Category Archives: business

Mirrors in the Office by Michelle Kunz

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Recent research in neuro-psychology includes the discovery of certain movement neurons which are activated when we observe others making movements we recognize from our own experience. These neurons are called “mirror neurons” and they are so powerfully triggered that to some part of our brains it is as if we actually made the movement ourselves.

Researchers happened on these neurons by accident and did not immediately recognize the full implications. Only after many observations in separate and unrelated experiments did they put together the correlating data and make sense of what they had. The full discovery ignited great excitement in the worlds of psychology and related areas of human behavioral study.

Here’s where it matters for our purposes: we make movements large and small every day. And they have impacts large and small on everyone around us, creating sympathetic and perhaps not-so-sympathetic reactions in others which may not even make sense to those who experience the reactions. For example, if you see me lift my coffee mug and take a sip, you don’t have to move a muscle to know exactly what I am experiencing at every point along the way. If you like coffee, you’ll enjoy that experience, creating a shared experience of pleasure.

If I furrow my brow in anger and draw my lips down in disapproval, you also know what I am experiencing in that moment without you having to be angry or disapproving yourself. And you will most likely not enjoy that experience, perhaps drawing away from me, or even expressing your own anger and disapproval to someone else if you connected deeply to your mirrored experience of anger and disapproval.

Everything we experience is put through our personal set of filters. So there is a great deal of room for error as we rely on our mirror neurons for input. Unfortunately, the part of the brain that processes our reaction to the movements and events triggered by the mirror neurons isn’t aware of those filters and processes the observation and movement data very quickly, unaware that the interpretations may be flawed. So most of the time before we have had the opportunity to become aware of our filters we have already assessed the incoming data and responded as if we KNEW what we were observing to be true based on the data alone.

Using the brow furrowing example, I might make that movement and accompany it with a grimace. Your mirror neurons and your filters interpret that as anger and you have an internal reaction to that, pulling away from me and perhaps, in the extreme, feeling the beginning of anger within you. However, I might merely be concentrating fiercely on a task that I find unpleasant or difficult. Particularly if I combine the brow furrowing and grimace with any kind of verbal exchange that includes tightness in my voice, you may still interpret this concentration as anger, most especially if you are highly sensitive to anger for any reason based on your past experiences.

One of the goals of increasing our self awareness is to increase the gap time between incoming data and response. We desire an increased gap time to allow us the opportunity to examine our filters and choose to engage with or without them in place. This requires practice and patience.

Several questions help us make good use of the discovery of mirror neurons: What data am I putting out for others to mirror? What impact is it having on them? What data am I taking in from others? How are my personal filters engaged to possibly alter my perceptions of that data? What are my default tendencies in response to that data? How can I increase my gap time?

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Where Collaboration Begins by Michelle Kunz

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Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict. William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842)

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination. J. B. S. Haldane (1892 – 1964)

In a recent study on collaboration, BNET and Harris Interactive polled 2093 people and discovered the following:

  • Personality conflicts and egos are among the hardest problems to solve

  • Bad chemistry and poor leadership are often blamed for lack of collaboration

  • Leaders are often not open to new ideas

  • There is a lack of feedback from other team members

  • New ideas are not being tracked

At the heart of teamwork is collaboration, working together to achieve a common goal. But collaboration isn’t just about reaching a goal. Collaboration suggests getting along, consensus building and positive feedback. Why are individuals rating these areas so low if teams depend on these very dynamics to achieve results?

Because leaders are tied up with other activities. The reason new ideas don’t get air time or proper support, feedback across the team is not encouraged and personality and ego issues are at the forefront of team challenges is because the leaders are not at the helm of the ship. They are somewhere in a meeting of their own, on a team of their own, experiencing very similar feelings of frustration. Here are some of the top frustrations I hear from managers:

  • No support for new ideas from upper management

  • Personalities and egos drive organizational agendas

  • Untold hours wasted in pointless meetings

  • Work that actually matters is stymied by bureaucratic procedures or territory wars

Given that the complaints are similar, it would seem that someone somewhere would be capable of validating the experience of everyone else and begin acknowledging the reality of the dysfunctions. In company after company across the U.S., employees are crying out to be heard in their frustration, and motivation and morale continue to suffer while validation and acknowledgement remain off the table.

Someone needs to go first

Let’s assume that upper management has something so important preoccupying them that true organizational health is simply not on the agenda in any real way. Never mind study after study that shows that lack of organizational health has a real connection to the bottom line in terms of employee satisfaction and turnover, productivity and other measurable results. If everyone up in the C Suite is too busy, someone else needs to make a move instead.

