Why the Same Warning Works on One Colleague and Not Another | Ep 10

The second pattern hardly ever gets pictured. Anxious, impulsive, quick to anger, easily overwhelmed. That's called secondary psychopathy, and I'll refer to it as the reactive form. The first relationship manager looks like this one. The strongest evidence that these are two real patterns comes from the prison system.

Researchers took 367 violent offenders who all scored high on psychopathy and sorted them by personality. Two groups came out with comparable criminal records. One was anxious and troubled, and the other wasn't. A smaller study of 96 prisoners found the same split by a different method. So, the anxious man isn't the failed version of the calm one.

He's a pattern in his own right. Hang on to that, because the popular picture of a difficult person at work tends to only describe the calm one. How many To help bring this to life, here are four characterisations of people who look like one of those patterns, but aren't. The most common mistake here isn't missing the pattern, it's misidentifying it.

The first is somebody having a really bad year. Burnout, a sick parent, a workload nobody could carry. Anxious, irritable, snapping under pressure, and none of it's related to this personality trait. Ask when it started. Behaviour that arrived with a change in somebody's life is usually related to stress and psychological strain.

The second is a colleague who's unflappable and direct. Calm, unafraid, puts the objective ahead of feelings. That describes a lot of great executives, but calm on its own tells you nothing. What matters is whether the calm comes with harm to other people or not. The third is somebody breaking a rule that doesn't work, openly, and arguing for the rule to be changed.

That's not a personality related pattern either. It's a disagreement about a rule, and fixing the rule will tell you whether that's all it is. The fourth is anybody whose behaviour might have a clinical cause. Neither form is a diagnosis, and differentiating a personality disorder from everything else should be done by a qualified clinician.

Hopefully that helps to avoid misusing the label. That's the one, and So why would the same warning land so differently? Everybody runs two systems side by side. You can picture them as a brake and an accelerator. The brake notices the chance of punishment or loss and slows you down. The accelerator notices the chance of reward and pushes you forward.

Psychologists call this the behavioral inhibition and activation systems. Now look at what organisations actually do. A warning, a sanction, a performance improvement plan and a disciplinary hearing all press the brake. Recognition, reward, promotion and a stretch assignment all press the accelerator.

Almost every response to bad behaviour tries to press one or the other. And in my experience organisations use far more brake than accelerator in their procedures. Here's why that matters. A warning is only as strong as the brake it presses. If somebody's brake is quiet, the impact of the warning will also be quiet, however firmly it's delivered.

And if the brake works at rest but fails under load, the warning works right up to the moment it matters most. That's one way to read the two relationship managers. A quiet brake in one and a brake that fails under load in the other. The evidence that follows helps to test that reading. The evidence Firstly, which of the two does more of the damage?

The largest pooling of the workplace evidence brought together 166 samples and 49,350 psychopathy scores from 16 years of studies. It looked at job performance, helping out beyond the job and behaviour that actively damages the organisation or its people. Psychopathy was linked with worse outcomes on all three, and harm was mostly more pronounced for the anxious, impulsive form of psychopathy and only to a lesser extent for the cold form.

That's the reverse of the picture most of us tend to imagine, so if you take anything away from this episode, take that. As always, there's a limitation. I've confirmed the direction of that difference and not its size, so I'm not going to give you a number for it. And I'll be wary of anybody who does.

That doesn't make the cold form harmless. A study of 523 employees, rated by their co-workers, found that its bold, fearless form was associated with misconduct in people with less education and weaker social skill, and with better job performance in the highly educated and those who were more socially skilled.

The same disposition, two very different careers. That may be part of why individuals with the cold form survive and advance in organisations, although that's my inference and not the study's findings. Thank What separates the two forms? The first clue comes from questionnaires, which reflect what people say about themselves, so need to be treated accordingly.

One team predicted that the cold form would have a weak break. People high in the cold form did report a break that engaged less readily when punishment was in prospect. A second study of 326 young adults sharpens a picture somewhat. Both forms report being drawn to reward, so the effect of the accelerator is shared.

Only one thing separated them, sensitivity to the threat of punishment. The obvious conclusion here is that the cold form simply feels no fear. The evidence says something more useful. Researchers measured a reflex, the startled blink that grows when a person is afraid, in a cohort of 125 prisoners high in psychopathy.

When they were looking at the threat, their fear response was normal. When their attention was on something else, it reduced. That study didn't separate the two forms. So a consequence can register, it registered when it's the thing in front of you. The moment attention moves to something else, the deal, the target or the win, the consequence drops out of view.

That's why a warning sitting in a file can be absent at the exact moment it's needed. That's why i If the cold form has quite a break, then the usual management instinct, raising the stakes when nothing changes, should work badly on it. A study asked whether harsh treatment might even suit them. It ran a scenario study and a field study of employees working under an abusive boss, a supervisor who treats them with sustained hostility.

Employees high in the cold form reported more positive mood and more engagement under that kind of boss. And in the field study, they were less angry than their peers. Only the cold form was measured. So the treatment you would expect to wear anybody down creates a situation where those individuals do comparatively well.

That makes getting tougher the one tool least likely to reach them. What does reach them? Another team tested three features of an organisation across three studies of leaders. Clear rules, the ability to sanction misconduct and the visibility of what leaders were doing. Clear rules, in particular, weakened the link between a leader's cold form traits and their self-serving abusive behaviour.

Now go back to the sample of the bank. The warning asked the calm man to remember a consequence while he was chasing a deal. The second approval signature put an obstacle in the path of the deal at the moment he reached for it. Notice what the rule did. You didn't have to remember anything and neither did he.

