The Boardroom Turret Gunner

A few years ago, we witnessed a senior executive meeting on the East Coast in a luxuriously appointed boardroom atop the headquarters of a publicly listed company. We’ll protect the company and the time we were there, but it was instantly clear who was in charge. Because the meeting was so contrary to what we encounter in Silicon Valley, we asked ourselves, was it the way the imposing executive sat or where? Was it the fact that everyone in the room oriented their chairs to him? Perhaps it was the way everyone else in the room was restrained while that singular individual barked orders—in addition to the fact that everyone in the room was slightly deferential to him and the amount of airtime he consumed. Perhaps it was the fact that when that individual paused, everyone else waited, or the way the individual swung around in the plush swivel chair in which he sat and fired questions to the prepared and unprepared alike. We referred to this executive as the turret gunner; he has all the trappings of a hierarchical leader.

As we sat and watched, somewhat in disbelief at the way the turret gunner was treating his subordinates, we learned that several people in the room spent hours a week working with the turret gunner and knew what was likely to evoke a negative response and what was not, but the person presenting that day was not one of them. The presentation was related to a review of a new initiative, and the turret gunner swung around and pointed his questions to the presenter. The fast-paced questions were laden with either implicit or explicit threats. The explicit threats could be as blunt as, “I’ll fire you if you don’t . . .” The implicit threats could be as subtle as, “What was the performance of . . .?” The presenter, who had lived and breathed the project for the last year, knew every detail of how the project functioned but somehow was not able to recall the answers. For the presenter, important details that needed to be brought to the forefront were memories that, in that environment, couldn’t be recalled.

The presenter continued talking but couldn’t recall information important to the decisions that were being made. The stream of verbiage seemed incoherent, and the senior people, especially the turret gunner, seemed to feel confirmed in their view that they were senior for a reason and the presenter junior for a reason. The presenter seemed to agree to do things that he certainly couldn’t execute. He agreed to do things that he wouldn’t otherwise do, and in more than one extreme case made commitments and agreed to targets that he should have known were unattainable. Ultimately, the people in the room made a set of decisions about the project, but those decisions were not the ones that could best spur the project forward because the best information was not discussed.

What happened? The harangued presenter wasn’t thinking at his best because he experienced an amygdala hijack. The amygdala is a small part of the brain that controls the fight or flight response. In situations in which the amygdala perceives a threat, this tiny part of the brain evokes an emotional response and can respond a few milliseconds faster than the thinking brain, or cerebrum, can. As such, the amygdala will override or hijack higher brain thinking and drive an immediate action-oriented response. This part of the brain is there for our survival in threatening situations, so this response can be powerful and automatic. However, the office environments where most of us spend our days are far removed from the wild environments in which the fight or flight response evolved. What this means is that while in primitive humans, immediate action was required to dispense with an existential threat, in the modern office, those actions might be unhelpful or even preposterous.

An amygdala-oriented response is dangerously seductive precisely because of the immediate, action-oriented response it causes. The tried-and-true management technique of anger and shouting is based on this truth.

In the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (the British army’s officer training academy), which David attended, issuing certain types of commands clearly, loudly, and as an order is a skill that is actually taught. The “do it or you’re fired” message, delivered either explicitly or implicitly, is dangerously effective at creating movement. Leaders who make use of it may even feel a sense of satisfaction that they are able to motivate people to take action by using it. However, the question remains: what action? If the action is generated by bypassing the cerebrum, in which the required decision-making faculties are housed, then for the modern people-centric enterprise it can be a disaster. If the business that we are in is one where we require people to think about problems rather than move widgets, then we must strive to create an environment that remains effective even as we move as far away as we can from that type of seductive mode of operation.

Hierarchical organizations are intrinsically designed in this way. In a typical hierarchical organization, action occurs according to who is in the senior position, not who has the best idea. In a hierarchical organization, the senior people can typically fire or at least negatively influence the careers of their subordinates. While the massive negative consequence of a firing is under the control of a manager, promotion beyond a single hierarchical level is usually outside the control of a direct manager. As such, the traditional hierarchy is a fear-based system. The manager can fire, but he or she usually cannot move the person up more than part of a hierarchical level. This type of organization is designed to get an army of things done, by an army of people.

If you think back to the candle problem, when subjects are given an incentive, that is thought to create stress—an amygdala-based response. This shuts down the cerebrum, which is necessary to solve the problem most quickly. In essence, hierarchical organizations are designed to do this in order to create action, but they do so at the expense of creative thinking. So, the effectiveness of the hapless victim of the turret gunner suffers the same effects that cause subjects in the candle problem to slow down.

We must create a people-centric organization that promotes mindfulness and moves far away from the threat-oriented calls to action that are common in hierarchical organizations. The bottom line is that the people-centric organization needs to create an environment in which people feel safe enough to share ideas—but more than that, they need to feel safe enough to have ideas.