Learned Helplessness at Work (S1E4)

What happens when a follower stops trying — not because they don't care, but because experience has taught them that trying doesn't change anything?

In Episode 4 of The Resilient Organization, Dr. Ashley Newcomb introduces Elena — a mid-level manager who was once exactly the kind of employee every organization wants. Proactive. Invested. Always bringing something forward. And then, one unreturned effort at a time, she stopped.

This episode goes deep on Organizational Learned Helplessness at the individual level — how it develops, why it's almost impossible to see from the outside, and what leaders can do today to begin reversing it before it becomes something harder to recover from.

They aren't stuck because they lack talent or passion. They're paralyzed because they no longer believe they hold the power to change their own story.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

I want to start today with something that I think a lot of leaders have experienced, but very few have been able to name. Let's say that you have someone on your team. They used to bring you things like ideas, concerns, problems, observations. They, in short, were the person who kept you informed, who flagged things early, who never let a problem sit unaddressed for long, and then gradually that stopped. The emails still come, the work still gets done, but the voice, their voice, that specific engaged, invested voice, went somewhere and you're not entirely sure when it left or why. If that sounds familiar, today's episode is for you. In the last episode, we followed Shannon and Bryson's team. They were a group of IT professionals who did everything right but got punished for it. So eventually they stopped contributing to the bigger picture, not because they stopped caring, but because repeated experience had taught them something deeply discouraging, that nothing that they did was going to change their situation. So they stopped trying. That is organizational learned helplessness. And today we're going to go deeper into what it looks like, not just at the team level, but at the individual level. Because OLH doesn't just happen to teams, it happens to people. It happens one person at a time, often quietly, often in the very individuals that you would expect the absolute least. I'm Dr. Ashley Newcomb and I'm the founder of Inspired Coaching and Leadership. This is the Resilient Organization, and today I want to introduce you to Elena. Before we get into Elena's story, I want to make sure that we have a clear picture of what organizational learned helplessness actually is, because it's one of the most misdiagnosed patterns in organizational life. Now the concept of learned helplessness comes from psychology. The foundational research showed that when living beings are repeatedly exposed to situations where their actions have no effect on the outcome, they eventually just stop trying to act. Even when the situation changes, even when the agency becomes available, the belief that effort doesn't produce results gets wired in, and I mean hardwired. And it stays wired in long after the original conditions have changed, and sometimes even after the original leadership has changed. So let's bring that into an organizational context. Organizational learned helplessness is what happens when a follower through repeated experiences of powerlessness, dismissal, disconnection, just all the bad stuff that makes you feel like that spark between effort and outcome. Well, as a result of all that, the follower internalizes the belief that nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, they do will improve their situation. And so they stop doing it. Not all at once, not dramatically, but gradually in the specific areas where trying has failed them repeatedly before. And I want you to really take note of something here. Everything that we've talked about so far is gradual. There's nothing that's cataclysmic. There's nothing that everything was great and hunky-dory until one day the bottom fell out. All of these scenarios are examples of when these negative events and these negative culture shifts happen gradually over a period of time. And here's the piece that leaders most often miss about organizational learned helplessness. OLH is not a motivation problem. It's not a character problem. It's not a performance problem, at least not at its root. It is a conditioning problem. The father was not always this way. Something happened. That subtle pattern formed, and over time, that pattern rewrote what they believe is possible for them in this environment. Stop for a moment and really think about what this internal experience sounds like. Nothing I do makes a difference here. I've tried this before and it didn't go anywhere. So what's the point? Why would this time be any different than the other times that I've tried? So if you reflect on those statements, those are not the thoughts of a lazy or disengaged person. They are the logical conclusions of someone who has been taught through direct, repeated personal experience, that the system is not responsive to their effort. This is not water cooler talk. This is not rumor mill. This is something happened to them that was a deeply personal and individualized experience that frankly just wore them down over time. They aren't stuck because they lack talent or passion. They're paralyzed because