The Road Ahead

Quotes can have a wonderful way of reminding you of what is deep and important in your life. I like to think of quotes as guiding principles – reflections of values – actively lived or lying dormant waiting to be rekindled. We put quotes on walls and desks for a reason. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and the new Queen of the block, Pinterest prominently feature quotations to address every facet of life. Quotes are snippets of borrowed stories we’d like to realize in our lives. Using quotations to inspire and enrich our work lives can energize and revive our sometimes weary spirits.

Here are 10 of my favorites:

1. “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”Albert Einstein

There are several variations of this well-known quote by Albert Einstein, but this one is my favorite. It’s been a long-time mantra for my work because it reminds me that the process of learning is continuously evolving. Of that we can be sure. Even when we are stuck in old mindsets, life’s experience will undoubtedly show us sometime new. But I believe Einstein was aiming for something else with this idea. We don’t have to sit still and wait for our consciousness to evolve, but can actively seek the knowledge and experience to broaden our thinking – and feelings – within the course of every daily interaction with the world. Curiosity is the key and imagination is the guide. Certainly the good professor would agree.

2. Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Ghandi 

Ghandi’s towering  yet humble advice often leads me to search for the best within myself, especially when circumstances are difficult. This simple yet challenging thought reminds us to look within first and walk our talk. I find this centering quote helps me to act with greater empathy and compassion towards others, listen more deeply and model the patience, understanding and kindness I seek in the world. While Ghandi’s quote, like those of many famous cultural icons, has been “tweaked” to suit a bumper sticker culture, I extract the essence of his idea and find I am still – inspired.

3. “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.” William James

Like many other psychology students, I was presented with the colossal task of making my way through William James’ classic 1200 page tome, The Principles of Psychology, written in 1890. James, a philosopher trained in physiology and psychology, was one of the pioneers in questioning the nature of emotion. Writing about James’ prescient 1884 article, What is an Emotion? neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux wrote, “There were no psychology journals yet. He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus and ends with a conscious emotional experience.” The question, then, as now, is what occurs between the stimulus and the response. James’ brilliance gave a clue that the choice-point is our cognitive thought process. The more we understand how we think – the more we build the capacity to direct our feelings. 

4. “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.” Hafiz 

Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Persian born Sufi poet Hafiz, “the poet’s poet.” Of the estimated 5,000 poems that Hafiz wrote, none were ever written down. It appears that Hafiz, like William James, understood that fear – the common emotional response to most stimulus – weighs us down. It gnaws at our spirit. He’d like to see us living in better conditions. Choose another room. Because fear is still such a predominant emotional response in the workplace, we’d be wise to heed Hafiz’s warning. Settling for fear is all too common. It’s not inevitable, even if it’s easy. 

5. ‘To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all wish to succeed in our work. At the deepest level, we all seek meaning through our work. Although this quote doesn’t speak directly to work, because of its prominence in most people’s lives, our work is a place where our impact can be significant. While few of us are solving the world’s big problems through our work, each one of us has the opportunity, in simple ways, to help others to breathe easier. There are many ways to do this. Everyday interactions with others give us endless opportunities to extend our consideration and empathy. And even if we are not engaged in work that shakes the world we can try to engage in what the Buddhist called Right Livelihood – that our work, at least, does no harm. 

6. “The price of anything is the amount of life that is exchanged for it.” Henry David Thoreau

Clearly, the 19th century transcendentalist, Thoreau lived an intentional life. In 1845 he moved to land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to a small, cottage he built near Walden Pond, in Massachusetts. In his famous book Walden he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Every activity we choose exacts some cost of our life energy. Some of it yields great rewards – like engaging in a loving relationship. Other expenditures of our time and energy cannot be said to produce a sufficient ROI (return on investment) in terms of life’s meaningful rewards and memories. Choose wisely. 

7. “People will forget what you said; people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

I often use this quote in my work on emotional intelligence. It can act to motivate us to remember that our interactions with others are felt. This can work both ways. People can remember the hurt they felt when slighted by peers dozens of years after the fact. An insensitive or unkind boss can leave a bitter taste in our mouths even when they are long gone. We can also fondly remember small acts of civility and kindness, even from lost acquaintances or strangers. How do people remember you? How do you want them to remember you 

8. “Talk to yourself like you would someone you love.” Brene Brown

Brene Brown burst on to the social media scene with her 2010 TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability. 8.5 million views later, the talk has injected Brene’s long time research topics – courage, worthiness and shame – into conversations where such feelings were previously taboo. Brene wisely explains that our lack of self-love is often predicated on fear. We are often as unforgiving with ourselves as we are with the world – and much of it stems from fear, “I think people don’t understand that anxiety is fear. Jealousy is fear. Greed is fear. All of those are elements of a fear-based culture.” Self-compassion is the starting point for driving out fear from all the nooks and crannies of our lives, where in many cases, it’s been parked for a long time.

9. “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” C.S. Lewis

More than fifty years ago, C.S. Lewis wrote these words in a letter to his god-daughter. It precedes the first chapter of his classical story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis, a writer, poet, academic and Christian theologian, authored the famous Chronicles of Narnia. He believed that fairy tales survive because they transcend age and time. We all grown up enthralled and mystified by the tales and myths we absorbed in childhood. But soon we put “childish things away,” and enter the world of rationality we call –  adulthood. Lewis believed we give away important pieces of our inner life when we do so, but that wonder, however faint, continues to live on as we age. While the stories that regaled us as children may not hold the same magic, we must find new ones as adults that restore our sense of wonder and awe in the world.

10. “Love the questions themselves.”  Rainer Maria Rilke

Born in the late 19th century, Rainer Maria Rilke is considered to be one of the greatest poets to have written in the German language. This abbreviated quotation comes from Rilke’s longer verse in Letters To a Young Poet, “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”Rilke understood that uncertainty is the nature of human life. At any moment, things can, and will, change. We act as if periods of uncertainty are temporary in our lives. We anxiously refer to the times we live in as uncertain, as if there was ever a time in human history where that was not true. Rilke’s antidote to permanent uncertainty and the fragile human condition is to learn to love the mysteries of life.

Writing about Rilke’s evolution as a poet, the great Hermann Hesse wrote, “His mastery of form increases, penetrates deeper into his problems. And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe.” Each one of us must make peace within ourselves in what we perceive as a chaotic world. Rilke’s prescription of patience and love of our mysterious journey through this “chaotic world” is worthy of our aspirations.

Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment, subscribe, share, like and tweet this article. It’s appreciated.

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication Consultants

Do you know about the marshmallow test?

No, it’s not about seeing how many marshmallows you can toast and eat by the fire. It’s the classic Marshmallow Study conducted in 1968 at Stanford University by clinical psychologist Walter Mischel that became one of the longest running experiments in psychology. The initial study examined 600 children to see how they would behave when given a marshmallow and left alone. Each child was given a choice: wait for the experimenter and you get two marshmallows or just eat the marshmallow while you wait.

It’s fascinating to watch some of the children’s strategies for handling the choice. Subsequent follow-ups demonstrated that the children who waited – in other words, delayed gratification – performed better later in life with academics, attention, stress management and relationships than kids who rang the bell first (ate the marshmallow).

You may be wondering – what’s a 1968 study about children and marshmallows have to do with workplace relationships? While “mindfulness” was not on any scientist’s radar screen back then, the marshmallow study speaks to early patterns of self-control that follow us into our adulthood. Impulse control is learned early, and what’s still not completely understood is how much is native to a brain or learned through the power of social conditioning.

One thing is certain – while some of us may be born with more of a predisposition towards patience and self-discipline, none of us are born with the skills to be mindfully self-aware.

Take a few (delightful) minutes to watch this video of the children participating in the marshmallow study. Which one would you guess is most like you were as a kid? As much as I would like to think I had the willpower of the kid in the zebra suit, I’m probably more like the girl who ate bits of the marshmallow till it was gone and then took matters into her own hands and went looking for the person in charge.

Work Relationships are Rarely Easy

As I’ve written before in these pages, mindfulness is a skill that requires a commitment, over time, to develop and maintain desired behaviors. A daily meditation practice is only one way to engage acting mindfully.While there’s ample evidence of the physiological benefits of regular meditation, the practice alone won’t necessarily transform how you relate to other people.

Mindfully relating to others at work is an especially challenging and important skill. After all, relationships are the foundation of business. Business happens because people make it happen. Unless you work completely alone, you get things done with and through other people. And “performance” is based on feelings, even when those feelings are outside of conscious awareness.

One of the most significant findings of the last two decades is a greater understanding of the social nature of brains. Advances in our understanding of social neurobiology, show that our interactions with others shape our brain’s neural pathways including those that are genetically programmed. Recent studies show that the brain responds to nonverbal messages and emotional cue throughout life.

In his book, The Developing Mind, social neurobiologist Daniel Siegel uses the phrase the “feeling of being felt” to describe relationships that shape the mental circuits responsible for memory, emotion, and self-awareness. Brain altering communication is triggered by deeply felt emotions that register in facial expressions, eye contact, touch posture, movements, pace and timing, intensity and tone of voice.”

