The [un]common stuff that lives between strategy and execution, that teams don’t talk about.
Your first read every Wednesday morning, meant to be applied and forwarded.
Believe it or not, nobody actually calms down when you tell them to... (shocking, isn't it?!)
I was having lunch with a leader recently who'd just come out of a heated team exercise. She was sandwiched between different people with different styles, expressing real frustration in the room.
By nature, she's observant, soft-spoken and the kind of person who takes everything in before she says anything.
She told me the only thing she wanted to do in that moment was stand up and tell everyone to calm down. As she said, calm down, her voice got louder, firmer and mirrored the frustration she described seeing in the room only minutes prior.
We laughed because we both knew how that would go, and then laughed harder when we acknowledged that her way of telling everyone to calm down completely matched their energy.
Here's what was actually happening to her in that moment.
The room had gotten loud, positions had hardened, and she'd frozen. The chaos had swallowed her whole and the only exit she could find was two words that would've made everything worse.
That's the tornado, and most leaders have been there, but very few talk about it.
Telling a group to calm down is like pouring gasoline on a fire... the emotion isn't the obstacle. The emotion is information and when you try to shut it down, people defend it harder, which leaves you with more to deal with, not less.
The real issue is the assumption that lives underneath the tactic of 'managing the room'.
Most leaders who want to tell a room to calm down picture themselves as separate from what's happening. The observer, the neutral party, the one who can see clearly because they're not in it.
Oh but they're in it, alright!
When you're in the room with the tornado of emotions happening around you, your stillness is still a signal and your silence is still a contribution. The way you're sitting, where you're looking, how tightly you're holding your pen, it's all landing on the people around you, whether you mean it to or not.
You're not watching the weather, you're part of it.
So before you try to manage anyone else in that room, the first question is, what are you contributing to it?
When you feel yourself getting prickly.
This one comes before the tornado. It's the early warning system, the moment you still have enough awareness to catch yourself before the room catches you.
You know the feeling when your jaw tightens and you stop listening and start preparing your response. You're physically present, but you've already checked out.
A few things that actually work in that moment to bring you back to presence.
- Look somewhere else in the room and count to ten (sounds weird but trust me, it works).
- Take a breath, not a performance sigh, just enough to create space between what you heard and what you say next.
- Remind yourself why you're there - to be right or to work toward a common goal?
- Change your physical state. If you're standing, sit down. If you're sitting, open your hands and plant your feet. Research shows that changing your posture during a stressful moment lowers cortisol and increases your sense of control.
Your body is already communicating with the room in moments like this; it's important to know whether you're being intentional about what it's saying. You can't settle a room you're still adding heat to.
When you're already in the tornado.
This space is different; it isn't prickly. The room is loud, everyone's talking at once, positions have hardened, and your brain has gone completely still in a way that feels nothing like calm. You're not regulating, you're frozen.
The instinct in that moment is to either say something big to stop it, hence "can everyone just calm down," or say nothing at all and hope it burns itself out. Neither works particularly well.
What does work is smaller than you'd think.
- Pick one person in the room, not the loudest one, someone who hasn't fully ignited yet, and ask them a direct question. "What's your take on this?" It doesn't resolve the room but it narrows your focus from the whole tornado to one conversation. Your nervous system can work with one conversation. It can't work with eight at once.
- Give yourself a physical anchor. Both feet on the floor. Hands open or resting on the table. One slow breath. Not for the room. For you. You're resetting your own system before you try to do anything else.
- If you need a minute, take one. Say something like let's pause for five minutes is the most useful thing you can do when the room has gotten ahead of everyone in it, including you.
When you're steady enough to manage the room.
Now you can work, not before.
- Redirect to the objective. When things get heated, the conversation stops being about the work and starts being about positions. Who said what, who disagreed with whom, whose approach is right. The fastest way to interrupt that is to bring the work back into the room. What are we actually trying to solve here? works. So does, what does a good outcome look like for everyone? It gives people's brains somewhere useful to go instead of somewhere reactive.
- Change the container. Sometimes the problem isn't the conversation, it's the format the conversation is happening in. A full group with one simmering disagreement is a bad container for honesty. People perform for each other. They match each other's energy without realizing it. Break the room. Call five minutes. Move into pairs. Ask people to write their actual concern down before they speak again. One team I know spent close to an hour going in circles until someone made that one change. The conversation that followed was completely different. You're not avoiding anything. You're giving the conflict somewhere better to land.
- Pull someone else in. When the room is stuck, widen the conversation. "I'd love to hear from someone who hasn't weighed in yet." It creates a pause, shifts the energy, and almost always brings something useful into the room. You don't have to have the answer. You have to keep things moving. *Caveat, don't put someone nervous about speaking up to be this person. Bring in someone you know will be a calm anchor.
'Finding calm' starts with knowing you're standing in the same weather as everyone else.
The difference between the leader who manages that moment well and the one who reaches for the gasoline isn't seniority or experience.
It's awareness of the room, themselves and the difference between prickly, frozen, and ready.
Remember, if your team is passionate enough to disagree, it shows they care. Help them focus that care into a productive discussion.
Keep both feet on the ground,
Kendra
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