The Perfect Cocktail for Self Inflicted Stress
/While I remain firmly of the conviction that abusive behaviours are still rife in the corporate world, I am also acutely aware of just how many leaders are desperately trying not to be so. But we have another problem now, in that many modern businesses have created the perfect cocktail for self inflicted employee stress.
We take highly talented people who are used to success, and give them the 3 ingredients almost guaranteed to create fear – unboundaried autonomy, unreasonable expectations and inadequate coaching. High levels of adrenaline and cortisol are cultural and employees experience these abnormal levels for extended periods of time – caused by the perceived threat levels from pace, expectation, volume of external stimuli and a transactional and distracting work rhythm. What are people learning, really? The positive conscious learning of how to be genuinely creative and collaborative, or the negative reinforced conditioned responses – playing safe, not taking real risks, deflecting, staying small?
When a culture is predominantly based on positive learning, metrics and targets are incredibly helpful, and demanding 100% compliance to processes is seen as a helpful underpinning of creativity and collaboration; when a culture is predominantly based on negative learning, metrics and targets skew behaviours in a destructive manner and compliance is experienced as fear and coercion. We know what the difference between negative learning and positive learning looks like – but this demands that managers are paying attention to the person, and not overly focusing on the result or the business problem at hand.
Coaching within organisations is not really coaching. It’s either teaching (showing people how to do what we’re asking them to do – a very valid and necessary management activity, but it’s not coaching) or it’s manipulation, where the manager tries to look like they’re coaching, but actually they are leading the person to come to a pre-conceived conclusion; to the Manager’s idea of the solution. Hence the accent in my coaching training programmes of making managers aware of their unconscious controlling habits. I’ve seen little evidence in universal manager cohorts of genuine encouragement and the active giving of licence and permission to struggle, to be wrong, to be uncertain, to make mistakes – to be genuinely creative and collaborative.
Culturally there are still too many manifestations of ‘undesirable’ behaviours being valued – people being promoted for being visibly effective; the achievement of short term numbers being dominantly rewarded and the missing of targets being unconsciously punished. Sales people have a mortal fear of failure – they feel it as a wounding; a foreshadowing of ultimate rejection, whereas Engineers welcome failure, celebrate it even, as a necessary and positive step towards exceptional achievement. This fear of rejection is driving undesirable behaviours – competitiveness, self promotion, short term results over long term growth, an unhealthy obsession with achievement of targets.
Insecure over-achievers often get the senior leadership roles due to their ‘drive’ – probably the most prized executive attribute. These people are not easy to work for, mainly because their insecurity is so often triggered since they’ve accepted ridiculous targets on behalf of their team. One of the most common dynamics I see in businesses is the insanity of sales teams being predictably and often seriously behind target at the end of month 1 of a new year. It’s the end of month 1 and we already know that we’ll never make the year’s number in 11 months’ time. There are two reasons for this which is why it is so pathetically predictable. First of all we had to pull as much business forward into month 12 of last year, since we had to get to the highest possible number (having been behind all year but still forecasting that we could make it up somehow). So we started this year effectively in negative territory. Secondly our leader does not have the courage to negotiate reasonable sales targets. Their ego will simply not allow them to ‘fail’. And so here we go. Insane stress levels from day 1, and all pathetically predictable.
Autonomy is of course a good thing; a great thing. Dan Pink’s work on motivation shows us that what people want in their work is autonomy, meaning and mastery. People want the freedom to choose how they work and the respect, dignity and space to work things out for themselves. People want to work on something that matters; that will genuinely make a difference to the world and to peoples’ lives. And people want to master things, to learn new things and develop and grow their skills. But most managers idea of giving autonomy is to abdicate responsibility, in the rather fatuous ‘my door is always open, call me if you need me’way. Except that most people don’t call their boss when they’re really struggling because their experience of doing that is not positive. And although this is often unfair on the manager (it’s one of those Spectres where the fear of what might happen rules) that does not exonerate managers who substitute abdication for autonomy.
I could forgive the first two parts of the cocktail, if the standard, quality and consistency of management and coaching was decent. It does not need to be perfect or actually anywhere near perfect (in fact as we’ve seen, clumsy is great), it just has to be decent. Managers have to care enough to coach. Abdication says ‘my door is open, call me if you need me’ – I make everything your responsibility. Autonomy with coaching says ‘how are you doing, where are you struggling, what do you need?’
A participant on a recent coaching training programme I ran asked a fabulous question. She said ‘why does it feel so incredibly valuable to be coached, yet feel so desperately unhelpful to coach’? And this question goes to the heart of the issue – of what is real versus what we fear. The feeling of such immense value from being coached is absolutely real. The feeling of being unhelpful when coaching someone else is not real – it is one of our powerful Spectres.
We need to know what is real, and what is fear. So here’s my general rule – most of what you think you know is fear, and not real. When in doubt, assume it is your fear filtering your perception of reality. And the solution?
You could commune with nature – go for a walk, listen to the birds, watch the clouds roll by. You could count your blessings – savour the beauty of your life, list what you have to be grateful for. Or you could do something doubly valuable - connect with another human being – ask someone how they are, listen to them, pay attention to them, show them some kindness.
In just a few minutes you will have re-connected with reality, and you’ll know what to do next.
About the Author: Gareth Chick is a 40 year corporate veteran with a global profile. His career has included hugely successful spells as CFO, CEO and Chairman in both public and private sectors, including private equity. What makes Gareth's experience unique is that he combined those executive roles with a part time career as a leadership trainer, researching psychology, neuroscience and psychotherapy to create leadership development programmes used now by many major global corporations. In the last 15 years Gareth has trained over 5000 managers and served as Executive Coach to over 200 senior execs including FTSE100 CEOs and Fortune 500 VPs. As Founder of Collaborative Equity LLP, “promoting corporate cultures and sustainable business models of shared ownership, shared responsibility and shared rewards", Gareth acts as consultant to many global leaders, specialising in first time CEOs and Start Up founders. ↠ find out more at ceq.com
