Defensive Behaviors: Managing Fight-Flight-Freeze at Work (Part 2)

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Welcome back to the lab. In our last cast, we looked at three commonly known threat responses that show up at work. And we talked about fight, the fight response. We talked about the flight response and also the freeze response. But there's three lesser known threat responses that we need to look at today. This is the article, Six Defensive Behaviors That Show Up at Work and How Psychological Safety Can Help. It's by Ron Carucci in the Harvard Business Review, November 2025.

All right, so today we're going to be looking at the please-appease response, the attach or cry for help response, and then the collapse. These behaviors can look like loyalty, they can look like neediness, or they can just flatly look like disengagement. But they're often signs that someone doesn't feel emotionally safe. So here's how to recognize those and respond to each. So let's go through the first one here today, the please and appease response.

When someone always agrees with you or they always volunteer for everything, they may be afraid to say no or to speak up.

What we want to do as managers here is to reward honesty, not overt helpfulness. Now, it's great for employees to be helpful, don't get me wrong, but we want people to push back appropriately. We want to invite respectful dissent. So thank people for raising concerns. Thank people for balancing their workload or trying to figure out in this crazy, chaotic world that we live in and work in, how to balance their life. And praise truth-telling, not just compliance, right? Not just complicitness.

So the please and appease response is something that you should be on guard for. It's not so obvious, right, as the three that we reviewed in their last cast, but this one is sometimes dangerous. It's dangerous for the individual because you're not recognizing the fact that they need perhaps to say no more. And you may be helping them there, so be careful.

The second one we'll talk about today is the attach or cry for help. We want to offer steady but not reactive support. Constant check-ins or constant escalations can reflect fear that help won't come unless it's urgent. So people raise the flag all the time, right? It's like flooding the zone, if you've heard that in a political context.

So the way that to really know your people well and know it's not just the attaching, crying for help is to hold regular one-on-ones, clarify expectations frequently, and ask this question. What have you already tried before stepping in to give your own input? So sometimes these people are just, again, your directs are just attaching to you. They're crying for help and they're becoming dependent.

On you in some ways. So push back a little bit, take them off the, you know, take them off the bottle, the baby bottle, and let them grow up a little bit. Be careful, be respectful, be sensitive as you do that, but push back a little bit.

And then the last one we'll talk about today, and this will close out the article, is the collapse, the complete disengagement of an employee. We know from Gallup that about 70%, plus or minus 5%, depending on the year. 70% of our employees are disengaged. That means they are not, they're showing up for a paycheck. They're not looking and they're working at a job, not as a career, right? They're disengaged. Only about 30% of our employees are truly engaged.

But as a manager, you want to treat this disengagement as a signal, not a flaw. Apathy is a signal. Presenteeism, or even burnout may reflect a collapse response. So what do we do? Check in with them privately. You might ask the question, you seem quieter these days. How are you doing? You know, just kind of lean in to their emotions and what you feel like that they're experiencing. You might want to look at workload, maybe adjusting workload.

They may have too much on them. You may need to clarify priorities. They may be ambiguous and kind of apathetic because they don't really know what their priorities are at the moment. And then normalize rest as a requirement of high performance. I mean, I really buy into that. I mean, not that I'm resting all the time, but I do rest a lot because I think it's extremely important to making sure that I can think at the highest levels that are required of my job. And so I build in normal.

I've done this for years, not just since I've been in my organization. I've done this for 25, 30 years. Build in a lot of time, downtime where I can rest, reflect, and then go back at my, you know, high intensity kind of mental calisthenics. But so that's a really good one. Adjusting workloads, clarifying priorities. Employees and normalizing rest is a good way to deal with a common problem in our organization's disengagement of employees.

Well, I hope that's been useful for you, the review of this article. Try some of these things. I'd love to hear how they work for you, and I hope they do. And until next time we meet in the manager lab, do good work. You.