Feeling "Sandwiched in Your Work? There are Tools to Ease the Pressure.

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.

The Semicolons in Our Lives are Doing Battle with Our Twitter Brains

Evolution has hardwired us to read but there is no genetic map for it. The “expert reading brain” comes into being through parents, teachers and self-study. Its thickly branched and interconnected cells are the result of deep, focused attention and concentration on the pages of a non-networked book or article. According to Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) and a chorus of neuroscientists, hyperlinked reading triages our attention inviting multi-tasking and the potential for a “techno-brain” less able to deal with complexity.


Should we be worried? Yes, because the problems we face are “swampier”. These “semi-colon” situations have no technical recipe upon which we can draw. We have to learn as we go and that requires a deep thinker type of brain and skill.

Our workplaces past and present have never been very friendly to slow, concentrated thinking. Packed agendas and back-to back meetings in a hurry up, make-a-decision-fast atmosphere, most often create too much noise for creative thought. In the not-too-distant past, holidays, evenings and weekends offered some respite for re-charging and reflection. But, now the 24/7 social media tsunami is escalating the battle with our evolutionary need to concentrate to survive. Or is it?

We are evolving as did our ancestors. How we do so might be more the point.

Personally I am a Twitter and blog fan. I find those media stimulating and information-rich. I am learning more because of my interconnections with others. These links are not distracting. They instead spark all kinds of ideas which I record. They lead to research pathways I might never have discovered. Put simply – I have added to not subtracted from my thinking brain.

However, I do follow a structure which helps my “expert reading brain” to stay alive:

1. I seldom click on hyperlinks until I have read the whole article;

2. I take notes highlighting key points and then adding my own thoughts about their meaning for my habits and challenges;

3. If I don’t have time to concentrate when I encounter the new information, I set aside time in the evening or morning – about an hour every day – to review and focus on the ideas flowing through Twitter and other sources;

4. Although I have a Kobo, I plan to mix reading “regular” with e-books. Apparently the hands-on nature of a “real” book, like handwriting, is a more efficient and possibly meaningful route to our brains.

Nicholas Christakis, professor of medicine and sociology at Harvard University, claims that we are in the very early stages of the new biosocial science. It is helping us to understand why we behave for better or worse.

At the heart of the matter is wisdom. Without it, we are only left with information. To quote Confucius:

Wisdom can be learned by reflection, the noblest; imitation, the easiest and experience, the bitterest.

We need all three.

Shocked Out of Creativity as Kids?

Although I haven’t read Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s book Nurture Shock about child development, the title sparked a thought: Are we shocked out of creativity when we are growing up?

We do know that adults ask fewer questions, laugh a whole lot less than kids and certainly don’t play as much with some exceptions. Those include people such as comedians, clowns, magicians and jazz musicians and employees who are part of organizations that encourage fun like IDEO, Zappos, Southwest Airlines and many software companies. But, for the majority of adults, working life at least is far too serious and the idea of fun is often viewed as flaky.

The scarcity of questions, laughing, fun and play may go way back to the settling in of “judgment” when we were growing up - self-consciousness from how we were taught to react to mistakes, problems and uncertainty. Play is a safe harbor for facing challenging and hostile environments – experimenting without suffering dire consequences. Fun and laughter allow us to let go, reduce the noise level thereby allowing weak signals in our brains where insights reside to be detected. But, we also lose control temporarily. Questions take us out of our comfort zone because they stir the pot and introduce uncertainty. All of these factors battle with judgment for mind and body space.

After a screw up, we have about 500 milliseconds to react with awareness: ignore the mistake and brush it aside for the sake of our self-confidence or investigate the error and learn from it. Let the judgment mindset in? Or, take more of a growth mindset?

What can we do? Young children and students who are praised for their efforts, not their "smarts", typically demonstrate significant self-improvement. They are encouraged to challenge themselves, learn from their mistakes. We can do this for ourselves to bury the judgment factor and soften the bruising of our egos. Who knows what wonderful ideas may emerge when our more open minds are simply wandering around?

Want to Make Progress on a Tough Challenge? Take Some Cues From Golf

Until most individuals recognize that sustained training and effort is a prerequisite for reaching expert levels of performance, they will continue to misattribute lesser achievement to the lack of natural gifts, and will thus fail to reach their own potential.

- K. Anders Ericsson

We humans have always marveled at the accomplishments of athletes or for that matter anyone who pushes the limits of mastery no matter the skill to be conquered. Golf provides a special window into the journey because we witness the ups and downs of professional golfers of all ages publicly, Tiger Woods for one. Their stories in many ways mimic working life, particularly the managing stress and personal development parts. That’s where we can tune in for some tips.

Karl Morris who is mental coach to Darren Clarke, Charl Schwartzel and Graeme McDowell, picks up on the importance of “deliberate” practice popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. As K. Anders Ericsson explains – the academic guru on the topic – this is not mindless practice. Athletes and any other persons wanting to better their best focus on incrementally stretching beyond their comfort zones, not unlike what we all had to do during our elementary, high school and college or university studies. Plus athletes have expert coaches who, like teachers in our younger years, are a must to provide feedback, guidance and encouragement.

