Teams Blog

I promised a look at the science behind stress according to the textbook mentioned in my last post, Human Motivation. (Actually, I don’t make “promises,” but that’s a subject for another post.) The first point of interest is that scientists do not use the word “stress” the way most people do: as an inherently negative state. According to Dr. Robert Franken, “Stress is… viewed as set of neurological/physiological reactions that serve some ultimate adaptive purpose,” reactions including blood becoming thicker and rushing to the brain and muscles, sweating, fats being released in the bloodstream, and increased breathing rates. As you might suspect, this is what we often call a “fight or flight response,” and indeed, all of these reactions allow us to do either of those things better–or heal better if they fail. (Thicker blood contains more of the chemicals the body needs to heal and presumably bleeds out slower.)

In developed nations, the events that trigger this reaction rarely require physical action or risk injury, however. Repeated exposure to these physical changes without the ability to respond physically is blamed for the well-documented connection between what business people call stress and higher disease and death rates.

But there’s a catch. “How the individual responds to those reactions determines whether they produce feelings of distress (a negative feeling) or produce feelings of eustress (a positive feeling),” Dr. Franken wrote. Jumping from an airplane creates the fight or flight response. If you jumped out on purpose, you enjoy the response. If the plane has stopped working, you probably don’t.

This distinction is important because the internal physical reaction is actually a two-step process. First the reaction needed to arouse greater attention and deal with an immediate threat kicks in. About 10 seconds later, secondary reactions that provide more long-term energy occur, and that response takes between 15 minutes and one hour to return to normal. The diseases associated with distress, to use the more precise term, appear to come mostly from this second phase.

There can be a third phase. If the distress remains long enough, the adrenal glands that create all of the hormones in the two-phase reactions can eventually collapse, “often the precursor to death…” Franken wrote.

What I see in this is a 10-second window of opportunity to control your internal response to a stress event, which fits perfectly with what I teach as the “S-R/S-R” model. An external stimulus (“S”) creates a response (“R”) in us, but it’s not like the classic response test where you cross your legs and the doctor hits below your kneecap with a rubber hammer, creating an automatic external reaction. Instead, it is an internal response which becomes an internal stimulus for the external response. In the workplace, then, we have two opportunities to control our external responses to outside events like a harsh word from a co-worker. First, we can change our internal R such that it does not become an internal S. Second, if that doesn’t work–if we get angered by that harsh word–we can control the external R. That is, we can keep our trap shut until we calm down.

Now I know how long we have to do that before we hurt ourselves: 10 seconds, which is an eternity. Maybe that old anger-management advice about counting to 10 has a scientific basis after all.

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A used college textbook I picked up at the unfortunate end-of-life sale of a Durham, N.C., bookstore has been feeding me some interesting insights into the book’s namesake, Human Motivation (Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.: Belmont, CA, 1994). Written by Univ. of Calgary psychology professor Robert Franken, for a study wonk like me it is a pleasant way to get my research fix without having to work quite so hard. Most of my research involves going through ”primary research,” meaning scientific journal articles, most of which are written as if a computer were programmed to spit out as much multisyllabic jargon as it could within something resembling English. “Secondary research” like this book, in which an expert reviews the work of other experts and sometimes dumbs it down a bit, makes life easier for “tertiary” researchers like myself. My job is to explain the heavy stuff to the popular audience–in my case, the customers for my training services and you, dear reader.

I was going to dive into the science of stress from the book at this point, but instead I think I’ll reduce my own holiday stress by indulging in a rant. As alluded to in an earlier post, I have little patience for people who step outside their areas of expertise and report scientific findings without learning the context. When Greg Hyer was nice enough to “spotlight” me in his recent LinkingRaleighNC newsletter, I made the point that I spent thousands of hours using my old journalism skills to review the scientific literature on teamwork. Although I keep up with other topics in the business world to make sure my solutions remain relevant in the real world, I don’t comment on those topics as if I were an expert.  That’s not to say I’m shy about expressing my opinions, but I don’t claim they come from any special knowledge of the topic.

The danger is that listeners who assign a level of credibility to someone based on their knowledge in one area do not easily distinguish it from what is realistic in other areas. That is, credibility tends to be “one size fits all.” Physicist Edward Teller, considered by many the father of the hydrogen bomb, practically caused the Cold War (in my nonexpert opinion) with the help of people who gave him too much credibility in the areas of foreign and military policy based on his expertise in physics. Whenever a speaker uses a law of quantum physics in a talk about management, I see pens scribbling madly. But the whole reason quantum physics has been so controversial and fascinating in the scientific community is because those laws at the subatomic level do not apply to objects the size of atoms–or humans.

