How Psychology Affects Your Team’s Throughput and Creativity
Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash
Stress will destroy both your productivity and creative problem-solving ability — just the things you and your team need to compete in this economy. But the majority of leaders remain stubbornly in denial of the problem of stress and its effects on organizations.
For some time, modern cognitive and behavioral sciences have shown a strong link between increased stress and steep reductions in our ability to perform the creative problem solving required to produce the high quality of output demanded by today’s work environments. Stress is definitely crushing most teams, causing missed deadlines, shoddy work, unchecked conflict and outbursts on the job, employee burnout, and higher turnover.
Stress Impairs Normal Cognition
The widely acclaimed book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, presented much concrete experimental evidence showing how stress from either physical or mental over-exertion dramatically impairs the brain’s ability to function normally.
The brain, explains Kahneman, can be thought of as using two distinct systems for cognition. The first system, System One, is fast and performs its work automatically or instinctively. It cannot be directly observed or modified by the thinker because it happens so quickly. This is the part of the brain that evolved from the days on the African Savannah, where quick thinking and evaluation often meant the difference between life and death.
System One is useful in a crisis situation because it enables us to size up a threat in milliseconds, and react to it. Unfortunately, in complex human societies, it is quite often wrong. System One is where our cognitive biases live. It feeds us erroneous information that our slower, more deliberate System Two must carefully sort out.
System Two then is the part of the brain that is able to do advanced planning and complex calculation. It is responsible for analytical thinking. Unfortunately, System Two is also energy intensive and gets easily tired. Kahneman even goes so far as to call it “lazy.”
In fact, when System Two is placed under stress, it quickly loses its ability to do its work analyzing data and coming up with right or at least reasonable answers. Meanwhile, System One is constantly feeding it erroneous warnings about external threats. It’s like a tired and overworked scientist is being assisted by a frenetic and excitable assistant who is afraid of everything.
What Kahneman’s research implies is that the more stress your team is under, the greater the likelihood that they will be unable to counter their own biases in tough debates or discussions. It will also be harder for them to find creative and novel solutions in complex systems or scenarios.
Let’s consider an example. Suppose your team is running an experiment on your product. The data has come back somewhat ambiguous, but you need to make a decision on which feature variation to roll into production. This was your idea and you really want it to be accepted into the product. A colleague points out that the statistics are fairly ambiguous. You’ve all been working very hard on this version, and it is painful to hear the criticism.Your System One is screaming in your ear that the data is “good enough.”
Under these conditions, your System Two is very likely to give up and hand the reins back to System One, even though it’s probably wrong. You have to fight hard to avoid the temptation of bias. But if you’re aware of Kahneman’s model, it will be easier to take a step back and look at what’s happening rationally. We’ll get to tips on how to deal with this problem at the end.
The Role Of Emotional States At Work
Emotional stress in the office can both cause, and be a source of, additional stress on your team. It frequently emerges from a lack of clear communication and poor listening skills. When team members interact, no matter how much they may think they are being completely analytical and rational, emotions are playing a role in the communication.
We find some valuable sources of insight in the classic psychology book, “Games People Play,” in which Eric Berne presented his foundational Transactional Analysis to the world in 1962. Transactions are simply communications between two people. Games People Play, is essentially a pattern library of common communications between people, in relationships, at work, and so forth.
Building on Freudian analysis, Berne described three distinct ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. The Parent contains all of the “shoulds” that we have collected in our brains from external events as we have grown up. The Child contains the emotions or feelings we have about external events. The Adult is the rational actor, but it is affected by the other two states. You can think of the Adult as equivalent to Daniel Kahneman’s System Two (above).
Example
Healthy vs. unhealthy transactions
A healthy communication is when both participants are operating from their Adult ego states (see right, above). An unhealthy interaction is when either the Child or Parent ego state is dominant in either participant of the communication.
If you want to read more, there is a great explanation here by Natali Morad.
I first discovered Berne’s work years ago through a conflict resolution course I attended. At the time, I didn’t think it’d be relevant to my work as a software product developer. Over time, however, I have repeatedly used Transactional Analysis to understand the emotional states of coworkers, clients, and colleagues.
Since most work in today’s knowledge economy involves communication with others, there are transactions occurring all the time. Using transactional analysis, it is possible to uncover hidden biases and power struggles between team members or colleagues. Next time you interact with a colleague at work, try to pay attention to whether their emotional state appears to be coming from the Adult, Parent, or Child ego states. It can be very illuminating.
Further, it is also important to pay attentions to differences in power when looking at transactions. Differences in power, whether real (reporting structure) or imagined (social status), can strongly affect the ways coworkers interact. For instance, when a manager asks a direct report for a status update, the conversation can go in a few different ways.
In healthy relationship cases, a simple request for status will be met by a simple answer, even if there is no status to report. If, however, the manager and the report already have a strained relationship, the request can feel like an attack. If you are the manager, and you know the report has been struggling with your leadership, you need to be extra careful how you make requests.
You can’t always know in advance either. Sometimes you just have to ask for something, and see what kind of response you get. When you do get a response that seems unreasonably defensive, don’t bristle. Take the time to stop and understand where the defensiveness is coming from. Ask questions in a gentle and nonjudgemental way to see what you can find out about their emotional state.
Too busy for all that touchy-feely nonsense? Think they’re just being too “sensitive?” Well, maybe you have plenty of time to look for another employee then. Because it’s likely that is your trade-off.
What Is Essential?
Stress obviously comes from the feeling that we’re all overtaxed with too many tasks. The paradox of success is that as you become more successful, people begin to see you as a go-to person to whom they can bring challenges and responsibilities. While this shows a bit of respect, the paradox is that it becomes increasingly difficult to say “no” to the inessential.
