July 7, 2008
Wow, what a spectacle the men’s single’s tennis final at Wimbledon turned out to be yesterday!! It had everything – Federer, the five times (in a row) Champion reduced to 2-0 down in the first hour; an heroic comeback to draw level at two Sets apiece and then two great players matching each other’s brilliance in the deciding Set before Nadal’s raw strength, talent and determination brought him through as a worthy winner. And the tension was compounded by two rain breaks which gave the both players time to think…..and for the pressure to mount!
Personally, I found the psychology of the final, hailed by the press as the best ever, fascinating. It showed how intense pressure (driven by the desire to win, the fear of losing, the size/prestige of the prize and the crowd) in the contained context of the match took both players, and ultimately the game of tennis, to new levels. And this is what pressure in all forms of work can do - as long as you have the right support around you, it doesn’t last too long and you have the personal resources to cope with it.
We are all like Federer and Nadal to some degree – extreme pressure asks us difficult questions and drives us to find answers we didn’t know we were capable of coming up with. And that means that we find levels of performance we didn’t know we could deliver. You can’t be under pressure 24/7 but, as in tennis, the most spectacular results can emerge from relatively short bursts of intense pressure followed by respite.
I think that Chef, Gordon Ramsay summed up the constructive role that pressure can play in life when he said the following in an interview with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio FiveLive last year – also note the pressure doesn’t have to come from an external source:
“… I put myself under immense pressure - I’m very healthy, but I need that pressure. It only becomes stressful when you can’t handle it…..and boy, do I love handling it!”
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Stress, Well-being, pressure | Tagged: determination, Federer, Nadal, performance, pressure, psychology, respite, support, Talent | 
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Posted by Cary Cooper
July 2, 2008
One again I have the pleasure of sharing my blog with my good friend and colleauge Gordon Tinline who is a Director at my University spin off company Robertson Cooper - I hope you find Gordon’s post of interest and as always I welcome your comments!
Understanding how to balance Control and Support is critical for managing pressure and maintaining a sense of well-being – indeed, both are acknowledged in the Health and Safety Executive’s Management Standards for Work-Related Stress. Research shows that when work demands are high the difference between the highest and the lowest levels of performance is largely predicted by perceptions of control and the extent to which employees feel supported.
However, it seems to me that there is quite a difficult balance to strike between these elements. This is because performance outcomes are influenced by multiple factors – including your line manager’s behaviour, your behaviour and the context you are operating in.
I’ve recently been working with a team of professional footballers at the very highest level of the game. They encounter a version of this issue as they try to maintain control over the direction of their careers when surrounded by agents and other advisers who present themselves as essential sources of support. The risk here is that an over-reliance on these sources of support turns the puppeteer into the puppet – the result is that situations where agents end up exerting a controlling influence over the player are commonplace. This is understandably frustrating for many football managers, who are keen to educate young players to be able to make good judgements about when to exert control and when to draw on their support network.
There are obvious parallels here with the workplace situation – we need to be given enough space and autonomy to do our best work, but at the same time we need to know that we are not alone and can call on our manager / organisation for support when we need it.
Over-reliance on support means losing control. The solution lies in understanding where you need to exert control and where you need to seek the advice of others with more knowledge of a particular area - or whom you trust as truly having your best interests at heart. You are at the centre of the axis and to get the balance right you have to make good judgements about what you need as you go through your career.
Gordon Tinline
No Comments » | Guest Blog Spots, Leadership, Management, Productivity, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: autonomy, control, Gordon Tinline, HSE, managing pressure, support, Well-being, work related stress | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
June 26, 2008
I think I saw the future today. Of course, I’ve seen it all before….but that was in an episode of Star Trek. This was the real thing!!
I’d encourage you to visit http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html and take a quick look at this demo of the ‘Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience’ where holograms of two executives in California are beamed to a Stage in Bangalore, India and interact seamlessly with the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers. I’m not exaggerating when I say it looks virtually no different to if they were actually on the same stage together.
The two companies have clearly invested a lot of money in this system and they probably stand to make a lot of money too. But my interest is in the potential of this technology to change working lives. Business will be the first market for Telepresence and it has already been sold to companies in 23 different countries. After that it won’t be long before they start appearing in our homes!