For example, I’ve heard several people try to apply something called the Principle of Uncertainty to human relations. They say it means that an observer has a direct physical impact on the actions of the observed person. This is neither an accurate statement of observed effects, or even the correct principle to apply to the asserted effect.

When you look at a car going down the road, you can tell where it is, what direction it is traveling in, and roughly how fast. This does not appear to be the case for the particles that make up atoms and their cousins. A scientist cannot, for example, be absolutely sure where a particle is and absolute sure how fast it is going. The more sure she is of one, the less sure she is of the other. Quoth Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, “Articulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, it applies only at the small scales of atoms and subatomic particles and is not noticeable for macroscopic objects, such as moving vehicles.”

The effect of the observer plays a role, but is not the point to the Uncertainty Principle.  The “observer effect” is more accurately tied to a another physicist who gave the analogy of a cat in a box who may or may not be dead. In our observable world, whether the cat has died has nothing to do with when somebody decides to open the box. In the quantum world that operates on mathematical probabilities, the “cat” would not definitely be dead or alive until the observer opened the box. There’s also a concept speakers may be thinking of in which changes to one particle can effect another particle long after they bump into each other.  (“Long after” in relative terms; we’re talking tiny fractions of a second).

Regardless, in the human world, a team member is going to do what the team member wants to do. Obviously, it is possible to influence somebody else’s moods or decisions, otherwise my “Art and Science of Persuasion” class would be a big waste of time. But it requires old-fashioned communication skills and basic psychology, not concentrating on their brain waves as you sit alone in your office. Even then, the best you can do is hope your efforts overcome the myriad of influences on their decision-making from genetics, parenting, earlier experiences, current environment, and everyone else who is trying to change their thinking. But quantum-level effects are not a concern.

My point is this: when trying to decide who to listen to on a given topic, caveat emptor (“buyer beware”). Speaking of that, I’ll share Dr. Franken’s expertise on the science of stress next time.

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This week I met with a new referral partner, marketing expert Angela Ursprung of Strategic Guru, and she mentioned an incident that brought up a teamwork issue. She talked about once giving a partner a sales lead, and the person never followed up. She never gave the person another lead, and rightfully so. When it comes to sales leads, use it or lose it, I say.

Two of the underlying needs of us humans are the needs for relationships and esteem (refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). When that person ignored Angela’s lead, he or she disrespected the effort Angela had made to build a relationship and her expertise in mapping a marketing opportunity to a provider. At the very least, if the person had a solid reason for not following up, he or she could have communicated that fact back.

When a team member makes an unusual effort on your behalf, a simple thank-you is not enough. A strong effort comes from a strong motivation, and encouraging a repeat of that behavior requires a strong response. The best way is to match the effort. Try the action your colleague suggests, if you have the resources—even if you don’t think it will work. After all, you could be wrong! If you cannot follow up for some reason, at least respect your colleague enough to explain why. This will feed their motivating needs and raise the likelihood of their providing help to you in the future.

This is not a “manipulation,” by the way. Every relationship you have is based upon feeding each others’ needs. I’m talking about not messing up your work relationships by ignoring basic psychology.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, I followed up on Angela’s lead this morning. When an expert helps me, I pay attention (and respect).

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Last night I delivered a talk on “The Mindful Way of Working” for the first time, sort of. I qualify the statement because I have guided people in meditation and mindfulness for a few years now, and have taught some of the techniques for decades as a martial artist. But I had not taught these practices in a business context, a meeting of the IS Committee of the North Carolina Project Management Institute (NCPMI). Part of the reason is I didn’t want people to think I was pushing my religion, Zen Buddhism. So I probably went overboard in making the point Buddhist practice is compatible with any other religion (my “sangha” in Seattle was founded by devout Catholics) and meditation is used by Protestant ministers, Moslems, Hindus and secular humanists, among others. Another point of discomfort for me is that the topic strays far from my primary practice of using scientific findings to support group work.

But I decided to offer the course anyway, primarily to expand my marketing possibilities, I will admit. Of course, I also could have done that by offering team–building games despite there being no scientific backing that they provide any return on investment (ROI). There is little research on productivity or other benefits from mindfulness in the workplace yet, but there is significant research on the stress-reduction capabilities in medical practice. In fact, the method called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has proven effective in a variety of settings, and the few studies in the business world are encouraging as well.

