The Business Sensei

What is stress?

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

I hear all the time about stress reduction and the importance of eliminating stress from your life. The problem is, if we eliminated all the stress, we would also eliminate all progress and success. Stress is healthy, in the same way that food is healthy: we need it pretty much every day, but too much can give you a belly ache or cause other health problems. It’s not necessarily the food per se, it’s the quantity or quality that kills you.

Stress, at root, is anything that gets us moving, be that thinking, feeling, or acting. When a stressful event occurs, we experience physical and psychological reactions. It is the combination of the stressful event along with our reactions to it that we need to know how to use to our best advantage. It’s when we don’t use stress to our advantage, or when it gets out of control, that we start experiencing the negative effects of stress: illness, distractibility, reduced team performance and organizational commitment, loss of creativity, and so on. In order to really understand how stress works, though, it will be helpful to look at cavemen and the starship Enterprise.

Let us turn the clock back twenty thousand years or so and consider Thag. Thag is a hunter, a member of a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers. In Thag’s line of work, the biggest risk is being eaten by something that disagrees with you. On a typical day, Thag wakes up in the morning, grabs his trusty spear, and heads into the primeval forest to hunt. He probably does not have a cup of coffee, there being a notable lack of Starbucks in the forest primeval and besides, Thag hasn’t yet invented money.

So far, this has been a fairly low stress day for Thag. There is enough stress, specifically hunger or the needs of his family, to get him up and out hunting, but nothing too extreme. This is about to change. As Thag makes his way through the forest, birds chirping ominously in the background, a tiger suddenly springs out. Now the stress level skyrockets. Thag’s heart starts beating faster, his breathing comes more quickly, and the blood is really flowing in his veins, which, in point of fact, is where he’d like to keep it. Under the surface, as it were, epinephrine and norepinephrine (the chemicals formerly known as adrenaline and noradrenaline) are released into Thag’s blood. Energy is routed from non-essential functions, such as digestion, healing, and the immune system, to Thag’s muscles. In little more than a heartbeat, Thag is ready to fight or run.

But wait! Since when are digestion, healing, and the immune system non-essential? Without them, we’re not going to be particularly happy or healthy. Fundamentally, if you’re looking at a hungry tiger, or, more to the point, if that hungry tiger is looking at you, neither fighting off the flu nor digesting your last meal are particularly high on the priority list. Your goal is to live long enough to worry about the flu otherwise that last meal really will be your last meal.

Why not run or fight and also maintain digestion, healing, and the immune system? Well, to answer that let’s jump from the distant past to a not quite so distant future. Whenever the starship Enterprise is attacked by Romulans, Captain Kirk orders full power to weapons and shields. That makes a certain amount of sense: when someone is trying to blow you out of space, you don’t want to put half power to the shields. Sometimes, though, full power is just not quite enough. When that happens, as it so often does, Kirk orders emergency power to the shields as well. At that point, Mr. Spock usually observes that such an action will mean taking power from life support, which never stops Kirk but does serve to make the scene more exciting (which is also a form of stress, albeit a pleasant one at least when it’s happening to someone else). Basically, the Enterprise may be big, but it’s not infinitely large. It has only so much power. That power can be put in different places, shifted around as necessary, but there’s still a finite limit to how much there is. Most of the time life support, or long-term survival, is a pretty high priority. However, when confronted with hostile Romulans, the short-term need to not be vaporized takes priority.

On Star Trek, this is known as a Dramatic Moment. For Thag, however, it’s more commonly known as the Fight or Flight response. Confronted with danger, the stress triggers Thag’s body to fight or run. Like the Enterprise, Thag’s body is finite. He has only so much energy to go around.

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

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

Master of Time and Space

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

Where oh where has my little week gone, where oh where has it gone?

It’s Thursday afternoon and that big project is due at 5pm. There’s no way you can finish it in the time you have available. No problem, you can just go to the time bank. All your life, people have been telling you that it’s important to save time. Well, just like you’ve put away money for a rainy day, you’ve saved quite a lot of time. Now you just need to withdraw some of that time and use it to finish the project.

What do you mean that didn’t work? When you save time, shouldn’t you be able to withdraw it when you need it? Unfortunately, that trick never works. Even Doctor Who, the main character of the popular British science-fiction series about a wandering Time Lord, can’t manage that one. That’s the problem with time: no matter how much we save, it’s never there when we go to make a withdrawal. We all get sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to the hour, and 24 hours in a day. Time passes whether we use it or abuse it. The only choice we have is how we use the time, not whether we use it.

We have so many gadgets now for measuring time: clocks, watches, iPhones, the list goes on and on. But measuring time is not experiencing time: we have thermometers that tell us what the temperature is, but whether we feel warm or cold can depend on many factors other than just the number on that thermometer. 45 degrees in January can feel downright warm, and 55 in July might seem blessedly cool. Time is similar. Our experience of time passing is very different from what the measurement of time might tell us; this is why productivity and time are not the same! While we might measure time by the ticks of a clock or the dropping of grains of sand through an hourglass, we experience time as a series of events. When we have nothing to occupy our brains, time seems to stretch endlessly, each second ticking by with the excrutiating slowness of an overwritten sentence. Watching paint dry is so painful exactly because nothing much is happening. Conversely, when we are engaged in something that fills our brains, time seems to race by. When we look back, though, on a day filled with activity, it often seems like a very long time must have passed. Two people can experience the passage of time in the same situation very differently. Some athletes will view their opponents as moving very rapidly, while other athletes, who trained to manage their perceptions in ways that change their sense of time, will see their opponents apparently moving in slow motion. The second are far more likely to win.

