Antivenom

Heaven help me, I've just been holidaying with a Toxic Achiever.  Do these people never relax? 

Toxic Achievers are organised, and want everyone else to be organised too.  The upside: because of them the Holiday Will Happen, and as Camp Manager they're focused on confirming arrangements, making sure we get a great spot and that everyone will pay their share of the deposit on time.  The downside is that holidaying with a Toxic Achiever means that everyone has to be up bright and early to start the day as there's a lot to do and we can all have Fun!  We have to be first to the beach because we need the spot under the tree otherwise we won't have Fun!  While you and I would be happy with a slab of Yet More Xmas Ham and a bread roll, our Toxic Achiever cooks toasted sandwiches on an open fire on the beach because this too would be Fun, and after all we can't just relax! 

After lunch there's More Fun to be had – let's climb the hill in the midday heat to look at the view – and when we get back to camp someone has to rinse the togs and towels, someone has to peel the potatoes, someone has to sweep the tents.  No skiving off either – what do you think this is, a holiday?  Everyone co-operates of course, because we all need an organiser and a planner, and it's just too scary not to.  We silently agree to not question, just to keep our heads down and go along with it.  

An amusing holiday tale you probably recognise, but it isn't just about holidays.  Toxic achievers are the impatient drivers behind you, hooting the instant the lights change to green.  And at work, if you challenge their impatience and anger they'll always justify it:  "I'm not angry,  I'm just fed up with their incompetence: I've asked them twice now to sort it out."  Who wants to live like this?  Actually, there is a relationship between Toxic Achieving and cardiovascular strain, so they may well be shortening their lives by behaving in this poisonous way! Our Challenge of Change Profile include a measure of Toxic Achieving and we've found it to be the third most important scale after Ruminating (#1) and Detachment (#2) because of the unnecessary demand it puts on the cardiovascular system.

Do you recognise any of these behaviours in yourself?  The tendency to get frustrated, impatient and/or grumpy, to want everything done immediately, to be so driven that everything is turned into work? Here's what you can start doing to make life easier for you (and others), and still have Fun!:

1. Become an observer of your mood and behaviour.  Notice when you are getting impatient, angry or annoyed.  Initially you might not be able to do it at the time when you are caught up in it, but perhaps at the end of the day, make a habit of reflecting back on your day.  With practice in noticing how you are feeling you will be able to catch yourself earlier.

2. When you do spot it, don't immediately justify your behaviour.  Just acknowledge that you lost it, and be more aware of the negative consequences for everyone around you.  This is the really hard bit – habitual toxic achievers find it difficult to not justify how they are! 

3. When you catch yourself like that, bring your attention back to the here and now. Stop thinking about all the things that are on your list, everything that has to be done next.  Just be in this moment in time and enjoy that.  Be under the tree on the beach for as long as you can!

4. Remember that your breath can be your best friend. When you are het-up, shut your eyes and concentrate on breathing in and out.  Think of nothing else, even for a few minutes.  It will calm you down.

5. Stop imagining all the what ifs and if onlys. As Mark Twain taught us, most of them don't happen anyway.  By all means have a back-up plan, but once you have that in place, let the rest of the negative imagining go.

6. Question your time lines. What would really happen if it was a day late? Why does it have to be done by Friday at 5? Who is going to work on it over the weekend anyway?

7. Be kinder to yourself.  It's OK to waste some time, it's not the end of the world to miss a deadline (probably no one will notice), people can like you not only for what you have achieved, but also for just being around for them.

Lizards and Leaders

In the course of delivering the Challenge of Change Resilience programme, participants will from time to time suggest that rumination must have a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have evolved. Evolutionary oversimplifications of this kind are widespread and persistent: as early as 1966 Robert Ardrey claimed in The Territorial Imperative that a human being is 'as much a territorial animal as is a mockingbird singing in the clear California night'.  The basis for his argument was that humans own property, but let's dispense with these sorts of glib notions by looking at the evidence. 

Land is bought and sold in the marketplace, and we don't need our backyards to survive.  Mockingbirds sing to proclaim their territory, which they depend upon for survival and which they'll defend with aggression.  Aggression in animals other than humans serves two fundamental ends: sexual selection and food protection. It is mostly engaged in by males, and a dominant male who can see off his rivals will impregnate more females and thereby ensure the predominance of his genes in the gene pool.  A more aggressive animal is also more likely to eject from its territory any other animals that might compete for the food available within it.