For the class and my Zen practice, I say “mindfulness at its most practical level is simply keeping your mind on what is going on in this moment. As in meditation, you try to focus your mind on one thing and let all extraneous thoughts go on their way. For example, if at work you are writing a report and you think, ‘I need to pick up some bread,’ don’t go on to making out your grocery list in your head. Put your mind back on your writing.” Purists will rightly argue there is a lot more to it, and I touched on aspects such as recognizing automatic thoughts for what they are and noticing the impact of certain physical sensations on our emotions and relationships.

What it boils down to is self-control, perhaps the most critical skill to business success. We all have to do things we don’t want to in order to accomplish routine tasks, act professionally with colleagues we don’t like, guide employees to do things we think should be obvious to anyone, and so on. Mindfulness, and the meditation practice that supports it the way working out supports athletic performance, are powerful options to achieve that self-control.

The class participants seemed either to get it or not know what to make of it, and either response is fine with me. But I know they stayed very engaged throughout the class and walked out with a choice of new tools to help their working or personal lives. To me, that makes overcoming my fears worth the risks.

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I am working as a volunteer stagehand for the City Ballet of Raleigh production of The Nutcracker Suite, and it reminded me how I got started as a team leader. My undergraduate degree was in that kind of work from North Carolina School of the Arts (as it was called then), which may seem to have little to do with team coaching. But it was there I first led a team, ten students working as the lighting crew. Someone else designed the lighting, but as “master electrician” it was my job on “load-in” day to get the 120 or so lights hung where they belonged, connected to the right circuits, and the circuits connected to the right dimmers.

I planned that thing half to death. I led the team in preparing the lights, developed a process, and trained the members on it. As a result, we got the load-in done very quickly—one “techie” not on the crew said our time had to be “some kind of record.” Without knowing it, I had just become a project manager. The parallels between a show and a business project are obvious: each has a budget, schedule, and scope and quality requirements. Unlike a lot of projects, though, a show has a “hard deadline.” Most business projects that supposedly have such don’t really. If enough things go wrong, the deadline moves. But with a show, when the curtain is scheduled to go up, it has to go up.

Oddly, most shows I’ve been involved with did so without massive last-minute pushes. (Not all, of course—I recall loading out one show’s costumes the night of the final dress rehearsal after nearly pulling two all-nighters in a row to get done.) And conflicts break out, but most of the time they get smoothed over at least to the degree that everyone does their job professionally. I can’t say either of those positives applied to most of the business projects I have observed, even in mature companies. Techies and onstage performers alike are rightly known for their “whatever it takes” attitude, but the same is true of most of the team members I’ve worked with. Is the difference in show “project” success the clarity of the goal in putting on the show? The fact that roles and responsibilities (on- and offstage) are extremely well defined? How well understood the process and tasks are by everyone on the team, across all functions? The fact that everybody including the techies has a backup with the training to step in on a moment’s notice?

I’m not sure. But I am sure if your team had all those best practices in place, it would be performing a lot better than any of your competitors’ teams.

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Two nights ago I attended a Raleigh Chamber of Commerce event for our local elected officials. Although I always feel a little out of place at such events, I am a veteran networker and dived right into the fray. The officials and business “names” in the crowd were gracious and approachable, I’m pleased to report.

You never “sell” at these events, so I did my “bartender” routine, as I call it. (My long-time joke is that I’m the guy who walks into a bar and ends up with the bartenders telling me their problems!) I asked questions and learned about the various folks. With business people, I asked what their companies did and kept digging. With officials, I first thanked them for serving. As a former reporter, I have talked to many elected officials from city councilors to U.S. senators. No matter what I thought of a person’s politics, I have found the vast majority genuine in their interest in doing good. That night I asked how they handled the stress, what got them started in office, and other such human questions, in part to see if I could pick up any interesting ideas I could pass along to people in my classes.

One such conversation turned up a pearl. I spent at least 20 minutes talking one-on-one with a state senator. I’d love to be a name-dropper here, but my ex-reporter ethics won’t let me since he didn’t know he was speaking to a blogger. Anyway, he mentioned an incident from his business days. His company was losing a lot of tools through “shrinkage,” internal stealing. Instead of taking a harsh, punitive approach, he went the exact opposite direction. He told the managers to give each employee a $100 budget to buy the tools they needed. The shrinkage stopped.

This is a fantastic example of using employee empowerment, in this case to solve a problem you would never expect it to fix. By making employees responsible for the problem they were causing–and, importantly, combining that with the resources and authority to address them–he solved the problem without lifting (or wagging) a finger.

He seemed genuinely saddened by his inability as a legislator to treat state workers with that same compassion and ingenuity. It was reassuring to remind myself regarding our legislators the same thing I ask team leaders to keep in mind about their employees: they are human beings first and foremost, and most of them want to do good.

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