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Your thoughts start racing. Your jaw clenches. An invisible weight settles onto your chest. We’ve all experienced the signs of stress. Recent research by Korn Ferry found that workplace stress has risen nearly 20% in three decades. But, is that good, or bad? Until now, we’ve associated stress as something negative that we must overcome in order to think clearly and produce results. But Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal is mounting evidence that what we think we know about stress is backward.
Her 2013 talk at TED Global is one of the 20 most popular TED talks of all time. Here are some of her more surprising findings:
Stress is not the enemy. Your beliefs about stress is the enemy.
The University of Wisconsin studied 30,000 adults in the U.S. for eight years. They started by asking participants, “How much stress have you experienced in the last year?” They followed up by asking, “Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?” The bad news: people who experienced a lot of stress in the past year had a 43% risk of dying. But, that was only true for the participants who believed that stress is harmful for their health. In fact, people who experienced a lot of stress, but did not view stress as harmful, actually had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.
There’s more. The researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. That’s more than 20,000 death a year. “If that estimate is correct,” says McGonigal, “that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death [in 2012] killing more than skin cancer, HIV Aids, and homicide.”
When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body’s response to stress.
Think about the last time you felt stressed. Did you interpret the physiological signs of stress – increased heart rate, faster breathing, sweaty palms – as anxiety or evidence that you weren’t coping well with pressure? “What if,” McGonigal suggests, “you understood that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge?” That’s what participants were told in a 2011 Harvard University study. Before going through a social stress test, the group was told that the body’s stress response was helpful. That pounding heart? Your body is preparing you for action. Faster breathing? No problem. You’re getting more oxygen to the brain.
In a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up and your blood vessels constrict. This is one of the reasons that chronic stress is associated with cardiovascular disease. But when participants in the Harvard study were told to view their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed even though their heart was pounding. It turns out at that the relaxation of the blood vessels during stress is the same physiological response to joy and courage.
Believing that your body is helping you think clearly and prepare you for action can mean the difference between a stressed-induced heart attack in your 50’s and living well into your 90’s. Want to learn more? Check out McGonigal’s book, “The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You and How to Get Good At It.” It may just save your life.
Question: Do you know that some people feel stress the same way they do joy? Want to know how they do it?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
People
When we think of career advancement and leadership development, a good option is the use of a mentor. Whether you are a senior executive or an emerging leader, there is never a bad time to ask for the assistance of a mentor. Just as Plato had Socrates and Bill Gates has Warren Buffett, mentoring is an excellent opportunity to accelerate your growth as a leader.
By definition, a mentor is someone with knowledge and experience that you can benefit from and is willing to share his or her acquired wisdom. The underlying idea is to improve yourself by connecting with their experience and insight. To get the most out of the relationship, here is a short list of things to keep in mind:
Define your need.
Take the time to define your mentoring needs. Are you a technically-minded person who could polish your relationship-building skills? Are you a junior executive who could benefit from the experience of someone more seasoned? Once you have a solid understanding of your mentoring needs, make a list of those who can potentially fill the role.
Build the relationship.
Learn as much as you can about the people on your list. Which ones have values that closely align with yours? Get to know them in a casual setting over coffee or lunch to see if you have a natural rapport. Don’t lead with “Will you be my mentor?” (That’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date.) Instead, get to know them. Start small and see where it goes.
Set expectations.
Once you’ve found a good match, take the time to set expectations for the relationship. Will you meet informally to chat over business challenges? Should you set up a weekly call to discuss an initiative? Maybe you’d prefer an interview style where you go over a set of questions. Choose the style that best meets your mentorship goal.
Be prepared.
If you’ve chosen wisely, there is a good chance that your mentor has just added you to an already busy schedule. Be respectful by showing up to your mentoring sessions on time and being prepared. If you agreed to do some homework, make sure you honor that commitment. If you chose an interview format, bring a list of carefully prepared questions.
Move on.
Just as you set expectations going into the relationship, be clear when you feel it’s time to move on. Don’t allow the relationship to end in an awkward fizzle, but bring it to an honorable close. Thank your mentor for taking the time and caring enough to invest in your growth. Chances are, your relationship will evolve into a long-term trusted friendship.
If you are the type of person who takes on challenges, you’ll likely have a series of formal and informal mentors along your career path. If you make the effort to manage these relationships well, they can be some of the most important connections of your lifetime. And when you get an invitation for coffee from a junior colleague, be prepared to use your positive experiences to pass it on.
Question: What knowledge or skills are you hoping to acquire that a mentor could help you accelerate?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
People
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
Like many of the quotes attributed to Henry Ford nearly 100 years ago, this one continues to ring true today. Ford was known for his innovation, ingenuity, and resourcefulness that revolutionized transportation in America.
Today, the world is in the throws of another revolution that will disrupt not only transportation, but every other conceivable industry. In order to meet the overwhelming demand and associated stresses that these changes bring, teams need to effectively deal with conflict. When some of your team members have strong, conflicting opinions about what strategy to take, here are three steps you can take to put everyone back on track:
1. Separate the business issues from the personal issues.
If personal styles vary greatly among your team members, administer an assessment like the Gallup© StrengthsFinder. Collect the top five strengths of every team member and put them on a matrix. Review the matrix with the team to help them see what personal styles they have in common, and where there are differences. Doing so will enable the team to build a common frame of references for dealing with individual differences.
