Christine is known for creating strategies that are responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue and company value. Imagine if she was able to sit down with you and SHARE all of her knowledge and insight!
Since that isn’t physically possible, this podcast is the next best thing!
Christine uses each episode of Crack the Behavior Code to give you a glimpse into her strategic approach to business and leadership. She brings you on a journey to leverage neuroscience-based tools in order to promote behavior change and begin understanding what all humans need (and how you can provide it)!
What happens when a person leaves? Do you know it in advance? In a prior blog I wrote about the often unknown reasons that blindside employers when a rock star quits. Today, let’s look at taking a more proactive approach: checking in on what it’ll take to keep your stars at your organization.
As a leadership and culture coach I very often work through personnel matters. So when I witnessed the clear and concise thinking from Kaye and Jordan-Evans, I knew I had to share it.
Why Employees Stay
Kaye and Jordan-Evans surveyed over 17,000 employees to learn what conditions will keep an employee with an organization. They call these conditions “stay factors”. Note that these are neither industry-specific nor role-specific, they are universal.
Interesting tidbit: 91 percent of survey respondents listed at least one of the first two items among the top reasons they stay. I love that challenge and learning is at the top. This is one reason I harp on Individual Development Plans to our clients!
How To Do A Stay Interview
How to do a Stay Interview? You simply ask the employee. Some leaders fear that discussing this topic will open a proverbial can of worms and get the employee thinking about leaving. I disagree heartily. The employee is already thinking of leaving at times, possibly on hard days, when they feel overwhelmed or discouraged, if they’re experiencing tremendous stress in their personal lives. It’s likely only a fantasy about leaving, but why not simply communicate directly about it? It’s refreshing, builds trust, and shows you care.
There’s no ideal time to do a stay interview. The goal is to do it before an employee has one foot out the door. You can do it during a development conversation, when checking in on their development plan, you can do it at year end or at the new year, any time is fine. If you don’t know what their answers might be to the below questions, then it’s time to do now!
Recommended “Stay Interview” Questions From Kaye and Jordan-Evans:
· What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning?
· What makes you hit the snooze button?
· If you were to win the lottery and resign, what would you miss the most?
· What one thing that if changed in your current role, would make you consider moving on?
· If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you would change about this department?
· If you had to go back to a position in your past and stay for an extended period of time, which one would it be and why?
· What makes for a great day?
· What can we do to make your job more satisfying?
· What can we do to support your career goals?
· Do you get enough recognition?
· What will keep you here? What might entice you away?
· What do you want to learn this year? How might you learn it?
Be sure to ask “anything else I might have missed?” and use effective listening (ask “what specifically?” and the other questions in the linked blog). And be careful with your responses: don’t dismiss their ideas/input/answers, be curious as to what it’s like to be them. You don’t know, so be an anthropologist studying a fascinating creature. If done this way the interview will deepen connection, loyalty, trust, and ultimately, boost retention.
What You Can Do Now
1. Implement Individual Development Plans – people need to know they are growing and learning. This helps us feel achievement and empowerment at work—which is key. Keep it simple: have the employee and their leader develop it together. If you make it too complex no one will do it!
2. Do regular Employee Engagement surveys so you know how people are feeling.
3. Create a Cultural GAME (Growth, Appreciation, Measurement, Engagement) Plan based on the results from your survey in #2 above. Here’s an infographic.
4. Give Frequent Bi-Directional Feedback so everyone is connected and clear on what’s working and what they’d like to see more of. Here’s an infographic.
The Net-Net
· Stay interviews help you understand how your team members are feeling about their work—it’s essential to stop guessing and start knowing what will keep your stars happy
· Do stay interviews across your organization as needed, during development conversations is a good time
Put the recommended programs place to maintain and grow the good feelings in your organization. Happy = will stay!
Great employees are harder to find than ever before—and if you’re hiring, chances are really good that you’re raiding another organization’s rock stars.
So once you get great hires on board, you need to keep them. In past blogs I’ve shared proven tools and techniques our clients use to recruit rock stars, to onboard them, to engage them and to identify the signs that they’re considering quitting. Now let’s focus on what’s happening in their brain when the honeymoon phase is over after being a new hire.
Honeymoons End—Then Your New Hire “Goes Native”
Based on an informal poll of my leadership and culture coaching clients, reality sets in, and the new job honeymoon is over in the first 60-90 days, depending on the role. This is when a new hire, then, is most at risk of buyer’s remorse, of regretting that they accepted a role at your organization. This is also when a new hire has “gone native”—they are now a part of the tribe and no longer have the fresh unbiased perspective of an outsider. Going native isn’t a bad thing—it happens out of our deep need to we’ve selected. But if the tribe is in a tricky state, buyer’s remorse could become an epidemic. We’ve all seen influencers that leave the tribe—and take some of the top performers with them. Here’s how to prevent this.
Why Smart People Make Stupid Decisions
Season 4 · Episode 8
Thursday, August 12, 2021 • Duration 10:49
We’ve all been there.
We make what we think is a rational decision. And then seconds, minutes, or days later we wonder “What was I thinking?!” Was it a temporary lapse of sanity?
Were we just distracted and decided anyway?
We knew it wasn’t the right decision or the best decision, but in that moment, we made a decision anyway. And it ended up being a stupid one. Why?
[Shutterstock]
The Science Behind “Stupid”
Does this mean that we are indeed stupid? Nope. It simply means that not every decision we make is actually rational. We see what we want to see filtered through our inherent biases, and then we make decisions based on those biases. These biases are called cognitive biases and we all have them.
A cognitive bias refers to the systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. These biases cause conclusions, inferences, assumptions about people and situations to be drawn in a less than logical fashion. We all create our own “subjective social reality” from our perception of the input we receive — both from outside of us and inside of us.
How can we stop making stupid decisions and start making smart ones? By spending time understanding our cognitive biases.
Why do we make hiring and recruiting mistakes? Or even role assignment/placement mistakes?
Often it’s because we’re rushed, we don’t have a process that has been proven to be successful, or we don’t have a clear profile of who we truly need in a specific role.
But also it’s because we don’t leverage neuroscience.
The Proven 3 Step Process To Get The Right Person In The Right Role Every Time
So how do you get the right person in the right role? It’s actually easier than you think. It requires a proven process, and that you don’t cut corners.
Credit: Getty
1. Figure out where you are on the Inflection Point chart. See the chart below so you know the main people, money, model challenges, and opportunities your organization is in the midst of—and are around the corner. Look 1-2 years out and sketch out the org chart you’ll need. Some of our coaching clients prefer a 1 year and 3-year org chart. We help them develop the plan for the immediate hires (so they can achieve the 1-year org chart with everyone at solid performance), then we help them create the organizational infrastructure to support their next inflection point of growth.
2. Once you have clarified the roles you need, dive into who the right person truly is. For this you’ll need:
a. The leadership level appropriate for the role (how much ownership do you want them to take?) What makes sense for this role? Check here:
b. An impact description to ensure we know exactly what a great fit will be and what they’ll own. Here’s an example.
Don't Make Your Brain Dumb
Season 4 · Episode 6
Thursday, July 15, 2021 • Duration 08:07
What makes a person successful?
Having a growth mindset? Being a visionary? Being born into the ‘right’ family?
These may help, but a healthy brain is foundational. Without it, success is going to be far harder to come by. So what is a healthy brain, a successful brain? It’s one that has high blood flow and high activity.
The Amen Clinics perform brain imaging called single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), which assesses at blood flow and activity patterns in the brain. Since 1991, they have performed over 135,000 brain SPECT scans on patients from 120 countries. The data from SPECT teaches us the four crucial aspects of a person’s brain-based success.
Daniel Amen
Here are the 4 crucial aspects of ensuring your brain stays strong and doesn’t ‘dumb down’:
1) Protect your prefrontal cortex (PFC). You’ve heard me talk about this key region of the brain before. It’s behind your forehead and it governs the development of your personality as well as complex behaviors. In humans, it accounts for 30% of the brain’s volume. That’s a lot. Cats weigh in at 3%, dogs at 7%, chimpanzees at 11% of their brain’s volume. The PFC is involved with executive functions, such as strategy, visioning the future, planning, focus, judgment, impulse control, and empathy. It’s your internal CEO. Low PFC activity = bad decision making. That’s why protecting it is crucial. In a study, Amen published they found that 91% of traumatic brain injuries involve the PFC.
Preventing brain injuries is easy (phew!):
The Future of Work
Season 4 · Episode 5
Thursday, July 1, 2021 • Duration 15:21
I won’t start by saying 2020 was a rough year. We know that already.
We know that 2020 brought many businesses to their knees, requiring profound pivots, workforce and workplace changes, policy changes, and how it significantly altered how humans work.
As an executive coach for mid-sized to large organizations, I was in the thick of these changes every day (and still am). It wasn’t uncommon to receive texts after hours and on weekends as my clients scrambled to find their footing in a brave, new, uncertain and constantly changing world.
Based on my work with over a dozen diverse organizations over the past year, below you’ll find my predictions for what I believe The Future Of Work will look like.
#1 The Human Experience (HX) Will Replace The Employee Experience (EX)
Net-Net: Seeing employees as humans and helping them grow in all areas of their lives
Focus on: Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial health
It’s ok to be human at work now. We’ve seen the inside of one another’s homes, heard our colleagues’ children crying, dogs barking, and more. Thank goodness. Now we can connect to one another without the veneer of stilted professionalism.
Employee Experience (EX) was a 2-dimensional way of looking at humans. Now we care about the entire Human Experience (HX) and support our people to have more fulfilling lives, which of course helps them bring a more productive version of themselves to their work. Thanks to Gartner’s 2020 Reimagine HR Employee Survey, employers that support their peoples’ lives overall enjoy a 23% increase in the number of employees reporting better mental health, plus a 17% increase in the number of employees reporting better physical health. Additionally, employers benefit from a 21% increase in the number of high performers (compared to firms that don’t provide the same degree of support to their employees).
Three Fast, Easy, Neuroscience-Based Ways to Get Unstuck
Season 4 · Episode 4
Tuesday, June 22, 2021 • Duration 07:22
As an executive coach, I invest a great deal of time in helping people get unstuck. And I repeatedly see 3 key areas where they are ensnared. We all want to be happy, to get along, to have great lives. The tricky part is we don’t live in a vacuum, so for better or worse, we must interact with others. This can be the best part of life, as well as the most challenging. Here are my top 3 neuroscience-based strategies to help you get unstuck fast:
1. Catch Trouble Before You’re Entangled
You’re bopping along, having a great day, then you get blindsided by someone’s unpleasant behavior. Why? It’s their thing—not yours. Why take on their negativity, get fearful/avoid conflict/get angry/judgmental? It’s all about energy. Emotions have energy, and you have a choice as to whether you absorb that energy or not.
Here’s how we absorb it and let it burn our high:
Fear: you fear the person or fear they have power over you, your finances, your future, your happiness, or so on. You get the idea.
Judgment: you judge the person or situation
Attachment: you think something needs to be a certain way or must occur on a certain timeline, and you’re attached to getting what you want.
All 3 reactions cause you to become emotionally entangled, and then you’re in trouble. Let’s be conscious of this as leaders, as solving problems is often a part of our job. The next time a buzz kill comes your way—stop, pause, and notice your response. Are you reacting with fear? Judging the person? Feeling attached to a certain outcome/how things should be? Stop. Feel it. Then choose differently. Choose to let them have their experience, but do not make it yours!
2. Realize Your Ego-Mind Wants To Make You Unhappy3. Consciously Develop Your Emotional IntelligenceNet-Net
Why We Lie
Season 4 · Episode 3
Tuesday, June 15, 2021 • Duration 08:37
Why We Lie, And The Neuroscience Behind It
I’m fine.
Of course, I love you.
I’ll call you.
No, you don’t look fat in those jeans.
We are liars.
All of us.
We lie to save face, to avoid hurting other people’s feelings, to impress others, to shirk responsibility, to hide misdeeds, as a social lubricant, to prevent conflict, to get out of work, and many more reasons.
And we lie a lot.
Deception costs businesses and government billions, ruins relationships, undermines what we care about, and even takes lives. The more white matter (see my blog The Truth About How Your Brain Gets Smarter)--or some might even say the more intelligent the neocortex—the greater potential a person has to lie.
Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has confirmed that lying is simply a condition of life. In her research, she found that both men and women lie in approximately one-fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes. Wow. And over the course of a week, we deceive about 30 percent of people we have 1:1 interactions with. Wow—wow!!
Women are more likely to tell lies to avoid hurting other people’s feelings, and men are more likely to lie about themselves. De Paulo found that men lie more often to impress. A typical conversation between two guys contains about as many lies as it does lies about others.
Five Ways To Get Optimal Outcomes From Your Team
Season 4 · Episode 2
Tuesday, June 8, 2021 • Duration 07:55
What makes a team optimal?
Alignment, communication, collaboration, energy management, leverage, trust, and what else?
Google did some comprehensive multi-year research on this topic. I’ll refer to it below and map it to my work during the past 30 years in the areas of safety, belonging, and mattering.
Over the course of two years (ending in November 2015), Google conducted more than 200 interviews where it assessed more than 250 attributes of what makes an optimal team. The findings from the 180 teams studied were surprising.
While they had hoped to find a recipe for an optimal team (for instance, take one Ivy League MBA, one extrovert, one expert engineer), Google actually found that who was on the team mattered far less than how team members interacted, structured their work, experienced their contributions. The answer was in behavior and emotional resilience. The results echoed some of what Carnegie Mellon researchers found back in 2010 with their collective intelligence work.
They learned that five key dynamics resulted in optimal teams:
Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Are You Getting Enough Hugs?
Season 4 · Episode 1
Tuesday, June 1, 2021 • Duration 06:08
Are you getting enough hugs?
Virginia Satir, a world-renowned family therapist, is famous for saying “We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
How many hugs are you getting each day?
With social distancing, dramatically reduced human contact, and more digital than physical interactions, many of us are running short on hugs. These extra measures to keep ourselves healthy is causing mental and emotional health problems, lost productivity at work, reduced intimacy and trust, increased anger and aggression, and that’s just a start. As leaders, it’s essential that we take this seriously—the more emotionally and mentally balanced we are, the more we can help our teams to become so.
So, let’s look at why humans need hugs, and then we’ll look at strategies to get more.
4 Reasons Why Humans Need Hugs
1. Hugs strengthen your immune system and balance your body. A hug results in some pressure on your sternum, which then stimulates the thymus gland, which then regulates and balances the body’s production of white blood cells, which keeps you healthy. Hugs help increase circulation and help balance our sympathetic (fight/flight/freeze) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous systems. All good.
2. Hugs increase your feelings of safety. Hugs emotionally “feed” us, help us remember that we’re not alone, help us feel more trust with others. Ever notice how relaxed you feel after a juicy hug? Hugs remind us that we’re with others. And together we can face any challenge.
3. Hugs increase your feelings of belonging. Hugs boost oxytocin levels, which heal feelings of loneliness, isolation, and anger. Hugging is a shared experience: you’re both giving and receiving affection. Nice!
4. Hugs increase your feelings of mattering/self-esteem, being seen, and self-love. Extended hugging (20 seconds or more) boosts your serotonin levels, causing you to feel happy and more positive emotions overall. When you see another person look at you with kindness and affection you remember that you’re loved, just like you did as a child when your parents looked at you and acknowledged you were here and they were happy you were.
Think back to your dating history. Most of us have met someone we thought was really cool--until we got to know them better. Then disappointment set in because what was advertised, and what was reality, were different.
Gallup recently released research on the six questions employers can ask to uncover remorse. The primary finding is that when certain policies are promised, but not honored or followed by the organization’s leaders, remorse sets in.
Ask yourself the following questions:
#1 - Is flexibility consistent or dependent on the team manager?
Per Gallup, 51% of employees say they would change jobs for flextime, and 35% say they would change jobs for a flexible working location.
In today’s workplace, flexibility matters. Flexibility for hours worked, location worked from, even flexibility in reporting and collaboration. Is it easy to duck out of work for a personal appointment? Does this apply to everyone in the organization?
Are your remote workers treated the same as your onsite workers? Are they included in development and performance motivation programs? Are they included in recognition programs? Does their leader have the same number of one-on-one meetings with them (via webcam) as with onsite workers?
#3 - Do leaders know how to manage in a matrixed environment?
Per Gallup, 84% of U.S. employees today participate in matrixed teams. And the biggest challenges for workers are prioritizing work and excessive amounts of time in meetings (up to 1/3 of their day!). How are you helping your workers to prioritize? See a prior blog for a tool on this. See the meetings link above too for a technique our clients love to reduce meetings and those that attend.
#4 - Do leaders understand gig workers?
Per Gallup's recent gig economy perspective paper, 36% of all U.S. workers participate in a gig work arrangement in some capacity.
#5 - Are development programs personalized in a meaningful way?
In a past blog on performance motivation and Individual Development Plans (IDPs) I provided a template to ensure your team feels that their growth is important to the organization. Are your leaders helping to co-create IDPs with their workers? Are they then having quarterly or worst case annual development check ins? Are they allocating time for workers to develop?
#6 - Are employees offered and encouraged to participate in well-being programs and other benefits?
A 2016 Society for Human Resource Management survey found a significant gap between the benefits companies actually offer and the benefits employees think their company offers. Why? I find two reasons in my executive coaching work. One: the onboarding process isn’t effectively communicating the actual benefits, and two: annual benefits summaries are not being offered to refresh everyone’s memory.
The Net-Net
Buyer’s Remorse occurs when an employee experiences a disconnect and disappointment between what they understood a culture would be and what it actually is.
Leaders can tackle and prevent this problem by ensuring the culture is clear, the policies are clear, the above six questions are addressed and the employee experience is consistent.
Check out this graphic, then in a few minutes, I’ll walk you through how I used it to help a client make a smart hire instead of a stupid one.
What’s Your Bias? Or How Bias Impacts Business
Neil Jacobstein, an expert in artificial intelligence, notes that we all use AI and algorithms to mitigate and compensate for many of the following heuristics in human cognition (thinking):
Anchoring bias: Tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
Availability bias: Tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes.
Bandwagon effect: Tendency to do (or believe) things because many people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Hindsight bias: Sometimes called the “I knew it all along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened.
Normalcy bias: Refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Optimism bias: Tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes.
Planning fallacy bias: Tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs and task-completion times.
Sunk-cost or loss-aversion bias: Disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.
Click here for a complete list of all cognitive biases.
Jacobstein is fond of pointing out that your neocortex has not had a major upgrade in 50,000 years. It is the size, shape, and thickness of a dinner napkin. “What if,” he asks, “it was the size of a table cloth? Or California?”
The Benefits Of Bias—And How To Optimize Yours
Biases can be helpful. They filter through information overwhelm, they help make sense of the world, they allow us to make quick decisions in a fast-paced world. Check out this recent challenge an executive coaching client of mine had.
My client needed to hire a VP of marketing to take the company to the next level. He had four candidates that had made it to the interview stage and one had even made it onsite to meet with four different key stakeholders in the organization. I asked him why he favored this one candidate by such a long shot. As I listened I heard the following biases.
He was showing:
• Planning fallacy bias: Underestimating how long the process would take and what a great hire would cost.
• Anchoring bias: Focusing on one piece of information (the candidate’s current job accomplishments but not his entire career—his resume had two decades of one to two-year roles).
• Availability bias: Because the candidate was successful (in a huge company with tons of resources available) he assumed he’d be successful in a much smaller company (with about 1/6 of the resources the candidate was accustomed to).
• Optimism bias: Some of this too…thinking we’d have a solid candidate identified, screened, hired within six weeks.
I expressed these concerns, and how cognitive biases can be busted when you:
• Take Your Time: You will make better decisions when you aren’t hungry, tired, or stressed. Taking time before making a decision allows you to have to think about the future and the impact of your decision.
• Get An Outside View: Ask a trusted advisor or peer for their opinion.
• Consider Options: What else could you do?
Then he asked me to interview the candidate. I deeply questioned the candidate in each of the bias areas our client had. The result? They’re not the right fit for the company. Not by a long shot. The excellent news is our client avoided a costly hiring mistake and the super excellent news is that he still has three candidates that might fit the bill once they are interviewed by carefully avoiding cognitive bias.
While we’ll all still make stupid decisions now and then (welcome to being human!), once you understand cognitive biases you’ll mitigate risk by implementing the tools above.
c. If the role is senior, map out their decision space (what exactly will they have decision authority over). Here are some examples.
All of the above will cause emotional engagement in the candidate’s brain: oxytocin (yes! These are my people! I’ve found them), serotonin (wow, does it feel good to know I’ve found my tribe), dopamine (I can’t wait to see what we create together!).
3. Make sure that your recruiting process is working. The following makes all the difference (and see the proof below):
a. Post the Impact Description I mentioned above – you’ll get fewer candidates, but they’ll be the right fit.
“From May 9 through July 8 we ran an ad online. We had 14 applicants, two people were interviewed, and zero people were hired.
Then we used STI‘s Impact Description format. Within *one week* we had 25 applicants, nine interviews, and seven very solid candidates. STI’s Impact Description format made all the difference!”
~ Justin Rodriguez
Talent Acquisition Manager, Principle Auto
b. Screen for Value Alignment digitally – if they aren’t aligned with your values, they won’t fit in with your culture. You can simply set up an auto-reply with 3-5 values questions and direct candidates to send the answers to a 2nd email address. When you read their answers to the values questions, you’ll know who’s aligned with you and who isn’t.
“We integrated your strategy for recruiting for value alignment and high accountability into our process. It worked out very well.
We had 70 applicants for the position. Each applicant received an email from us and requested that they answer some values questions. 25 out of 70 responded! 7 were contacted and brought in for interviews. 2 were brought back for more than 2 interviews and we just selected the candidate today.
I think this approach took 30 or more days off the process plus we calculate that the process saved us 60 team member-hours per candidate.
The process also gives you more insight into the individual and you feel you know them a lot better which takes the risk-off.”
Ask: What is most important to you at work—please list in order of importance:
You’re in a team that has a plan, people have your back (this shows safety is important)
You’re part of the team, you have an equal value to others (this shows belonging is important)
You’re acknowledged and appreciated for your unique contributions; you are making a difference (this shows mattering is important)
To discover the Meta Program profile of your candidate:
There are many Meta Programs —about 60—per Leslie Cameron-Bandler. Think of each Meta Program as a color and each person a unique artwork formed by the combination of those colors.
Here are the Meta Programs our clients find most impactful when recruiting:
Direction: Toward-Away. Are you motivated to go toward a goal or away from pain? Think salesperson versus accountant: what criteria do they assess situations with?
Reason: Options-Procedures. Do you like to have many options and choices, or prefer a proven step-by-step process? What feels right to you?
Scope: General-Specific. Do you feel comfortable with a high-level overview, or do you want specific details? When describing something, do you start with the details or the summary?
Orientation: Active-Reflective. Do you have short sentence structure and high action, or do you want to think about things first, using longer sentence structure with many clauses?
Source: Internal-External. How do you know you’ve done a good job? Through external feedback or internal monitoring?
So during the interview…
Ask: What do you enjoy most at work/what makes work fulfilling? Why?
Listen for achieving goals/accomplishment [Toward] OR solving problems/mitigating risk [Away]
Ask: Think of a recent large purchase (like a car, home, etc.) or a big decision you made recently. Why did you choose the specific item you chose?
Listen for having lots of options, choice, possibility [Options] OR having a proven process OR a story that had a number of steps that ended with the choice being made [Procedures]
Ask: Tell me about your weekend.
Listen for high level, net-net, executive summary [General] OR details and specificity [Specific]
Ask: What’s your approach when solving problems? How do you decide what to do? How do you do it?
Listen for take action, charge forward, do it now, high bias to action [Active] OR consider, ponder, understand, analyze, THEN take action [Reflective]
Ask: How do you know you’ve done a good job?
Listen for external proof: achieve quota, win the contest, get praise from boss [External] OR “it’s a feeling, I know I’ve done my best” [Internal]
Here come more good feelings and firing of hormones and neurotransmitters in the candidates and even the hiring manager’s brains. Woo hoo!
d. Use whatever tests you like best. Our clients like Caliper, Kolbe, Predictive Index, Achiever, Topgrading, More Than A Gut Feel among others.
Tests are a good idea to check ourselves so we don’t get too excited—let the prefrontal cortex (the analytical part of the brain) take over here and ensure the data backs up all the good feelings.
The Net-Net
Using some basic brain-based tools can help you screen candidates more effectively
It’s essential to move beyond the “rock star moment” of the interview and ask self-revealing questions to find out who the person truly is
Using these tools will save you time and heartache
Wear a helmet when doing any type of sport where a head injury could occur. Avoid tackle football, hitting soccer balls with your head, any sports that often result in your head being hit.
Sleep 7+ hours a night. You’ll see in one of my blogs that less than that decreases PFC function, which compromises a host of executive function behaviors from decision making even to thinking clearly.
Reduce alcohol and marijuana use as they too decrease PFC function.
Daniel Amen
2) Protect your brain’s pleasure centers. The nucleus accumbens (NA), in both the right and left hemispheres of your brain, are involved in pleasure and motivation. You’ll remember blogs I’ve written about the neurotransmitter dopamine. Well the NA is lit up by the dopamine your brain releases from sex, chocolate, video games, cocaine, stimulants like coffee, high fat and high sugar foods, and fame. Most of us are familiar with the connection between dopamine and addiction, which we’ve been seeing with excessive video gaming for many years now. Not to bum your high, but intense pleasure actually results in substantial drops in your levels of dopamine. When repeated over time (like with heroin addiction, for instance) the NA becomes less responsive, which leads to needing more of these behaviors. That’s how addiction happens, be it to chocolate or methamphetamines.
Protect your pleasure centers by:
Reduce or limit thrill-seeking activities like racing, excessive video games, pornography, scary movies, drugs that could wear your NA out.
Increase the behaviors that protect your brain, such as exercise (ideally outdoors), meditation, listening to music you find pleasing, enjoying the company of friends, hobbies, doing things you are passionate about. All these and more help activate— and not overload—your pleasure centers in healthy ways.
3) You can make your brain better. Amen Clinics is well-known for running the first and largest brain imaging and rehabilitation study on active and retired NFL players. Needless to say, they witnessed high levels of brain damage to players, many of which had been hit in the head thousands of times. They were thrilled—and surprised—to see that 80% of the players showed improvement in as little as two months on their Memory Rescue program. Since most of us have (thankfully) not been repeatedly hit in the head, there is hope for all of us to have better brains—and better lives.
The Net-Net
Protect your prefrontal cortex by protecting your skull, getting 7+ hours of sleep each night, reducing alcohol and marijuana use
Protect your nucleus accumbens—your pleasure centers—by dialing down addictions (we all have them—even to coffee or chocolate) and over-stimulating forms of entertainment (watch excessive video gaming)
You can indeed make your brain better by getting help if you need it. Amen has helped pro football players
How does a person become successful? That’s a long answer. For starters, you can stack the deck in your favor by having a healthy brain!
We all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We all want to know we’re making a difference. We all want to work with (note I don’t say “for”) organizations whose values align with our own. According to some 2020 Gartner research, 74% of employees expect their organization to become more actively involved in current cultural debates of the day. How did you feel about some of the more public displays of CEO support of their values, such as certain social media companies unplugging accounts of hate groups and other malevolent social forces?
The more a CEO models the organization’s values, invests in addressing challenging or even uncomfortable social issues, the more engaged their employees are. The same Gartner survey found a leap in employee engagement—from 40% to 60%— when their organization acted on today’s key social issues. Wow. If you need some help setting/refreshing your values, here’s a kit to help you.
#3 Hybrid Work Will Be The Norm—So Build A Virtual Culture
Net-Net: Release control over the work environment
Focus on: Where your people feel most productive and connected to their team/the organization overall
Hybrid workforces are already becoming common, with employees working in their home, a quiet coffee shop, or the office (or some variation). What I’m curious about is the varying interest in a hybrid that I’m seeing across my clients. Some employees are itching to get back to the physical office as much/as soon as possible. Others are ok coming in 1-3x per week, based on what’s needed. What do your employees want? Find out. Regardless, you’re going to need to have a GAME (Growth, Appreciation, Measurement, Engagement) plan to keep everyone “together” as a tribe. See the infographic above.
A recent Gartner survey found that 64% of managers believe that employees working in the office are higher performers than remote workers. And they said they’d be more likely to give in-office workers a higher raise than remote workers. This isn’t the experience of my clients, though, who have found that remote workers are often higher performers. Gartner’s data showed the same: for full-time workers from both 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2020 (during the pandemic) remote workers are 5% more likely to be high performers than those who work from the office.
And be aware of gender disparity here too: many of my clients are finding that men are more interested in returning to the office versus women. If some managers believe the in-office employees are more productive, this could affect salary increases and promotions, which again could reinforce salary disparity between genders. No Bueno.
#4 Employee Monitoring Will Be Replaced By Performance Monitoring—And Trust
Net-Net: If you don’t trust them, why do you employ them?
Focus on: Monitor performance and results, not hours clocked
Did you know that as a result of the pandemic, more than 1 in 4 companies installed technology to passively track and monitor their employees? Wow. Imagine the privacy issues that come from this, as well as the trust issues. Now imagine if this happened to you—would you feel like your employer was looking over your shoulder all day? Spying on you? It’s a sticky topic, and according to Gartner's research, less than 50% of employees trust their organization with their data. This is not surprising, since 44% didn’t receive any information regarding the data collected about them and how it would be used. Whoa. A little respect, please.
Expect to see a bevy of state and local regulations this year that will establish limits on what employers can track about their employees. If you choose to monitor your employees digitally, be sure to over-communicate and be super transparent about the details. Regardless, you’ll get the best results (and highest morale) by simply establishing clear KPIs, success metrics, goals, OKRs, whatever you prefer to call them, and monitor individual performance instead.
#5 Flexible Working Hours Will Become The Norm
Net-Net: Ensure overlap that’s essential, let go of control for the rest
Focus on: Letting people bring their best self, according to their work rhythm
Are you a morning person? Or an evening person? What would it be like to work at your peak time each day? How much more productive and fulfilled could you be?
My clients are becoming increasingly flexible re: when to let their employees work. Some are requiring availability (not continuous though) between 9-5 pm, meaning the employee can take gap time during this range as long as they check email at regular intervals and attend key meetings. Others are setting up split shifts (a mom for instance could work from 7-8 am, then once the kids are set, from 10 am-2 pm, and again a check-in on email/etc from 7-8 pm). Get creative with exploring what your people need and what serves the business. This will require us to become better at giving feedback and often doing it digitally. See the infographic above.
Gartner’s 2020 Reimagine HR Employee Survey revealed that organizations offering employees flexibility over when, where, and how much they work saw 55% of their workforce as high performers. Yet at an organization with a standard 40-hour workweek, only 36% of employees were considered high performers. Again, it’s time to measure results, as I mentioned in #4 above, versus time clocked.
#6 Freelance, Temporary Help Will Be Welcomed To Optimize Resource Allocation
Net-Net: Stay lean and get extra help as needed
Focus on: You’ll need better communication and more Standard Operating Procedures to ensure quality and consistency with temp help
We all need more diverse capabilities and skills from our teams than ever before. And Gartner’s analysis shows that organizations are now listing about 33% more skills on job ads in 2020 than they did in 2017. Why? Because the world is moving faster, technology is moving faster, we have more diversity in the work we do, so we all have to level up to meet ever-changing needs.
Many of my clients are looking for temp help, using UpWork, Fiverr, and other sites to get the specific (often narrow) help them need at the moment. We’ll need great communication to make this work, to help onboard everyone faster, and ensure consistent quality work.
#7 Neurodiversity And Mental Health Support Will Be Destigmatized.
Net-Net: We all have our struggles, so let’s support instead of judge
Key Focus: Create a Neurodiversity [link to neurodiversity blog] policy (if you don’t have one yet) and internal support groups
Infographic: Stress, change, isolation are devastating to us all… learn what these do to the brain so you can sidestep this risk
I was very happy to learn that even before the pandemic, Gartner's research showed that 45% of well-being budget increases were being allocated to mental and emotional well-being programs. And now in the midst of the pandemic (and let’s be realistic—for the ongoing future) we’ve seen mental and emotional well-being brought to the forefront for all organizations.
Per Gartner, by late March 2020, 68% of organizations had introduced at least one new wellness benefit to help their employees navigate the pandemic. And in 2021, we’ll see organizations join my clients in widely offering “mental health days”, support groups, compassion around ADHD, OCD, Bipolar, GAD employees. Just like some of us have a bad back and can’t sit long in a given position, these mental and emotional challenges will be viewed the same way—with acceptance and non-judgment.
We’ve still got a way to go to whatever the new normal is going to be. With the above tools you’ll be better positioned to capitalize on it, and with a happier, healthier, more productive workforce.
Have you ever noticed that your mind is always talking? Blah blah blah – all the time. We know from both Wayne Dyer’s research and the NSA that a human has about 60,000 thought per day. 90% of them are repetitive. Whoa. That’s nuts!
What would happen if you didn’t think so much? Have you ever had the experience of stopping the relentless dialog in your mind? Try it.
Focus on your breath: inhale for a count of 7 through your nose, hold for a count of 7, exhale for a count of 7 through your mouth. Do this at least 7 times in a row and you’ll start to get still. The mind needs a project. It’s ok to give it the task of counting to get still as you do a parasympathetic nervous system reset.
Mike Dooley of Tut says “A young soul learns to take responsibility for their actions, a mature soul learns to take responsibility for their thoughts, and a wise soul learns to take responsibility for their happiness.” Why not be a wise soul?
To be a conscious leader, we eventually will embrace neuroscience-based strategies for emotional intelligence. Let’s talk about the two elements of doing so. There is personal competence, which is our self-awareness and ability to regulate our emotions, and social competence, which is our awareness of the emotional experience of others and our ability to navigate the emotions of others.
How aware are you of your emotions? Do you know how you’re feeling at any given time? Our feelings are how we navigate our experiences. Grab our emotion wheel to check in on yourself.
Next, are you able to witness your emotions and not get swept up in them? This is where mindfulness and meditation really help. As we learn to slow our thoughts down, we gain the ability to be less wrapped up in our own emotional dramas.
As we deepen our awareness of ourselves, we can then have more compassion for the emotional experiences of others, which enables us to navigate conflict more easily, give others a break when they’re stuck, and help them get unstuck. We start to notice that we don’t take another person’s emotional outburst personally. We can witness it without being wrapped up in it.
Humans take on the emotions of others when they fear, judge or get attached to what the person is to them, or what that person represents. It’s essential to use neuroscience-based strategies to manage the relentless chatter of our ego mind in order to have both inner peace and behavioral choice
Three key parts of our brain are stimulated when we lie. First, the frontal lobe (of the neocortex), which has the ability to suppress the truth—yes, it’s capable of dishonesty due to its intellectual role. Second, the limbic system due to the anxiety that comes with deception (hi, amygdala!)—and yes, when we’re lied to, our “Spiderman sense” here can perk up, just as we can feel guilty/stressed when we’re doing the lying. And third, the temporal lobe is involved because it’s responsible for retrieving memories and creating mental imagery. Just for fun, add the anterior cingulate cortex because it helps in monitoring errors, and the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex because it is trying all the while to control our behavior. Our brain is busy, busy, busy when we lie.
And it’s far more peaceful when we tell the truth because our limbic systems aren’t stressed about lying and our frontal lobe isn’t inhibiting the truth.
Lies At Work
Where do we see a prevalence of lies? At work, or more specifically, to get out of work.
According to Zety’s recent 2020 research, of over 1,000 Americans, they found 96% confessed to lying to get out of work. Here’s the net-net:
The most common lies include feeling sick (84%), family emergencies (65%), doctor’s appointments (60%), or lying about a family member’s death (31%)!
On average, one person has used 7 different excuses to get out of work on different occasions.
Only 27% of respondents who lied to get out of work regretted it, and 41% of respondents would lie again.
91% of people making up excuses to get out of the office were never caught!
More men than women were caught lying, and only 27% of respondents who lied to get out of work regretted it. For those caught, 70% regretted lying. But despite not feeling bad about themselves for lying, 59% of respondents said they wouldn’t do it again.
Here’s a silver lining: the older we get, the less compelled we are to lie to avoid work.
Are we all pathological liars? Or do we need to look at why we feel compelled to make up stories instead of just telling the truth? Is lying to avoid work a cultural problem, at least in part? And what about people that don’t experience regret when they lie? The stance of perpetual innocence or extreme entitlement (and thus reality distortion) is a topic I addressed in my blogs on Borderline Personalities [Kelcie: link to my 2 blogs on this please].
Lying Rx
To reduce the amount of lying in your workplace, you’ll want to first look at how safe people feel. Is it ok to tell the truth? Is it ok to fail? Is it ok to be human and not a superhero/work robot/cog in a wheel? Is it ok to have feelings and need a break now and then? Find out.
· Do regular employee engagement surveys – see our fave one here [show either SBM Index sample heat map or link to blog that explains it]
· Use the emotion wheel at the beginning of each meeting to check in on how everyone is doing
· Create support groups [Kelcie link to this blog] if people need a little extra help
So why do we lie? Because it works for us. Temporarily, at least. For fun, you might want to join me in telling the five types of truth [Kelcie please link to this blog]. And you’ll notice not only how good it feels, but how much simpler it makes your life.
Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
Google found that psychological safety was by far the most important dynamic. Without this people don’t feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions, checking in. There’s too much risk of being labeled as “out of it” or “clueless.” All humans want to belong to a group, and we’ll take tremendous risks (such as not speaking out even if we feel it’s very important) if we feel we may become an outcast, lose status in our tribe, or be ostracized somehow.
Googlers now use a tool they call teams. It’s a 10-minute check-in on the five dynamics. A modified check-in is below, one that our clients find works very well. During the past year, more than 3,000 Googlers across 300 teams have used teams and focused on the five factors above. They often will kick off team meetings with each team member sharing a risk they took in the past week. The net is that they’ve seen psychological safety ratings increase by 6% and structure/clarity increase by 10%. But the best part is the increased connection in the team due to increased communication.
Rate Your Team Per Google’s Five Dynamics
Consider the five factors from Google:
Psychological Safety
Dependability
Structure & Clarity
Meaning of Work
Impact of Work
On a scale of 1-5 where 5 is excellent, rate your experience of each factor in your team. Now total up your score. Here’s our rating format. If your total score is:
Up to 10: High Risk. There’s a lot of work to do. Use the table below to map to safety, belonging, mattering. Get a neuroscience-based coach, and get to work healing your culture.
11-18: Risky. Your team is not performing nearly as well as it could. Let’s get everyone more connected and collaborative. Time for team training and coaching.
19-25: Solid. Congrats! You’re on a high-performing team. Time to raise the bar!
Below is a shortcut to help you figure out where to focus, how to get better, and a way to talk about this concept with your teammates in a structured way.
Ask Others, Get a Hug Buddy. If you live with others, this is easy. Start keeping a daily tally and find out what number of hugs makes you feel most at peace. If you live alone, get a Hug Buddy. This is a buddy that observes the same social-distancing and pandemic protocols that you do. It’s essential to be able to relax into a delicious hug. Set times when you’ll get together for hugs. You can also sit back to back on the ground and lean against one another for an extended period of time. You could be reading or talking during this time.
Hug and/or Sleep with Your Pet. Yes, this is not the same as hugging a human, but still, it’s contact with another living thing, so go for it! Many people I know are “breaking the rules” and letting their dog sleep on the bed now. Throw a special dog blanket on top to protect your bedding and snuggle up!
Hug Yourself. This may sound silly but it works. Remember the goal is oxytocin and serotonin release, so you may want to turbo-charge this experience by listing all the things you love about yourself. This is about mental and emotional health, friends, and yours is more important than ever with the extended pandemic and continued uncertainty.
The Net-Net
Hugs are good for our mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual health
Now, more than ever, people need more hugs
We can get creative to get more hugs, and also get proactive by getting hug buddies and tracking how many hugs we need daily to feel good
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