What You Value

If we place value on a growing body of neuroscience that demonstrates the impact and power of neural interdependency, the question becomes one of choice in deciding how to relate to others. Developing greater mindful awareness of our communication habits is one level of proficiency in relationship building. But it takes a deeper understanding of our motives in relating to others, especially in work relationships, to build mindfulness that can become our default state.

Developing greater mindfulness is a practice, the definition of which is simply, “done with repetition.” While you may want to be more mindful with your manager, expanding mindful awareness of your habits, in all of your work relationships, will give you better insights than simply focusing on one person, although that may be a good start. While there is often a tendency to want to “solve” our more intractable people problems first, try to resist the temptation to start with the most “difficult” person you know.

For beginners, it’s helpful to practice mindfulness when you are more relaxed to give yourself the space to calmly observe your reactions and those of others. Recognize that mindful awareness is not an “event” or “technique” or “strategy” that you use. Rather it is a commitment to a way of being that is transforming not only how you behave but how you perceive the world.

11 Ways to Practice

1. Clarify Your Intentions. As mentioned earlier, understand your motives. You may intend to be more patient or kinder with a specific colleague or with all the people you work with. Be clear with yourself about your intentions. What do you really want your outcomes to be –for you – and for others?
2. Think More Consciously. Being consciously self-aware means you are intimately aware of what, how and why you are thinking what you are thinking. Author Eckhart Tolle says that “When we can’t make up our minds, it’s because of our minds, or what I call “the voice inside your head.” Many people don’t even know they have this voice, but it’s talking away, creating a never-ending monologue.”
3. Develop Your Emotional Literacy. The more you engage in conscious thinking the more aware you will become of how those thoughts make you feel. Making the connection is the essence of emotional literacy. Expanding this knowledge enables you to manage your “negative” emotional triggers more skillfully and to cultivate the type of feelings that support you communicating more effectively with others.
4. Observe Your Behavior. We all have behavioral patterns with others, especially those people who we work with often. Some of these behaviors work – meaning they produce a positive result. Get to know what these are. Conversely, begin to note (by getting better at more closely observing others) what signals you send that provoke weak or negative responses in others. Over time, you’ll get a clearer picture of communication habits you have (that could be specific to an individual or more general) that you may choose to change.
5. Avoid Self-Absorption – In an era of chronic time pressures, poor attention and constant distraction, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and self-absorbed. If it’s always about you and your agenda, then it’s rarely about others. Non-verbal cues are always communicating what’s really on you mind. Paying attention to others is golden in our time-starved lifestyles. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the full attention of the other person (they’re subject to the same cultural influences as you are in most cases) but at some level, your genuine interest will be felt.
6. Use Language Carefully. Language is power. Often the emphasis on nonverbal influence seems to diminish the value of words. Name calling in office environments has really gotten toxic. I cringe when I see courses or books from well-meaning consultants who refer to “problem” employees as “losers,” “slackers” “whiners, etc. When you label others, you de-personalize them. And when other people hear you use labels or make derogatory remarks about others, they will, at some level, assume you will so the same to them. http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2012/09/what-to-do-when-you-have-to-work-with-someone.html
7. Care About Others More. Yes, care more. How? Learn to engage your empathy, compassion and curiosity every day. Practice it. You are rewiring your brain when you forge these new habits. Research shows that when we are stressed, our focus becomes more internalized, resulting from anxiety that has switched on the stress response. As a result, we unconsciously switch off the part of our brains that generate empathy and compassion towards others. We’re in our own heads, trying to solve problems, make decisions and assuage our fears. Focusing on others is the last thing we’re thinking about. Often we feel and act as if changing our state is out of our control – it is not.
8. Learn to Express Disagreements & Even Anger Differently - Becoming more mindful in your relationships does not mean you have to become a saint or a pushover. The challenge is learning to be direct and assertive, where appropriate, without resorting to attacks, sarcasm or disrespect. There will be people that we work with whose behavior we do not like or condone. Being mindful in the face of such behavior can seem impossible, even unreasonable, but in response we must revisit #1 and ask ourselves – what are my intentions and what do I want my outcomes to be. If we decide that all we want is revenge, we must take the consequences. Mindful thinking about this process can be very valuable.
9. Letting Go of the Illusion of Control – Repeat this several times a day – I do not have the power to control or change others. Knowledge from neuroscience helps us to understand that the brain is always assessing potential threats or rewards from outside events. Most people perceive your motives at deep levels and act on them, often without any conscious awareness. Which signal do you want to activate when communicating with others?
10. Stop Judging Others. Your mental comparisons and evaluations are triggering your feelings – and those feelings leak through your body language. If you think I have an agenda (whatever that means) you are probably communicating that to me nonverbally. If you believe I am not as smart as you, I’m getting that at some level by how you are communicating with me.
11. Pay Attention to Cultural Influences. All work relationships happen within the context of the organization or situation in which you work. In other words – it’s the system! The mental models that shape the dynamics of an organization shape the patterns of communication within that system. According to Quantum Shifting author John Wenger, “Behaviors at work are tempered by the systemic norms.” The more you are aware of these factors, the better able you are to access how they influence you and your communication with others.

While you may not have much choice in who you work with, you can choose how you want to behave with them. When you behave towards other more mindfully, you’re likely to increase that others will perceive your positive intentions, even if your communication or actions aren’t perfect.

But remember intentions without actions won’t amount to the changes you would like to experience. “First, said the Greek sage and philosopher, Epictetus, say to yourself what would you be; and then do what you have to do.”

Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment, subscribe, share, like and tweet this article. It’s appreciated.

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication Consultants

(Haraz N. Ghanbari – AP)

The times they a’changin, even if you are not ready.

While Mitt Romney did get 47% of the vote, it’s the other 53% of the electorate that showed up that is a huge part of the story.  In his post-election coverage, The New Yorker’s editor Hendrik Hertzberg wrote, “Nearly as pleasing as Obama’s surprisingly easy reelection – and, to me at least, rather more surprising – was the electorate’s nearly across –the-board embrace of cultural and social liberalism and, implicitly, of secularism.”

This America showed up to vote in jaw-dropping pluralities that even the most hardened skeptic (well most) can’t deny. The headliner percentages for African-Americans (95%) Latinos (75%) Asian-Americans (75%) and young people (between the ages of 18 and 29) made up a bigger share of the electorate (to many an analyst’s surprise) than they have in past elections, with a 19% margin of support for the President.

Predicted, but still stunning, was the President’s support from woman, and in particular, single women.   While women turned out in the same numbers as 2008 (54% of the electorate) the gender gap rose from 12% to 18% in this election.  Of that number, two-thirds of single women voted for Obama.  Interestingly, single people are now the majority in 15 states.   One striking demographic shift in the crucial women’s vote is that these women are no longer white, married middle class suburbanites but a broad coalition of unmarried women, urban-dwellers, people of color and those under the age of 30.

Social issues reflecting the values of these voters also won big in this election. Fourstates, Washington, Minnesota, Maryland and Maine voted for marriage equality and two states, Colorado and Washington voted to legalize recreational use of marijuana. Senator-elect Tammy Baldwin (WI) will serve as the first openly gay member of the U.S. Senate and self-described bisexual candidate, Krysten Sinema from Arizona won a congressional seat. Though geography and politics divide support for these issues, the historic reversal of recent opposition to these measures and candidates is notable.

Changing cultural values and demographics are an undeniable factor in the recent election, and raise important questions about how they will affect the workplace of the not so distant future?  How much of the 2012 vote will translate into policy changes is  an open question, but surely  this cultural and demographic tsunami comes with expectations that will shape how we work.

These Voters Want “Things”

Fox Channel host Bill O’Reilly made headlines with his post-election comments that Obama’s election reflected that “the demographics are changing, and it’s not a traditional America anymore.” Pointing to Obama’s support among African-Americans, Hispanics and women, he noted they voted for him because they want “stuff.”

O’Reilly’s nebulous response notwithstanding, all voters and employees want stuff.The question is what stuff will the new electorate want?  Depending on what stuffthey get, the spillover to the workplace is inevitable and in some cases the stuff they get will reshape the landscape of work.

Let’s look at a few examples:

The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. the ACA or Obamacare)

“Obamacare” is one piece of the stuff that the winning electorate already has in established law. In fact, some analysts would argue that the 2012 election was a mandate to continue Obamacare since Mr. Romney proposed to repeal it on his first day in office.  Signed into law in 2010, the ACA is the most significant overhaul in U.S. healthcare regulations since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

At this time, 48.6 million Americans have no health insurance (that’s down by 1.3 million since the passage of the law, largely due to a provision of the ACA that took effect in 2011 allowing parents to continue to cover children under 26 on their health plans).

