The Business Sensei

Of Cats and Unwanted Prizes

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration.

In an office environment, however, a catastrophe is anything but a cause for celebration.

The worst thing about catastrophes is that they happen about as often as a cat sitting down on top of the book you’re reading. At least, to listen to some managers, it certainly sounds that way. Somehow, every little thing, every small problem, was magnified until it had the aura of impending doom. In short, every setback was becoming a prize for the cat with the most beautiful behind. At one company, the conversation went something like this:

“We’ve found a major bug in the software.”

“We can’t delay the ship.”

“We can’t ship with this bug.”

At that point, the manager started screaming that the product would go out on schedule, or else. When he finally calmed down and I was able to talk with him privately, he told me that he knew that if the company didn’t ship on time, the customers would abandon them and they would go out of business. He was happy to ship non-functional software to avoid that fate.

When he calmed down still further, he agreed to delay the ship.

I am sure that most readers are chuckling to themselves right now. After all, delays in software are legendary. Obviously, this manager was overreacting. True enough; the question is, why? Why would a perfectly sensible, intelligent man react so negatively to something which is, frankly, a common event in the software business?

It turns out that this particular company prided itself on holding to very aggressive schedules. The schedule was so aggressive that they were virtually always running behind. Therein lay the problem.

Time is a funny thing. We react very differently depending on how we perceive it. Being behind schedule all the time had the effect of generating a certain sense of urgency, which was the stated intent of the aggressive schedule. Unfortunately, the urgency generated in this situation was of the slightly breathless, heart-pounding sort similar to what one might experience if being chased by a very large cat of the “has a big mane” variety. A cat which, I might add, is looking to do more than just sit on your book.

The problem with aggressive schedules is that, in fact, being behind schedule can generate the same panicked response in people that they would feel in a situation which actually was dangerous. While in those situations, we’re very good at running away or fighting desperately, but we’re not good at making cool, rational decisions or developing innovative solutions to problems. Each pebble encountered along the road becomes a giant boulder. When we do finally get to the end of the project, rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment and success, there’s more of a sense of relief that at last it’s over. What’s missing is the thrill of victory that energizes people for the next project. That feeling of success is the key to getting, and keeping, people excited and motivated.

In short, instead of the team beating the schedule, the schedule was beating them.

Conversely, when a team is running slightly ahead of schedule, something very different happens. Running ahead of the game means that the team is feeling a constant sense of success. When people feel successful, they work harder, they are more creative, and they look forward to coming into work each day. Teams that are running ahead of schedule are more likely to develop innovative new solutions to problems rather than just slap on band-aids. Feeling that you have the time to stop and think is critical: just think about how easy it is to miss the obvious when you are feeling rushed.

The trick is to view your schedule as a living document. It’s something that you will constantly adjust according to the situation, especially at the beginning of a project. The less you know about potential difficulties down the road, the harder it is to plan: so don’t. Instead, plan to plan. As you move forward, you can revise and project the schedule further and further into the future.

If you find yourself running behind, that’s feedback. Pay attention to what it’s telling you. Is something more complicated than expected? Is someone overwhelmed with a task that turned out to be significantly more time-consuming than you thought? Did something go wrong? Is a vendor habitually late with parts? Is your schedule just plain too aggressive?

If you’re running ahead, that’s also feedback. It might mean that the schedule is too easy and your team isn’t being challenged. Be willing to become more aggressive. It could mean that you need to slow down: are people rushing and cutting corners? At one company, pressure on QA engineers to rush product inspections led to some very expensive and embarrassing recalls and some very irate customers. Moving way ahead of schedule could also mean that your team is working too hard too soon: success is a marathon, not a sprint. Burn out early and you won’t reach the finish line.

Leave the catastrophes to the cats.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” and “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” He is also a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Is The Blob Eating Your Business?

(originally published in Computer World)

Indescribable…

Indestructible…

Nothing can stop it…

If those three phrases seem oddly familiar, it’s because they were used to advertise The Blob. The Blob, for those who were never eaten by it, was a 1950s campy horror movie in which a mysterious blob of protoplasm crashes to Earth in a meteor. Meteors have few amenities and are not known for their food service. In short, a meteor is not the most comfortable way to travel, so it is not big surprise that when the Blob gets out it starts absorbing everyone in sight. Despite the best efforts of Our Heroes, as the movie progresses, the Blob also progresses from a little tiny grey lump to a giant red Blob capable of engulfing small buildings in a single bound. Fortunately for the world, Our Heroes figure out that the Blob does not like the cold and are able to freeze it solid using fire extinguishers. At the end of the movie, the Blob is flown off to the Arctic where it will remain so long as the ice never melts.