What it boils down to is that we do not experience time or perceive time by the passage of seconds on our watches. We perceive time through the passage of external events: day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, the changing of the seasons, and so forth. Those who have spent time in a windowless conference room or office may have noticed that feeling of disorientation that occurs when you step out at the end of the day and realize just how much time has passed: working for IBM in the late 1980s, in the winter months I would often arrive at the office before it was light and leave after dark. Spending the day in a windowless office meant that by the end of the day, I felt extremely confused about what time it actually was. Spending the day in an office dealing with a constant barrage of interrupts produces a similar disorienting effect.

At the same time, as it were, how we feel about time can change our perceptions of the world around us. In one classic experiment, divinity students about to give a talk on the Good Samaritan had their sense of time manipulated: while still in their dorm rooms, some of the students received a phone call stating, “Where are you? You were supposed to be in the chapel five minutes ago!” Other students received a phone call stating, “Although we have plenty of time, we’d like everyone in the chapel a few minutes early.”
On the route between the dorm and the chapel was an apparently sick or injured person. Those divinity students who thought they were late went by that person, in many cases without even noticing him lying there. Those who did notice assumed that someone else would take care of it or figured that maybe the person wasn’t that sick, or something. Conversely, those divinity students who thought they had plenty of time were far more likely to notice the sick person and take appropriate action. Feeling rushed reduces our ability to see the world.

Just as our perceptions of time influence our behavior and how effectively we work, pursue goals, and interact with others, the physical space we are in matters as well. Space creates associations and triggers for our behavior; the right space can make us feel safe or in danger, critical or creative. The same space at different times can also trigger different reactions. Fundamentally, we humans are creatures of our environment. We can’t completely ignore our surroundings when looking at organizational psychology and behavior. Rather, we need to understand how space matters and how our interactions with the space around us can serve to reinforce or undermine our organizational culture, narrative, learning, motivation, perceptions of fairness and justice, and goal setting. Even our perceptions of leadership can be affected by how space and time are handled.

Chutes and Ladders (Airplane edition)

For some reason, I’m having trouble getting out of my head the image of a game of Chutes and Ladders played with pictures of airplanes and flight attendants.

I was asked to comment recently on whether stress  might have played a part in the story of Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who slid down the emergency chute, beer in hand. The beer part might not be a good addition to the kid’s game, even if mild alcohol consumption is supposed to reduce stress. Here’s what I wrote:

There is no question but that the current economic situation has increased the stress level for everyone. Unfortunately, one of the places where showing this is considered socially acceptable in on an airplane, where flight attendants are often not viewed as the professionals that they are. Furthermore, the struggle over overhead bin space seems to have only increased as more and more airlines charge to check bags; this, of course, increases the stress level of the passengers.

Why is this story getting such play? As Americans, we appreciate noble gestures: there is a huge difference between going postal with a gun and doing something dramatic to make a point. Slater’s actions hurt no one (which is not to say they were without risk; at the superficial level, though, it appeals on a very visceral level), which puts it into the second category. When we see someone act in such a dramatic fashion, we are reminded of our own stress and frustration at work, and admire someone who is willing to stand up to authority.

However, that doesn’t mean that Slater’s actions were a good long-term career move! It really depends on how JetBlue and other airlines might react. The standard, stodgy, reaction is to refuse to give him his job back. A more daring airline might choose to play up the adventure/daring angle of his actions and build a marketing campaign around it: “At XYZ Airlines you won’t need to do this!”

Of course, if you want to avoid situations like this, it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in your company. Are employees excited about working there or just showing up because they have nowhere else to go? Is the CEO out in front of the employees demonstrating her excitement over the future of the company, or is he sitting in an office somewhere issuing vague directives? Do employees look for reasons to not come to work? What is the company doing to help manage stress: providing sufficient time off? Exercise facilities? Quiet space? Opportunities to have fun on the job?

At a very broad level, I’d also have to wonder how this fits with JetBlue’s image, or brand, as a fun airline? When you think about JetBlue’s advertisements, they try to present an image of flying, sorry, jetting, being a fun activity. In an odd sort of way, this incident can either reinforce that image or damage it, depending on how JetBlue handles things going forward. No, it’s not entirely rational: after all, when flying we want to get safely to our destination; at the same time, the idea of the trip being fun is appealing.

If this story fades out, then probably nothing happens to JetBlue’s image. But if the story hangs around, the focus can potentially make or break JetBlue’s brand: pressure cooker work environment or fun place to be. The answer will affect how travelers view the airline, and that influence, subtle though it may be, will affect whether or not people fly JetBlue.