Once the ACA is fully implemented in 2014 and insurance coverage is mandated (through a number of measures) companies employing 50 or more people but not offering health insurance will be required to provide it and will pay a shared responsibility if the government has to subsidize the coverage. Very small businesses will be able to get subsidies if they buy insurance through one of the health exchanges being established in every state.

Although some noisy high-profile CEO’s like pizza-chain Papa John’s John Schnatter have threatened to lay off employees or freeze hiring rather than raising prices (or lowering their own compensation), most business analysts agree the law is here to stay and it’s time to begin planning for compliance.  Implementation at this scale is massive and there is much speculation about how companies will handle the mandate.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that between 4 and 6 millions fewer people could lose their coverage through employers under the law. Some companies may decide it is cheaper to drop coverage for their workers and give them the money to purchase insurance through state health exchanges.  Some analysts believe that companies, especially within certain industries such as hospitality or food service, may attempt to move towards increasing their pool of part-time workers to evade the mandate.

It’s too soon to understand how the effects of the ACA will impact the business bottom line but it’s not too soon to begin to imagine a healthier and more robust workforce that will reap significant benefits for the entire populace and economy. Given that the U.S. is the only major industrialized country (other than Turkey or Mexico) that doesn’t offer universal health care but spends more per capita than any other nation on health costs, expect that the ACA will have a major influence on all American workplaces.

Immigration Reform

Even one year ago, comprehensive immigration reform legislation seemed impossible but now seems plausible given the powerful voice of Hispanics in the 2012 election.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) estimates that these reforms could add over $1.5 trillion to the economy over ten years, or about 0.84% to GDP.  These calculations are based partly on the outcomes of the 1986 Reagan Amnesty reforms which gave legal status to about 3 million undocumented individuals.  The CAP believes that giving 11.3 undocumented immigrants a route to citizenship could increase their collective earning power by as much as 36 billion a year. That money would funnel back into the economy and create more demand and jobs.

Speaking after President’s Obama’s order earlier this year to halt deportation for younger undocumented immigrants, Latina activist Lorella Praeli, who herself is an undocumented immigrant and college graduate stated, “I would find it incredibly difficult, politically, for any future president of the United States, to say, “I’m going to take this away from people,” because I think we’ve shown America the contributions that we make. And we’re going to be able to continue in a very different way to contribute with now being able to enter the job market. And it would be difficult for someone to say, “I’m just going to take 800,000 people’s work permits. I think we’re unstoppable.”

Women’s Rights

Women spoke their preferences loudly in the 2012 voting booth. A range of issues, favored by the majority of women voters this year, will have both direct and indirect impact on workplaces issues affecting all workers.  Pay equity will likely resurface as a post-election issue, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation that was twice introduced and rejected in the Congress will likely find new support.

The Act would expand the scope of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Fair Labor Standards and address the inexcusable issue of male-female income disparity in the U.S.  Despite the fact that women now make up 46.6% of the American workforce they still earn only 77.4% of men’s earnings in 2010.

Other important issues impacting women and affecting their role as workers will be the gains they realize from gender parity ratings under Obamacare, as well as many free preventive health care benefits and maternity benefits offered in the plan. This election also insured that women’s reproductive rights will stay intact under this administration. It is likely that the President will appoint at least one, if not two Supreme Court judges, during his tenure and these appointments will likely be to judges favoring women’s rights to choice, as well as the preservation of laws protecting them from gender discrimination

According to Think Progress, for the women who do not identify as heterosexual, this election marks an important step forward for LGBT equality.  Obama is the first U.S. President in office to endorse marriage equality and may enact policies in his second term to extend legal rights and protections to parents and spouses that are not part of the “traditional” family structures.

The LGBT communities in general may find that employers may be mandated by new laws – and cultural pressure – to expand their own policies and practices to embrace the new electoral mandates and expectations.

It’s also safe to assume that the expansion of women’s representation in the United States Congress will result in an increase of legislation that benefits women’s economic and social standing in the workplace – and beyond.

Game Changer?

The cynics will jeer but it’s possible that this election will be seen in hindsight as agame changer for the workplace. Every week dozens of articles are written about the death of modern management and the transformation that must take place in the ranks of leadership and organizational structure.

To be sure, there will be resistance and attempts at obstruction.

In his Forbes article, Don’t Diss the Paradigm Shift, It’s Happening, Steve Denning discusses scientist’s Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the phases of paradigm shifts and the parallels to modern management.  According to Denning, “The change in the management paradigm has been long in the making. It is not some fad that was cooked up last night and that will evaporate tomorrow. It has been gathering momentum around the world for several decades. It has deep roots in Europe, in Asia, and in the Americas.   There is now a whole body of knowledge about how this works and why this works. The shift entails a different way of treating people: a shift from a world in which people are manipulated as things (resources, eyeballs, demand) to a world in which people are interacted with as human beings.”

The realities are on the table – an empowered, diverse electorate which may translate into new demands in the workplace, one and possibly two (Obamacare and immigration reform) of the most sweeping legislative mandates in over a generation, a slow-growth (for now) economy, the highest corporate profits and capital reserves in nearly two decades, looming demands to address climate change and continuous technological transformation.

Our greatest enemy might be the drawers full of destructive beliefs that keep us mired in yesterday. As Denning points out, “The older paradigm is difficult to displace precisely because it has been shown to work in solving problems in the past.”

The balance of power is shifting.  Perhaps it tipped a bit on November 6, 2012. One thing is certain, many of the employees that emerge from this “New America” won’t all be signing up for the old paradigm.

They will want different stuff.

As always, I appreciate your comments, subscriptions, tweets, shares and likes.  

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication

‘We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.’~ Voltaire

 Pick an emotion – any emotion that characterizes how you feel during your workday. When you become aware of what you feel while you work, which emotion do you experience most often?

Impatience.

 Frustration.

 That’s what most people I work with choose.

 If you were able to select an emotion that you think would support you most in your work – what would it be?

 Patience.

That’s what most people I work with choose as their “ideal” work default feeling.

 What’s the opposite of your impatience and  frustration?

 Calm. Focused. Relaxed.

 That is where most people I work with say they want to be.  When I ask them, “How often do you feel patient, calm, focused and relaxed while you work,” most laugh and admit, “rarely.”

 Perhaps impatience and frustration are the default emotions of our times?

Is patience a “virtue,” as it’s often described– a character trait, or as with impatience – a flaw? It’s instructive to consider that the root of the word virtue comes from the Anglo-French meaning worth, maleness and virility.

For some, impatience is a character plus, a sign of a no-nonsense type of person who cuts to the chase and gets to the point.  After all – two of the most high-profile people in the world – Bill and Melinda Gates, describe themselves as “impatient optimists.” Writing in SELF Magazine, author Valerie Frankel comments, “I’ve always imagined my impatient nature is a sign of success – something that all busy, hard-driving, intelligent people share.”

In other words, just as with every other emotion we experience – how we behave is driven by our beliefs about what we feel.

 In the Jewish Talmud, patience is extolled as an important personal trait – portraying those who endure while suffering through challenging conditions as virtuous. Muslims believe that a person can grow closer to God through patience, especially through suffering. In Buddhist traditions, patience is known as one of the “perfections” where the practice of patience is a way to enlightenment. In both Buddhism and Hinduism the emphasis is placed on the conscious awareness or mindfulness, achieved thorough the practice of meditation to cultivate more patience and clarification of thought.

I’m dubious about concepts of trait, character, virtue and even personal nature. These age-old ideas keep too many of us locked into emotional ruts and behaviors that given the opportunity to change – we would. If I am impatient – by nature – I may not take the actionable steps I could to make meaningful changes in my life. It’s reminiscent of discussions about whether leaders are born or made. While we all work with certain “natural” tendencies, often evident since childhood, the discovery of neuroplasticity – the ability to re-train the brain, opens up whole new realm of possibility for personal change.

 The World We Live In

 How does the world work on you?

 In a world characterized by technology and speed – is there room for patience?

In his article on the effects of technology, Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini writes, “Technology has made us impatient. We no longer enjoy pausing. Or remembering. We log on, tune in, dial-up and speed off like drag racers, leaving in our wake a swirling cloud of historical dust, memory, perspective and people.”  In response, author Linton Weeks, writes, “But technology only does what we want it to do. And we want it to do everything faster. We: Speed date. Eat fast food. Use the self-checkout lines in grocery stores. Try the one-weekend diet. Pay extra for overnight shipping. Honk when the light turns green. Thrive or dive on quarterly earnings reports. Speak in half sentences. Start things but don’t fin……”

 Or maybe we can blame our impatience on the rise of urban life? As a big fan of cities, I believe I thrive in the rich, dense environment of that stimulus. It charges my senses. I believe in the possibilities that urban life offers to enliven and enrich cultures. But as a former longtime NYC resident   I can also attest to its energetic drain. On some days, just getting from my home in lower Manhattan to work in midtown or upper Manhattan felt like an act of will.

 On good days, I used the experience to practice patience, curiosity and empathy – three emotions that feed my well-being – and shift my negative responses to external stimulus.  On iffy days, I’d duck into a pocket park (there aren’t enough in any city) or a “quiet” café to replenish my energy, even for fifteen minutes.

