Responding to Personal Attacks

I’m working on a paper that examines how people might respond with forgiveness when they experience some sort of personal attack, insult, or other form of negativity, especially at work.

What we are realizing is that such negative occurrences are experienced as threats to one’s identity - that sense of “who am I?” in a particular context. For example, if a coworker or -even worse - a boss says to you, “Your work sucks”, the part of you that believes “I am a competent worker” is essentially under attack. So how do you respond?

Assuming that forgiveness (a release of negative emotions and desire to do harm to the one that harmed you) is the goal, then people tend to respond in one of three ways:

Refocus - We choose to refocus our attention on some other aspect of our identity. So if our “competent worker” aspect of our identity is being threatened, we might instead focus on our friendly and supportive nature.

Restore - We choose strategies to restore our identity to its previous state. We might seek an apology from the person who offended us, or perhaps talk to HR about sanctioning the offender. Once there is some form of justice, our identity will be restored.

Reconstruct - Perhaps the offense is so severe that it seems to override other aspects of our identity, and there does not seem to be any apology or pay back on the way. In such cases, we might need to do the deep work of incorporating the offense and our forgiving response as adversity which builds our character. 

Experiencing offenses and attacks is part of the leadership landscape. Choosing how we will respond is thus a key leadership competency. 

*The Leadership Sausage is my ongoing effort to bring my half-baked leadership R&D thoughts into the open, in the hopes that they will grow and perhaps even help someone else once in a while.  You can see how the sausage is made most working days at mpower2lead.com and on LinkedIn.