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!

Corporate Venom

I recently took part in a podcast hosted by my colleague Victoria Soell.  The theme was what neuroscience had to say about narcissism, but rather than pursuing a wide psychological perspective, we focused on so-called ‘narcissistic managers’ in the workplace.  The label is used pejoratively, but just having an inflated regard for oneself hardly characterises the negativity that the phrase is intended to convey.  ‘Psychopathic managers’, a term often used synonymously, does have those connotations, but hijacking a label from a criminological setting is no more helpful (the full podcast can be viewed at https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uyzfhQpMO0OLE79oIaeks?si=a5c26811d50f47f7). 

There are many reasons why particular managers might be less competent, including a lack of appropriate training or having been elevated beyond their ability to fulfil the role.  Our podcast conversation focused instead on managers who may in fact deliver results very effectively, but who create team environments that are negative and toxic.  Their success is part of the problem: they may be promoted to increasingly powerful roles, at significant cost to the widening number of team members reporting to them.

A question we addressed in the podcast was identifying the behaviour that typically characterises these managers, and we drew on one of the scales in the Challenge of Change Profile®, labelled ‘toxic achieving’.  The measure is identified by three traits: time urgency, believing that ends justify means, and anger.  In other words, they want everything done yesterday, they’re not concerned about the costs to anyone else in getting a result, and anger is their default mode if the outcome is not to their satisfaction.

Another common characteristic is that they tend towards the extraversion end of the extraversion-introversion dimension (usually referred to as just extraversion).  There are many theories of extraversion, but the best explanatory model is stimulus intensity modulation.  This suggests that extraverts have relatively low levels of resting basal brain arousal: their stimulus-seeking behaviour is aimed at increasing basal arousal to the optimal level.  Introverts, with relatively high levels, modulate arousal downwards by limiting stimulation, and there is ample research evidence for these differences based on objective measures such as anaesthetic sedation thresholds.

Scores on the Challenge of Change Profile scales all have a preferred direction, either high or low.  This is particularly important with scales such as rumination, where having a low score is definitely preferable.  In contrast, there is no value-judgement inherent in being extraverted or introverted.  Although extraversion is often associated with toxic achieving it isn’t in principle toxic, and relating it to management styles requires a more nuanced view that distinguishes between what might be called benign as opposed to malign ways in which it is expressed. 

There are two related but discrete aspects of extraversion, sociability and impulsivity, and the extraversion scale we developed as part of the Challenge of Change Dream Team® programme was designed to distinguish clearly between them.  Sociability reflects the conventional view of extraverts as outgoing and gregarious, and will tend to have a positive effect on team climate.  Impulsiveness – acting on the first idea that comes to mind without necessarily thinking things through – might easily transform into impatience to get on with the plan, and if thwarted, impatience might in turn transform into anger.  Frustration can often be a precursor to anger, but whether or not that happens is more a function of the degree of habitual toxic achieving behaviour than impulsive extraversion.  Toxic achieving is a sufficient cause of negative anger, independently of how extraverted a person might be.

Toxic corporate behaviour is often excused on the grounds that it gets results, but it isn’t a prerequisite for successful management.  To explore what accounted for more positive ratings of managers by their direct reports, one of our Challenge of Change case studies used a variety of data, including scores on the Profile.  We found that positive ratings overwhelmingly related to measures reflecting the ability to express emotion appropriately and to respond sensitively but objectively to team members’ emotional upsets, and managers who possess these ‘people skills’ are in fact no less productive than toxic achievers, but without the cost to the team. 

There is no doubt about the destructive effects that toxic managers inflict on team members, and their behaviour actually impacts on themselves as well.  Our toxic achieving scale was developed in response to shortcomings in the well-known concept of ‘Type-A behaviour’.  Although somewhat outmoded, research evidence shows that Type-As are significantly more vulnerable to heart disease, no doubt as a consequence of the repeated cardiovascular demand imposed by habitual anger.     

One of the questions we’re asked on our training programmes is what should be done about toxic managers.  The best solution would be to not employ them in the first place or to let them go as soon as the negative effects of their behaviour become known, but employees are often fearful of reporting on these managers, so those responsible for making appointments or promotions may not be aware of the damage these individuals are causing.  However, team members do have an option: subjected to what is often unambiguous bullying by these managers, the best solution is to leave.  