According to the U.N. urban life is on the rise, with more than half of the world’s 6.9 billion people living in cities. While city life may offer many benefits, research is beginning to show how cities can affect our brains, particularly memory and attention. A study conducted by the University of Michigan in 2008 found that simply spending a few minutes on a busy city street affected the ability to focus.

 Sara Lazar Ph.D in psychology and director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Laboratory for Neuroscientific Investigation of Meditation, points out, “On a busy city street, it’s probably more adaptive to have a shorter attention span. If you are too fixed on something, you might miss a car coming around the corner and fail to jump out of the way.”  While many factors influence attention and memory, the study glimpses the role of the voluntary attention system, that part of the brain that allows us to concentrate in spite of distractions. People suffering from directed attention fatigue can experience short-term feelings of heightened distraction, impatience and forgetfulness.

Turns out my intuitive urban rejuvenation strategy of seeking respite in green and quiet places, was just what the doctor orders.  Studies show that even 20 minutes in a more natural setting helps the brain to recover from city stresses. Even rooms with verdant views have been found in studies involving hospital patients to speed recovery.  Now I understand my ferocity in protecting the Norway maple tree which sat majestically in front of our apartment windows!

Impatience and Frustration – The Thieves of Time 

We need more research to understand how impatience works on our neurophysiology.

While we wait – let’s pay attention to our mind. It’s after all the narratives in our minds that drive impatience. Our perception of time – the crisis of the time “famine” – which seems to grip us and spike our impatience – plays a big role.

Allan Lokos, the author of Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living, writes, “Patience is not an item, product or object; a thing that we have in greater or lesser supply. We therefore cannot lose patience. Undoing this misperception is important if we are to see things as they really are, which is the ground of wisdom. Impatience is a feeling that arises when particular conditions come together in a specific moment. When we understand that feelings are arising and feelings are not reality, we can relax a bit. We see that we don’t have to react to every feeling as it arises; in fact, that would be an exhausting way to live.”

After all, impatience and frustration are about control. Lift the veil of every feeling of impatience and frustration that you experience and you’ll find you are grasping for control. Self-control, control of others, control of the world, control of time – most of it – - illusionary. Yet we still hold firm on the grip of it. Our impatience often says this is not enough; it (whatever “it” is) is taking too long, I want more and I want it now.

Life is too ephemeral for me to wait – for anything. This life now – in this moment – is not enough and I can’t wait for the future to unfold.

Perhaps we, like the times we live in, are waiting.

To Waiting

W.S. Merwin

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

Thanks for reading and I always appreciate your comments, subscriptions, tweets, likes and shares. 

Louise Altman, Intentional Communication Partners

Part 2 of this article is long overdue. Since I published Part 1 in April 2011 the article has consistently been in the blog's top 5. I'm grateful for the response and I've been inspired to write more about the fascinating, emergent world of neuroscience.

While I am a very informal student of the science, what I’ve learned has reshaped the way I approach my work; in fact, everything I do.   As I wrote in Part 1, given this dazzling new knowledge, I expect that slowly, but surely organizational leaders will come to realize that too many of the beliefs, philosophies, methods, practices and strategies that govern their thinking about human dynamics and work are still mired in the Industrial Era mindset.

While there are critics of neuroscience and its interpretations who worry about the “culture’s obsession with the brain and how we have elevated the vital organ into cultish status, mythologizing its functions and romanticizing the promise of its scientific study,” we’ve already realized great benefits from the science that is clearly to stay.

What we now know about human development and optimal whole body-brain functioning should not only change the way we manage people at work – but how we raise and teach our children, provide health care, conduct our legal system and structure government policies and institutions.

In Part 1, I focused on the concepts governing management practices that can benefit from developing an understanding of neuroscience.  In Part 2, I want to broaden the applicability of neuroscience to more of organizational life. – specifically, culture.

Cultures are driven by beliefs 

Every culture mirrors the larger culture in which it is contained and reinforces macro beliefs that result in assumptions and expectations. As I wrote in Part 1, one major belief  that keeps fossilized management thinking in place  is the false premise that there is no place for psychology in business. This fallacious thinking is driven by the antiquated belief that the personal life is and should be separate from business life.

Let’s knock this patently false idea right out of the discussion – you cannot compartmentalize feelings.   The neuroscience is clear - when we try to suppress feelings (which is the common informal business expectation) we rob the resources of our pre-frontal cortex (PFC), used for problem solving and analytic thinking, to stifle emotional responses. Like a car, a PFC only has a limited supply of fuel, and if we are using that fuel in another area, there is less available for other cognitive tasks.

The prevailing professional axiom that employees should  – refrain from expressing “personal” feelings – ultimately works to the detriment of the person and the organization.  The Catch -22 here is that while employers don’t want messy personal feelings displayed or discussed, they do want feelings like –enthusiasm, passion, confidence and determination from their employees.  While every person can learn better skills at emotional regulation – emotional denial is essentially ineffective and carries a physiological cost that is impossible to separate from “performance.”

To traditional business philosophy, neuroscience findings can seem to be counterintuitive. For example, it would be safe to say that most professionals and management “experts” still believe that one of the hallmarks of sound decision making is to limit emotional noise.

Although the role of emotion in cognitive decision-making is complex, and “Decision Science” is relatively young, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a significant discovery that changed scientific assumptions about decision-making.  Studying people who had suffered injuries to the ventromedial frontal cortex, which processes feelings of empathy, shame, compassion and guilt, Damasio found they experienced a diminished capacity to feel these social emotions. As a result, those patients, whose logical reasoning was left intact, were unable to make even simple decisions.

Culture Rules

Have you heard the analogy about asking fish to describe the water they swim in? The fish aren’t aware of their environment because they’re swimming in it. We’ll give people in organizations more credit than fish, but the analogy is still apt. While it is hard for most employees to describe their culture, that doesn’t diminish their references to it.

“We have a top down culture.”

“We’re a prove-it culture.”

“Men still rule in this culture.”

“We’re a workaholic culture.”

When people describe their workplace culture, they are attempting to describe their day-to-day experience. The wisdom behind the aphorism, “Culture eats strategy for lunch,” is that feelings and behaviors are the main forces creating culture, while cerebral driven “strategies” lag far behind.

Though fascinating, how cultures are shaped and motivated is not the point here. Cultures exist. They are a predominate force in determining how people think and ultimately, how they will behave.

Think of workplace cultures as aggregates of the thinking, feelings and actions of an organization – over time. Those cultures create environments that produce processes, policies, practices and relationships that result in neurophysiological responses.  Recently a large study of the workplace showed that workers without much control over the pace at which they do their work were 23% more at risk for heart attacks. Controlling for individual “A” type behavior styles, the larger question of how much responsibility a workplace culture contributes to individual physiological response has been seriously called into question in many studies.

Productivity

The question of productivity is also an important one in determining the role of a culture’s impact on personal neurophysiology.  Clearly there are employees driven by their own personal motivations and needs to work beyond “normal” hours (whatever those are these days).  The reality is that U.S. employees are working longer hours than ever, 1,797 hours in 2011, or about 34.5 hours per week, as compared with the closest European counterpart, the U.K. at 1611 hours or 31 hours per week.  The drive to increase worker productivity often comes at the cost of worker well-being and jobs.  Corporations are reaping the benefits of a GDP that is higher today than in 2007, and doing so with 7.3 million less private sector jobs.

While the scientific evidence for the connection between stress, performance and work keep mounting, the research on sleep disorders and optimal functioning is not far behind. According to Harvard Medical School, research is revealing how sleep loss, even poor-quality sleep, can lead to an increase in errors at the workplace, decreased productivity, and accidents that cost both lives and resources. 

“We are a nation of walking zombies” said Cornell University sleep researched James Mass, “three-quarters of Americans have trouble sleeping at least three nights a week. If we operated machinery like we try to operate our bodies, we’d be accused of reckless endangerment.” The consequences also can be traced to work – including a decline in alertness, fuzzy decision-making and less ethical behavior. A 2007 study by CVS Caremark estimated lost productivity related to fatigue at $136 billion dollars a year.

The Conditions of Culture

To be sure, every employee brings their own stressors and emotional baggage to their job and managers and organizations cannot be solely blamed. But organizations play a major role in creating the conditions in which workers must perform every day.  Every size organization establishes and reinforces the norms (often unconsciously) and policies that shape human behavioral responses.

We can thank executive coach David Rock for organizing many of key discoveries of neuroscience into an elegant model that can serve as a guide for management. Attempting to source and explain the changes in cognitive processes his clients were experiencing, Rock identified five domains of social experience that the brain treats as survival issues: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. Named SCARF, the model “describes the interpersonal and primary rewards or threats that are important to the brain.”

