It’s not getting any easier for managers to manage. The younger generations want agile, open, engaging tech-savvy workplaces where legacy bureaucracies reign. The front-line is seldom satisfied. An economic environment in perpetual turmoil yields no promises for stability. Politicians and bosses from above don’t always consult and make good policy or strategy. Managers are truly the “sandwich generation” no matter their age.
But, good news: the fog around what works in management is less dense. Precision tools with a proven track record are beginning to proliferate.
Here are two top tools from 2011:
The Three to One Rule – Three Positive Emotions to One Negative
If you want employees to be open to change, generate creative ideas on the fly, make good decisions and generally be more productive, put away your negative, anxious self (even if you have good reason to be so). Sprinkle positive ideas and comments three times as often as negative. The latter spread faster than the former. Positive emotions that are genuine also build trust.
The Progress Principle – Small Wins
Black holes and snails leave burned out people in their wake. There is nothing worse for morale than a team having worked night and day on a project only to see it stalled somewhere up the line. Our brains like rewards. The size doesn’t matter. No rewards – funkiness sets in.
Managers who take pushing the fly wheel seriously also continuously re-generate team energy.
Both of these tools radiate results in all directions. Like compound interest, such multi-purpose instruments are cheap ways to develop increasing returns.
For more information, check out these researchers on YouTube:
Barbara Fredrickson, Positive Emotions and Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle.
Showing posts with label emotional tagging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emotional tagging. Show all posts
Monday, January 09, 2012
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
While Rory McIlroy Had "Stack Attack", I Washed Floors
The father of the 2011 Masters winner Charl Schwartzel usually takes a pill and goes to sleep instead of watching his son battle it out in the last round of a tournament. “Wake me up when it’s over” he tells his wife who has no problem with the uncertainty and the tension. I can identify with the father. I felt so badly for 21 year-old McIlroy at the tenth hole and thereafter that I had to channel my emotions elsewhere (washing floors).
After a brilliant three rounds and being atop the leaderboard each day, to topple to a final round 80 to a tie for 15th is excruciating. Young McIlroy must have felt the weight of Northern Ireland on his shoulders when the wheels started to fall off.
Sports psychologists understand the phenomenon and how to treat it. The unpredictable event (which most athletes fear) triggers a chain of events because the athlete gets distracted with negative thoughts. That, in turn, causes loss of confidence, shallow breathing, emotional anxiety and a tightening of all the muscles. Not ideal for a fluid golf swing. The good news is that the “yips”, “meltdown” or “paralysis” can be prevented at best and managed before a “death spiral” ensues. No doubt, Rory will become a keen learner of avoiding this scary phenomenon and will be better for it.
But, this can happen to anyone in the workplace too when the pressure is on to perform and the situation is not totally controllable. That is, it depends on many variables and sound decision-making along the way.
What are some of the tips for working through situations when you are thrown a curve?
1. Prepare for each inevitability. Have a game plan;
2. Practice deep breathing and meditate daily (even for 10 minutes a day) as they develop frontal lobe resilience in the face of adversity;
3. Turn a negative thought about the situation into “what is the silver lining here?” thought. Optimism generates mindfulness (and clarity about the next action) whereas pessimism causes mindlessness (and confusion).
4. Use the time gaps in-between having to perform to stay in the present and not dwell on what just happened. For example, if we simply tune into our surroundings (sights, smells, sounds), we automatically remain in the present. Better still to view nature as it calms all of us down.
Positive psychology researchers have a mantra: emotions drive thoughts and thoughts drive motion. What we can control is our thoughts: what we think when an event is not to our liking occurs. It takes practice but eventually becomes ingrained (to change our thoughts into more positive and productive ideas).
Neuroscientists also have a mantra: What we pay attention to grows (more connections in our brains) with the corollary that our brains know how to start something (a new neural network), not stop (untangle a dense network). That means, we can change the automatic pathways in our brains (eventually) in reaction to challenges: when we work on starting something new (or improving a thought process), the new grows and the old wastes away.
Ironically, the military understands this as men and women subjected to their boot camps and who make it through the various stages typically become “mentally tougher”. I’ve been reading about the Green Berets’ training in Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces by Linda Robinson. The grueling conditions under which men and women are subjected and the practice for any imagined possibility builds confidence and adaptability.
In ordinary life, anything that makes us stretch has a similar effect: marathons, tri-athlons, iron mans, meditation, yoga, goal-setting, journaling, learning a new language, etc.