they no longer believe that they hold the power to change their own story. And I want to distinguish OLH clearly from something that we're going to talk about in our next episode, which will be organizational Cinderella syndrome. Because these two patterns can look similar from the outside, but they are fundamentally different on the inside. With OLH, the follower loses hope. They give up, they stop extending effort because they genuinely believe it won't produce results. Their trying stops. With organizational Cinderella syndrome, which we will discuss in more depth in the next episode, something different happens. The follower in organizational Cinderella syndrome doesn't lose hope exactly. They transfer it. They begin to believe that their situation will improve only when someone else makes it happen for them. They wait, they depend, they look to leadership to rescue them rather than taking autonomous action themselves. Both patterns are extremely costly to an employer and to a leader. Both erode organizational resilience, but they require different responses from leadership. And today we're squarely focusing inside of OLH territory. So I promised you the story of Elena, and that's what we're going to dive into next. Elena was a mid-level manager with genuine ability. She had a strong track record, and her talents were just off the chart. She was thoughtful, she was detail-oriented, and in her first year of the organization, she was exactly the kind of person that you would want on your team. She raised concerns early, she proposed improvements, she flagged inefficiencies, and she offered concrete ideas for addressing them. She wasn't the type of follower that just wanted to stir up trouble. She was the type of follower that had a plan or at least a suggestion for a plan on a solution for the problem. And for a while, she was, well, to be blunt about it, she was the shiny object. So her leadership listened to her. They knew her resume, they knew where she came from, they knew the experience that she brought, and they expected this type of innovative thought from her. Now, let me stick a side note interjection in here that the hiring authority for her organization and the leader that she was assigned to, who was really more of a manager than an actual leader, there was a disconnect with how they saw Elena. So the hiring authority had great hopes for her, which of course, I mean, why would you hire somebody that you were like, eh, this is going to be mediocre at best? But the leader, her person that she was assigned to for her direct supervision, they were not impressed with pretty much anything about her. But initially, she did feel heard. She felt heard by not only senior management, but by her direct supervisor. Her direct supervisor would listen and nod and say things like, Oh, that's a great point. Let me think about how we can move on that. And Elena would leave those conversations feeling like her contribution mattered. But the follow-through didn't come. Not reliably. For whatever reason, her immediate supervisor did not pass her ideas up the chain of command and initiatives that she proposed would either get absorbed into broader conversations that quietly disappeared or just flat out ignored. Problems that she flagged and discussed with her supervisor would persist for months without any visible action. Directions would shift, sometimes dramatically, without any explanation at all. Elena actually told me about one situation where she was assigned a piece of work to do. And while she was working on it, they actually came up to her, her supervisor told her that they needed her to work on a user manual for another project. And when she completed the manual, she followed back on the original project only to find out that that project had been discontinued, but no one told her why or when or even how it was discontinued. And when she would follow up on something that she had raised previously, the response was always warm but very vague. We're still working through it. The timing isn't quite right. Let's revisit this next quarter. But what Elena's manager didn't realize was that each one of those moments was a data point for her. And Elena, like all of us, was collecting data. That's how we function as humans. We go through life trying to make sense, and it's actually called sense making, where we kind of put together bits and pieces of smaller information to make the larger picture. And that's exactly what she was doing: building a picture. She was updating her understanding of how this system actually worked. And the picture she was building looked a little something like this. Effort is not connected to the outcome here. What I do doesn't change what happens. The system is not responsive to my input. What my organizational leaders told me that they valued and what they actually acted like they valued were two entirely different things. So she adjusted gradually, rationally. She stopped raising concerns that she didn't believe would be acted on. She stopped proposing improvements that would require leadership follow-through, and she learned that she couldn't count on that follow-through. She stopped volunteering for initiatives that might ask her to invest energy that experience had taught her was not valued by this organization. She was still productive and she met expectations. Her performance actually looked pretty stellar if you