Writing about SCARF and the new field of Neuroleadership, author Manie Bosman highlights its importance, “Understanding that the human brain is primarily a social organ which perceives the workplace as a social environment can help leaders manage and facilitate these needs to the benefit of the individual and the team.”   The relevancy of this awareness could not be more salient for every leader.  To Bosman’s point, these functions of the brain can also be managed by leaders to the detriment of the individual, the team and the organization through sheer lack of awareness of the impact of policies, processes and behavior that activate the threat response rather than the reward centers of the brain.

Organizational structure plays a major role in how the five domains of SCARF will be activated.  Power arrangements within organizations filter down to the micro level where each employee experience their status within the group.  The brain determines status in relation or measurement to others.

According to David Rock, “The brain maintains a complex map for the “pecking order” of the people surrounding you.”  For example, recent studies at Brigham Young University and Princeton in group decision-making showed that when women are outnumbered in group settings, they speak up less than 75% of the time. Interestingly, participation by the women improved when the decision-making was consensus driven rather than by majority rule.

Organizational conditions shape the social environment of the workplace culture. I’d highlight this as one of the most significant findings of social neuroscience. Although the beliefs and customs of each culture will determine how the social brains interact, the universality of these discoveries has broad implications for every workplace on the planet.

Organizational leaders that continue to believe that work is simply transactional – miss not only one of the most important scientific discoveries of the past fifty years, but also miss the point – what the human brain/heart needs, despite the circumstances.

Thanks for reading. commenting, subscribing, tweeting, sharing and liking this post~

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication Consultants

Here's some posts that you may find compliment today's article: Why Neuroscience SHOULD Change the Way We Manage People, Part 1, The Management Model You Can't Manage Without, Part 1 and Part 2,  and 5 Reasons Business Can't Afford To Avoid Psychology for Another 100 Years! 

There’s lots of compelling information emerging from neuroscience about compassion.

That’s good news because, frankly, we need it.

You see, the really good news is that we’re hard-wired for compassion. Speaking at this summer’s conference in Telluride, Colorado, The Science of Compassion: Origins, Measures and Interventions, sponsored by Stanford University Medical School’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, Stephen Porges, Ph.D. presented the following conclusions from his research:

• Compassion is a manifestation of our biological need to engage and bond with others
• Compassion is a component of our biological quest for “safety” in the proximity of others.

Stunning!

Summarizing the Telluride conference findings, Emiliana  Simon-Thomas, Ph.D.,  Associate Director and a Senior Scientist at CCARE, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford writes, “The discussions revealed growing consensus that the biological, physical and behavioral properties of compassion – the feeling we get when confronted with suffering , infused with the urge to help – have evolved to help us survive.” 

What We Learn and What We Believe

As scientific consensus about compassion as instinct continues to solidify, humanity’s beliefs about the goodness of others seem to lagging behind the studies.

There’s a wonderful Buddhist teaching story that compares lunch in heaven to lunch in hell. Both places have the same set-up; large dining tables filled with delicious food. However, the forks are too long and it is impossible for the diners to eat with them. Those who dwell in hell live in eternal frustration and hunger at not being able to eat the food.  Those who dwell in heaven, however, simply smile and use the long forks to feed each other. The meaning is simple; the same conditions can be experienced differently based on attitude and perceptions.

The precursor to allowing, experiencing and benefiting from compassion appears to be the conditioning and beliefs we humans bring to the experience.

According to Dacher Keltner, PhD, executive editor of Greater Good magazine and professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, “Humans are selfish. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable.  The bad in human nature is stronger than the good. These claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotions. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the font of irrationality, baseness and sin.” 

Our conditioning and beliefs can be major blocks to allowing feelings of compassion to arise within us.

Let’s take a look at the photo at the top of this article.  I don’t know who this woman is – one of millions of homeless human beings who, tragically, live on streets all over the world. I specifically chose this photo to ask you a few questions.

Does this photo evoke your compassion?  If not, why not?  This isn’t a judgment – the photo can trigger lots of feelings and it’s valuable to know what they are. It’s also important to know what your thoughts and beliefs are about this photo – the person and the circumstances.

If I believe this person is lazy – will I experience compassion?

If I believe this person is where she is by choice – will she get my compassion?

If I believe that there is nothing I can do about her plight – will compassion be the primary emotion I experience?

What if I think people like this are ruining our streets and creating unsafe conditions for our families? Compassion – I don’t think so.

For me, this woman’s circumstances trigger a range of strong feelings – compassion being among the most powerful. Some of my emotions can be traced to the two years I spent in one of my first non-profit jobs helping to develop the largest network of shelters for homeless families in New York City.  It saddens and angers me that nearly 25 years later, the organization still exists and homeless services have been institutionalized rather than being temporary as I/we believed at the time.

The photo also reminds me of something I experienced in the daily grind of facing hundreds of mothers with children with nowhere to go, “compassion fatigue.” Not a term, I like or use often, but one that many people understand and attribute to their lack of compassion or empathy when reason tells them a situation deserves their compassion.

I never lacked compassion when I worked on this project – but my fatigue, exhaustion, despair, anger, worry and lack of self-care – overwhelmed my internal resources.

Experts in compassion fatigue note that sufferers often believe that resources and support for needs are chronically outweighed by demand. Compassion fatigue can leave people feeling pessimistic, cynical and exhausted. Often the only remedy seems to be to become emotionally detached and numb, not uncommon, especially in the helping professions.

Philip Muskin, MD, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, has also gone through compassion fatigue. In the course of treating a young man who became more and more depressed, Muskin says, “Nothing I did worked. Here was a really talented person with tremendous potential. His suffering became my suffering.”

After trying every medication and therapy he knew of, Muskin felt angry and demoralized, and went to see a therapist himself. “He told me, ‘People send you these patients all the time. It isn’t that you don’t know enough; maybe no one does. Maybe the only way to help this person is to just try to be with him and understand his pain.” 

Switching Off Compassion

 In her Telluride conference summary, Emiliana Simon-Thomas refers to compassion as a push-pull. One critical factor to feeling compassion is the amount of “safety” we feel.  According to Simon-Thomas, “It turns out that feeling safe is a precondition to activating biological systems that promote compassion. In the face of another person’s suffering, the biological mechanisms that drive our nurturing and caregiving can only come online if our more habitual “self-preservation” and “vigilance-to-threat” systems (e.g. fear, distress, anxiety and hostility are not monopolizing the spotlight.”

 In his Telluride presentation, Dr. Porges, professor of Psychiatry and Bioengineering and Director of the Brain-Body Center at the University of Illinois, Chicago, noted that “Compassion requires turning off defenses.”  He further added that “Our physiology blurs our perception of the world with different psychological experiences.”

Judgment and defensiveness, Porges says, turn off the heart connection.

 Switching on Compassion 

If judgment and defensiveness turn off the heart connection as Dr. Porges states, what turns it on?

Compassion researcher Helen Weng  suggests that the secret lies in the brain’s frontal lobes, which her studies show calm down alert signals from the amygdala (the brain’s threat detector).  The practice of mindfulness, in many forms, is increasingly being recognized as an important factor in learning to regulate neurophysiology.

According to Emiliana Simon-Thomas, “The regular practice of mindfulness – the moment to moment awareness of your body and mind – turns out to be a  common theme across programs for training compassion, including those based at the University of Wisconsin, Emory, the CCare at Stanford, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and of course, 2000 years of Buddhist tradition.” “Compassion, as Simon-Thomas concludes from the research, comes more readily if people can be more openly aware of the present moment as it is occurring, particularly, in the presence of other’s suffering, without reflexive thinking or judgment.”

We can turn on the goodness – when we learn to stay present to what we are feeling in the moment. When we are aware of the beliefs, judgments and assumptions that create a wall of protection from what we perceive are dangers from the outside world, we turn off our habituated defensiveness.

We want closeness – despite the discomfort – when we believe we can help others to alleviate their suffering.  The research shows that the brain likes helping others (when we let it) even more than helping the self. Called the “carry-over” effect such as giving something of ourselves to others, activates the pleasure circuits of the givers brains.

The neuroscience gospel of good news continues when it comes to compassion.  As Simon-Thomas concludes in her conference summary, “While survival of the fittest may lead to short-term gain, research clearly shows it is survival of the kindest that leads to the long-term survival of a species. It is our ability to stand together as a group, to support each other, to help each other, to communicate for mutual understanding, and to cooperate that has taken our species this far.”

Let’s switch it on more often.

Thanks for reading, commenting, tweeting, subscribing, sharing and liking these posts. It’s much appreciated. 

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication Consultants 

“There is no data showing that anxious, fearful employees are more creative and productive, but there is data proving that employees in a threatening environment are less engaged, less loyal and for the most part miserable.”                                                                              Mary Prefontane

This post is inspired by Bill Maher. Yes, that’s right, Bill Maher, the irreverent, super-sharp, potty mouthed host of the long running HBO cable TV series, Real Time.

Every week Bill does something called New Rules, where he chooses a topic that he highlights with an outrageous and dead-on 3 minute rant.  This week’s topic focused on the American worker and his/her curious relationship to taking time off from work.  I’ll give you a few minutes here so that you can see the short clip.