“Educating our emotions” is a life-long process. Rory found that out the hard way, very publically at the 75th Masters tournament. He has the money and the maturity to obtain good coaching and practice new ways. But, money is not needed to toughen a mind nor is it necessary to join the military or run marathons. The basis requirement is the resolve to do so and the belief that it works.
After a brilliant three rounds and being atop the leaderboard each day, to topple to a final round 80 to a tie for 15th is excruciating. Young McIlroy must have felt the weight of Northern Ireland on his shoulders when the wheels started to fall off.
Sports psychologists understand the phenomenon and how to treat it. The unpredictable event (which most athletes fear) triggers a chain of events because the athlete gets distracted with negative thoughts. That, in turn, causes loss of confidence, shallow breathing, emotional anxiety and a tightening of all the muscles. Not ideal for a fluid golf swing. The good news is that the “yips”, “meltdown” or “paralysis” can be prevented at best and managed before a “death spiral” ensues. No doubt, Rory will become a keen learner of avoiding this scary phenomenon and will be better for it.
But, this can happen to anyone in the workplace too when the pressure is on to perform and the situation is not totally controllable. That is, it depends on many variables and sound decision-making along the way.
What are some of the tips for working through situations when you are thrown a curve?
1. Prepare for each inevitability. Have a game plan;
2. Practice deep breathing and meditate daily (even for 10 minutes a day) as they develop frontal lobe resilience in the face of adversity;
3. Turn a negative thought about the situation into “what is the silver lining here?” thought. Optimism generates mindfulness (and clarity about the next action) whereas pessimism causes mindlessness (and confusion).
4. Use the time gaps in-between having to perform to stay in the present and not dwell on what just happened. For example, if we simply tune into our surroundings (sights, smells, sounds), we automatically remain in the present. Better still to view nature as it calms all of us down.
Positive psychology researchers have a mantra: emotions drive thoughts and thoughts drive motion. What we can control is our thoughts: what we think when an event is not to our liking occurs. It takes practice but eventually becomes ingrained (to change our thoughts into more positive and productive ideas).
Neuroscientists also have a mantra: What we pay attention to grows (more connections in our brains) with the corollary that our brains know how to start something (a new neural network), not stop (untangle a dense network). That means, we can change the automatic pathways in our brains (eventually) in reaction to challenges: when we work on starting something new (or improving a thought process), the new grows and the old wastes away.
Ironically, the military understands this as men and women subjected to their boot camps and who make it through the various stages typically become “mentally tougher”. I’ve been reading about the Green Berets’ training in Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces by Linda Robinson. The grueling conditions under which men and women are subjected and the practice for any imagined possibility builds confidence and adaptability.
In ordinary life, anything that makes us stretch has a similar effect: marathons, tri-athlons, iron mans, meditation, yoga, goal-setting, journaling, learning a new language, etc.
“Educating our emotions” is a life-long process. Rory found that out the hard way, very publically at the 75th Masters tournament. He has the money and the maturity to obtain good coaching and practice new ways. But, money is not needed to toughen a mind nor is it necessary to join the military or run marathons. The basis requirement is the resolve to do so and the belief that it works.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Comedian-in-Chief, Fly-Swatter Extraordinaire: Obama Raises the Stakes
I have a cartoon from one of the newspapers showing President Barack Obama responding to a request from Prime Minister Stephen Harper: “Well, I’ll cough on you if you insist, but I don’t think charisma is contagious. Now with additional Obama feats such as swatting a fly successfully within the tenth of a second required and charming the press corps with skillfully delivered good jokes, the bar just keeps rising higher. Harper will need to go to improv school to crack the Obama leadership ceiling.
There’s a spontaneity within President Obama not well-developed in Harper. Comedians know how important that quality is to connect with an audience. That’s why they take improv, or responding and creating in the moment, very seriously. Deep down, it’s a control and trust of oneself issue. Loose or tight. Acting into thinking rather than planning into acting. Tough to do if a leader wants to have everything figured out and never look silly.
Yet, we warm to anyone, let alone a leader, who shows he’s just like us. He has to battle some of the ordinary things in life like swatting annoying flies and not taking life too seriously all the time. When we engage in these day-to-day activities, we don’t always win. The fly gets away because we were not fast enough or the joke goes over “like a lead balloon”.
It could have gone either way for Barack Obama. But, would it have really mattered? Negative results would most certainly have given his critics more reason to doubt his abilities. But, those with a gentler, kinder view would have applauded his efforts because he tried. “No guts, no glory”, as the saying goes.
