The Business Sensei

Frog Soup

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

As we can see, stress can be one of our most effective tools. The key is learning to use it well. As we saw in chapter 9, performance is all about being able to develop effective strategies and measurable goals. As we see from examining the dynamics of performance, success in this endeavor is not based on what we can do in a few minutes, a few hours, or even a few days or weeks. Performance is determined by how long and how steadily we can work. We get an amazing amount done when we can work in ways that take advantage of our innate productivity cycles! The old aphorism that, “success is a marathon, not a sprint,” isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law (at least metaphorically!).

It’s when we let stress get out of hand, or when we allow the wrong kinds of stress to dominate the environment, that we start to undermine our natural productivity cycles. Once stress becomes destructive, we rapidly enter a destructive cycle that can transform even the best organizations into miserable places to work. Unlike our mythical boiling frog, which has the sense to know when to jump, all too often we allow ourselves to be trapped in those cycles, not realizing just how bad it is getting.

While the stress and performance management techniques we looked at will help, it’s even better to develop the habits of thought and working that prevent destructive stress cycles from occurring in the first place. The more we avoid destructive stress, the more our performance management techniques serve to increase our performance, rather than merely maintaining it. Learning to avoid destructive stress, also known as developing a success mindset, is the topic of our final chapter.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications

Organizational Stress: A Two-Edged Sword

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

There is an old and hoary claim that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will sit there until it cooks. In fact, this happens only if the frog is equipped with little frog cement galoshes rendering it unable to jump: frogs are too smart to be boiled alive. They leave long before the water gets hot enough to cook them. Why, then, does this story have such longevity?

In my experience in the high tech world, I often find that people are sitting in some very hot water indeed. One might think that they would have noticed the warning signs as the heat increased, but apparently not. In fact, they are tolerating, or even accepting as normal, conditions that leave outsiders shocked. Rarely did conditions start off as bad as they became; rather, they became worse and worse over time until the water was boiling. This can make it difficult to recruit new talent or to keep the people whom they do manage to hire. It also means that a tremendous amount of effort is being expended on merely surviving the environment and preventing burnout instead of on productive activities.

It appears, therefore, that while frogs have the sense to get out of the hot water, people do not. Now, most people are smarter than frogs. What’s going on?

For one, frogs do not show off how well they can handle being boiled alive. At many companies, however, what frequently happens is that dealing with an unreasonable situation is seen as a sign of toughness or dedication to the company. Over time, a culture develops which celebrates and perpetuates that purported toughness. In jujitsu, I hear all the time from people who tell me that they had to give up falling because they just couldn’t tough it out anymore. In fact, it almost invariably turns out that they never learned to fall correctly in the first place and that’s why it now hurts too much to continue. Assuming that they just had to “tough it out” prevented them from recognizing and fixing mistakes early, before they were ingrained as bad habits.

Now it’s certainly true that overcoming a difficult or stressful situation feels good: it increases feelings of competence and self-efficacy. There is, however, a difference between overcoming and enduring. Mountain climbers overcome challenges, they don’t merely endure them. Enduring is fine, so long as it moves you toward a goal. Unfortunately, what far too many people choose to endure is, in fact, not moving toward anything except burnout and failure.

Another issue is that people respond to a situation by checking to see how others are responding: if it looks as though others are tolerating the situation, the instinctive response is to attempt to tolerate it as well. Thus, each person assumes that he or she is the only one uncomfortable, while, in reality, no one is happy. Ironically the harder team members work to avoid letting down the rest of the team, the more the team lets down its members and the company.

Of course, in true frog-boiling tradition, if the situation gradually worsens, we often don’t realize just how bad it is getting. It’s not until the environment undergoes a major change or we take a vacation that we realize just how dysfunctional things are. Like sitting in an awkward position, it’s often not obvious how sore you are until you move.

So how can you recognize that you’re being boiled alive and what can you do about it? To answer that, we first have to understand what stress really is, and why it’s necessary for success.

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author