Bill concludes that the American worker, “the most productive in the world,” is just plain scared. Too scared to take a vacation and too scared to relax – even for a day.

He points to other major developed countries where workers enjoy generous “holidays” and ample time off.  Even tiny Sri Lanka, Maher extols, has 21 days paid vacation leave for their workers.  What ticks off Maher is that far from being pissed off about their modest vacation benefits – many Americans aren’t even complaining, they’re criticizing other countries as being lazy and unproductive. Why don’t we get it – Maher asks.

 Fear as a Cultural Disease

I’ve spent considerable words writing about fear in these pages. My views on the destructive and insidious impact of fear on our psyches, bodies and cultures are well-known.  Yet, I find myself drawn to this topic once again.  Fear’s damage is evident everywhere on this planet.

Because fear sells it’s pervasive in most cultures.  A 24/7 global information cycle brought to us by a wired world, brings us in touch, in real-time, with often devastating news and portends of deadly contagious bacteria that are on the rise.  While some of this information is vital to our social well-being and under the best of circumstances enhances awareness that increases sensible action, much of it leaves us overwhelmed.

According to author Judith Acosta, “Viral fear, that generalized anxiety induced and spread by the media in all forms, is evident not only in advertising but in television programming and films.  For the thoroughly inured and brain-injured there’s also a 24-7 fear channel on cable in case someone needs to scare themselves to sleep.”

Fear contagion (all emotions are contagious, but fear packs a heavy physiological punch) is dangerous because when we’re emotionally overwhelmed, there’s a real danger of paralysis to action.  Add to that the stimulus bombardment in the average daily life and you get a recipe for serious energy drain. This sets up a series of coping strategies that we adapt to just to get through the day.  Depending on the resiliency of our will and psychological disposition, it can lead people to live a life of chronic anxiety – waiting for the other shoe to drop.

New York University neuroscience and psychology professor, Joseph Ledoux recently advanced the distinction between fear and anxiety in a New York Times article titled, Searching the Brain for the Roots of Fear, “Fear and anxiety are in the brain because they helped our ancestors cope with life’s challenges. But when these states interfere with our ability to survive and thrive, one has anxiety disorder.”

What we have come to accept as normal in cultures where fear is a dominant energizing force is constantly reinforced by values and beliefs that are largely communicated through rationalization.  We reach adulthood with a system of beliefs about how things work, especially the big things, – money, work, relationships, parenting, health and people – without challenging the validity of what we’ve introjected from our early experience.

Ledoux points out that “While anxiety is defined by uncertainty, human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future and our place in it. With imagination we can ruminate over that yet to be experienced, possibly impossible scenario. We use this creative capacity to great advantage when we envision how to make our lives better, but we can just as easily put it to work in less productive ways – worrying excessively about the outcome of things.”

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

W. Edwards Deming

I’ll step out on a limb here to say that from my perspective, fear is one of the key emotions that drives most workplaces.  Most work environments are hothouses of fear-based emotions.  Although, individuals bring their fear baggage with them into the workplace, the systems they find themselves in negatively trigger and reinforce latent fears that result in counter productive behaviors.

John Wenger, author of the excellent Quantum Shifting blog, writes, “In many businesses, the fear is palpable. Managers at all levels behave in ways that communicate, either directly or by implication, that people should not challenge the boss, challenge the status quo or give honest feedback. I’ve seen businesses where people fear doing or saying anything that might damage their career prospects, where they worry about being excluded from decision-making because their ideas might seem a little too crazy and therefore an inconvenience to conventional thinking or where they are concerned about being judged for an idea that is not clever enough. They see managers as task-masters as opposed to leaders who are there to assist them.”

There exists a great paradox between today’s organizational aspirations and the day-to-day reality of life on the ground.  Passion, engagement, talent management, paradigm shifts, growth and sustainability are words that all speak to an elevated vision of organizational cultures that rarely exist in practice.  These noble ideas can only be cultivated in environments that tangibly promote freedom.

The reality is that most organization cultures still resist the primacy of emotions as the currents that generate all of these desirable visions. We’re still locked into ideas about work and business that pit individual needs vs. corporate goals. We talk the language of teams and shared responsibility but most employees understand they are on a constant proving ground where the “personal” is still viewed as outside the business model.

Power – Fear’s Shield

Tom Rieger, former chief architect for Gallup’s global efforts to remove barriers to success, has examined dozens of organizations to understand how fear permeates systems.  Fear based patterns, Rieger explains, are similar across organizations, “As companies grow and divide up responsibilities, people feel endowed with control over certain departments and that endowment leads to a desire to protect, which leads to barriers. In fact, the biggest threat to a company’s success isn’t necessarily its competition. A lot of times, it’s the fear that lives within its own walls.”

Well before the time we are in elementary school, most children understand, at least, viscerally, about power. We’re either struggling to gain it or keep it. But few children are taught to understand what it means – where their real power comes from and how the culture around them views power. We use the power but don’t explore the meaning.

I sometimes ask my clients to make a list of where they believe their power comes from. Then I ask them to rank their power source items into two columns, internal and external.  You’re guessing correctly if you think that the internal power source list is much smaller than the external list. Money, position and status related items top the externals list.

Many clients remark that they’ve never thought about internal power prior to this exercise. Yet, every day, those in positions of leadership make decisions that affect the power balance of entire groups without taking the fragile perceptions of those affected into account.  At the core, these power arrangements are the basis of the beliefs we uphold and are causal in our choices.

The webs of power and fear are complex. According to Tom Rieger, “Departments begin to view their world as the piece and not the puzzle. That causes a loss of connection to the overall outcome but promotes a connection to a small part of the process, and there is no regard for how decisions affect other departments. Then, self-sufficiency becomes threatened, so people begin to seize control of others or decisions or resources to regain self-sufficiency.”

Even though  fear’s everywhere, embedded in every nook and cranny of the culture, we still have choices in terms of how to respond. First stop on this journey to liberate ourselves from fear is to own it.  Open the closet and basement doors and stare fear in the face. Denial and rationalization are stuck places.  Recognize when fear is driving you – in the workplace, relationships and in the every day choices you make in living your life.

I leave you with a quote from one of my heroes, Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Under house arrest in Burma for over two decades, kept apart from her life in Oxford, England and her husband and sons, Suu Kyi was released in 2010.  In the past few days, she  finally got to Oslo to claim the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to her in 1991 and to visit Oxford to receive the Honorary Degree given to her by the University in recognition of her enormous contribution to standing for freedom in the face of brutal repression.

“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.”

“For me, my role is about unleashing what people already have inside them that are maybe suppressed in most work environment.”                Tony Hseih, Zappos CEO

Is the “modern” workplace designed for people?

Are the systems created for work designed to maximize productivity and profit or human well-being?

Who factors in the real cost of human labor when analyzing productivity and profits?

What do most managers believe they are managing?  

I have far more questions than I have answers on this topic. In fact, I think we’re now on new terrain when it comes to redefining the meaning of work in a global “supply chain” world.  While it may seem absurd that in one part of the world children are still working in coal mines; while in another, companies like Google have installed, Chief Culture Officers, this is the new “normal.”

It all seems a bit crazy – sort of upside down, doesn’t it?  On one end of the spectrum some companies haven’t even gotten the Henry Ford message, while at the other end, a company like Patagonia is advising customers to resole their old shoes before they consider buying new ones.

In her address at the Barnard College 2010 commencement, actor Meryl Streep captured the essence of the times we now live in, “There is no ‘normal.’ There’s only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.”

Design Mind blogger, Tim Leberecht, writes about the nascent movement among some “business leaders who are talking about the “Human Age” and claiming that capitalism is being replaced by “talentism,” defined as access to talent as a key resource and differentiator.”  According to Leberecht, “Many companies have embarked on initiatives to unleash their human potential. Those are big words and noble ambitions and naturally they seem worth striving for.”

But back here on Earth, I’m hearing lots of stories about workplace cultures that aren’t envisioning a glorious new Human Age in the workplace; rather we are talking to employees who don’t even believe they have five minutes to have a non-task oriented conversation with a co-worker.   One manager recently shared, “I’d like to foster stronger bonds and closer relationships, not only because I know that’s what’s needed to build collaboration, but because it would feel better.”

While there are many factors that drive the norms that shape today’s workplace (key among them being the atrophied legacy of command and control models of organization)  the hard reality is the structure of most organizations simply isn’t set up  to optimize human potential.  Tim Leberecht points out, “There appears to be a fundamental chasm between individual human behavior – which is expansive and multidimensional, ranging from the rational to the wildly irrational, sentimental and unpredictable – and the design of organizations, rational, practical, results oriented and engineered to perform consistently.”

Despite the small, emerging visionary organization or bold leader that truly gets that business as usual is about to be over in the near future; most senior leaders are still remarkably ignorant of the basics of human dynamics.  Even more telling is the general lack of awareness of group dynamics that most managers of people have.