Plato argued that we are “sitting in a chariot drawn by two horses: reason and passion”. Researchers who study how good decisions are made have found, not surprisingly, that we use both horses to do so. Interestingly, emotions usually lead the way as they make a direct unconscious connection with our actions just as our breathing does. Reason takes a little more work. From an evolutionary perspective, as Joseph LeDoux from New York University describes in The Emotional Brain, connections in our brains from the emotional to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive to the emotional systems.
Given the automatic precedence of emotion over reason in our brains, President Obama has a significant advantage over those leaders who muffle their fun and passionate sides. Like many aspects of leadership, much can be learned. If Prime Minister Harper spent some time with our Second City folks, I’ll bet we’d see a slightly more spontaneous and funny side of him. It would be good for his ratings. His rational, highly competitive nature might just buy into that!
There’s a spontaneity within President Obama not well-developed in Harper. Comedians know how important that quality is to connect with an audience. That’s why they take improv, or responding and creating in the moment, very seriously. Deep down, it’s a control and trust of oneself issue. Loose or tight. Acting into thinking rather than planning into acting. Tough to do if a leader wants to have everything figured out and never look silly.
Yet, we warm to anyone, let alone a leader, who shows he’s just like us. He has to battle some of the ordinary things in life like swatting annoying flies and not taking life too seriously all the time. When we engage in these day-to-day activities, we don’t always win. The fly gets away because we were not fast enough or the joke goes over “like a lead balloon”.
It could have gone either way for Barack Obama. But, would it have really mattered? Negative results would most certainly have given his critics more reason to doubt his abilities. But, those with a gentler, kinder view would have applauded his efforts because he tried. “No guts, no glory”, as the saying goes.
Plato argued that we are “sitting in a chariot drawn by two horses: reason and passion”. Researchers who study how good decisions are made have found, not surprisingly, that we use both horses to do so. Interestingly, emotions usually lead the way as they make a direct unconscious connection with our actions just as our breathing does. Reason takes a little more work. From an evolutionary perspective, as Joseph LeDoux from New York University describes in The Emotional Brain, connections in our brains from the emotional to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive to the emotional systems.
Given the automatic precedence of emotion over reason in our brains, President Obama has a significant advantage over those leaders who muffle their fun and passionate sides. Like many aspects of leadership, much can be learned. If Prime Minister Harper spent some time with our Second City folks, I’ll bet we’d see a slightly more spontaneous and funny side of him. It would be good for his ratings. His rational, highly competitive nature might just buy into that!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
How CEOs and Presidents mess up: a case of the U.S. border security saga
Each president is in a certain way a prisoner of the structure of power.
---Hugo Chavez
Until former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush squared off in a debate in Toronto, I believed that the relentless thickening of the border between the United States and Canada was due mainly to ignorance, paranoia and myopia. I also believed that if we could “hit” those roadblocks head on with evidence seasoned by diplomacy and some creative thinking, then we could stave off the “an error of a hundred miles from a slight deviation of a hair’s breath”.
Whoops, it’s far more complicated! Ignorance of a different and more serious order: those at the top have no idea what it’s like to cross the border. The power gap (or bubble) is the real driver of ignorance. How does one counter that?
The stunning realization hit me when both Clinton and Bush professed ignorance about the June 1, 2009 date when everyone must have a passport when entering the United States either by land, sea or air. As reporters in the major newspapers reported, both men were “befuddled”:
Clinton: “I literally don’t know anything about this. And most Americans don’t. I promise you’ve got my attention.”
Bush: “I’ll be frank with you Frank (directing his comment to the chair of the debate, Frank McKenna, former Premier of New Brunswick). I don’t know about the passport issue. I’m sorry to claim ignorance but….I guess I am. What happened to the E-Z pass?”
The legacy of the 9/11 disaster lives on: same mistakes. The guys at the top don’t know what’s going on. Why? Their privileged positions enable them to escape the ordinariness of life. Sure, Bush is now scooping up his dog’s poop after a sabbatical of eight years but I’ll bet he’s never gone through the hassle of the U.S.-Canada border crossing, ever. Ditto for Bill.
This is a CEO/President problem in any organization. Take Nortel which is a shadow of its former self, teetering on oblivion. Back in John Roth’s time at the helm, I was asked to help its major research lab in Brampton to “get with the program”, code for having to make a 90 degree turn in its strategic direction and start aligning itself with Roth’s vision. This was an order.
The lab, which had grown into a creative and vibrant ecosystem of hundreds of engineers, software designers, programmers and the like, dutifully generated, through many brainstorming sessions, an exciting roadmap forward. It took about 6 months—a quick turnaround. People were pumped and engaged. Then, without warning, Roth disbanded the lab. A team that was an in-house strength for Nortel never had a chance to help the organization adapt. All those relationships and talent wasted!