So how many males reading this had to engage in hand-to-hand combat to win their partners?  How many readers have an aisle in their local supermarket that is exclusively theirs, and will attack anyone daring to take food from the shelves in it?  Here's a different way of thinking about it: our 'territorial' behaviour is governed primarily by a desire for privacy. Unlike other animals, we don't defecate, urinate or have sex publicly, unless we're very drunk.  Humans are a species of animal, about that there can be no doubt at all, but we're not just subject to the dictates of our hindbrains. What we have going for us is a comparatively massive cortex, and with that comes the capacity to act using rational judgement rather than simple genetic imperatives.

So why do we ruminate?  Rumination is mistaken for reflection or problem-solving, despite the fact that it self-evidently never solves anything.  The real reason is that we have a distinct sense of self, described in the Resilience programme as the central character in all of our ruminations, called 'me'.  What we're attempting to do when we ruminate is to retrieve our self-esteem from perceived slights.  In reality it does nothing of the sort – professional ruminators go on and on round the same scenarios, putting the same perceived offender slowly to death 110 times.  The scenario eventually peters out, only to be replaced by the next one.  And when anger is involved, our language helps us to justify rather than to question our behaviour, as in, 'I was justifiably angry!'   No you weren't, you just lost it.  'It' here is control of attention, which is at the core of CoC Resilience: if you want to be free of stress, you need to start waking up from the nightmare of rumination and controlling your attention.

How does all this play out?  Suppose someone produces a report that doesn't quite meet the required standard.  Scenario 1: the manager sighs out loud, looks angry and says 'you've missed the point!  You're just not getting it.  We're out of time now, I'll get someone else to do it.'  Scenario 2: person's manager sits down with them, starts by making an explicit distinction between the work and the person who did the work, suggests that together they explore the shortcoming of the work and what needs to be done to improve the report, and asks what further training might be needed.  

The manager in Scenario 1 is a mere manager, the one in Scenario 2 is a leader.  Direct reports to the former are confused and anxious – they're not given any constructive pointers so they don't learn and give up trying.  Direct reports to the latter willingly do what they're asked because they respect their leader.  Unfortunately the first variety does get results, but at significant cost – the team ends up afraid and passive, and because the manager's style is to divide and rule, only their favourites develop.  If you wanted a physiological context, the manager in our example is a reptile, relying on what's sometimes described as our 'reptilian' (i.e. evolutionarily ancient) hindbrain; the leader is a human being, employing processes dictated by the pre-frontal cortex. 

Managers like the one in Scenario 1 are likely to engage in justifications, such as 'I may have nuclear explosions, but 10 minutes later I'm my wonderful self again'.  Nuclear explosions cause fallout and massive collateral damage, and there should be no room for this kind of primitive behaviour in organisations.  Unfortunately lots of people with work experience will have had one of these managers from hell, but they're also likely to have experienced enlightened leadership.  What distinguishes them is precisely the kinds of behaviour human brains are capable of.  One of the case studies we conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the Challenge of Change Resilience training programme sought to discover the reasons for more positive feedback to team leaders from their direct reports, and the significant predictors were the ability of the leader to express emotion appropriately and to have what we call 'detached compassion'.  

A synonym for detached compassion is empathy, which is being able to understand how others feel but maintaining sufficient detachment to avoid becoming over-involved.  In other words, leaders behave in an emotionally intelligent way, motivated by cooperation and a genuine concern for the wellbeing of their people.  The only person lizards are concerned about is themselves. 

Smash, Grab and Burble

We know that expressing emotion is a vital part of resolving experiences and building resilience.  Those people who soldier on, denying or ignoring their emotions will have a much tougher time dealing with life's rapids.  American Vietnam veterans returned, defeated, to the USA after an unpopular war and felt unable to talk about their experiences. Many took years to re-integrate back into their work and personal lives, some never did, and some suffered flashbacks years later.  In a more everyday context, you may know people who when asked why they are angry, snap back through clenched jaws 'I'm not angry!'  Or the person who tells you in a high pitched voice that they aren't stressed. 

