On the boss who sounds the alarm and the one who reaches for a plan
8 min read
I have worked in a few organizations, and today I am part of our family business. Along the way, I have seen two very distinct kinds of managers, whether at the junior level, in middle management, or in the C suite. And as always, I am not here to tell you what to think. I only want to share my perspective, as unbiased as I can keep it, and walk through both sides.
To do that, let us take one example and keep coming back to it throughout the article.
Imagine your company has one very important client. A couple of months into working with them, they receive an offer from your competitor, one that works out better for them, and they want to walk away from the deal.
What kind of manager will you be in that moment?
Manager 1: The Alarm, And Why It Works
When you speak to this kind of manager, they make a few points that are hard to ignore. The biggest one is this: some problems only get solved when someone refuses to stay calm.
The alarm manager acts the instant they hear the problem. They do not keep quiet, and they do not wait to think through every option. They go straight into action and work out the steps along the way.
And as they say, fear and alarm are among the greatest motivators. They move people and resources faster than usual, and that speed can lead to good results. Our brains, by their very nature, hear bad news much louder than good news, and that alertness keeps us sharp and moving.
Now the science behind it. John Kotter, in his books Leading Change (1996) and A Sense of Urgency (2008), argued that the first step of any real change is establishing a “true sense of urgency.” Without it, change stalls. In A Sense of Urgency, he wrote: “From years of study, I estimate today more than 70 per cent of needed change either fails to be launched, even though some people clearly see the need, fails to be completed even though some people exhaust themselves trying, or finishes over budget, late and with initial aspirations unmet.”
Andy Grove, who ran Intel for years, took this even further. He called his book Only the Paranoid Survive, and his belief was simple: a company that gets too comfortable will miss the moment its entire business is about to change.
There is a reason our brains work this way. In 2001, a group of psychologists led by Roy Baumeister went through a large body of research and found that bad events affect us more strongly than good ones, in almost every area they looked at, from relationships to feedback at work. Their argument was that this is not a flaw. For most of human history, the person who ignored danger even once might not have lived to learn from it.
The real world has its examples too. Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012, and its fall is widely blamed on how slowly it moved on digital photography, even though Kodak itself invented one of the early digital cameras. Blockbuster is the classic cautionary tale. In September 2000, the founders of Netflix, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for 50 million dollars.
Blockbuster’s CEO, John Antioco, said no. At the time, Blockbuster had roughly 9,000 stores and around 6 billion dollars in annual revenue. In 2010, it filed for bankruptcy.
These are two of the best real world examples of what happens when the alarm does not ring loud enough.
And if you have ever been in that room, you know the feeling. The phone rings, the news spreads, and suddenly everyone is awake. People feel needed, the work feels important, and for a while the whole team is pulling in the same direction. Energy and focus spike, people drop everything else, and the problem gets undivided attention.
What The Alarm Costs You
This is where we see the other side of it. What does sounding the alarm at every challenge cost you and your team?
The same alarm that pushes people to perform better can also freeze them. Under the threat of fear, people and whole organizations become rigid and narrow.
This is not just a feeling. In 1981, three researchers, Barry Staw, Lance Sandelands and Jane Dutton, studied how people and organizations behave under threat. They found that under threat, we take in less information, decisions get pulled to the top, and people fall back on old, familiar habits. Exactly when a problem needs fresh thinking, fear pushes us towards what we already know.
The brain explains part of this. Amy Arnsten, a neuroscientist at Yale, has shown that even mild stress, the kind that feels out of our control, can quickly weaken the prefrontal cortex. That is the part of the brain we use to plan, reason and make judgements. So the moment we panic, the part of us we need most starts to switch off.
And fear travels. Sigal Barsade, who spent her career studying emotions at work, showed in an experiment that moods spread through a group from one person to the next. When the manager is panicking, it does not take long before the whole team is too.
And when people are afraid, they stop telling the truth, and lying starts to look like a better option than tackling the issue.
Nokia is the example that stays with me. When researchers Timo Vuori and Quy Huy studied how Nokia lost the smartphone race, they found fear running through the company. Middle managers were afraid of the people above them, so they held back bad news. The top leadership ended up believing Nokia’s technology was in far better shape than it really was.
Think about how it feels to sit in that meeting. The manager is raising his voice, everyone is on edge, and you have a problem of your own to report. Do you say it? Most of us would stay quiet and hope it fixes itself.