All in all, the Blob is a fun movie, although it is probably considerably less enjoyable to be living in the town being eaten by the Blob. Thus, it is odd that people voluntarily choose to create blobs that then eat them. I am not talking about the giant red Blob of the movie, of course, but rather the giant mass of red tape that devours so many businesses. Although bureaucracy is not the Latin word for “giant tangled ball of red tape,” there are times when it might as well be!

All right, it’s no big shocker that bureaucracies and red tape go together. So what? Well, the interesting question is not do they go together, but how do they come about? And what can you do about it once your organization is being devoured by a giant red blob? Fire extinguishers, sadly, do not work in this situation. Fortunately, understanding how that blob gets started can help you figure out how to deal with it.

At a very basic level, red tape exists to make people feel safe. All the procedures and processes of the organization exist to prevent mistakes. Mistakes, after all, are Very Very Bad: they could lead to a lower grade and might go on your Permanent Record. More to the point, they might cost the company money or actually make you look bad in front of your boss.

But wait, this seems counter-intuitive: doesn’t a lot of red tape cause people to make more mistakes? Well, yes, a phenomenon aptly demonstrated by a company which I will refer to as ShrinkWrap. At ShrinkWrap, management was so afraid that people would make mistakes that they instituted elaborate paperwork requirements to make sure that every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed. The paperwork is so complex that it inevitably leads to errors, which convinces management to add checklists, or meta-paperwork, to make sure the paperwork is done correctly. Think of it as kind of like a pearl: something irritates the oyster, so it surrounds the irritant with nacre. This, of course, make a larger irritant, so it adds more nacre, until eventually we have a pearl. Red tape works much the same way except that in the end all we have is a giant red Blob.

The issue here is that the longer a business exists, the more time there is for something to go wrong. Sometimes these mistakes represent serious problems that need to be prevented. Sometimes, they are the normal cost of doing business or of trying out new ideas. Innovation, for example, is an activity filled with mistakes: it’s that old, but true, line about a thousand ways to not make a light bulb. Unfortunately, telling the difference between different kinds of mistakes can be challenging. Understanding which types of mistakes must be prevented and which ones only help feed the Blob is not always simple. The net result is that they all feed the Blob.

However, on the bright side, dealing with the Blob really only requires recognizing that it exists. Unlike the actual Blob, bureaucracies are famously slow moving: red tape is sticky. The reason it is sticky is that provides people with a sense of security. No one can be blamed for following procedure, even if following procedure means that nothing gets done. The trick, therefore, to getting things done or getting new ideas accepted is not to rush people: rushing people only makes them dig in their heels. Instead, ask how you can make it easy for them to do what you want? How can you allay their fears and make them feel safe as they grease the wheels?

It can help considerably to take the time to hear their concerns. What are they afraid of? What’s really bothering them about your ideas? Much of the time, it’s simply that the idea is new. Help people become familiar with your idea: when it’s no longer quite so new feeling, it’s easier to accept. Take the time to ask them questions about how the status quo is getting in their way. Let them tell you what’s wrong, and then ask them for suggestions on how to improve the situation. Your goal, simply put, is to ask the questions that will let them have your way. Do it right and they’ll end up volunteering to cut through the red tape for you and then trying to convince you why your idea is good enough to run with.

In other words, you can’t defeat the Blob but you can get the Blob to defeat itself. It’s less exciting than in the movie, but a whole lot more effective.

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

Techniques for managing performance

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

At this point, we now understand that managing stress is really the art of managing performance. Managing performance, in turn, requires that we recognize what sort of performance we are after: do we, like a sprinter, need to perform at an extremely high level for a short time? Or, like a marathon runner or endurance cyclist, do we need to maintain strong, consistent performance for a long period of time? In the course of our day, do we need to frequently deal with unexpected or unanticipated problems that have the effect of distracting us and raising our arousal outside the optimal zone?

The key to using the various techniques for stress management, or, more properly, performance or arousal management, is recognizing that:

The techniques are flexible; how you choose to apply them determines the results you get.
They take practice. Remember that under stressful conditions, we revert to our rehearsed, trained behaviors. What we haven’t rehearsed we don’t use or it doesn’t work when we need it most. Top performers in all domains practice the skills necessary to maintain that performance. Put another way, the will to win is useless if you don’t have the will to prepare.