This can sound glib, and there’s no doubt about the challenges that changing jobs can incur, but ask yourself these questions: can you do anything to change these managers’ behaviour, or have them dismissed?  While you should certainly make your feelings known, neither is likely.  Are you waiting in the hope that the managers might themselves move on?  This means living in misery that will impact on both your work and home life, and it might not happen for a long time; even if it does happen, how much control would you have over selecting their replacement?  Saying that life’s too short to surrender it to someone else’s anger is a cliché, but on the occasions when we’ve heard back from people who did leave, they invariably wish they’d done so sooner. 

Generation Tosh

Generational categories – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z – are based on the notion that those born within narrow 15-year periods display characteristic behaviour that distinguishes them from those born in years earlier or later.  For example, people born between 1965 and 1980 are supposedly ‘apathetic’, but next generation people are ‘narcissistic’.  Really? 

Like so many anecdotal attempts to categorise people the classification is arbitrary, and has little evidence to support its vague generalisations. Mark McCrindle has dubbed the current cohort (2013-2025) Generation Alpha, a name that is claimed to make sense ‘as it is in keeping with scientific nomenclature’, but switching to Greek doesn’t transform popular mythology into science.  The objection is not so much to arbitrarily creating categories for a bit of fun; the objection is pretending it’s science.        

Are people born between 1981 and 1996 more self-regarding or narcissistic?  The BBC television series ‘Age of the Image’, aired in 2020, opens with a scene of a throng gathered around Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa.  Many will have crossed continents for this opportunity, but what are they all doing?  Taking selfies.  The painting has been relegated to a backdrop for yet another image of beaming, happy me.  The crowd includes people from all age groups; the self-regarding attitude reflected in the scene is no different across supposed generations.  All that’s changed is that cell phones have become more ubiquitous.

Generational ideas have been systematically criticised, most recently and trenchantly by Philip Cohen, who describes the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of these categories as perpetuating a cultural pastiche.  He and other writers do acknowledge the fact of cultural and societal change over time, but tracking it on the basis of misleading categories hinders a proper understanding of complex, reciprocal links between behavioural changes amongst individuals on the one hand, and broad social or technological trends in society on the other.   

Technological innovation usually brings both advantages and disadvantages – obvious examples are nuclear energy or AI.  In the same way, the convenience and immediacy of communication technology is accompanied by the sometimes personally devastating effects of false comparisons.  Presented with endless beaming selfie happiness can make any personal unhappiness seem even deeper; it can be hard to remember that the inane grinning may just be a show put on for the picture, by people who might in fact be equally unhappy.

Demonstrating the validity of ‘soft’ data is certainly problematic, as we discovered when seeking to demonstrate the effects of the Challenge of Change Resilience Training®.  The gold standard, essential in trials of new drug treatments, is the randomised controlled trial.   Our solution was to compare criterion scores for trained participants with scores for groups who had received a dummy training equivalent.  The study was based on a long inter-test interval, and we stratified the samples by factors such as age and job experience as well as controlling for variables such as mutual comparison.  Within those constraints, the training was shown to significantly reduce sickness-absence amongst the test participants compared with the controls (Roger & Hudson, 1995). 

Providing reliable evidence for generational differences is well-nigh impossible, yet references to Generation X, Z or whatever trip off the tongue as if they were real.  Individual people in any generation might well be apathetic or self-regarding, but claiming that these characteristics generalise within age-bands is intellectually irresponsible.  Unfortunately, repeated usage leads to the ‘illusory truth effect’: say something dubious often enough and it gets accepted as being true.  Just so with the generation myth.

Righting Wrongs

‘What’s wrong?’ is a fundamental question in science research, but the motive for posing it is curiosity rather than a cynical attempt to find fault.  It is also not necessarily an argument for the wholesale rejection of existing views that the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ is sometimes taken to imply. Einstein’s theory didn’t render Newton redundant, any more than quantum mechanics replaced relativity.  Progress in science is a cumulative process where existing findings are consolidated or revised, punctuated by occasional large jumps.

The question has a parallel in the work of the English Franciscan friar William, born in Ockham, Surrey, in 1285.  Better known as William of Occam, his lasting legacy is Occam’s Razor, which he expressed in Latin as entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem – ‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’.  In other words, the best answer is the simplest one, and the principle of Occam’s Razor, slicing away redundancy, is a defining feature of science.  Its importance was echoed by the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s own version, Feynman’s Razor: if you can’t explain something in simple language you probably don’t understand it.