The belief that work is and should be a function of solely “rational” processes is still the dominant theme that underpins the foundation of how work is organized.

Even the typical change initiative introduced by well-meaning organizational leaders suffers from high rates of failure because of the importance that society and business continue to place on being “logical” and “rational.”  Writing on the limits of rationality, Covert Processes at Work author, Robert Marshak identifies three reasons why change efforts fail:

• Most change agents rely primarily on rational approaches to foster organizational change
• Most change initiatives actually involve significant non-rational dynamics and processes
• Most change agents still insist on operating as if organizational change is a rational process

The over-reliance on the belief that most organizational processes are solely rational ignores what Marshak calls the covert processes that undermine most work and consequently workplace relationships. Marshak defines these processes as “any hidden or unconscious dynamic”. These are the beliefs and feelings that underlie people’s behavior. They affect what we do, even though we may not be aware of them.

It’s important to note that these dynamics stem from three sources: the internal (these are the personal processes that each individual brings to the workplace culture) the interpersonal (these are the dynamics generated by interactions between people) and the structural (these are the processes shaped by organizational norms, policies, rules, etc).  The interplay of these three processes shapes workplace relationships. And while the power of culture unequivocally impels the nature of workplace relations, there is a significant role individuals can play in the choices they make in relating to others in the workplace.

Make no mistake – the mantra to HUMANIZE the workplace and UNLEASH HUMAN POTENTIAL is simply not the responsibility of organizational architects and leadership – it is as much about how each person engages their colleagues in the process of work.  After all, a culture is an aggregate of tiny, everyday gestures, comments and actions that form day-to-day work life.

To Humanize – Stay Human

“When we change the way we communicate, we change the society.” 

Clay Shirkey, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

People are not tasks. I’m still surprised when I meet people in the workplace who don’t believe that people are the most important part of their jobs.  Sadly, the people are a means to my end meme still dominates. Granted, many people are disengaged, burnt out and disempowered – whatever the word du jour is – and can’t summon up the energy to deal with diverse personalities and needs and intense organizational pressures and demands.

Conversely, this suffering is a symptom of the de-humanization process. An over reliance on the rational (we’re here to work!) and on emotions that don’t feed the human spirit (anxiety, mistrust, resentment, frustration) all contribute to the  sense of exhaustion and disillusionment  that many employees feel.

Your business needs are not the same as your personal needs. Another symptom of the de-humanized work environment are chronically unmet needs. This is often completely out of our conscious awareness.  In my work, I often ask clients in group settings to identify what they need to work optimally. Commonly, what I hear in return are the lists of things the organization or team needs to get the job done.  This suggests that workers are often totally divorced from their own internal drives and desires.  We’re particularly out of touch with our psychological needs.

Typically, universal human needs are not identified to us as children so we adopt a set of usually unsuccessful strategies that are a poor substitute to satisfying our real needs.  For example, I hear many people in the workplace saying they need more work-life balance (well at least that’s a start from identifying corporate needs as ones’ own).

The term work-life balance sounds (particularly in a public setting) a lot better (within organizational norms) than saying – I need more sleep or I need some quiet time to rest my mind.  To humanize, we must acknowledge our humanness and stop acting as if we are automatons who can keep moving, thinking and producing (optimally) for 12 hours a day.

One of my favorite quotes regarding human needs in the workplace comes from author and founder of Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg, whose reminder that, “People who are in touch with their needs do not make good slaves” should be placed on every work station in the global workplace.

Cynicism is the enemy of humanization. Personally, I find cynicism exhausting. Cynicism’s not chic or cool, it’s debilitating. It devalues contribution, creativity and sincerity. Ultimately, it is an unsuccessful defense mechanism against disappointment and despair.  Dropping our cynicism doesn’t have to mean we lose our discernment, in fact, I believe the lens of cynicism clouds our ability to perceive clearly.  I have to believe that treating others humanely, with caring, respect, empathy and consideration of their needs, matters.  When I act this way, I contribute to the generation of more humanity within my workplace.

Innovation is not Humanization.  In his Harvard Business Review article, Please, Can We All Stop Innovating,” author Bill Taylor asks, “So what if we all stopped trying to “innovate” — and started trying to have fun and really do something new? And what if we set ourselves a more basic (and more authentic) set of challenges as we look to the future? What difference are we trying to make in our field? What do we care about?  How can we reimagine the sense of what’s possible?

I pose these questions to you. Don’t you want more humanization in the workplace? We’re probably in agreement that most organizations aren’t ready to release their grip of power over the processes they think they control, right? So what are you willing to do? What’s needed in your workplace relationships? Are you willing to take the first steps?

Wherever you are within an organization, you can take steps towards creating a more humanized workplace.

 As always, I appreciate your comments, subscriptions, share, likes and tweets.

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication

The majority of people don’t respond positively to feedback (aka criticism).

The expanding knowledge we have about how the brain works is helping us to understand why.

Even under the BEST of circumstances, many of us find ourselves recoiling in response to hearing what others think about us.  Our receptivity depends on context, relationships and circumstances – but the greatest factor is our emotional state.

We’ve all heard the term “don’t take this personally,” right?

Actually, I don’t know what that means. I think it’s a way we buffer the blow of being hurt or hurting someone else. Because the so-called “emotional” and “rational” brains are a unified system, we cannot not respond to what someone says (or does) devoid of its feeling content.

In his excellent synthesis of the latest social neuroscience, author David Rock, developed the SCARF model to understand the brain’s perception in relation to the social environment.  According to Rock, “Two themes are emerging from social neuroscience. Firstly, that much of our motivation driving social behavior is governed by an overarching principle of minimizing threat and maximizing reward. Secondly, that several domains of social experience draw upon the same brain networks to maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks used for primary survival needs. In other words, social needs are treated in much the same way in the brain as the need for food and water.”

This process never stops. The brain never stops trolling for input to determine threat or reward whether we’re talking to our boss, best friend, significant other or granny.

Although responses will be mitigated by cognitive strategies that can have the effect of reducing the dissonance we may experience when we encounter unwelcome response from others, if the feedback/criticism is important enough, it can trigger a limbic response in us that engages the flight or fight mechanism.

While rationalization may ease some of the anxiety experienced, the limbic system responds to threat by triggering fear or anger in milliseconds.  Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are secreted into the blood stream and accumulate in the amygdala.  Because work is often a highly charged context for experience (given basic security and self-esteem needs) the workplace is often a stress producing environment even under the best of conditions.  This can preset an atmosphere conducive to triggering limbic arousal.

The Nature of Feedback

It’s not possible, or desirable, to go through life without letting others in relationship with us know what we need and want. At some time or other, we must honestly assert to others what we think and believe, regardless of how uncomfortable these conversations may be.

When we are in positions of “authority” and we are accountable for another persons’ performance (the workplace and school come to mind) we are usually obligated to rate or rank others.

How we manage these sensitive conversations with others will have a great impact on how what we say will be perceived and received. Precisely because emotions are triggered on both sides of these exchanges, developing greater skill in preparation, approach and executing feedback is critically important to achieving positive outcomes.

Most feedback is spontaneous and opportunistic. Often we stumble unprepared into making off the cuff remarks that don’t accomplish positive results because they exacerbate the receiver’s emotional defensiveness.

The person giving feedback needs to carefully prepare what they want to say and how they say it with thoughtful consideration of the following:

• Intention/Purpose – A lot of the feedback we give to others is not only unsolicited, it’s unnecessary.  It’s important to do a sincere internal check to understand why we are telling others what we think and feel about their behavior. What is the purpose of what I am saying? This should be the guiding question we ask every step of the way. Why is this important? Is it relevant? Am I trying to change another persons’ behavior, and if so, why? Is the purpose of my feedback an attempt to elevate my position of power or esteem? Your analysis of intention and purpose should be informed by another important question – what do you want the outcome to be? Is the outcome solely for my advantage or does my purpose include consideration of the receiver? Are there others that may be affected by my feedback? If so, what might be the emotional fallout of this interaction? This is particularly important in the workplace because of emotional contagion and its multiplier effect. Often feedback is reactive and motivated (usually unconsciously) by competition, comparison, judgment and emotional projection.  Feedback can be our way of attempting to assert control over another person or situation.  Since control of anything outside of our own personal sphere is illusory,this motivation often leads to miscommunication and unnecessary hurt on the part of the receiver.

• Emotional Baggage – Unresolved emotional baggage often drives criticism of others.  It definitely shapes the tone of an interaction. Unchecked emotional issues (either personal, directed towards the receiver or spillover from cultural factors (i.e. workplace issues) will influence our behavior.  When you are anxious, angry, mistrusting, hurt, etc. you are unlikely to be able to carefully communicate your message to others.  You must put your own emotional house in order before you approach another person about their behavior.