There are several positive aspects to this advance – first, I can almost hear the sigh of relief from salesmen who pound out the motorway miles to get to and from customers each year. Imagine how stress levels will fall when you don’t have to get up at 5am to drive to the other end of the country – instead, you go to the office at the normal time and use Telepresence. Second, I can hear an equally large sigh of relief from the environment as cars are taken off the roads (which also benefits those who do have to commute) and less people need to fly for business purposes. Finally, consumers will benefit as the time to market for new products and technologies will be dramatically reduced because of the ease of having ‘face-to-face’ meetings using this system or ones like it.
Of course, it won’t actually be a face-to-face meeting – but you can’t get much closer to having one without actually being in the same room. I’m sure that using this system would take some getting used to, but compared with the stop-start nature of tele-conferencing it seems like this offers a whole new level of remote communication. Anyway, check out the demo and let me know what you think….and remember, this is not science-fiction!
No Comments » | Productivity, Stress | Tagged: business meetings, CEO, environment, stress levels | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
June 20, 2008
This week Labour MP Tom Harris hit the headlines after he wrote a blog post entitled “Heaven knows we’re miserable now”. He suggests that although we are richer and more secure, we are actually less happy and more miserable than we were decades ago. He implies that even with the credit crunch we are wealthier and relatively more secure than ever before - because in the past we had the fear of nuclear war, poverty and the average wage was much lower. In some respects, I agree that we are better off now and that this hasn’t led to corresponding increases in happiness – the well-rehearsed ‘money and material goods doesn’t buy happiness’ theory!
However, I disagree that our cynicism, whinging and apparent pessimism is part of the intrinsic British makeup. On the contrary, as an American who has lived and worked here for over 30 years, I think we have become more optimistic, less cynical and less whinging. The ‘70s saw the height of pessimism, conflict and cynicism - but since the ‘80s we have progressively become more positive and the benefits of a positive mindset have been demonstrated and acknowledged in the fields of professional sport, business and our language – for example, the proverbial glass ‘half full’, ‘positive mental attitude’ from the ’80 and ‘90s and more recently ‘positivity’.
In my opinion, what we are seeing today is not ‘national miserableness’, but a reaction to an underlying concern about our security. The insecurity of our jobs, financial insecurity, insecurity because we live in a world where we know terrorists are prepared to give up their lives to destroy others, the lack of community as we hunt the almighty ‘buck’ to look after ourselves and our families.
I suspect what is happening is that people at the moment don’t feel they have much control over their own lives. At the same time, they don’t feel that the ‘significant others’ in society (e.g. government, employers, Bank of England, FSA, etc.) are in control of events either. This lack of control - whether it relates to the cost of fuel and food or the decline of the economy or the rising influence of the EU - causes concern and anxiety for people. So, this so-called nation-wide ‘miserableness’ is a means of expressing our worries, a reaction to a specific way of life that characterises our society – it’s not an intrinsic national negative personality trait!
Read Tom Harris’ Blog post at http://tomcharris.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/heaven-knows-were-miserable-now/
No Comments » | Productivity, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: credit crunch, happiness, harris, miserable, unhappy, Well-being | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
June 19, 2008
Last month Personnel Today reported research from Frankfurt University showing that ‘professional smilers’, such as flight attendants, sales personnel, call centre operators, waiters and others in contact with the public for extended periods of time, were at risk of seriously harming their health. Professor Dieter Zapf, a psychologist and researcher into human emotions at Frankfurt University, said that fake friendliness led to depression, stress and negatively affected the immune system. The implication of the findings was that every time a person is forced to repress their true feelings, there are damaging consequences for their health.
This is hardly surprising, but for me puts the spotlight on recruitment decisions – those of both candidate and recruiter. For the recruiter, it’s critical to know what you’re looking for and how to identify it in the candidate. For example, if you are looking for a friendly, sociable flight attendant you need to understand the enduring personality characteristics that drive the behaviour you are looking for, as well as checking that the person has the skills to interact with passengers effectively. If someone has a personality characterised by high levels of neuroticism and introversion they are very unlikely to behave in the manner you require – no matter how well they perform in the role play at the assessment centre. Learnt skills can mask true personality in the short-term, but it never lasts.
Which brings me to the candidate’s responsibility in these situations: No matter how much someone wants the job there is no point in them pretending to be someone that they are not. If you like to spend time quietly problem-solving, analysing data or writing reports you are unlikely to enjoy the kind of work that requires a lot of human contact, outgoing behaviour and constant smiling. So it’s important to be honest with yourself and the recruiter and to self-select out of the process when this kind of mismatch occurs.
