Are you feeling stonewalled in meetings? Do you find your points getting derailed, misrepresented, or undermined (factually or personally) when presenting or participating in discussions with small groups?

This can be a killer, particularly when you need a decision from a colleague who has more structural or social influence than you do. If you let someone get away with defining how the group perceives you, it can negatively impact your ability to influence change.

The Perception Aspect

The ability to get your point across and influence decisions rationally is part the critical Perception part of the People-Process-Perception triangle that makes managers successful.

Perception is something many of us struggle with: how do we manage up; how do we build relationships outside our team that allow us to influence decisions; how do we describe our team’s work in a way that enables us to do more of it; how do we get our point across in a small group setting, when people are pushing back on us in ways that shut us down.

It’s the part of managing that causes people to not want to become managers: politics.

If you find yourself wondering, “How come my ideas never get approved? How did that meeting get so derailed that we never got around to discussing approval of my proposal?” read on!

Recognizing and Countering Unhelpful Reactions

In Gabriela Vogel and Shanna Grafeld’s free Gartner webinar on Key Tactics to Counter Manipulative Communication within the C-Suite, Vobel and Grafeld effectively outline prevalent methods that people use during presentations and discussions that can torpedo you.¹

Vogel and Grafeld spell out four negative tactics, role play examples of what each tactic sounds like, and describe how to apply rational and social counter-tactics that diffuse these ploys. As they did this, I found myself flashing back to past work discussions and recognizing the techniques I had come up against. Their presentation also includes an exercise that you can use to determine which tactic your colleagues may be leveraging to throw you off balance, so you can apply the appropriate counter-tactic.

Here’s an example:

• In a meeting, you propose a new data-driven process for determining which projects will get implemented.
• One participant attacks your proposal, accusing you of seizing control and slowing down progress.
• Although they don’t say it aloud, this person’s insecurities have been triggered: they are worried that the data-driven process will impact their ability to get their goals achieved.
• Instead of responding to the accusation of seizing control, you remain calm and describe or demonstrate how your process will actually speed up delivery, using an example of one of their projects that could have been accelerated by this process. This gets the discussion back on track.

This webinar is so good that I found myself wishing I had watched it a few jobs ago, when a colleague with structural power used these negative tactics to manipulate business decisions and undermine other people’s perspectives. I wasn’t able to hold my own against that colleague and I dreaded going to meetings with them only to watch people with less power get beat up because that senior person’s insecurities prevented rational discussion of important issues and prevented change that would have enabled the company to achieve the strategic objectives.

What I Learned

No matter how skilled you get at managing Perception, you can always learn something new – because people will always find new ways to push your buttons.

What I learned in this webinar was how the manipulative tactic that people use reveals a hidden insecurity that was triggered by the discussion, how to recognize which insecurity has been revealed, and how you can counter that specific insecurity without making the behavior worse.

This is great stuff that they don’t usually teach you in management classes.

Your ability to remain calm when someone tries to stonewall or derail you, and redirect the discussion into more productive channels will not only enable you to achieve your goals, it will create a positive perception of you amongst your colleagues.

Your Turn

Share in the comments:

• What tactics have you been a victim of?
• Were you able to remain present and counteract the attack on how people perceived you and your ideas?
• When discussion trigger your own insecurities, have you ever found yourself using one of these negative tactics to shut down the conversation? How did you learn to overcome that tendency?

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1. Don’t be intimidated by the “C-Suite” in the title of the webinar – this is information you can use at any level. ↩︎