Manager 2: The Planner, And Why It Works
Now the same problem lands with Manager 2. But he does not jump straight into action. He takes a deep breath, and then he works through it.
Step one: What is the problem? Let us define it. Step two: Why has it happened? Step three: What tools do we need to solve it? Step four: Propose a solution to the client in a way that works for both your business and theirs. Step five: Take their feedback and improve the solution if needed. Step six: Keep caring for the client after the solution is in place.
Essentially, this is a way of lowering the temperature of the room, so that focus and concentration can come back in.
The science behind this manager is best told through examples.
Google’s Project Aristotle ran from 2012 to 2014. Google’s People Analytics team studied 180 teams, 115 in engineering and 65 in sales, across 250 attributes. They concluded that psychological safety, the feeling that it is safe to speak up and take risks in front of your team, was the single most important factor separating the highest performing teams from the rest. It mattered more than talent, seniority, tenure or team size.
The idea of psychological safety did not start at Google. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard, studied 51 teams in a manufacturing company in 1999. She found that teams where people felt safe to speak up, admit mistakes and ask questions learned more, and the teams that learned more performed better.
Then there is Toyota’s “5 Whys,” described by Taiichi Ohno in Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (1988). When something goes wrong, you ask “why” again and again until you reach the root of the problem, instead of just treating the symptom. Ohno’s own maxim was: “Having no problems is the biggest problem of all.” It is worth noting that the method only works where people feel safe naming problems and are not punished for it, which brings us right back to what Google and Edmondson found.
There is science behind that deep breath too. James Gross, a psychologist at Stanford who studies how we manage our emotions, looked at two ways people handle stress. Some reframe the situation, they look at it differently and ask what they can do about it. Others simply push the feeling down and carry on. In a 2003 study with Oliver John, he found that the people who reframed felt more positive and less negative emotion, and got along better with others. The ones who bottled it up felt worse, even when they looked calm on the outside.
And you can feel the difference in the room. When the manager says, okay, let us look at this together, people stop guarding themselves and start thinking. The person who made the mistake is not afraid to own it, because nobody is looking for someone to blame.
Now the human side. How does this process affect the manager, the team and the people around them? People working in such teams find they can breathe when an issue comes up. They do not fear it, and they do not stress over it. Instead, they simply start contributing, and slowly but surely, the problem turns into a task.
What The Planner Can Cost You
Just as there is a cost to being the alarm manager, there is a cost to being the planner too.
The planner often thinks, let us take this one step at a time. But sometimes that calm turns into complacency. And because the planner’s habit is to think about the problem first and stay optimistic, there is a real chance they underreact to danger.
The science backs this up. Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist in London, has found that around 80 percent of us have what she calls the optimism bias. We believe good things are more likely to happen to us, and bad things less likely, than they really are. A calm manager is not immune to this. Sometimes “let us not overreact” is just optimism talking.
The hardest example is NASA. Before the Challenger disaster in 1986, engineers had already seen damage to the O rings on earlier shuttle flights. Every time the shuttle came back safely, the damage felt a little more acceptable. The sociologist Diane Vaughan later called this the normalization of deviance. Nobody panicked. Small warning signs, handled calmly, slowly became normal, until the day they were not.
There is also how it looks from the outside. Because they are always so calm, the people around them might feel the manager is not interested, or does not really care about the problem.
Now think of the person on the team who can see the danger. They raise it, and the manager calmly says, we will get to it. They raise it again and get the same answer. After a while, they stop raising it. Not because the problem went away, but because they feel nobody is listening.
Which One Is Right?
By now, many of you are probably asking yourself, what kind of manager am I? I do not think that is the question you need to be asking. The real question is: what kind of manager does this problem need me to be?
Even the research seems to agree. David Snowden, who created a framework called Cynefin, argues that different problems need different first moves. When something is truly chaotic, like a fire, there is no time for questions. You act first and figure it out after. But when a problem is complicated rather than chaotic, you slow down, study it, and then respond.
If you asked me to choose, I would say I am Manager 2, the planner. More often than not, when a problem comes up, my first thought is: okay, it has happened, let us deal with it step by step. But I will admit I have seen managers like me sleep through problems. And I have also seen alarm managers alienate the people around them because they want action all the time.
So I would say the best place to be is somewhere in the middle, choosing which manager to be depending on the problem in front of you.
The Echo
The next time a problem lands on your desk, listen to the first words that come out of your mouth. Then ask yourself: is that the manager this problem needs?
Echos Of My Mind
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