You didn't have One more assumption to test before we move to the practical part. The idea that people like this can't change. That proposition rests on a real study. A secure therapeutic community for offenders found that treatment was associated with worse violent re-offending among the psychopathic patients.

It shows that one program for forensic inpatients went badly. It doesn't show that nothing works. A better question is whether people who change do better afterwards. A team followed 152 high-risk offenders through a treatment program and for about 5 years after it. Those who changed more re-offended violently less.

The change was smaller in the coldest core of the trait. Now a couple of caveats because the evidence argues with itself here. A 2026 study found that the questionnaire measures of the break didn't show up in brain-based measures. Consequently, whether the reactive form of psychopathy is really distinct from ordinary distress remains in dispute.

Neither caution changes what you should do because everything that follows is chosen to work on both forms. Neither Here's what you might actually do. There are four moves and I'll flag how well evidenced each one is as we go. The first is judgement from practice. Not an evidence based tried and tested method.

You don't need to know which pattern you're dealing with and you're not entitled to guess. What you can see is how somebody responds to what you've already done. Somebody who improves at once and relapses under pressure is telling you one thing. Somebody who shrugs off the warning and changes the day the process changes is telling you something else.

And somebody who improves and stays improved is telling you the warning worked, which is what happens most of the time. So keep a record of responses, not impressions. What you did, the date and what changed afterwards. That record is evidence about the response and you can use it without risking mislabelling anybody.

At the bank, that record would have shown the difference within six weeks. One line reads, warning on the fourth, five clean weeks, two overrides at quarter end. The other reads, warning on the fourth, no change at all, then nothing from the day the second signature went in. Neither line needs intensive diagnosis.

The latter, you second move is the one I'd make first As it's supported by the best evidence When behaviour doesn't change after an initial conversation The instinct is to escalate the pressure A formal warning, then a final one, then a hearing Before you escalate, check the rule first Make sure it's clear, written, specific And built into the process at the exact point where it gets broken A rule that says act with integrity does almost nothing A rule that says overrides above the limit need a second name signatory Recorded in the system does a great deal Built into the booking screen, it does more yet Then put the consequence at the point of decision A prompt when the override is attempted A reviewer who sees the deal before it closes A hold that makes somebody stop before they carry on That part comes from our reasoning in attention research Not a tried and tested method None of this is punitive And it also reaches the reactive form Because a pause at the moment of decision Is exactly what the brake that fails under load needs One limit stated plainly The rules research measured leaders high in the cold form And their self-serving and abusive behaviour Applying it to other conduct And to the reactive form is a reasonable step And it's still a step I would take it and check the record One The third and fourth moves are also judgment from practice Reasoned from the evidence rather than tested against it The third is for the person who improves and then relapses under strain For them, a sterner warning adds more of what caused a relapse in the first place First ask where the pressure is coming from A new target that arrives without notice One deadline stacked on another A manager who escalates at the moment of greatest load Take some of the pressure off before escalating warnings That's not excusing bad behaviour Which still gets dealt with on its merits And it's not therapy which isn't a manager's job It's recognising that you can partly control the conditions for relapse The fourth move uses the one system that both forms share Both forms of psychopathy report to being drawn to reward So make the behaviour you want the rewarded route Reward great performance rather than only punishing underperformance And make rule changes like the second signature Quick to get rather than slow to get around Yes, that looks like rewarding people for doing the job The question is whether it reaches them A practical suggestion If overrides are the problem Publish the month's performance alongside the target So the person who hits the number gets noticed It costs almost nothing And it presses the accelerator in both buttons In the next step If Three things I wouldn't do.

I wouldn't default to getting tougher. In the research on abusive bosses, harshness was a setting where the cold form did comparatively well, which makes it a poor tool for reaching and addressing the problem. I wouldn't screen candidates for either form of psychopathy. The questionnaires were tested in anonymous, low-stakes conditions that don't resemble the hiring process.

Nobody can say with confidence what the reactive scale measures, and the same disposition predicts misconduct in one person and strong performance in another. A screen built around the calm, fearless picture would also be looking in the wrong place, because more of the measured harm sits with the reactive form.

And I wouldn't tell anybody what they're not. Not you don't seem to care about consequences, which starts an argument you'll most likely lose. Instead, say what happened. On the 4th and the 11th, the limit was exceeded without a second approval, and the file now has to go back through credit risk before renewal.

That's true regardless of whatever is going on inside the person. check постоянで Here's what none of this authorises. Nothing in this video is intended to characterise anybody negatively. The research is built from group data. Much of it captured in prisons and a pattern across thousands of people doesn't describe the person in your team.

What it does give you is a way to read responses and formulate moves that work on both patterns without being pejorative. And the uncomfortable part which I'd rather say than leave out. The popular picture of the dangerous psychopathic colleague has focused attention on the smaller aspect of the problem.

The larger part is often somebody who is anxious and struggling, whose behaviour, in my experience, gets worse under exactly the pressure organisations apply to fix the problem. In the next episode, the colleague who is only difficult with you, and why that's not always what it looks like. Thank The full written version of this video is on my website including every source and limitation and the four things I still can't answer If you found this episode useful please like and subscribe to my channel so you get notified about the rest of this series Each episode takes one pattern people get wrong at work And in the comments tell me one thing Think of a rule at your work that people break Is it written down at the point where they break it or only in the policy somewhere Not who breaks it, where the rule lives If one thing survives the week make it this The individual who doesn't flinch isn't where most of the measured harm sits I'm Dr Nick Kecker Thank you for watching and remember Observe and act differently When