I was standing outside on a cold October night at 2am with my newborn baby in my arms waiting for the fire department. I figured the fire alarm was legit the second it woke me up because I smelled smoke.
Without hesitation, I grabbed my sleeping baby, bundled up and headed outside.
As I stood there surrounded by neighbors with the cool night air visible on each exhale, I was reminded of the many midnight false alarms in my college days. We huddled together, abuzz from the blaring smoke detectors, cold and disgruntled.
I kept wondering. Was the alarm really necessary? I couldn't see any smoke! Yet I wasn't going to risk going back inside, not with my baby.
The very real alarm bells in my story makes me think of the nuances of human communication. Whenever we communicate we can decide to sound alarm bells or signal for safety.
Communicating in an alarming way might seem innocuous because it is extremely pervasive. An aggressive tone of voice. Instilling fear as a motivator. Offering ultimatums. Including inflammatory language. Using superlatives to get a reaction out of people while obscuring the facts.
Truly, this is how most headlines and marketing copy works.
But sounding the alarm bells gets our defenses up. It causes the release of stress hormones in our body. It drains our energy, causing us to waste time fretting about things we cannot control. And, if that's not bad enough, it impairs brain function.
While such communication tactics might be common place, our capacity for weathering false alarms is diminishing.
A friend of mine lamented to me about a cryptic email from her boss sent to her entire team. He declared they were taking a new direction on a project because of something he just learned at a conference. And he didn't want to delay because apparently they were "doing it all wrong."
As the project lead, she was mortified. Not only had the email sparked concern for her personally, the rest of her team was in an uproar. It seemed like all their work the last few months was going to be completely scraped. And he signaled a deep lack of trust in their experience and training, all because of a single presentation he saw.
Not surprisingly, the email sparked a false alarm. He thought he was motivating the team, not degrading them. They weren't "doing it all wrong" after all. The presentation changed his perception of the work they were doing, so the one off-handed comment was more about him than them.
But it didn't matter that his intentions were good. My friend spent months doing damage control to repair the broken trust and lost respect her team now had for him. Luckily, she got better at guarding her team from his alarming communication style and was able to maintain the quality of their work. But overall the situation remained draining and unsustainable for her.
Wholehearted leaders are mindful of when we sound the alarm bells. And otherwise communicate in ways that signal safety. Fostering connection. Practicing empathy.
It's easy to feel like we are justified for sounding the alarm bells about something. Maybe we're fired up or inspired and want other's to get onboard. But such a tactic often ends up being counter productive - creating more work and unintended consequences as people shutdown, hide or go into fight mode.
Cautiously and intentionally sounding the alarm in communications requires impact awareness combined with presence. It takes knowing what could spark concern and the discernment to know when such a strong, gut-reaction is required.
The vast majority of the time, there isn't an immediate safety concern present. But when there is, by all means, sound the alarm bells.
Take, for instance, the fire alarm on that cold October night 10 years ago. It turned out, our upstairs neighbors had blacked out while cooking a steak on the stove. They were so inebriated the fire department had to knock down their door to gain access.
It wasn't a false alarm at all. In fact, the alarm likely saved all our lives that night. Without it, the fire department wouldn't have come in a timely fashion to remedy the situation before it became catastrophic. While I wasn't happy to be woken up with my baby like that, I was grateful we are all safe in the end.
When sounding the alarm is needed, it's very effective. But it's time we tread lightly on abusing such communication tactics. After all, our performance is better when we experience safety because our brains are fully engaged!
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