A client said to me yesterday, “You have to realize that the ‘fight or flight’instinct gets activated pretty quickly in men. So much of what you want us to do requires us to override biology.”

It does explain much of what I see in my clients these days. It doesn’t seem to take much to get two team members acting “aggressively” — or at least what I see as aggression (talking loudly, leaning forward, saying things like “you’re wrong”). And if that doesn’t get them the desired results, they seem to move into “flight” (walking out of the room, refusing to discuss further, missing future meetings).

It made me question whether my view of the necessary fix — find a way to work together to solve problems — is impossible, and even necessary. Am I just trying to justify a way of interacting that feels better to me?

It seems to me that life is different than it was in “kill the dinosaur” days, and that it calls on us to develop different skills. While we might have been able to kill the dinosaur by ourselves, or quickly pull together a group of other men who could meet the crisis with us, we still could probably be successful in a “the biggest, loudest, scariest person tells the rest of us what to do” way. But today, success seems to require crafting a team of people with different strengths and skills who have to work in a coordinated way over time.

This seems to necessitate a new way of working, where team members can acknowledge that others may have strengths they don’t, and be willing to follow the other’s lead in those areas. And decision-making seems to require finding a way to constructively air all the different points of view and then make a decision based on this wider joint view of reality.

I don’t know — try it. Next time you feel the “fight or flight” instinct building, ask yourself whether it is really going to get you what you want in the long term (regardless of how “right” it might feel in that moment). Or is listening, and working through the issue, more likely to bring success.