Why Accountability Feels Threatening

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Why Accountability Feels Threatening

Lauren explains why accountability can feel threatening in high-stress systems and how leaders can approach feedback with clarity and compassion.

Lauren begins a new series on maintaining authority without escalation, focusing on why accountability can feel threatening in high-stress or trauma-exposed systems. When teams are already carrying chronic stress, even small moments of correction can activate the nervous system and trigger defensiveness, avoidance, or shutdown.

Rather than avoiding hard conversations, Lauren encourages leaders to understand these reactions as stress responses and approach accountability with clarity and compassion. When done well, accountability reduces ambiguity, strengthens trust, and supports healthier, more sustainable teams.

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Transcript:

Lauren Spigelmyer: Alright, we're heading into a new series this week. And gosh, this one I've been really excited for. I mean, the last series was good too, but this one is something that so many entities and organizations have been bringing to the table. So, we thought, why not do a series on it? It's authority without excal... excalation, escalation. It's a good segue if you listened to the last episode, it was talking about sustainable authority. This is how do we maintain authority without escalating things. How do we hold accountability in high stress or trauma exposed systems? What does that mean? If you are serving people, if you're a service-based organization, nonprofit, medical, police, education, and you're serving people, children, whoever, who are highly stressed or have high trauma backgrounds or exposures, this is for you. Like, how do we hold those people accountable? How do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we hold our teams accountable when they are working with those people? So, we're going to do a couple sessions here. One is on why, the first episode is going to be why accountability feels really threatening. Then we'll talk about boundaries. Then we'll talk about repair. Then we'll talk about designing cultures where hard conversations can actually become something safe and revitalizing. So, we're gonna move from like internal to relational to cultural to structural. If that makes sense.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, today we're focusing on why accountability feels threatening in these systems. So, we'll talk about how, like, feedback and correction activate the nervous system, not just for the staff, but for leaders too. And when teams are already carrying a lot of chronic stress and or trauma exposures like secondary trauma. Even small moments of correction can trigger a lot of defensiveness, can trigger shutdown, can trigger avoidance. Totally normal response. So, how do we manage and deal with all of that? When you do work in a high trauma or even just high stress environment, it's natural for you to kind of, sort of, not sort of, kind of fully be on edge. And when you're on edge, when someone is holding you accountable, especially in a way that maybe doesn't feel nice, it activates your survival response. And if you don't understand that that's happening inside of your psychological system, we misinterpret the behavioral responses as resistance. But what they're actually telling us is just regulation breakdown. Just like, I'm too overwhelmed to handle this. Not that I can't handle this. I'm just too overwhelmed in this moment to handle this. And the behavior is misinterpreted. And that doesn't work well for anyone. So. Let's first kind of ground in accountability, holding people accountable is an event of the nervous system. In every episode almost, I'm always constantly talking about or referencing the nervous system. And I'm gonna continue to that because that's the core and the basis of our work. But when you get feedback from someone, it's one, we don't always deliver feedback incredibly well. Sometimes it's really like negative focused and it can have like positive focus first and then a negative. But even if like your positive focus is like, oh, I just need to say something. because I know what I really need to say is this negative thing. Ultimately, feedback usually feels like a threat. Even if it's not meant to be a threat, it's often perceived as a threat. Even if it's not consciously perceived as a threat, it's psychologically received or perceived as a threat. And that's because when you're getting that feedback, it's usually coming from a power dynamic, from above down to below. And... there's not really any way around that and not necessarily a bad thing. It's just when that's the case, it feels really vulnerable. Like for example, just for a second, envision yourself. This is, like, a really good example of it and like a scale of a young child. So, let's pretend you're a teacher, maybe even male teacher, pretty tall and you're working with first graders. So, if you can envision what like a six, seven year old looks like, they're pretty small, pretty short. That teacher, even if not tall, is still towering over that student. Even if that teacher didn't have authority over that student, which they do, or there wasn't a power dynamic, which there is, just the physical difference in height creates a power dynamic. And the physical difference in height creates a vulnerability with and in the child. So