You may work with someone who is so closed off you find impossible to read them: are they mad, bad, glad or sad? This can be a significant issue for managers.  People like to get to know their boss and to be able to anticipate them.  If they cannot be read, it's hard to form a connection with them. One of our case studies showed that managers who receive the most positive feedback from their reports are characterised by being able to express how they feel appropriately, being sensitive to how others feel and maintaining a detached perspective on issues.

If we asked the people in the above examples to do the Challenge of Change Profile, they would most likely score high on the Emotional Inhibition scale.  Their justification for not expressing how they feel will include not wanting to burden others, but the more important reason that emerged clearly from our research is what we call 'fear of disclosure' – the feeling that expressing emotion is weak and makes you vulnerable.  The opposite is true.  We all know the old adage that 'a problem shared is a problem halved', and what happens when we talk to others about our concerns is that we begin the process of putting our emotional responses into perspective, so that we can move on to resolving them and letting them go. 

Women are more adept at this than men.  Unemployed, single men have some of the worst mental health statistics: they are blokes conditioned not to talk about their emotions and there is no one to talk to.  Women are far more emotionally intelligent generally, but while we did find a significant gender bias favouring women in expressing emotion, it isn't exclusively to do with gender.  People have different styles of expressing the emotions they experience.

Not so long ago Cynthia witnessed a smash and grab at a very expensive, exclusive jewellery store.  Alas she wasn't inside purchasing a Rolex, she just happened to be walking by.  After giving descriptions and a statement to the police she was asked if she wanted witness support, which is a form of debrief and counselling session.  What she wanted was to get home, ring all her extended family to tell them to watch TV because she was a star witness in a story that they would show that night!  Had she accepted the support, the counsellor would have asked her to tell her story AND to talk about how she felt: was she frightened?  Disappointed in her response? 

When she rang her six brothers and sisters and her friends to tell them about the experience, she was really debriefing herself: each time the story got told she developed more of an understanding and more perspective into the event and her emotions.  You only need a few people to talk to: you don't need 300 face book friends.  And work colleagues really matter. It is important to be able to say 'I'm worried sick about this presentation,' 'I'm gutted I didn't get that role.'  Workmates get it in a way that not everyone at home will.  After a negative event at work, the process of talking the experience through with colleagues is an important part of resolving it.

Some organisations actively promote this practise, for example, assigning an experienced buddy to offer support after an accident. They don't necessarily need to offer a solution, the key is really listening, without making judgements. Some people might need professional counselling which is independent of work, and most organisations have EAP counselling services for this purpose. Counselling is a more structured process of understanding and resolving emotions, and although counsellors are more skilled it still won't work for the person concerned unless they can unlock their emotions.

The purpose of expressing emotion is to help you to reach the point of resolution.  You probably know people who endlessly tell and retell their story without anything being resolved; more often than not they are just story-telling rather than talking about the emotional impact they experienced.  It's draining for you to listen to, and you end up either avoiding the topic or avoiding them!  On the other hand, some people can be too emotionally uninhibited, bleeding emotionally all over the place. You need to be cognisant of the time and place as well as your role when expressing your emotions. 

What to do if you are high on the emotional inhibition scale

1. Start expressing positive emotions.  Learn to talk about the good experiences you've had, the fun you had in the weekend, the laughs you shared with work mates, the joy or excitement of the concert you went to.
2. When people say 'how was your weekend' don't stop at just saying 'good.'  Say why it was good – what you loved about it, the company you enjoyed and why.
3. Likewise when you go home at the end of the day and you get asked 'how was your day' don't just say 'good' and leave it at that. Try to find a different word each day and then explain why, for example: 'Today was a load of fun. We all got together to talk about the project and we brainstormed a lot of ideas, some of which were crazy!' or, 'Today was immensely frustrating. The plant kept breaking down and we couldn't figure out why. We had to re-do a lot of work.  It was such a waste.'
4. Next time you're at the supermarket checkout and you're asked how your day has been, watch the way you dismiss what the checkout person has said as just mechanical and automatic.  Yes, they are all told to say this, imagine how tedious it can be for them, especially when they see people getting irritated!  Next time, make eye-contact, really talk to the individual, not the 'checkout person'.  You don't have to go on at length, just say how your day was and ask how theirs has been, but mean it.  Costs nothing, and the reward is being present instead of absent.
5. You may find it easier to write about how you feel.  Many people know the cathartic experience of banging out a grumpy email (don't send it though!) and then to return to it even a few hours later only to find you aren't so tense about it anymore.  Some people don't have anyone to share their emotions with so this approach can be especially helpful.