Remember, when you find yourself always feeling tired or waking up in the morning not feeling rested, that’s an important clue that you are draining your reserves faster than you are replenishing them. No matter how much we may feel like we’re running around being productive, actual quality performance is rapidly declining under those conditions.

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

Speaking of panic…

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

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration. 

It is not a cause for celebration when our arousal spikes up so fast, or is kept high for so long, that we hurtling down the right side of the performance curve. Instead of a more or less gradual decline in performance, we instead experience a very different form of catastrophe.

As we can see, instead of sliding smoothly down the curve, performance can collapse suddenly. Whether this collapse occurs depends on a number of factors, including the overall level of stress, a person’s overall level of fitness, whether or not you’ve had enough sleep, how recently you remembered to eat, and so forth. People who are in good physical condition, are getting enough sleep, and who are remembering to eat despite the stress are less likely to experience catastrophe. They aren’t immune, but at least their odds are better.

When we are sliding down the performance curve, various centering and focus techniques can be used to stop our descent and move us back up toward the peak; we will look at those techniques shortly. Once we fall off the cliff, however, we have to start all the back at the left end of the curve. In other words, we need to rest and recuperate, at least overnight, possibly for a few days, before our performance will return to its precatastrophe peak. Quite simply, when we are sliding down the right side of the curve, we are drawing on our energy reserves more and more rapidly. When we hit catastrophe, we’ve exhausted our reserves and we need to recharge.

If we try to continue performance once we’ve hit catastrophe, we just make things worse. Now we’re into error catastrophe, where mistakes compound upon mistakes, and our efforts to fix them only causes yet more errors. Athletes who hit catastrophe generally don’t have a choice about continuing: they are often physically unable to do so. If you’ve ever seen an uninjured runner or cyclist abandon an endurance race, that’s often what’s going on. In the office, however, we are more likely to get into competitive frog boiling. No one wants to be the first to admit defeat and go home, so everyone keeps pushing on even though productivity is plummeting and we’re actually making the situation worse. When we are feeling stressed, our instincts are to make the stressor go away; taking a break and sleeping seems counter-intuitive, even though it’s exactly what we need. Remember, cognitive short-cuts most often kick in when we’re tired or distracted, and lead us into errors. It is also possible to reach a point of such mental fatigue that it almost becomes too difficult to stop and take that necessary break. This is where it’s particularly important that the team leader has the judgment and presence of mind to chase everyone out of the office.

A final thought here: I’ve seen many companies where the idea of going home and getting a good night’s sleep was viewed as a sign of weakness. Instead, the teams would push on until they dropped from exhaustion, and then force themselves to continue the next day. The results were never worth it. In the infamous Apollo 13 disaster, with oxygen running out for the stranded astronauts in the damaged space capsule, mission controller Eugene Krantz still ordered the crew to get a few hours sleep before attempting the difficult maneuvers necessary to bring the space capsule back to Earth. Running out of air was less risky than the consequences of attempting a difficult operation on no sleep.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

In the Zone

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

There are a number of advantages to operating in the zone of optimal arousal. The major advantage is that our focus feels almost effortless. We automatically pay attention to relevant information and ignore things that are not relevant to the task at hand. This is assuming, of course, that we know what is relevant and important to the task at hand! How do we know what is relevant and what is not? That’s where goal setting comes into play. One of the advantages of structured goals is that they tell us what is relevant and what is not. Thus, well designed goals combined with implementation intentions and the proper level of arousal generates that optimal level of focus shown in Figure 2. Productivity in this state is at its peak; it won’t get any better. In sports, this is known as performing in the Zone; an athlete in the Zone will perform many times better than a similarly skilled athlete who is not in the Zone: it’s the difference between winning and not even making it to the podium. The results in a business environment are similar.

One life or two?

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

Another area of destructive stress is everyone’s favorite problem: conflict between work life and family life. The problem here lies in the basic premise that we have two lives: a work life and a family life and that these are somehow two separate existences. Perhaps if you are James Bond you get to live twice; the rest of us don’t have that luxury.

One of the biggest sources of frustration for employees is this illusion that these lives are separate. When we ask people to sacrifice family for the sake of the organization, we are putting them into a very stressful situation. In part, we are forcing them into a form of role ambiguity: they are being forced to play two roles at once or choose between two very important roles. We are also forcing them into a mental state where they are doing one thing but thinking about the other: a form of multi-tasking. This is a very bad place to be. Not only does it reduce performance, it also interferes with job satisfaction. As you’ll recall from our discussion of the High Performance Cycle, reducing job satisfaction reduces commitment to the organization, which interferes with goal accomplishment, better known as productivity.