Research on stress is most often found in psychology, a field in which there is perhaps the least evidence for Occam’s Razor.  The discipline enjoys the cachet of calling itself a science, but is replete with superfluity and obfuscation.  There is no chemobabble or biobabble equivalent to psychobabble.  Psychological findings are also seldom exposed to another cornerstone of science, replication.  Current attempts to rectify this are indeed finding that many of the results might in reality be mere chance effects.  Psychology research does deploy scientific methods, but that doesn’t make it a science.

The programme of research that yielded the evidence base for the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® began in the early 1980s, by interrogating the then-current research on stress and stress management with ‘what’s wrong?’  The answer was ‘most of it’.  One example is the false distinction between so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stress.  They’re both called stress, which confuses the more rational distinction between highly motivating pressure on the one hand, and debilitating stress on the other.  The more recent specious assertion that stress can be your friend simply compounds the misunderstanding.

Another problem was the reliance on life-event scales to measure stress.  The scales list a range of things that might have happened to you over a preceding period, typically three to six months.  Each event supposedly impacts on some hypothetical capacity to adapt, so the more events you endorse the more your capacity is depleted and the more likely you are to suffer from stress.  There have been ample criticisms of the approach over recent decades but it is still widely believed to be true, no doubt because it offers the opportunity to blame something or someone else for your unhappiness.  

Since so much of the earlier work was conceptually and methodologically flawed, we disregarded it entirely in the search for a different approach.  We began by creating a psychometrically reliable instrument for measuring stress, using a unique scenario approach to generate a more objective set of potential items.  Subjecting them to rigorous statistical analysis resulted in the Emotion Control Questionnaire and its sequelae (Roger and co-workers, 1987, 1989, 2011, 2016), which included a prominent scale assessing the tendency to ruminate or churn over emotional upsets. 

The questionnaire presented the first psychometrically adequate measure of rumination, so there was little evidence available to indicate what its role might be in stress.  We sought to find physiological rather than psychological ways to explore this question, and as reported in a previous blog (Blog 62, Liberating Your Mind), we discovered that rumination compromises the homeostatic cycle.  Instead of a natural alternation between peaks of action and troughs of recovery, continuing to ruminate about emotional upsets serves to link the peaks and minimise the troughs, which impacts on both cardiovascular and immune functions.  Rumination also serves to prolong the misery we feel about the upsets, which is why defining stress as ruminating about emotional upsets shows exactly why stress has a negative impact on our well-being.

Given the earlier statement about the cumulative nature of research, what, if anything, can be salvaged from earlier work on stress?  The focus of the Challenge of Change is on what we describe as everyday stress, which we attribute to the process of rumination rather than to the events themselves.  However, exposure to particularly traumatic events might exceed your capacity to cope, and may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Contrary to the impression sometimes conveyed in the media, PTSD is rare compared to the widespread experience of everyday stress, but when it occurs it impacts significantly on the lives of sufferers. 

Although rumination still plays a significant role, the source of PTSD is unambiguously a particular event or set of events, and treating the disorder requires intensive intervention to help people come to terms with the event and its aftermath.  The threshold that separates everyday from post-traumatic stress is imprecise, since it might vary from one individual to another and even across different situations for the same person, but PTSD can reliably be diagnosed from a series of explicit symptoms, such as debilitating flash-backs (see also my previous Blog 41, Carried Over The Threshold).

‘What’s wrong?’ is a question that will continue to be posed, and research on rumination will undoubtedly be modified or even superseded by later work, but the extent to which findings are integrated into subsequent research depends on their reliability and validity.  Those with a weak foundation in science might disappear altogether – phrenology is a case in point – but the powerful evidence for the effects of rumination in both experimental and applied contexts will provide a well-established contribution to future developments.

Liberating Your Mind

The contemporary version of mindfulness originated in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in the late 1970s developed what he called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to help patients cope with chronic conditions, especially chronic pain.  In an influential HuffPost Contributor article, Purser and Loy offered a trenchant critique of what this work on mindfulness has become, which they refer to as ‘McMindfulness’, equivalent to a standard hamburger with little nutritional value.  