that's why I don't always do this well, but I try my best to do this when I'm redirecting my child in terms of behavior. I try not to... talk for like standing up down to him because it makes him feel really vulnerable. It feels like a threat. It's a power dynamic. It's not helpful. What I try to do is I usually like put him up on a bench on a seat and I get down to his level. I even try and get below his level because I'm giving him corrective feedback. It feels a little bit threatening, but if I'm below him, it flip flops the power dynamic. Now in most of the same, do that with your colleagues or coworkers where you're like, let me get beneath you, but at least at eye level with them. You can sit down at a table if you're taller than them. If you're already shorter than them, then it may not matter so much, but sitting is probably better than standing. Nonetheless, correction, even if like appropriate, and there are lots of times where correction is appropriate. We need feedback to improve, but correction feels and often triggers shame. And that's where like things can spiral.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, when people are already on edge from being in highly stressed, highly trauma exposed system, your tone of voice really matters. Timing really matters. Even day of the week kind of matters. Hierarchy carries significant weight. Not even just your physical hierarchy difference, but your position of power carries a lot of weight. So, what this looks like is if someone's a more like fight-based nervous system response, you get that fight-flight-freeze fawn. If someone's more like fight-based, they'll be really defensive. If someone is more flight-based, they'll be very avoidant. If someone is freeze-based, they'll shut down. And if someone is fawn-based, they'll over-apologize without any behavioral change. We don't want any of those responses. We want people to be able to handle, hear, take accountability. and then grow from it. That means meeting them with grace, but moving them into growth. I would even encourage you all to think about as a leader before you see, even if it is resistance, even if it is defensiveness, before you see it as, well, you'll see it, you can't stop yourself from seeing it. Let's say it's there. Instead of being frustrated or responding to the defensiveness or the reactionary response, instead pause and ask yourself like, oh, is this a stress response? Is this fight, flight, freeze, fawn? And is that getting in the way of this person receiving this and making behavioral change from it. Leaders will often avoid accountability. And often that comes from knowing that their staff members are already stressed and they don't want to add to the stress. Or they don't want to be seen as punitive. They fear being seen as punitive. They also might have a lot of their own trauma histories. And it's not uncommon for people to, like, police or nonprofit or behavioral health or education to have trauma histories or at least have like very stressful chronic chronically stressful childhood or histories. I think we also confuse compassion with accommodation. You can be compassionate without overly accommodating and that's kinda what we're after here. When we avoid the correction of the conversation or the hard truth, it may feel kind to us, but over time it's going to create a lot of role confusion. It's going to create a lot of resentment. It's going to create a lot of performance sinking drift. Not good performance metrics. And it's going to quietly erode morale, causing people to burn out, causing people to leave and turn over. When you avoid accountability, it does not reduce your stress. It just redistributes it somewhere else. I think about, there was a freshman one, I was a freshman once. When I was a freshman, I played basketball and full disclosure, I never really loved basketball. And I think as I look back and I think about it, even though I was super tall, six foot tall, people thought I was confident because I was very tall and I... I based on a lot of factors, actually wasn't terribly confident. And one of my like biggest irrational fears was I was very naturally athletic, but I didn't like eyes on me. I didn't like people to be looking at me. So, it's one of the reasons why I love track and field so much because there were so many different events going on at one time that no one was really ever paying attention to what I was doing. Not too much anyhow, but in basketball, there are only 10 people in the court. You got five people, you know, on your team. So, whether you have the ball or not, like everyone sees you always. And especially if you have the ball, people see you. So, for me, basketball was like, I felt so exposed. I felt so seen in a way I didn't want to be seen. So, I was very nervous, very anxious, and I didn't take a lot of risks. Well, I had a coach my freshman year who saw me not taking risks and I think just, like, saw my potential. and kicked me out of the basketball gym as a freshman, like threw a ball at the wall, yelled and kicked me out of his gym. And I was mortified. It was like my worst nightmare come true. But here's the thing, whether actions were appropriate or not, or how it was done was appropriate or not. Here's the truth. That person built trust with me before and after that event and shared that they saw my potential. and I could sense and feel that they really cared about me and they definitely didn't avoid confronting me. But it made me gain a