For people, who are naturally outgoing (in personality terms, extroverts who are open to experience and have low levels of neuroticism) I doubt that working in these roles would be inherently stressful, as the Frankfurt study claims. However, for someone who wasn’t completely honest during the recruitment process, or got the job as the result of a poor selection decision by the employer, these kinds of roles could become excruciating. I’d like to see the results of a study like this that controlled for personality type.
http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/05/16/45890/enforced-smiling-in-the-workplace-puts-health-at-risk.html
No Comments » | Management, Recruitment and Selection, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: Depression, personality, recruitment, Stress, stressful | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
June 3, 2008
With the summer holidays approaching, most of us are looking forward to switching off for a couple of weeks…….but does that include your Blackberry and mobile phone too? The advent of PDA / Blackberry technology enables us to take our work around the world with us, and while this has improved communications and flexibility (sending an email from a train would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago!), it also brings risks and challenges for us all.
The standard advice I give to people is to try to keep the use of this technology during holiday periods to a minimum – however important you think the matter is - because it’s important to have ‘real‘ time off, where you truly disengage from everything to do with work. However, I often come across people who push back against this with a different argument.
They tell me that switching their blackberry on 2 times during their holiday for only a short time (and being disciplined about it), might, for some workaholics, actually helps them to relax while they are away. This may seem counter-intuitive – but having discussed this with several people I’ve started to see how this could work… for some.
Firstly, for those who worry about things going wrong while they’re away from the office, and feel they are not ‘in control’, taking a quick look at the Blackberry can alleviate a lot of anxiety. It can enable them to go back to enjoying their time with their families with 100% of their attention. Secondly, if there are people who rely on you back at work and you can ‘unstick’ or support someone with a short email, this may relieve stress for co-workers, improve results or avert a potential major problem you’ll have to deal with on your return. And finally, the pressure of the first few days back in the office may be relieved, because you have already seen most of your emails and considered their content so that it’s one less thing to deal with.
I must emphasise that I’m not advocating this approach for everyone – it is absolutely fine and probably very sensible to say to yourself “I will not think about work even once during my summer holiday”. But for those who don’t want to do this (or can’t), there are options as long as you don’t start working all day every day. Ultimately, it’s down to each of us to decide how to get the most out of our holiday time for ourselves and our families – the measure of whether you’ve got it right, is whether you go back to work feeling refreshed and having spent some quality time with the people that matter to you, your family and friends!
1 Comment | Stress, Well-being | Tagged: pressure, Stress, support | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
May 27, 2008
This week I’ve been at the Police Federation conference in Bournemouth presenting the results of a survey that my University spin-off company Robertson Cooper administered to Inspectors and Chief Inspectors in England and Wales. The Police Federation is the staff association that represents rank and file officers in all 43 police forces in England and Wales – that’s the majority of serving police officers so its views carry some weight!
Much of the debate at the conference centred on police officers’ right to take strike action. In this country this is a right that they don’t currently possess because of the critical role that the police play in upholding law and order. This is something that has been taken for granted for many years, but now that we have entered more uncertain economic times where strike action is becoming more commonplace (see my earlier post on the Oil Workers strike things are changing. This situation for police officers was exacerbated by the Home Secretary’s refusal to grant police officers a pay rise for which they had been lobbying earlier in the year.
All this got me thinking about the psychological side of strike action and what having the right take it is really about for police officers. The conclusion that I came to was that it’s about feeling in control. Police officers have to deal with some of the most difficult, dangerous and stressful situations that you can imagine – where often they can not control what will happen next. Having the right to feed back to their employers about their working conditions through political lobbying alone is just not going to feel like it’s enough – particularly when all other sectors have the right to strike. Entering a protracted process of negotiation (where someone that they don’t know and have never met is representing them) is hardly likely to give officers the sense that they are in control of your own destiny. In this sense, it’s easy to see why having the right to withdraw their services in extreme circumstances may provide a powerful means of taking control. In many ways, it’s the ultimate form of feedback to the organisation!
I’m not saying that police officers definitely should have the right to strike – there are clearly issues of national security and the need to uphold the law to consider. But equally, not having the right when the rest of the UK workforce does have it fundamentally affects the psychological contract between officers and their employers. As always, I’d welcome your views.
1 Comment | Management, Productivity, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: control, police, Stress | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
April 30, 2008
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
No Comments » | Stress | Tagged: Depressed, Stress | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
April 22, 2008
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.
No Comments » | Stress | Tagged: autonomy, control, Stress, workplace stress | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