Mindfulness has joined a long list of panaceas promoted as offering greater happiness and good health, from supposed ‘Palaeolithic’ diets to meditation.  They all fade more or less quickly in popularity, defeated either by the discipline required to maintain them or being exposed as little more than fads.  Like meditation, mindfulness is promoted in part by invoking the cachet of being ‘Buddhist-inspired’, but to make mindfulness more acceptable as a means for enhancing corporate productivity, there is an accompanying insistence that the modern version is not tied to its Buddhist origins.  

You can’t have it both ways, and as Purser and Loy point out, the transformation of mindfulness into a marketable product divests it of its ethical roots.  Buddhist mindfulness ‘was intended for far more than relieving a headache, reducing blood pressure, or helping executives become better focused and more productive’.  A notable Buddhist teacher during the 20th Century put the desire for happiness in perspective:

“Even though you may be unhappy, it doesn’t matter.  Is that unhappiness your ‘self’?  Is there any substance to it?  Is it real?   Unhappiness is a mere flash of feeling that appears and then vanishes.  Happiness is the same.  Is there any consistency to happiness?  Is it truly an entity?  It’s simply a feeling that flashes suddenly and is gone.”
    (Ajahn Chah: Food For The Heart)

Purser and Loy do acknowledge the benefits that some people gain from attending mindfulness training programmes, and it is undoubtedly true that happy people are more effective and efficient than unhappy ones.  The important question, though, is what you think is the cause of your feelings of joy or misery.  For example, if you believe that your job or your manager is the source of your stress, then when you’re at work you’re bound to feel stressed – a mistaken belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

The mistake is the attribution of stress to stimuli such as work or your boss, which is the essence of why using life event scales to measure stress is so misguided.  The methodological and statistical shortcomings of the approach have been demonstrated, but a more general problem is that it creates victimhood – we become victims of whatever circumstance we imagine is causing our stress.  Many of the situations we find ourselves in are beyond our control, so we also end up feeling powerless.

Unfortunately, there is a persistent belief in the idea that there are ‘stressors’, mainly because it provides us with someone or something to blame for the way we feel.  In contrast to this stimulus-based approach, the Challenge of Change Resilience Training focuses instead on the way we respond to events.  Change is a constant of life, good times alternating with less good ones, and resilience is the ability to negotiate the changes without becoming stressed.  

In practise, this means not ruminating about emotional upsets.  Rumination is what stress is: in the absence of churning over what ifs and if-onlys, there is no stress.  There is still pressure, but responding appropriately to pressure – the demand to perform – is motivating and energising.  Pressure does lead to an increase in cardiovascular activation, mainly through an increase in adrenaline, but adrenaline is not a ‘stress hormone’, just a hormone doing what it’s designed to do: facilitate action.  

The increase in heart-rate and blood pressure provoked by adrenaline is entirely natural, but activation is in turn normally linked to recovery and repair.  Peaks of activation are followed by troughs of recovery, in a natural homeostatic cycle, but you need only think about emotional upsets to provoke and maintain an increase in adrenaline.  Negative rumination provokes and sustains the peaks, preventing adequate recovery and repair.  It also prolongs the misery of negative churning, which is why stress, defined properly as rumination, has a significant impact on both our physical health and our well-being.  

The good news is that rumination is primarily a learned habit, and the Challenge of Change offers a simple four-step process for changing the habit. Although it is not aligned explicitly with mindfulness, a central component of the training is controlling attention – harnessing and focussing awareness in an intentional way, which is one of the features of mindfulness.  The training also provides a clear resolution for the question begged by the name, ‘mindfulness’: what is your mind full of?  

It might be filled with thoughts about your next holiday or tonight’s meal, which in the training is called waking sleep.  A synonym for this is daydreaming, which we all do to some extent.  It isn’t damaging, but it can impact on efficiency: if your attention has been captured by fantasies about your next holiday, the piece of work in front of you comes to a standstill.  The real problem, though, is when negative emotion is added.  When your mind is filled with scenarios about emotional upsets, daydreams are transformed into nightmares.

To free yourself from stress, the first two steps of waking up and controlling attention need to be followed by the final two in the sequence.  Becoming detached is about being able to maintain perspective, not catastrophising and turning molehills into mountains.   This allows you to know the difference between constructive thinking and rumination.  Finally, just let go, not of the task itself but of the negative rumination that might accompany it.  Your mind is then left filled with attention, available to be given intentionally wherever it is needed.  In fact, it was never absent, it was just hijacked by rumination.