lot of respect for that person. In years past, that experience, it's probably the coach that I have the most respect for because I'm like, wow, he cared enough, did it powerfully in a way that was a little bit traumatic, but, ultimately, I know that he cared about me as a human being. and saw my potential and he wanted what was best for me. And he was trying to figure out how to get it out of me. So, I actually have a lot of respect for him for doing that. So, the point being, don't avoid accountability. Probably don't kick anybody out either. ah Okay, so what's the cost? What's the cost if your standards are unclear, if you're not holding people accountable? Well, if you have any high performers on your team, they're definitely burning out and people will start to underperform and that will just become normal. It's just gonna be how people show up in the organization. And because of those two things, leaders are naturally going to grow resentful of these people. And that whole cycle is going to cause trust to erode. When we hold people accountable and respectfully with compassion and we move them into growth and it's all done respectfully and done well, it lowers the anxiety because it reduces the ambiguity. That is what we want.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, what I'm gonna ask you to do is just pause here for a second and reflect. If you're in a position of leadership or wanna be in a position of leadership in the future. Think about yourself here for a second. What emotions arise in you when you have to correct someone? Do you avoid? Do you try to escape? Do you attack it really aggressively? What emotions arise in you when you have to correct or confront someone? Where did you learn what authority looks like? Whether good or bad, where did you see it? Where did you learn what it looks like? And in these moments, do you escalate? Do you avoid? Or do you over soften? When you're thinking about all of these things and you're kind of reflecting and like, oh, I realized I'm here. I could improve here. I'm feeling like this about our leadership team. It's really hard to make these changes on your own. It's, you need ongoing support, training, coaching, programs, courses, whatever, but it can't be just like one and done. Like a one-time training is not going to fix this problem. You need someone who can help you when you get to the stuck points or when you are in a repeated pattern that can help you break the pattern. And it needs to be really actionable, really implementable things because we're already in survival straits or already in high stress states and you can't learn a lot of new things or apply a lot of new things when you're in that state. So, ultimately, what we know is that we need supports for this type of work. And that is why Jessica and I developed from Five Eyes something we call the Staff Sustainability Program or the Staff Sustainability System where it helps organizations of all levels of all sizes, different budget ranges begin to implement these things. And maybe it's like gung ho. Like, all in a year, maybe it's across two years or three years or five years, whatever you have the capacity to take on, whatever you have the budget to take on. But ultimately, what does it look like to shape and shift and change not only leadership? I know we're talking a lot about leadership because we do serve a lot of leadership, but we also serve a lot of frontline staff. How do we actually serve both together and make it a cohesive whole and change the entire culture of the organization so that we don't have all those negative outcomes of turnover, burnout, whatever it is, lower enrollment? We want to increase the positive metrics and... lower the ones that are a little bit more unpleasant. So, if you want to learn more about the Staff Sustainability Program, Staff Sustainability System, go to fiveives.com, go to the Services tab. We also have programming that supports specific teachers in education and they can actually get credit from University of Pennsylvania. So, we have a course we run every semester in partnership with Penn for 4.5 credits. Anyone in the country can take it. It's a remote course. We're running one currently right now in the spring. We'll run one again in the summer. That is called the Behavior Breakthrough Program. And it is also on the website. If you go to the main homepage, fiveives.com, f-i-v-e-i-v-e-s.com, and you scroll all the way down to the bottom, it'll say On Demand Resources. And the course is very clearly on that tab. If you have any other questions about anything, like, from staff sustainability, about the course, anything in between, email us. Jessica and I can both, or one or the other can get back to you. We both have kind of the same email, different first names. So mine is lauren@fiveives.com and Jessica’s is Jessica@fiveives.com . You can email both of us, can email one of us, but happy to answer any questions or share any free resources that we have to support you in this work because we've seen the results of it, we've seen the feedback from it, and it just shifts and shapes and changes individuals within an organization and lots of individuals which shifts and shapes and changes the entire organization. So we love doing the work, we'd love to see how we can support you. Don't hesitate to reach out. Until next time, I'm Lauren Spigelmyer, and thanks for joining me.


Categories: : Emotional Regulation

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