fight, flight, or freeze. Here are a few ways you can build high-performing and connected teams that engage with maturity!
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