didn't know what was going on in the inside of her. From the outside, she was a solid, dependable follower. But anyone who had known her in that first year would have noticed the shift. Her ideas had dried up, her questions had stopped, the voluntary investment, the going above and beyond, had quietly, deliberately disappeared. Elena hadn't given up on her career. She had given up on this particular organization's ability to respond to her. And here's what I want you to hear the most clearly here. When I spoke to Elena about that period, she said something that I've thought about many times since. She said, I didn't stop trying because I stopped caring. And after a while, trying started to feel less like initiative and more like embarrassment. That last word, embarrassment. Focus on that for a moment. Because in an environment where effort consistently produces nothing, extending effort starts to feel naive. It starts to feel like you're the only one who hasn't figured out how things really work here. And once a follower reaches that conclusion, once trying starts to feel foolish rather than hopeful, the belief has been written and it's very hard to rewrite. I want to take a moment right here to connect Elena's story with Shannon and Bryson's because they are both examples of OLH, but they illustrate the pattern in two meaningfully different ways. Shannon and Bryson's team experienced OLH collectively. The conditioning happened to a group simultaneously through a shared experience of doing the right thing and being punished for it. And when the belief took hold, it spread through the team as a shared conclusion. We tried, it made things worse. We're done trying. The withdrawal was coordinated even if it was never explicitly discussed. And think about it, as leaders, we spend a lot of time investing in building teams so it makes sense that they would actually experience things like this collectively. And Elena's experience was different. It was quieter and more personal. The conditioning happened one conversation at a time, one follow-up that led nowhere, one initiative that disappeared, one direct shift that came without explanation. Nobody punished Elena the way Shannon and Bryson's team was punished. Nobody accused her of bad intent. The system just failed to respond. And over time, that non-response became a response all on its own. This is why individual OLH is often harder to catch than team-level OLH. There was no defining moment, no identifiable trigger, just a slow, quiet accumulation of unrewarded effort that eventually produces a very reasonable, very human decision to stop expending it. And the particularly painful part of Elena's situation and many situations like her is that nobody intended this outcome. Her manager wasn't trying to discourage her. The organization wasn't trying to beat her down, but that's exactly what happened. The impact and intentions are two different things. And followers respond to what they experience, not to what was meant, or unfortunately, not the intentions of leadership. So let's bring this into your world because you may be sitting with an Elena on your team right now and you just don't know it. Here are a few things to watch for. Watch for the follower whose ideas have dried up. There are people on your team who used to bring things to you concerns, suggestions, questions, observations, and they've stopped. Before you conclude that they've run out of things to say, especially if you're running an organization in the South where we always have an abundance of things to say, ask yourself this honestly. When was the last time that they said something to you or brought something to you that actually changed something? Because if the honest answer is that it's been a while, or even worse, it's that you're not sure, that's worth sitting with. Watch for the follower that stopped asking for growth. Elena stopped asking for new challenges, not because she had lost her ambition, but because she had recalibrated her expectations based on what the environment had shown her was possible. When someone who used to push for development quietly stops, that silence is not contentment, it's conclusion. It's the end of the story. Watch for the follower who complies without contributing. They're doing what's asked, they're hitting the marks, but that discretionary effort, that above and beyond, the proactive ownership, the voluntary investment, that's gone. And because they're still technically performing, it's easy to miss. But there's a profound difference between a follower who is present and a follower who is invested. And that difference matters enormously the moment you actually need them, especially the moment that's going to challenge the very fabric of your organizational resilience. And here's a harder one. Watch for the ways that your own leadership patterns may have contributed to what you're seeing. When you ask for input and don't act on it without explanation, you're teaching your followers that their input doesn't matter. When you change direction without bringing your team along on the reasoning, you're teaching them that their investment is precarious. When you're consistently failing to close the loop on things that have been raised, you're teaching them that raising things is effort with no return. None of these behaviors are malicious. Some of them can even be well-intentioned, but the lessons that