The insider “intelligence” was that Roth was never informed well enough, if at all, about the lab’s value—current and potential. People speculated that the “power bubble” prevented Roth from being better informed. With no strong advocate, the lab disappeared into oblivion. Perhaps this was the “deviation of a hair’s breath” that, if prevented, might have helped Nortel be more resilient when the technological meltdown followed shortly thereafter.
Are we seeing the same phenomenon now with the U.S. border security issue? It seems eerily similar. The people at the very top (the Presidents) not aware that the genie is really out of the bottle and impending disaster of a bigger kind lurks around the corner.
Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”: once we have made a judgment, we embrace confirming information and discount disconfirming information. We hold the view in place by tagging the confirming information with a positive emotion and the disconfirming with a negative emotion. In the common vernacular, these are called “pigheaded” decisions. History is replete with copious examples of leaders falling prey to such emotional tagging, unable to “see” reality and the best solution, as a result.
Will Barack Obama be able to transcend the power bubble and the cognitive dissonance that goes with it? The jury is out.
Check out S. Finkelstein, et al in the January/February 2009 Ivey Business Journal or their book, Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You.
---Hugo Chavez
Until former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush squared off in a debate in Toronto, I believed that the relentless thickening of the border between the United States and Canada was due mainly to ignorance, paranoia and myopia. I also believed that if we could “hit” those roadblocks head on with evidence seasoned by diplomacy and some creative thinking, then we could stave off the “an error of a hundred miles from a slight deviation of a hair’s breath”.
Whoops, it’s far more complicated! Ignorance of a different and more serious order: those at the top have no idea what it’s like to cross the border. The power gap (or bubble) is the real driver of ignorance. How does one counter that?
The stunning realization hit me when both Clinton and Bush professed ignorance about the June 1, 2009 date when everyone must have a passport when entering the United States either by land, sea or air. As reporters in the major newspapers reported, both men were “befuddled”:
Clinton: “I literally don’t know anything about this. And most Americans don’t. I promise you’ve got my attention.”
Bush: “I’ll be frank with you Frank (directing his comment to the chair of the debate, Frank McKenna, former Premier of New Brunswick). I don’t know about the passport issue. I’m sorry to claim ignorance but….I guess I am. What happened to the E-Z pass?”
The legacy of the 9/11 disaster lives on: same mistakes. The guys at the top don’t know what’s going on. Why? Their privileged positions enable them to escape the ordinariness of life. Sure, Bush is now scooping up his dog’s poop after a sabbatical of eight years but I’ll bet he’s never gone through the hassle of the U.S.-Canada border crossing, ever. Ditto for Bill.
This is a CEO/President problem in any organization. Take Nortel which is a shadow of its former self, teetering on oblivion. Back in John Roth’s time at the helm, I was asked to help its major research lab in Brampton to “get with the program”, code for having to make a 90 degree turn in its strategic direction and start aligning itself with Roth’s vision. This was an order.
The lab, which had grown into a creative and vibrant ecosystem of hundreds of engineers, software designers, programmers and the like, dutifully generated, through many brainstorming sessions, an exciting roadmap forward. It took about 6 months—a quick turnaround. People were pumped and engaged. Then, without warning, Roth disbanded the lab. A team that was an in-house strength for Nortel never had a chance to help the organization adapt. All those relationships and talent wasted!
The insider “intelligence” was that Roth was never informed well enough, if at all, about the lab’s value—current and potential. People speculated that the “power bubble” prevented Roth from being better informed. With no strong advocate, the lab disappeared into oblivion. Perhaps this was the “deviation of a hair’s breath” that, if prevented, might have helped Nortel be more resilient when the technological meltdown followed shortly thereafter.
Are we seeing the same phenomenon now with the U.S. border security issue? It seems eerily similar. The people at the very top (the Presidents) not aware that the genie is really out of the bottle and impending disaster of a bigger kind lurks around the corner.
Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”: once we have made a judgment, we embrace confirming information and discount disconfirming information. We hold the view in place by tagging the confirming information with a positive emotion and the disconfirming with a negative emotion. In the common vernacular, these are called “pigheaded” decisions. History is replete with copious examples of leaders falling prey to such emotional tagging, unable to “see” reality and the best solution, as a result.
Will Barack Obama be able to transcend the power bubble and the cognitive dissonance that goes with it? The jury is out.
Check out S. Finkelstein, et al in the January/February 2009 Ivey Business Journal or their book, Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You.
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