I'm Stickin' With You

The immediate feedback we receive from our Resilience courses is overwhelmingly positive and very humbling, and speaking to participants we meet later shows that the key messages are remembered by many of them.

We know that if people practise the four steps they will become more resilient – in other words, less effected by the negative impact of stress.  In the British Police study we could even show that this resulted in a reduction in sick leave, which is not surprising: we know that people who are stressed have weakened immune systems.  The Police study also showed that having a follow-up reminder had a 'booster' effect reducing stress. 

To help keep the message alive in people's lives we developed the web-based follow-up programme, the Challenge of Change Refresher, but we often think about what more we can do to make the training stick.  Here are some simple things that organisations and teams can do to reinforce the learning.  

1. Reinforce and build the language

Most importantly, use the word 'pressure' rather than 'stress' to describe the feeling that comes as demand increases.   People often describe this differentiation as an "aha" moment for them and that seeing pressure for what it is eliminates the stress.

Use the language you hear on the course in your conversations, for example: "I'm ruminating;" "We need to get into the loft and view this with perspective;" "I'm too attached to this;' "it's time to let it go."  Teams who use the language like this develop a short-hand code to maintain resilience and to help one another in pressure situations.

2. Leaders lead

In a recent session in an organisation the CEO said in front of his team "I need to get into the loft about this. I'm getting too het up and need some distance." That is not just helpful for him but it is fabulous modelling. 

Leaders can also ask coaching questions such as: "What would you need to do to ruminate less about this?"  "Where do you think you have a unique contribution and can add real value?"  "How important is this really?"; "What parts can you delegate or let go of?"

3. Establish rituals 

In one organisation they try to start their meetings with the question "who's here now?"  This isn't a roll call but rather a signal that you need everyone to Wake Up and be fully present in the meeting, not still in the last meeting or thinking about an email you need to send.  We've all experienced meetings where people's attention has been all over the place, but also meetings when people have been fully focused on the topic.  The difference is both immediate and obvious.

In another organisation they often have a mindful cup of tea together where the team sits down and someone directs their attention to the various senses involved in having a hot drink. 

One woman who leads a difficult monthly meeting tells us that she either spends five minutes in the Boardroom noticing her breathing before the meeting, or she listens to the eight minute CD we give out on the course.  She also told us that her and her team sometimes start or end their meetings listening to the CD!

4. Review meeting 

Spend some time in a regular meeting to review one particular aspect of the course.  Perhaps just asking people if they have been aware of their Waking Sleep and whether they have been practising Waking Up.  You could also review the communication section by having your team identify an internal or external customer, and then discussing what behaviours and habits they see in both parties.  The reminder can be really simple: in another organisation they have a sheet of paper on the wall in meeting rooms showing the separation of the person from the work they do.  One man also now has the 'loft' drawing on his notice board.

Don't forget too that we have the Challenge of Change Refresher programme, which is web-based.  Your team could watch the Refresher together.

5. Do the course again

A surprising number of people do the course for a second time – either the full day or the half day.  They tell us that they do it again because they have lost the discipline, need a top-up or a refresher, or want to deepen their understanding. 

These are just five simple strategies you could use, and we would be very interested in hearing what others are doing to keep the training fresh in their organisation.

Me First!

There have been many references over the past few years to managers being narcissistic or even psychopathic. Unfortunately there's been no clear definition of these terms, and since we have established conditioned responses to these words they end causing a great deal of confusion.

The best way to think about any kind of mental disorder is to place it on a continuum.  One of the worst consequences of thinking that there are discrete, separate 'conditions' is that the world gets divided up into people who have it and people who don't.  The DSM system of diagnostic descriptions has become a tyranny of narrow thinking, which is why it keeps getting elaborated to try to account for what doesn't quite fit.  

Instead, we need to place things on continua, and to think about them as distributed right across any random sample as bell-curves.  In the context of schizophrenia, for example, this meant introducing the concept of schizotypy.  At one end of the distribution there are people with no trace of schizophrenic behaviour, and at the other end are people with the full complement and who can reasonably be thought of as schizophrenic.  In between, where most people are, someone might well exhibit some behaviours that are similar to those found at the schizophrenic end of the continuum.  If you think in a narrow way they would have to go into one of two categories or 'types', normal or schizophrenic.  