they teach are real, and your followers are learning them whether you're aware of it or not. The good news, and there really is genuinely good news here, is that OLH is not permanent, or at least it doesn't have to be. It was built by experience and it can be rebuilt or reprogrammed by experience. But it's going to take a lot of effort and a lot of patience on the part of a leader to fix what's been broken by OLH. When followers begin to see that their efforts matter, that their voice produces results and that the environment is responsive and trustworthy, something starts to come back. But like I said, it's going to need patience. It's because it's going to come back slowly and carefully. But don't lose hope because it can come back. When people see that their efforts matter and that change is possible, hope returns and with it that creativity, that ownership, and that momentum that's going to be so instrumental in building and securing your resilience. I do want you to keep in mind that these are starting points, not solutions. OLH that has been building for months or unfortunately even years requires sustained intentional efforts to reverse. But if Elena's story resonated with you, here are three places that you can begin rebuilding today. First, close the loop on something that was left open. Think about the last time a follower brought you a concern, a suggestion, or an idea, and you didn't follow through. Go back to that. Now you don't have to explain yourself or to over apologize, but to close that loop honestly. You hired adults to man your workforce. So it's time to have adult conversations. You can tell them, here's what happened with what you raised, here's why it did or did not move forward. Here's what I can tell you now. That one act, the act of returning to something that was left hanging, communicates something that a hundred motivational messages cannot, that you were actually listening and that their voice left a mark. For whatever reason, it wasn't a good time, it wasn't a good space, it wasn't a good fit, whatever the rationale that you had for not following through, but you still need to let them know that, hey, you were heard, but there was a leadership decision that took us in a different direction at that moment in time. Second, when you change direction, bring your team along on the why. One of the quietest contributions to OLH is unpredictability. It's when followers invest in a direction that shifts without any explanation. When that happens, they learn that their investment is precarious. You don't have to share everything with them, and you certainly don't have to provide them with any confidential information. But when something changes, say so. Here's what shifted. Here's why we're moving differently. That transparency is not weakness. It's the kind of leadership that keeps people willing to invest in your next direction because they trust that if something changes or something happens, you'll tell them, you'll share that with them, you'll bring them along for the ride. Third, create one low-stakes opportunity for a follower to own a real outcome. Not a token task, not let's pick where we're going to lunch today, nothing like that, but something that has actual stakes where the follower's judgment will shape the actual results and where you resist the urge to step in. And believe me, as a leader, I know that that's a hard thing for us. Then you need to acknowledge the outcome specifically, regardless of how it goes. What you're doing is creating a new data point, a direct personal experience that says your effort, this, produced something here in this environment with this leader, and that one small trustworthy data point is where the rewriting begins. So eventually, Elena did leave that organization. But before she did, there was a brief window where a new leader came into her chain of command, somebody who followed through, who came back to things that had been raised, who changed direction, and sat down with Elena specifically to explain why the direction had been changed. This leader gave Elena ownership of a project that actually mattered and didn't rework her design. Decisions after the fact. Elena told me that in those months something shifted. Not completely, not overnight, but she started bringing things forward again. She felt revitalized. She was tentative at first, but then she started gaining confidence that she actually did have a voice and she felt some of her agency return. She said it felt like she was on solid ground again, like she could put her weight on it without wondering if that ground was going to crumble beneath her. That is what resilient leadership does. It builds ground that people are willing to stand on and they feel confident standing on. In the next episode, we're going to look at an entirely different pattern, one where the follower doesn't give up hope but transfers the hope, where instead of losing the will to try, they lose the confidence to try alone. That is organizational Cinderella syndrome. And that's where we're going next. So if today's episode is sitting with you, the training where followers go quiet, diagnosing hidden disengagement in your organization, and the free resource Five Signs Your Organization Has Gone Quiet are both available at inspiredcoaching.net. This has been the Resilient Organization. Thank you for being here with me, and I'll see you next time.