2. Identify where the team is in violent agreement.
If you haven’t taken the time to create a team charter, now may be a good time to stop and do so. The process of creating a charter will allow the team to establish a common set of values, purpose, goals, and expectations. Have the team sign the charter, give each member a copy, and post a copy in a common area. When conflicts arise, use the charter as a North Star to guide the team back to what they mutually agreed to. Here’s a template published by Redbooth to get you started.
3. Pop the power bubbles.
Sometimes, conflict involves power issues or strong personal agendas that require your direct attention. If you allow these to go unchecked for too long, it will erode confidence in your ability to lead the team. Sit down with any members on your team who may be testing your authority. Help them identify the sources of their conflict. Let them know that you will provide every resource you have available to help them, but that team cohesion is your first priority. Read this article from the Harvard Business Review to learn more about toxic team members.
Conflict can be healthy for a team when it’s channeled properly. Knowing how and when to intervene is a leadership skill that will pay off for you and your team.
Question: What approaches have you found helpful to create a culture of healthy conflict with your team?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
My team and I have delivered training programs to thousands of executives around the world. Some are in the form of lunch-and-learns. Others are delivered over the course of several consecutive days. While we love putting on “edu-taining” programs, we’re starting to push back on delivering these programs.
Here’s why. Global investment in platform technologies is expected to exceed $3.8 trillion in 2019 for things like enterprise resource management (ERP), customer resource management (CRM), and project management. Yet, when it comes to leadership training and development, most executives implicitly view their organization as an aggregation of individuals.
From silos to systems
Because of that logic, the $86.7 billion spent on global training last year was given to a disparate mashup of outside experts, coaches and consultants. Senior leaders have executive coaches who never meet one another. Offsite retreats are facilitated by a string of consulting firms. New training programs are launched from time-to-time for select cohorts of people, the lessons of which become lost. All of this leaves HR continuously chasing the answer to “now what?”
Unstructured training, coaching and consulting services can set people up to fail and cause unchecked organizational damage. Silos grow, communication gets bottlenecked, and cynicism sets in. This is why we designed triple loop learning programs. These programs offer more than a loose series of stand-alone training efforts with fuzzy ROI. Instead, they are based on an enterprise model that couples group training with team and individual coaching in a format that provides hindsight, insight and foresight to drive change that sticks. Here’s how it works.
Loop 1: Hindsight – the ability to reflect and learn from the past
In the earliest stages of designing a leadership training program, we ask our clients a simple question: what, precisely, is this program for and how will we measure results? Once we are clear on the program objectives, we design and deliver full-day sessions that allow participants to identify “what’s not working” gaps and what 3-5 changes can be made in the next 90 days to improve. We infuse these sessions with videos, case studies, hands-on breakouts and action-taking templates. By the end of the day, participants have looked back at problematic processes to gain hindsight into what they can do to make improvement as senior or emerging leaders. We let them know that we’ll continue to get together in full-day sessions every 90 days. But, we don’t stop there. We break the group up into smaller teams to move into the next learning loop.
Loop 2: Insight – the ability to interpret and respond to the present
The full-day programs allow participants time to step back, assess reality, and plan action for improvement. However, research shows that even after very basic training sessions, adults typically retain just 10% of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly 70% when they practice classroom training with real-world experience. Training participants, no matter how talented, often struggle to transfer even their most powerful classroom experiences into changed behavior. Not only do they not have enough opportunities to put theory into practice, but they also lack critical insight about how their behavior impacts results. That’s why we coach the smaller teams as they work on the 90-day action items to discuss breakthroughs and breakdowns. We encourage them to identify root causes together and have catalytic conversations about what changes need to be made and how to hold one another accountable for making change happen and locking it in. Then, we go a step further. We provide one-on-one coaching for each participant to achieve deeper learning and growth.
Loop 3: Foresight – the ability to predict and prepare for the future
Becoming a more effective leader means adjusting one’s underlying mindset to address the root causes of behavior. We use a diagnostic tool to assess how each participant behaves when things are going well and when faced with conflict. We coach each participant through the results of their assessment, then use those results to accelerates the participant’s ability to identify what is going on, why it is happening, and how to change. These monthly coaching sessions enable participants to experience real-time course correction when working on resolving real-world issues through teams to effect enterprise-wide change. Over time, participants gain the foresight to predict the future and make better choices.
Learning organizations have a competitive advantage in the 21st century. Unfortunately, we continue to rely on broken models and disparate, hot-and-cold running consultants to provide ineffective, one-off services that fail. The way forward requires a focus on an embedded enterprise-wide model that takes learning from in the classroom to behind-the-desk.
Question: Do your training programs leave you with that “now what” feeling?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the forty-eighth issue of CEE News!
Today’s organizations are fighting a workforce trifecta of facts. Fact 1: There are 1 million more job openings in the U.S. than workers to fill them. Fact 2: The employee quit rate in the U.S. has hit a 17-year high. Fact 3: Workplace burnout is being upgraded as a syndrome linked to chronic stress by the World Health Organization in its International Classification of Diseases. In short, managers are trying to get more done with fewer people at a greater risk to their own health. It gets worse.
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