Taking the time to respect people’s lives outside the organization is a powerful tool for building loyalty and commitment. Indeed, as we’ve discussed, time is a powerful gift. Sending people home a little early if you’re running ahead of schedule or accepting that quarterly report a little late so that Fred can attend his kid’s soccer game are extremely effective methods of reducing that work/family conflict. Flexible work from home policies are another good approach. When you make it easy for people to manage the demands of work and family, you build loyalty and increase satisfaction with the organization. That, in turn, feeds the High Performance Cycle.

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 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

The stress of 20-20 hindsight

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

The hindsight trap can be best described by Dr. Watson saying to Sherlock Holmes at the end of the mystery, “It’s so obvious once you explain it!” Holmes famously does not reply by saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” though one might imagine that he is at least thinking it. The fact is, though, that what Holmes is doing is not elementary or obvious, as evidenced by how few readers can actually figure it out. In fact, being able to look at an apparently random collection of clues and figure out how they fit together is incredibly difficult. However, because after the fact it seems so clear, we are vulnerable to the hindsight trap: we assume that because hindsight is 20-20, foresight must have been 20-20 as well.

In rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories recently, I realized that Arthur Conan Doyle does play fair most of the time: he reveals the clues to the reader, or at least he reveals the fact that there was a clue in such a fashion as to provide the reader the information he needs to figure out what is going on. For example, there are times when Holmes is taking advantage of knowledge not readily accessible to the reader, such as Holmes’ enyclopedic knowledge of mud or cigar ash, but that’s not the point: it is a sufficient clue that Holmes is interested in the mud or the cigar ash. Despite this, it’s extremely hard to figure out the solution to the mystery before Holmes reveals it. Once revealed, though, it’s equally difficult to imagine the pieces fitting together any other way.

Now, if this phenomenon was limited to Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it would be rather thoroughly insignificant. Unfortunately, it happens all the time:

“I can’t believe she didn’t see that coming!”

“How could he have not noticed the problem ahead of time?”

“Were they even paying attention?!”

When something goes wrong, be that in a marketing campaign, a client engagement, developing an app, or launching a new online service, the reasons are almost always obvious… in hindsight. Like a Sherlock Holmes story, once the ending is clear, we can’t imagine any other arrangement of the pieces. Thus, we assume that not only is someone responsible, that person or that team must have been incompetent, indifferent, or careless, because they didn’t recognize what we now know to be completely obvious. Ironically, what I’ve observed over and over is that when someone does point out the potential problem, they are first laughed at for being too nervous and then when the problem is clear to everyone, castigated for not pushing their point more aggressively!

On the flip side, when someone does successfully anticipate and forestall a problem, their efforts are not taken seriously. After all, the problem was obvious, so why did it take them so long to figure it out and prevent it? Clearly, they weren’t working all that hard!

The net result of both of these manifestations of the hindsight trap is that self-confidence and the feeling of being in control are both eroded. This is a very bad combination, because eroding self-confidence makes us less likely to take actions that might demonstrate control, and reducing control also reduces our self-confidence. As we can see, getting caught in the hindsight trap is a very destructive form of stress.  In particularly severe situations, the hindsight trap can produce such a strong focus on the past that it leads to organizational stasis or passivity. No one is willing to make a decision because they are too afraid of being second-guessed for it later. The decision to do nothing is viewed as the safest course.

Taking this a little further, we can now understand why fear based motivation sooner or later causes trouble. Fear activates our fight/flight response: just ask Thag! Fear focuses our attention on the source of the fear; if we can’t easily find the source, then our attention is very likely going to be grabbed by anything which we think might be the cause. In the first case, when people are afraid of the boss, they are not focusing on the goals of the organization. Rather, they are focusing on pleasing the boss, or at least avoiding his wrath. While this can be a tremendous boost to the boss’s ego and self-esteem, it doesn’t do much for the employees. Their sense of control is now based not on their actual ability to address problems and accomplish goals, but on the far more nebulous ability to manipulate the boss. Cooperation, creativity, problem-solving, and the high-performance cycle all suffer in this scenario. In the second case, where attention is grabbed by whatever seems to be causing the fear, we again see a loss of control. In this case, the organization or the team spends its time and energy focused on the wrong things, and hence fails to adequately address the actual challenges in front of them. Constantly seeking to change something that doesn’t matter will sometimes briefly create an illusion of control, similar to constantly pressing a “Walk” signal that doesn’t actually work. More likely, though, is that the wrong focus leads to repeated failures to change the situation, and a steady erosion of both individual and team confidence.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

When is stress destructive?