• Words & Body Language – The latest research shows that communication is far deeper and more complex than we ever imagined. Though the activity of mirror neurons, we are activating parts of our interpersonal brains that send signals far quicker than the words we are arranging in our pre-frontal cortex. Body language matters, even in an era of virtual communication. Tone of voice is a critical carrier of our message.  Our words take on even more meaning when we are not communicating face to face. Words cue our physiology – and the physiology of the receiver.  Anyone who wants to effectively give feedback to others must become more familiar with how they look and sound when they speak – how certain feelings change their physiology – and how they use language.

• Empathy – Empathy should shape how we prepare to give feedback. If it were me, under these circumstances – how might I feel?

• Fallout – Even though there are many people who are open to what they perceive as constructive feedback, expect some residual emotional impact with most people.  Just because the receiver doesn’t let you know how they feel (and in many cases, they won’t, especially in the workplace) be assured that there can be misunderstandings and emotional residue.  Many factors prevent people from letting others know how they feel in response to criticism (i.e. workplace and institutional power arrangements, non-assertive emotional styles, fear of loss or disruption in relationships, etc.).  Resentment is not an uncommon emotional response if people feel they have been unfairly judged.

Neuroscience findings show that an area of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, generates a pain signal from emotional hurt, similar to that of physical pain. UCLA researcher Matthew Lieberman hypothesizes that “human beings evolved this link between social connection and physical discomfort within the brain because to a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is necessary for survival.”

While the receiver may be silent or even appear to understand, if emotional reactions have been triggered that activate the brain domains highlighted in theSCARF model (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) the receiver may displace their feelings and react at another time. The perception of unfair or inaccurate criticism can cause the receiver to withdraw or limit their involvement or participation in the future.

In the workplace, feedback that is perceived as unfairly negative can have a chilling effect on initiative and disclosure.  If the receiver is unaware of his/her emotional reaction, it’s possible they may retreat to playing it safe (this translates to emotional safety from the brain’s perspective) by avoiding the circumstances that could trigger more criticism.  An emotional reaction can be compounded if others were aware of the criticism, requiring the receiver to save “emotional face” with more than one person.

The emerging data on how our brains interact and respond to others should change the way we give and receive feedback in all circumstances. Friend, spouse, neighbor or co-worker – context and relationship matter – but criticism is still a fragile undertaking.

The stakes are much higher in the workplace.  David Rock writes, “These studies and many others now emerging have made one thing clear; the human brain is a social organ. Its physiological and neurological reactions are directly and profoundly shaped by social interaction. This presents enormous challenges to managers. Although a job is often regarded as a purely economic transaction, the brain experiences the workplace, first and foremost as a social system. Most people who work in companies learn to rationalize or temper their reactions; they “suck it up,” as the common parlance puts it. But they also limit their commitment and engagement. They become purely transactional employees, reluctant to give more of themselves to the company because social context stands in the way.”

If you ask the average person to recall the times they were praised when they were at school, some will remember a few occasions. But if you ask them when they were treated unfairly or singled out for criticism – get ready for an earful.

I remember.

What about you?

As always, I appreciate your comments, shares, tweets, likes and your subscriptions.

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication

It strikes me that this is an era of pressing choices – personal and collective. Even die-hard conservative thinkers acknowledge that the times demand some action – even if the opinion is to retreat to old methods and ideologies.

How do we make complex decisions in the face of such pressure?

What tools do we need to create mindsets that can address the intricacies of problems that were unimaginable a generation ago? Polarization and tribalism, common to an era of great change, are freezing us into inaction in so many areas of our lives, work, society and business. There’s a general consensus that the deep divisions in thought we’re experiencing come at a high price.

Important questions that challenge existing models of leadership, corporate and government behaviors, climate change and income equality are being raised with greater urgency. Without critical thinking – challenging our own thought processes, beliefs, values and actions – we cannot move forward, especially in collaboration with others, to course correct and chart new paths forward.

Hope you will find this post from last year helpful in thinking through some of these questions.

“Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.” Graham Greene

I often hear people say, “We need more critical thinking in the world, we should be teaching it in schools.” I don’t disagree with those ideas. But I wonder if we understand how much change real critical thinking would bring – to our schools, to the workplace, to our cultures and to our personal lives.

I’m not an expert in the progress of pedagogy, but I suspect that the teaching of critical thinking isn’t at the top of most school lists in this “Age of Austerity” (at least for most). We don’t really understand critical thinking enough to know how much we struggle and suffer from a lack of it.

Most corporations and institutions say they need innovation, creativity, sustainability and trust to compete in the 21^st century.  They understand that the new worker is a knowledge worker and that continuous learning is the jewel in the crown of assets to get there. But I don’t think they really mean they want critical thinkers!

Critical thinkers ask questions. They must “live in the questions” as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. To the critical mind, questions lead to more questions. Critical thinkers not only challenge the status quo, they shake it up. They turn the status quo on its head and always ask, “Is there another way?”  That’s not comfortable to those who have an “immunity” to change.

That’s why it’s tough for most institutions and organizations to really embrace the full meaning and possibility of unleashing critical thinking within their cultures. While we’re in the grip of a powerful cultural meme that says that governments stifle progress and growth and businesses free it – neither are true.

Critical thinkers pose a threat to norms, to the safe and the orthodox. Critical thinkers toss the moneylenders out of the temple. Their very essence is to challenge atrophied practices and outdated assumptions.

For critical thinking to thrive, it must operate in an atmosphere of trust. Power politics, organizational and personal,  shut down free thinking and the honest exchange of ideas – and are the enemy of critical thought.

The Essence of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is essentially the ability to think about thinking. Most people don’t think about their thinking, and it’s not a skill many of us have acquired. In a results-driven culture, thinking about thinking feels passive. But developing the skills of a critical thinker is anything but passive. In its purest form, it requires the present and active involvement and engagement of the thinker in every experience.

In defining critical thinking many people get negatively hooked by the word – critical. The critical in the context of critical thinking doesn’t mean disapproval or judgment.  In fact, the skilled critical thinker needs to have the ability to think with great clarity and neutrality. The critical thinker is not without opinion, but has the ability to view experience from multiple perspectives.

Sharpening the Skills of Critical Thinking

The classic core elements of critical thinking include: observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and meta-cognition. How we understand and define these tools is important to the development of critical thinking.

• Observation – I think of this as the constant development and refinement of our ability to not only be self-aware but to cultivate the neutral (non-judgmental) “witnessing” of our own experience of self and others. This is the foundational skill we use to build critical thought.
• Challenging Beliefs and Norms – Norms form around comfort. While comfort may feel good, it can also be a refuge from change. Unexamined beliefs form major blind spots to critical thinking. We cannot discern the evidence we need to substantiate certain claims and assertions, if non-factual beliefs dominate our thinking.
• Ask Deep and Engaging Questions – Questions are surely the crux of critical thinking, but learning to ask deeper and more engaging questions is the key. Most of us have been conditioned by rote learning and memorization and our questioning skills have been weakened in the process.
• Brain Integration – One major cultural assumption that limits critical thinking is the idea that emotions are the enemy of reason. Rationality (the thinking we associate with the neo-cortical functions of our brain) is nearly always considered the Supreme ruler of critical thinking. Truth is we need a greater ability to integrate and balance both our so-called thinking brain and our feeling brain to maximize understanding and heighten experience. Familiarity with the information from our feeling brain invites intuitive and sensual experience into the equation.
• Collaborative Thinking – Critical thinking is social thinking. Practices in all areas of culture, but especially in the workplace, continue to foster authoritarian, left-brain, hierarchical thinking processes. Collaborative thinking requires exceptional listening abilities and the willingness to let go of control in over-asserting our own positions.
• Information and Learning – The critical thinker understands that learning is a continuous process and is actively seeking and open to new ideas and experiences. The critical thinker seeks out information not as a means to an end but to understand more about other people, their experiences and the larger world.
• Becoming Literate in the Emotions that Support Critical Thought – All emotions are of value to the critical thinker, but some are particularly important to engage, promote and sustain critical thought. Courage, confidence, enthusiasm, excitement, fascination, passion, optimism, satisfaction, wonder, appreciation, empathy, compassion, acceptance, calm and curiosity – the great driver of critical thought.
• MetaCognition – A very spiffy term to describe the critical thinker’s automatic awareness of their own knowledge and their ability to understand and control their own cognitive process. So – learning more about how we learn serves the critical thinker in their continuous path of growth.

Our need for critical thinking is greater today than ever before. We need to find a way to step outside of isolated and polarized thinking. We must learn to question the assumptions, information and behaviors that have led us to where we are now.

Most of us would agree that tepid reforms won’t change our workplaces or our culture. Critical thinkers challenge the safe, the comfortable and the inevitable. They are always going for ideas that have greater impact and depth. They make connections between things that appear on the surface as unrelated. They seek out possibilities even when problems seem insurmountable.

If we want to truly unleash the power of critical thinking, we’ll have to overcome the barriers of fear and passivity; entrenched and informal power arrangements; bias and conformity and the willingness to tolerate uncertainty.

It’s a tall order – are we ready? What do you think?

As always, I appreciate your readership, comments, subscriptions, shares and tweets!

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication Consultants