Office issues are unwelcome bedmates
Leadership is not for everybody. Some perform exceptionally well, and some fail miserably. You may be successful as a leader, but for sure you will, from time to time, be attacked by self-doubt, asking yourself questions like: “How can I keep intelligent individuals from making dumb group choices? What can I do to make the workplace less toxic? Why do I sometimes feel threatened by my best people?”
“Good leadership requires dealing effectively with messy, quirky, unpredictable, confusing, irrational, and clumsy people. That is what makes the business of leadership so insanely difficult and complex,” says clinical psychologist Nicole Lipkin in her book, What Keeps Leaders Up at Night. In this engaging tome, Lipkin explains the psychology behind many of the human behaviors that affect productivity and sound decision-making in the workplace.
With all of the responsibilities leaders of organizations have today, this insightful book is an excellent reminder that your people are what make your organizations great. It provides insight into why some of them act the way they do and how to better manage them, starting with yourself as the leader. Here are sharable principles from Lipkin’s research-based work.
• Understanding why good bosses sometimes act bad. Good bosses become ineffective because they’re too busy to win, too proud to see what’s going on, and too afraid to lose. Most executives are hardwired to act like stereotypical TV bosses — disregarding advice and sticking to their status as leaders — and they have to reset their thinking.
Being too busy to win speaks to the constant battle you are fighting in this crazy, workaholic, constantly wired, and connected global community that you live in. When you’re overwhelmed, you lose your temper more readily. You get anxious. You procrastinate more, forget things, and lose concentration. You get into that kind of mode where you’re writing a million to-do lists, but you’re not really accomplishing anything. You can’t be a great boss when you’re way too overwhelmed or busy; a ball or two is going to drop.
Being too proud to see involves three things: letting yourself get so tied to an idea that you won’t let it go, refusing to heed the advice of others, and relying on your past successes at the expense of weighing different options or solutions. All three of these behaviors not only damage performance and productivity; they can also very much undermine your credibility as a leader.
Being too afraid to lose happens when you worry excessively about failing to get the right results, when you question and second-guess every step along the way, avoid decisions and commitments that might cause mistakes, or get involved in every detail, particularly as deadlines loom. More than the other variations, this thwarts creative problem-solving and impedes team progress. Good bosses who fall into this trap often worry about appearing weak. They mistakenly associate failure and mistakes with weakness and incompetence.
• Making people listen to advice. You are a skilled influencer if you recognize that your greatest power stems from the sincerity and genuineness of your relationships, which spring from a conscious decision to embrace a life philosophy based on how you interact with people rather than what you can get from them.
As a human being you are meant to form relationships, the foundation of which is trust and mutual influence. Insincerity, the misuse of power, and manipulative attempts to gain influence quickly crack that foundation. If you focus on treating your people with kindness and respect, and let them know that you value them and their work, you will receive the same in return. Your influence will grow, and so will your personal and business success.
• Losing your cool in hot situations. In your fast-paced, change-filled business world, you deal with an amazing amount of stress. That stress builds up, day after day, and becomes a constant fact of corporate life that’s non-negotiable. But in truth your reaction to stress is negotiable, and an effective way of managing it makes you and everyone around you more efficient and productive. You need to learn how to cope with it.
If you are suffering chronic stress, you can’t manage other people as effectively as you would hope in stress-inducing situations. You might get some preliminary results, but for all of the exhausted effort, ultimately the task becomes hopeless. Stress management does not mean stress eradication. Rather, it means learning how to handle your own responses to the stress that unavoidably crops up every day of your life as a leader. Choosing to give attention to what’s going on in your head, observing your body’s functional responses and how others perceive you mark the initial confident strides toward dealing successfully with stress.
• A good fight going bad. What do Cain, Abel and you — who strive for success in the contemporary workplace — have in common? The two Biblical characters — just like you — suffer from bouts of envy from time to time. Left unchecked, envy in the workplace can quickly turn healthy competition into a cheap, extended fight. Occasional feelings of envy do not make one a bad person. It is a natural emotion triggered by the same chemistry that makes you feel good when you eat your favorite chocolate candy. The emotions underlying a good fight gone bad in the workplace often occur as a result of a sense of injustice, contention for resources or standing or feelings of inferiority. A bad fight can do a lot of damage.
• When ambition sabotages success. It’s a professional paradox. Nothing will make or break a company more surely than the way you handle change. Will you remain stalled in the mud and expire? Or embrace change and flourish? To flourish you need to become more aware of the psychology behind your own and your people’s responses to change. That awareness in and of itself will help guide better decisions about the future. “You have witnessed stories where ambition was so strong it actually became the person’s downfall. Julius Caesar was a stunning example of such failure. And he presents the reign of his adopted son and successor, Caesar Augustus, as a success that not only led to the second ruler’s deification, but brought about a period of 150 years of peace known as the Pax Romana,” writes Lipkin.
You have a voice inside your head with the ability to influence “cognitive dissonance.” In other words, when you do wrong, you come up with justifications, reasons, excuses, all to make what you did “right.”
• Good teams going bad. Common sense suggests that a team will accomplish more than an individual. But this is often not the case. In an experiment in 1913 it was revealed that the more men there were pulling the rope, the less each man pulled. Each man worked almost half as hard in a group as he did when he worked alone.
From the first primates that climbed down from the trees, to our cave-dwelling ancestors, to modern-day homo sapiens, and from little mom-and-pop operations to expansive multinational businesses, people always have and always will feel impelled to form and join groups. Every group — from a mixed-double tennis team to a 250-strong sales force — comes under the influence of group dynamics. Understanding those dynamics helps leaders create and manage teams more effectively and to keep them from falling prey to negative group behaviors that can make a good team go bad.
Sometimes a competitive climate can turn nasty. Lipkin offered this tip: “Create friendly competition, but not an ultimate ‘win or lose’ challenge among team members, and focus on how everyone’s individual efforts help the entire team achieve success.”
• Engaging people is recognizing how much meaning work can give to people’s identities. Employees who feel fully engaged in their work have higher rates of retention, lower rates of turnover, reduced absenteeism, greater productivity, enhanced profitability, fewer workplace accidents, and more intense customer satisfaction and loyalty. In a positive culture of engagement, people naturally go the extra mile for their team, their customers, and their company. To help people conveniently remember the importance of employee engagement, Lipkin introduced SLAM, an acronym that stands for social connection, leadership, excellence, aligned culture and meaningful work and life. Its holistic point of view respects all of the important aspects of human psychology, physiology, emotions, attitudes and behaviors.
People go from totally engaged to seriously deflated and disengaged because of a breach of something called the psychological contract. That’s a person’s belief about the mutual obligations that should exist between an employer and an employee. Some are stated and tangible obligations, like “If you give me pay and benefits, I’ll give you work output and time.” Others are unstated and intangible obligations, like “You provide me with a positive work culture, and an opportunity and I’ll give you commitment, loyalty, and effort.”
As a leader, what keeps you up at night? Is it the anxiety, the stress dreams, the fear of competition, problematic employees or your own attitude as a leader? It is hard not to bring these issues to bed, but they are unwelcome bedmates. And they have to be resolved in your head before you hit the sack.
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