To take another example, there is a popular belief that people can be placed in one of two categories – they're either extravert or introvert.  This simply isn't true.  Most people are in the middle of a bell-curve reflecting basal or resting level of arousal in their brains; they're best described as 'ambiverts'.  Extraverts (relatively low levels of basal arousal) and introverts (relative high levels) are found only at the ends of the distribution.  Fortunately there is powerful evidence to support the bell-curve, using anaesthetics: if extraverts have lower levels of basal arousal they ought to require less anaesthetic to reach the sedation threshold than introverts, and the effects should be reflected across the bell curve with progressively more drug being require as you move from extravert to extravert, which is exactly what happens.

The theme of this blog is managers behaving 'psychopathically', and using a bell-curve again helps to explain.  One of the key features of psychopathy is self-serving behaviour, looking after Number 1 even at the expense of others.  While I was at the University of York my team developed an interest in this, and developed a scale to measure self-serving behaviour.  Given to random samples of people, the responses were bell-curve distributed.  Psychopathy as a clinical problem appears only at end of the bell-curve, and these are people where the behaviour is so extreme they'll commit murder if it suits them.  At the other end of the distribution are people who are genuinely and systematically altruistic – their actions will always take account of the effect they might have on others, and they don't do things just to suit themselves.  In the middle, where most people are, there are degrees of self-centredness, and it is hardly surprising that at least some of them end up in senior management positions.  

The effects that these people have on organisations are disastrous.  They're in it for themselves, and they'll divide and rule, getting people on their side and using those people against others in the team.  And they can be very popular – they're often extremely skilled manipulators.  In the Challenge of Change resilience programme, this kind of behaviour is measured by one of the scales on the pre-training Challenge of Change Profile that participants complete beforehand.  The scale is called Toxic Achieving.  High scores do achieve goals, but in a poisonous way.  If you score low it isn't that you're not motivated to achieve, you just don't do it poisonously.  To turn the motive to achieve into something toxic, you add in time pressure (as in, 'everything yesterday, sunshine!'), the ends justifying the means ('just get a result, I don't care how'), and anger if the result isn't achieved.

Sound familiar?  When we illustrate Toxic Achieving we ask people to bring to mind the manager from hell, and no-one has any difficulty doing so.  That's certainly our experience in training: you can go into any organisation and there'll be two teams with the same workload, one team happy and the other miserable.  The cause is almost always management behaviour, or rather the behaviour of managers rather than leaders.  Any idiot can manage; leadership is a different matter.  Cynthia's work on business acumen has shown clearly that it is only partly to do with having financial literacy – being able to work with people is equally important, and this is described by a concern for helping their direct reports to develop their careers and putting time and effort into cultivating strong relationships with the team.  In other words, not behaving in a self-serving way.  The other feature of psychopathic behaviour that has been highlighted is narcissism, and narcissism and self-serving behaviour go hand-in hand, two sides of the same coin.

What's to be done about it?  Unfortunately, probably not a lot.  Psychopathy as a clinical problem that puts people behind bars has been shown to be remarkably resistant to change, which isn't too surprising – if I think I'm so wonderful and the centre of the Universe, why would I need to change?  People have to want to change, and even broaching the way a toxic manager behaves is likely to provoke justification for the behaviour with little commitment to making any changes, despite the misery suffered by their reports, and they can also often point to the fact that they do get results.

Unfortunately these results are obtained at great cost to others, and what's needed is the boldness to confront self-serving behaviour head-on.  Since toxic managers are also inevitably bullies there is a lever available for working on them – most organisations have quite explicit strategies for tackling bullying.  If a team is unhappy, endlessly complaining about the team leader, make sure first that it isn't just whingeing.  If what lies behind it is a toxic manager, get them in front of a management panel and challenge their behaviour directly, with the condition that if it doesn't change they no longer have a role in the organisation.  Unfortunately self-serving behaviour is justified and portable – they'll simple take it into their next role, so make sure that even if the manager has actually produced results, make their behaviour and the reasons they're moving on explicit in references – don't shy away from using words like selfish, self-centred and narcissistic.  Most of all start to build all of this systematically into management training, so that we can produce more leaders and fewer managers.