What's it Worth?

Corporate mission statements routinely include glib disclaimers about ‘valuing our customers’ or ‘valuing our people’, which you’d have thought would go without saying!  Despite the mission commitments, one of the reasons people say they’re unhappy at work is that they don’t feel valued, particularly by their managers.  As we described in a recent blog (Blog 66, Corporate Venom), one of the main ways managers contribute to the misery felt by their team members is by behaving in a way the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® describes as ‘toxic achieving’: wanting everything done yesterday, regardless of what it takes, and becoming angry when their expectations are not met. 

The Challenge of Change uniquely defines stress as ruminating about emotional upsets.  Toxic achieving behaviour provokes rumination, and hence our key piece of advice for managers in our Challenge of Change Dream Team programme is to avoid, as much as possible, giving their people anything to ruminate about.  A practical example from a Dream Team training workshop: one of the manager’s direct reports was facing a critical review, scheduled for later in the week.  The manager happened to bump into him early in the week, and before rushing off to a meeting, said ‘there’s some good news and some bad news’.  No surprise, the team member spent the rest of the week overwhelmed by ruminating about what the bad news might be.

This particular manager was not especially toxic, and in common with much of our behaviour, management skills tend to be bell-curve distributed: in most organisations, there are relatively few really outstanding leaders, and equally few truly terrible managers.  Most are in the middle, sometimes getting it right, sometimes not.  As we’ve shown in our case studies, the key feature of great leadership is people skills, assessed in the Challenge of Change Profile® as having high scores on Detached Coping and Sensitivity, coupled with low scores on Emotional Inhibition – in other words, picking up quickly on how people are feeling but nonetheless maintaining perspective, and being able to express emotion appropriately (see also Blog 52, Be A Bonobo).

To choose to behave in this way – and it is a choice – we have to value it, so a different way of thinking about this is to focus on personal preferences.  What do you value?  Ordinarily, value has a distinctly positive spin: we value well-being, thoughtfulness, generosity, peace of mind, etc., but think back to the last time you felt miserable about something.  Maybe you’d submitted a project outline to your manager, and they’d given a lot of negative feedback about it that you felt was unwarranted.  How long did the feeling of despondency last?  Days, maybe even weeks.  For it to remain with you, you had to value it.  

Misery is an emotional state, and the particular form of the emotion might vary – you’re just as likely to feel anger at your boss as feeling personal shame or embarrassment.  This too might stay with you for days or weeks, often reinforced by wrongly justifying it: ‘I was justifiably angry!’  Anger isn’t justifiable, but the point is that despite the unhappiness we hold onto it because it is valued.  The paradox is that we don’t do anything, positive or negative, unless we value it. 

Our habitual negativity bias unfortunately tends to focus on the negative, so we’re more likely to remember criticism rather than praise.  However, values are not fixed.  You might dislike someone for some reason, but on closer acquaintance you find you were mistaken, and your view of that person changes from negative to positive.  In our scenario, you might discover that your boss is going through a really tough time and was just distracted, or you realise that holding onto the anger is just making you miserable.  You then have the opportunity to let go.  Not  always easy, especially when we have no control over what’s happened, but we always have control over how we respond, expressed in the Challenge of Change as ‘shit happens, misery’s optional’. 

Letting go is the final step in the Challenge of Change Resilience Training, and what you let go of is not the task, but the negative emotion that might accompany it.  The four steps are sequential: you can’t let go until you’ve first woken up out of the nightmare of negative emotion, taken back control of your attention, and adopted a more detached perspective.  Thoughts about emotional upsets will tend to circle round and intrude again, as you’ve no doubt discovered!  Perfecting the four steps through diligent practise makes it progressively easier to remain in the ‘loft of the mind’ that we describe in the training, and from this perspective you’re then more easily able to value-shift.

Value-shifting means changing your perceptions and reactions in the light of a clearer understanding, which allows you to switch from valuing anger to valuing non-anger.  Value-shifting can lead to forgiveness, especially of yourself.  Rumination is a sure way to squander energy beating yourself up, or imagining scenarios of revenge.  Being in the ‘loft’ provides the opportunity to value-shift, which isn’t available when you’re ruminating on what’s described as the ‘ground floor’ of the house metaphor we use to describe the mind.  Talking about values can easily digress into a debate about ethical philosophy, but it can be kept simple and practical: next time you wake up in the midst of a prolonged bout of rumination, ask yourself why you value it so much!