The more options we have — or, rather, the more demands on our time — paradoxically, the more busy we feel and the less focused we are on what truly matters. This is as true for teams as it is for individuals.
Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism, provides further insights on the relationship between prioritization, distraction, and stress. According to McKeown, the most effective people, and the most happy and fulfilled, are those who only work on what matters most to them. The way of essentialism is therefore the relentless reduction of distractions and anything expected of you that does not move you toward your highest contributions.
Most teams that I meet with as a coach or advisor are suffering from the affliction of feeling that they have to do everything on their list. It is counterintuitive but true that the less they do, the more effective they will be. So a big part of reducing stress is to say no to things that are not truly essential. The teams that can focus on only what matters are always more effective, and usually happier and less stressed.
I have regularly been surveying product teams for a while now, and I routinely get feedback that the team’s (or company’s, for that matter) vision and strategy are unclear. Or, maybe it’s clear to the executives but they haven’t made it clear to the rest of the organization. Invariably in these cases, the feedback also shows that everyone is feeling too busy, and the level of organizational maturity in things like tools, automation, retrospectives, and other workflow issues is very low.
Finding and Keeping Flow
Some of you have perhaps encountered work by Daniel Pink, and in particular the popular book, “Drive.” In it, Pink cites research that identifies the source of intrinsic motivation. In short, people (and teams, for that matter) need autonomy — to be self-directed in how they do their work, mastery — the appropriate set of challenges that enable steady improvement, and purpose — a clear and inspiring goal to strive for.
Given this combination of three elements, teams doing complex knowledge work are able to perform at a much higher rate than those who must function under control and supervision, or any type of external incentives such as quotas or rewards.
One of the researchers cited by Pink, and frequently referenced by other great leadership and team-building literature, is the Hungarian-American social scientist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi is most widely known for defining “flow,” a concept that names the state of being when you are in your highest level of focus, providing deep satisfaction and effectiveness at work. “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” is well worth reading.
You can feel this effect in play when you apply effort to something you love to do. Maybe it’s gardening, or working out, or playing a sport. When you’re “in the zone,” that’s flow. It’s achievable by having a clear but reachable goal that is appropriately challenging for your skill level, and combining that with a relaxed and deep sense of focus. I know it, personally, from coding. When I am in flow, my performance is at its highest. If I am interrupted, it is virtually guaranteed to take a long time for me to get back into the zone.
Reducing Stress On The System
Here are five simple steps to reduce stress for yourself and your teams. Let’s call them Stop, Focus, Reduce, Refine, and Reflect.
Stop.
The first thing you need to do is STOP, and take a few deep breaths. You’re not going to fix the problem at all if you don’t slam the breaks right now, and take time to tune your broken system. If you refuse to stop and look at the system, you are only going to exacerbate the problem.
Take a page out of the Toyota Production System. When there is a problem is detected in production, workers don’t just shake their heads and keep going. They pull the ubiquitous Andon cord and “stop the line!” They won’t continue production until they have a satisfactory solution in place to address the problem.
Or maybe you prefer a Stephen Covey reference. The seventh habit of highly effective people is “Sharpen the Saw.” What that means is that effective people take time to stop doing the work so that they can reflect on how to do the work better.
Focus.
You need to understand why you are doing what you’re doing. What is your purpose? What is the vision of your team or the company? Get crystal clear on that before you do anything on your precious to-do list.
Think you know what your purpose is? Go ahead and write it down. Post it in the comments below in less than 10 words. Come on, let’s see it.
It’s a lot harder than it sounds, isn’t it? In fact, fairly universally, leadership literature from Robert Kaplan to John Maxwell to Peter Drucker all identify articulating your purpose as one of the biggest challenges for leaders, and one that is typically overlooked.
Reduce.
Do fewer things at a time, and do them together as a team. Agile teams who leverage the Kanban method in software development, or anyone who has read and been influenced by “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt, will be familiar with the concept of bottlenecks or constraints. For decades, we have known that doing fewer tasks in parallel improves the performance of a work system.
If your teams are stretched too thin, they will be slower, more stressed, and generally less effective. The best way to improve both their speed and the quality of their work is to have them do fewer things at the same time.
Refine.
Relentlessly iterate on your system and work to improve it. W. Edwards Deming first taught us the concept of “Continuous Improvement” in manufacturing and quality control. It has been in place in both Six Sigma and in the Lean literature at lease since early in the post-war period.
Yet continuous improvement still is all too rare in the knowledge and information fields. Teams I encounter in the enterprise frequently follow processes and procedures laid down by others as if there were no alternative. If your team is like this, push them to identify small improvements to their workflow systems that can enable increases in throughput and quality.
Reflect.
Reflection is well-known as an important way to allow your brain to repair itself, process and integrate new learnings, and synthesize a wide variety of information, away from the relentless stimulus of the office.
Take the time to reflect on how you and your team are working. This reflection can be done in a number of ways, from organizing regular retrospective meetings as a team, to simply making time to take a walk and allow yourself to think about how you’re doing the work. Both formal meetings and informal, private reflection time are important, and it’s best to allow yourself to do both. Put them both into your calendar and stick to it.
Conclusion
Today, work is performed more and more by teams, and less and less by individuals. As such, it is more important to pay attention to how we work together than ever before. The institutions we have built, our companies, our schools, our governments, and our community organizations, are made of humans with certain cognitive abilities and biases, strengths and weaknesses. An awareness of these and the careful application of brain science to the workplace can unlock the true potential of your team.