In golf or any domain for that matter, deliberate practice requires work, lots of it. That means attention, concentration, reflection and managing emotions with each shot, each action and reaction.

So, here are three tips from Morris and the researchers on whom he draws:

1. Attend only to one task at a time, one ball at a time until you get it right. So multiple goals and tactics are out.

2. Write down your score. Keep track so you have hard data feedback. This “immunizes you against pressure” in the future.

3. Attach positive emotions to shots even when they are less than your expectations. Even a smile despite a disappointment can shift your opportunity for future success.

Tip # 3 is probably the hardest to do. Rick Hanson in Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time breaks it down into three simple steps that are easy to remember:

Let Be: Acknowledge how you are feeling, your “inner dialogue”.

Let Go: Breathe deeply. Say goodbye to those feelings if negative.

Let In: Replace what you released with something better, like feeling grateful for… (you fill it in). Call it the “silver lining response”.

Note that “mere experience” and “everyday skills” do not qualify as deliberate practice. The latter is akin to the mental demands of complex problem-solving. But, according to Ericsson, too many people default to their everyday skills and as such suffer from “arrested development”!

Have we gone too far with thing and things?

In analyzing Agatha Christie’s writing over her lifetime, linguists concluded that her more extensive use of the word thing in her later years was an indicator of her mental decline. That observation barely registered for me at the time. But something must have stuck. I can no longer ignore that at work, in our personal lives, in books and in the media we use thing and things indiscriminately. Are we dumbing down our discourse?

The first inkling that thing and things was getting to me occurred when I was addressing an audience. I became hyper-aware that I was about to use one of the words in a sentence and then struggled for a micro-second to replace thing with the proper word. So far so good but it requires a ton of mental energy.

The next phase was in books, articles and media - it’s everywhere phase. My train of thought is increasingly disrupted by thing and things popping up no matter where I turn. They are well-entrenched in all that I read and hear, scholarly or otherwise. I am astonished at the extent to which we have fallen into a thingy world.

Was Agatha Christie ahead of her time in reflecting a normal evolution of our language? Or, was her mental capability less sharp? What do you think?

My take: a thingy world doesn’t look good on us.

Why growing talent from within is a smart rule of thumb

Succession planning is a very big deal these days. Put another way: growing and keeping talent for rainy days and beyond. But what I have always found puzzling is the tendency for many organizations to look outward rather than inward, thereby ticking off a lot of people. Why is the “devil you don’t know better than the one you do” in so many recruiting efforts?


Maybe it’s the quick fix approach in search of the Holy Grail. That shiny new person, full of energy, exuberance and efficiency tools will shake things up a bit. Get people moving. Save some costs. And above all improve productivity.

If it were only so simple. Organizations must refresh with new hires but not at the expense of ignoring those within. If everyone is counted in instead of being counted out via a “high potential” selection process upfront, the organizational culture has a greater chance to flourish.

There are plenty of studies showing that superstars don’t contribute as much as you think to organizational success. A superstar is one member of a team. All other members play different, yet important roles in getting the job done. If the superstar is an outsider, that person has a distinct disadvantage - not having a deep knowledge of the business. If the powers that be signal that an outsider is the best choice, the lines harden internally making the job of the new recruit almost impossible. Besides, like any economy, all “classes” are needed to contribute to growth and robustness. The worker bees do good!

But, what about the value of recruiting outside CEOs? Joseph Bower at the Harvard Business School has analyzed 1,800 successions and written about them in his book The CEO Within: Why Insider-Outsiders are the Key to Succession. Bower’s findings confirm that an organization’s performance financially is “significantly better” when persons who are insiders move up to the top job. This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of boards.

In Bower’s words, “it takes hard work to grow talent”. That’s why human resources departments are vitally important for guiding the talent strategy and setting up the right supports and systems for many to flourish. Nature does well with diversity. So can we.

Want more engagement in your workplace? Try the water cooler.

Socializing and socialism are two words that don’t get enough respect. Managers who are under the gun to produce more efficiencies and revenues per worker have limited tolerance for too much informal socializing. Governments faced with too little revenue and huge deficits often see “red” with anything approaching so-called socialism as it brings up negative images of “the welfare state”, laziness, entitlement and most importantly --- high costs. The gyrating economic environment doesn’t help.


But can’t we have it both ways, at least in the work environment? Let’s call it “work hard” and “play hard”.

Evolutionary biologists are absolutely certain about one aspect of survival: we need each other to adapt and thrive in uncertain times. It means interacting in messy, informal ways to share tools, tips and re-energize. It means keeping an eye on the “needs” of individuals in order to generate group prosperity.

Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” is ultimately about group success although you wouldn’t know it from today’s reality TV shows. They prefer the entertainment value of pitting individuals against each other. But, such shows have limited application in today’s more complex and highly volatile environment. Bottom line: if we connect and share more, our chance of survival and economic success goes up not down. Talking helps.

So, back to the water cooler. It’s a simple social place. Yet powerful. It’s a smart managerial tool to achieve cost reductions and revenue ideas. Water coolers and the like keep the information flowing feeding into the creative and innovations streams. They help off-set health and productivity issues from the emotional toll when people don’t feel supported at work.

The leaders of Google, Apple, Zappos, Steelcase and other dynamic "go to" organizations know this.