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

Stress is very much one of those things about which we can truthfully say, “Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” While we are capable of handling very large amounts of stress and responding quite effectively to the demands upon us, too much for too long is a sure recipe for unbaking your team and burning out the members of your group or organization. It’s also the case that whether or not the stress is good or bad depends on context: being around other people revs us up. When it comes to brainstorming and bouncing ideas off others, this can be a very good thing. However, when it comes to complex problem solving and tasks requiring deep concentration, the presence of others can turn from energizing us to distracting us. In addition, there are certain types of stress that are more destructive than others: it’s not just the raw amount of stress that matters, but the nature of the stressful event.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael

Editor-in-Chief

ERE Media

Ongoing stress

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

Unlike in Thag’s day, however, most of our modern stressors cannot be solved in the simple, direct fashion that worked so well for Thag. Faced with a tiger, Thag stabs it with a spear or he runs away. In either case, Thag gets to use all that energy his body is providing. Today, though, that approach is rarely quite so effective. While drop kicking our laptop across the room might feel satisfying at the moment, in the long run it’s likely to only increase our stress levels. And, no matter how much we might dream, bringing a spear to work is going to attract some very strange looks, many of them from men in blue uniforms or white coats. Nor do we get to run screaming from the office. The net result is that we’re all revved up with nowhere to go. Instead of helping us focus, we end up physically and mentally tense, unable to concentrate because we are “looking” for danger.

One of the interesting, and in this case irritating, factors in how we deal with stressful situations is that we use our own stress response to help us recognize when we should be having a stress response! In other words, it’s not just that our fight/flight response activates when the tiger appears; it’s that if our fight/flight response is activated, we assume there must be a tiger around somewhere. If we can’t find the tiger, we rev up even more. As you might imagine, having our fight/flight response activate even before we are consciously aware of the danger can buy us those critical fractions of a second that can make the difference between life and death. The price for that capability, however, is that our modern stressors can trap us in a vicious cycle of increasing stress responses. This is not good; once we rev up past a certain point, performance collapses. Even without that, we are not built to have our fight/flight response active for long periods of time. Remember that when we’re directing all our power to the weapons and shields, there’s not much left for life support. When fight/flight is active for long periods, it interferes with healing, digestion, blood pressure, and sleep. Long-term, we become more vulnerable to sickness and injury: anything from indigestion and distractibility to more serious problems such as reduced attentional capacity, high blood-pressure, and heart disease. On a very short-term, practical, level, stress has the potential to short-circuit everything we’ve discussed in earlier chapters about team development, motivation, goal setting, and the organizational narrative. Highly stressed people will often be compliant, but they are not actively committed to the organization’s goals, thus killing the High Performance Cycle. When the water is boiling, creativity, cooperation, and effective problem-solving are amongst the first things to go: stressed out people are more critical, more impulsive, more easily irritated by trivial incidents. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of too much stress is when trivial issues quickly escalate into intense, pointless conflict.

The other sneaky problem with stress is that stressors are not independent of one another. Stress is cumulative: it doesn’t take a major traumatic event to push our fight/flight response into overdrive. A great many small stressors add up to a large stress response. The daily hassles of life, frustration at work, a distressing political or economic climate, can all help trigger our stress response and keep it active even when there is no immediate physical danger. Thus, that one additional request you are making of your employees might not seem like much by itself, but can trigger a major outbreak of bad temper or collapse performance if it comes after a series of major changes or reorganizations or during a period when everyone is frantically working to hit a deadline. I’m still amazed when a company ramps up the stress level right around Christmas: so many people are already stressed out around the holidays that adding to it does not help.

The trick to dealing effectively with stress is in understanding how to maintain the right level of stress: we want people to feel excited and engaged. When the levels of stress are appropriate, that’s exactly what happens. When they get out of hand, though, is when individual and organizational performance breaks down. We also need to understand how to manage stress: Olympic athletes, after all, thrive under conditions of extreme stress. They have learned the trick of being physically revved up and mentally relaxed, giving them the best of both worlds and enabling them to perform at an incredible level.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence