Exchanging ideas to create the well-being advantage

This week, I’m really pleased to welcome another colleague and good friend to share my blog, Gordon Tinline.  Gordon is a Director of Robertson Cooper and a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. Most of his work in the last four or five years has been helping organisations reduce stress and realise bottom-line benefits through well-being improvement.  Increasingly this work focuses on the links between leadership behaviour and staff well-being. Over to you Gordon…

 
Middle management is so often the forgotten layer in organisations – the focus is always on high profile senior leaders and those subject to the pressures of the frontline – whether that be police officers on the street, Northern Rock bank tellers or nurses in Accident and Emergency. But in reality, being a middle manager is just as difficult – in many cases, more difficult. 

My work on well-being as a Director of Cary’s university spin-off company, Robertson Cooper has shown that those in middle management positions tend to experience demands from both above and below.  This is often compounded by a feeling of getting all the grief without the power to influence the root causes of many of the problems faced. 

Picture the scene: Your boss is on your back and asking you to justify last month’s results…  “Oh and by the way, can you also dig up some information to support the strategic change initiative I’m working on at the moment?”  Piling on the pressure, your staff keep asking you why they are not being kept in the picture about all the recent changes that they perceive as being designed to make their lives difficult.  You are seen by them as ‘the problem’ in that you clearly know what’s going on and are just not telling them. Of course, they can’t see your perspective - you don’t know much more than they do, and when you ask your boss he doesn’t seem to know either – but tells you to stay positive and keep morale high.  So it’s back to square one!

So what are your options?  A. Get promoted, but be careful what you wish for unless you are heading directly for the top tier!!  B. Keep sympathising with your staff and tell them you know how they feel - that it’s all down to the organisation and your boss. But then don’t be surprised when they rate you as a weak manager in your next 360 appraisal and your relationship with your boss deteriorates. C.  Chill out and try not to let it get to you – it’ll soon be the weekend and you can forget it all for at least half a day before you start preparing for the week ahead and checking your blackberry in case anything has occurred to your boss on his Sunday stroll. 

Of course, none of these options are really going to get you anywhere on their own. The answers lie in building open and constructive relationships upwards, downwards and sideways. Get closer to your boss and find out what it is that’s driving his behaviour – what are his real goals and what makes him tick. Start to join this up with the needs of those you manage - make things more transparent for them. This is not always easy and you will need to devote time to it as a specific goal…….on top of your current workload. 

But this is my point- the best middle managers are able to step back from the day-to-day tasks and multiple demands from above and below. They make time to consider the vital role that they play as an ‘operator’ of many of the organisation’s strategic aims and policies; that is, by taking a different perspective middle managers can start to see themselves as the lynchpin of delivery, as opposed to a pawn for more senior managers to move around on a whim.

And finally, option (c) above is not entirely facile - the middle manager needs to learn to switch off. Work pressures may be endless, but you have to believe that you are not failing (yourself or your employer) by not being able to work endlessly to keep everyone happy. If you fall into this trap the result will be a downward spiral of performance and health where no one wins.

Gordon Tinline

With the teacher’s strike, the Grangemouth oil refinery worker’s strike in Scotland and other groups considering industrial action, we have to ask the question: Are we going back to the bad old days of industrial relations we saw in the 1970s - the ‘them and us’ mentality that caused so much damage all those years ago? 

It is certainly the case that in difficult financial times, with jobs insecure, pension funds under pressure and financial markets in turmoil relations between management and employees often get strained.  On the other hand, if employers engage with their staff, treat them with respect and communicate with them accurately and honestly about what’s happening the consequences can be managed more easily. 

Senior management must be proactive about trying to empathise with the perspectives of their employees - who at times, like these, feel less secure about their jobs and more worried about their own personal financial situation. They therefore rely on the skills of their manager and other organisational leaders to provide accurate information about the viability of the organisation and future plans so they can make good decisions to safeguard themselves and their families. Where possible, employers should be making every effort to involve staff in decision making on these important issues – this effort will be repaid tenfold when things settle down and the workforce appreciate that they were dealt with fairly. Ultimately, engaging staff in any process of change helps to ensure survival now and growth in the future. 

Taking a step back, I think there are signs that the current unrest is not so much to do with salary issues, but more an underlying concern about the openness of management and their lack of engagement with and trust of their employees. There are also signs that the shear amount of work that certain professions are being asked to do is taking its toll and is not in line with the rewards offered – and that’s rewards in all their forms, not just pay. For example, earlier this month figures from The National Association of Head Teachers showed that more than a thousand Head Teachers and Deputies are leaving the profession early every year because of work pressures.

General Secretary Mick Brookes blamed a long-hours culture which saw nearly 44% of his members working 60-hour weeks. This is reflective of a general sea change in public attitudes which indicates that people have started to think that ‘enough is enough’, and that society will have to change. Undoubtedly, it’s going to take some strong leadership and a reappraisal of our values to get us out of an ever frenetic life style, so I’ll leave you with a question even bigger than the one I started with: 

Where is the drive for that change going to come from?

Reading my last post, I realised that it painted a pretty grim picture of childhood in Britain today and I want to balance that off with some more hopeful news. At the end of 2007, the Education Secretary, Ed Balls, announced that lessons in happiness, well-being and good manners are to be introduced in all state secondary schools. I remember thinking that this was a major step forward for education in the UK – one that begins to align the Education sector with some of the latest thinking from the world of business.

By introducing this initiative, the Government is acknowledging that well-being, self-awareness and a sense of purpose are just as important as the tasks that pupils are required to complete in order to achieve their academic objectives.

Pilots of the ‘Seal’ programme (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) – an idea which originated in the States - have already been successfully implemented in primary schools here and have been found to boost both academic performance and discipline by helping children to better understand their emotions. So, the Government concluded that it’s important for children to develop an emotionally intelligent way of approaching their work, as well as producing good results – Hallelujah! Exactly the same is true for adults in the workplace.

The hope is that the benefits of teaching children how to express their feelings, manage their anger and empathise with other people will create calmer, more productive school environments, as well as boosting the concentration, engagement and motivation levels of students. It is no coincidence that these are the exact same benefits that employers can expect when they commit to creating workplaces characterised by high levels of well-being and engagement.

And this emerging alignment between the worlds of education and work bodes well for the future of the UK economy – because tomorrow’s employees are likely to enter the workplace with a much more mature and productive approach to work. They will bring with them a holistic attitude which will include an understanding of the importance of balancing work and life to deliver sustainable levels of high performance, more sophisticated people skills and higher levels of personal resilience. So, although our children are reporting that they are more unhappy than ever, change is afoot and I’m delighted that these classes are set to be a standard part of the national curriculum. Because, as I explained in a recent post, you can learn to be positive!

Click here for the full article in from The Times.

It’s official – 1 in 4 children are unhappy. This was according to the Children’s society’s recent survey of teenagers which reported that more than a quarter of 14 to 16-year-olds said that they frequently ‘felt depressed’. But what is this really telling us? Should we interpret it as a sign that the stress epidemic that affects adults has now spread to children? Or is it more to do with the fact that children are using the word ‘depressed’ to describe feeling sad, but are not really clinically depressed?

Undoubtedly, children can be clinically depressed, but are 1 in 4 teenagers really clinically depressed? If they are, what is that saying about our society? In 2007, UNICEF rated the UK bottom of a league of industrialised countries for child well-being, saying our children were under-educated, unhappy and unhealthy compared with other European countries. Pretty depressing stuff!

One of the possible causes has to be the ‘adultisation’ of childhood (or should we now call it kidulthood?) – that is, the imposition of adult values on the lives children. It is well documented that the pressures on children are now greater than ever before – the target-based nature of schooling means that our kids essentially go to a version of 9-to-5 office work from the age of five or six – so it’s no surprise they are starting to exhibit the behaviors and psychological problems associated with adults at such an early age. Of course, parents play their role by ramping up expectations and the media contribute by ensuring that children are also worried about how they look and whether they have the right accessories to be ‘cool’.  And it’s no coincidence that the Children’s Society survey focused on teenagers – this is the group of children that are closest to adulthood and so, naturally, some of the pressures we all feel every day are leaking through into their world.

The BBC recently reported the results of a survey by their children’s news programme, Newsround, involving 8000 children. Many said they felt under pressure from school, their classmates, and family expectations. Seven out of ten said they felt the need to “look good”, and were on a diet some or all of the time.

School is very much like the adult world of work - doing well is important, but unless there’s space to have fun and enjoy the experience, what’s the point?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7363332.stm

I’ve been watching football again! The other day I saw Liverpool play their hearts out against Chelsea in the first leg of the semi-finals of the Champions League.  They were motivated, dedicated and displayed real team spirit.  But in the last few seconds of the game, an own-goal turned victory into a disappointing draw.  Not only will the player who scored the own-goal feel extremely bad for letting the team and the fans down, but also the team will feel deflated after losing a game they dominated and thought they had won.

However, the player shouldn’t feel too guilty because he played his heart out throughout the game.  The true test of any person, team or organisation is how they cope with adversity, disappointment and setbacks.  If you use the knowledge you gain from failure you can bounce back and win next time and this comes down to how we attribute the causes of the failure – it has to be positive!!

Of course, being optimistic and reframing events positively comes more naturally to some people than others – but both of these ‘habits’ can be developed and strengthened. For example, when we fail the “attributional style” that we adopt is critical. Attributing failure to factors that are permanent (“I will always be bad at this”) and global (“It’s not just this – but all of these kinds of things”) mean that we feel much worse and less positive than if we see it as a temporary blip that is very specific to this situation. So, maintaining optimism relies on seeing failures as temporary and specific (to the situation). Of course it has to be valid - if we don’t really believe, or are unrealistic about events, the resulting optimism will be fragile and unrealistic.

The way your workforce processes failure is just as important as how it deals with success and if you get it right your business will be more successful in the long run.  How we cope with our setbacks is a true reflection of our character as individuals, as teams, and as organisations.  As the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once said “Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already”.  Today he might have said “Stay positive!”

In my last post, I made the point that even someone as high profile as our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is not immune to the effects of feeling undervalued. Little did I know that his colleague and former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott would drive home the point by revealing that he suffered with Bulimia for over ten years.

Mr Prescott described this experience in his recently published memoirs and he should be congratulated for his honesty in discussing this difficult and sensitive issue. The news was such a revelation because during his long career in the upper echelons of the Labour Party he had a well-earned reputation as a larger-than-life character. He has always been a physically big man who has sometimes been too direct for his own good. He once famously threw a punch at a member of the public who had thrown an egg at him in the street and more recently was caught having an affair with a member of staff.

With this public image, who would have thought that Mr Prescott was suffering with Bulimia - a disease usually (wrongly) associated with teenage girls?  He also cites work-related stress as one of the causes of his eating disorder, which is interesting because the act of overeating and then vomiting is often reported by Bulimics as an attempt to gain some form of control over their environment. Of course, lack of control/autonomy is one of the main causes of workplace stress - so the link is clear.

This really does show that whatever a person’s public image, whatever their demeanor and what they look like physically, that person is subject to the effects of stress just like the rest of us. The science here is sound and now we really do understand the causes and effects of excessive stress - it’s not just based on a few isolated cases – research findings are conclusive enough to be generalised to all of us. Yes, we all have different thresholds, but the outcomes are largely predictable.

So, thank you to John Prescott for coming out about this - his honesty helps to remind us that we constantly need to manage our exposure to stress and that no one is exempt. He has also helped to dispel the myth that Bulimia is a teenage girl’s disease - if a senior male politician in his late ‘60s can suffer from it, then anyone can.

The tide seems to be turning for Gordon Brown - Labour are way down in the polls and every other headline seems to voice or imply some negative view of him and/or his leadership. But I wonder how this makes him feel?

We all need to feel valued and appreciated in our roles - when we’re not it starts to affect our motivation, engagement and feelings of self-worth. Whatever you think of Gordon Brown you can’t fault him for effort - he probably works in excess of 90 hours a week and (in his own way) has the best interests of the country at heart. But however focused and determined he is it can be demoralising to work this hard and still constantly receive negative feedback. 

We don’t know what those close to him are saying to bolster his confidence or exactly how he feels right now, but the Prime Minister wouldn’t be human if he didn’t feel in some way depleted after the events of the last two weeks.

My university spin-off company Robertson Cooper hosts a Business Well-Being Network which brings members together to communicate about well-being issues in the workplace. A theme that comes up time and time again is that organisations have to try to find ways to ensure that their employees feel valued, appreciated and involved. First, the business and its leaders have to create the right environment for this to happen. Then, Line Managers have to play their role by providing clear direction and feedback to employees (both positive and negative) on a day-to-day basis.

Of course, Mr Brown is unfortunate because his ‘organisation’ doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t have a boss - unless you count the Queen, and I doubt she is providing too much in the way of structured feedback on his behaviour! It can be lonely at the top and the people there need to be courageous when times are tough and Mr Brown will certainly need bucket loads of courage and support in the coming months.

Flexible working is not only important for those at the start and in the middle of their careers – it matters just as much for our most senior workers. There inevitably comes a time when senior leaders actively seek more flexibility because they want to start to enjoy the fruits of their labours - but this is not to say that they don’t still have a lot to offer the business. I can really empathise with this perspective and I’m fortunate enough to have employers who provide plenty of opportunities for academics to work flexibly: The benefit for them is that we stay productive and feel motivated to perform our jobs to the best of our abilities; and can do it in different contexts.

But this is not true for all senior leaders – as often they feel (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) that the business cannot function without their full attention. This is exacerbated where there isn’t any sign of a well-developed succession plan that delivers the next generation of leaders to the organisation. In this situation, the pressure is piled on a small number of senior leaders with no end in sight - in some cases cutting potentially impressive careers short. 

However, where succession planning is well-developed, all sorts of innovative options are available. For example, outgoing CEOs can spend a number of months / years actively mentoring potential successors, and can generally get much more closely involved in inspiring and developing high potential employees.

This kind of behaviour hints at a concept known as ‘Eldership’. Eldership has its roots in African and Asian tribal culture where former leaders pass over into a council of Elders at a certain point in their lives. The role of the Elder is to be a challenging sounding board for the current leadership. So each tribe - itself an organisation - has an impartial group of people who they know only have the best interests of the group in mind. Their role is to draw on their individual, collective and cultural experience to ‘quality assure’ the decisions of the current leaders.

To me this sounds like something that could work well in many organisations I know - both public and private. Of course, some might say that this is the role of Non-Executive Directors, but this is not always the case because, unlike Elders, Non-Execs could be younger but have specific professional skills (i.e. financial accounting, legal) and they may have multiple roles in many different companies. No matter how well-meaning and impartial the individuals concerned, they’re really just acting as consultants.

The closest equivalent to Elders in the western world are experienced statesmen such as Nelson Mandela, Kofi Anan and Jimmy Carter. These are people who have been there and have done it, and who have now crossed a line from being full-time politicians to acting as trusted advisors to the world. In the case of these people, I think the vast majority of us believe that they have the world’s best interests at heart.

Commercial organisations are not tribes, but they do share plenty of characteristics with these most ancient of communities which evolved with the narrow goal of survival.  It may be too idealistic to expect senior executives to continue working for the good of the business ‘gratis’ into their dotage, but there are aspects of the concept of Eldership that most organisations could fairly easily adopt anfld integrate with their succession plan for the top level.  This is all part of the recipe  for designing a sustainable, successful organisation - and of course, providing extra flexibility in the latter stages of a career means the business is looking after those who spend a large part of their careers looking after the rest of the workforce – which, when you think about it, is only fair.

“The war for talent” is an established phrase for summing up the challenge that all organisations face in terms of keeping and securing the best people. Many businesses, particularly bigger ones, have established programmes and processes for finding and developing talent, but the key relationship is always the one with the direct line manager.

Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner (2000) looked at a large number of staff retention studies and aggregated results across them to look for the trends. One of the strongest predictors of whether a person would leave was the quality of exchanges between employees and their boss - stronger than gender, ethnic origin and intelligence. Indeed, the critical role of the line manager in employee retention arises countless times in the literature and it is also frequently cited as a reason for quitting by employees after departure.

So this is where it can all go wrong…..or right. When a manager has genuine concern coupled with the motivation to develop talent and to inspire staff to do their best work you get a fantastic coming together of organisational processes and individual leadership talent that enables employees to realise their full potential.

But the other side of this is when a manager sees a talented team member and interprets it as a ‘let-off’ for him/her. When this happens, and it happens more than you might think, the employee’s talent is his/her worst enemy because it has convinced their manager that he/she is capable of delivering what’s required with minimal intervention. And this can work for both parties…..for a short time. The manager is free to get on with ‘real work’ and the talented team member is rewarded by being given autonomy to get on with his/her work independently. This can feel like a privilege in the early stages of a career, but it’s really an illusion because managing and developing talent is real work - more strategically important than many of the administrative tasks that most managers undertake every day.

So the situation described above is simply not sustainable - after a certain amount of time talented people get bored of doing the same work to a predictably high standard. They start to wonder ‘What’s next?’ They need to be constantly challenged if you are to see their potential and, just as importantly, if they are to stick around.

Then there’s the wider organisational perspective: It doesn’t matter how good the talent management programme is - if the operators of the system (the managers) aren’t engaged it will not deliver. Imagine a business with 200 managers each managing 10 staff- if half of these behave in the manner I’ve just described you have a pattern that will undermine the development of the talent pool that has been earmarked as the future of the organisation.

Finding talented people is no easy task – it’s time consuming and expensive - so it’s nothing short of criminal to use people’s talent as an excuse not to manage and nurture their potential. The best businesses have a constant eye to this potential ‘derailer’ of their talent programmes.

In the first part of this two part podcast Anna Farmery asked me about how stress is occurring within business, whether it is more stressful now than in previous decades, what role businesses are playing in stress management, its importance in talent management and also the impact of technology on our business lives.

To listen to part one of our podcast please click on the link below:

http://www.podcasternews.com/enbr/4991/show-151-managing-stress-in-business-pt1/

In the second part Anna and I talk about what causes stress in the workplace and how you can solve stress through leadership. I also talk about how you can predict stress in the workplace, so that you are managing the environment rather than reacting to the stress when it happens.  

To listen to part two of our podcast please clink on the link below:

http://www.podcasternews.com/enbr/4998/show-152-managing-stress-in-business-pt2/

To listen to Anna interview more experts or to read her excellent blog visit the link below:

http://theengagingbrand.typepad.com/the_engaging_brand_/