This is where the true leaders have an opportunity to shine. I recently met with a manager whose team has excelled in every benchmark in their industry, while teams around them have floundered. Sooner or later, this manager will attract attention simply because the numbers will begin to speak. What is this person doing? Investing great amounts of time and energy in coaching, mentoring, supporting and championing the team members. Regular training meetings, motivational programs, one-on-one coaching opportunities and a very personal relationship with each team member are essential ingredients in this manager’s recipe for success. These programs are not standard for the organization, and come out of the division budget, but the results show that every dollar is money well spent.

Meanwhile, this person still attends the requisite manager meetings and all other organizational meetings, in addition to meeting all the organizational goals and requirements for the team.

And the team? The team works together, supports one another, gives feedback, supports new ideas. In short, they collaborate to make each individual a partner in the overall team success.

Someone has to go first, and it is not likely to be your boss. A leader doesn’t wait around for someone else to go first. By definition, a leader is out in front of the pack, leading. So, would someone on one of those very unhappy teams lacking in collaboration please release themselves from sheep status and step up to be shepherd? Even if you don’t wear the title, earn the position. People who lead change people’s lives. They change the world. And let me offer a little validation here for those of you who share that vision: it is not an easy task to lead. Only the most resilient, creative and flexible –not necessarily the strongest or brightest — will pass the test of time when it comes to leadership.

Collaboration begins when one person decides to get along, to figure out why things aren’t working very well and how they might work better. It doesn’t matter if that person is the titled leader or not. There are many books available to explain personality types, in a variety of theories and presentation styles. Find out a little more about yours and those with whom you work. Do a little detective work and figure out how to make things work a little better. Egos are about fear. Figure out what people are afraid of and you can soothe their egos and get back to the matters of importance. Ideas don’t die unless the people who have them allow them to die. Devise a way to grow your ideas — and those of your team — and track them yourself. Leadership requires creativity.

Powerful leaders do not wait for others. Step up and make a difference. Collaboration begins with you and me and her and him and all of us, wanting it and working for it. Who will go first?

Death by Waiting by Michelle Kunz

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In the October 9, 2007 print edition of the “Wall Street Journal” Jared Sandberg’s “Cubicle Culture” column addressed an issue we can all relate to: the fatal effects of waiting on creativity, motivation, morale and productivity. Sandberg observes that no matter how many technological advances we develop to eliminate waiting, there are always built in enforcers of the status quo. Email, for example, can send our messages immediately, but we have no control over whether the person receiving will actually respond.

Managing up is a hot topic right now. Everyone would like to get their supervisor, or better yet, the C Suite, on the same page as they are. There is the perception that if upper management would change, everything would improve. There are many assumptions buried in those perceptions, and whether they are accurate or not is not the topic for this particular post. Waiting for management to change, however, is. That falls under the topic of trying to control the outcome of someone else’s behavior, overtly or covertly, and we can just let that go and move on to areas where we have more direct control.

As leaders we do have a great deal of control over how smoothly things flow within our direct spheres of influence. Most of this control lies in setting good examples, laying down clear operating guidelines, communicating expectations and following up with direct feedback which delivers specific information to the recipient on how they can adjust their actions to better serve the team. Let’s look at each of these areas in greater detail as they relate to waiting.

Good examples

Time management is one of those terms often used and seldom understood. It might be helpful to review the Pareto Principle which states that 80% of effects comes from 20% of causes. Think about that. What that is saying is that 80% of your causes (or efforts) are practically wasted (producing only 20% of your effects, or outcomes). The purpose of a time management system ideally is to maximize your efforts so that you are in peak performance more often than 20% of the time. Before you can implement a calendar or task list, however, you first need to identify which activities actually produce your greatest results (the 80% of effects) and devise a strategy for maximizing your time spent in those activities. This may require delegating, saying no to or redefining other activities so you can maximize your efforts.

If you can’t get your arms around this as a leader, it will be difficult to make the case for your team to do it. Here are some common areas where leaders lay down weak examples for teams to follow, wasting time and causing undue delays in the process:

  • Failing to stick to action-producing agendas for meetings
  • Attempting to get consensus on a topic when a clear decision is called for
  • Resisting setting up clear accountability guidelines so action is well supported
  • Allowing deadlines to slip without asking for accountability in ways that produce action
  • Overlooking the importance of clarity in all aspects of communication, inviting misunderstandings, mistakes and delays
  • Miscalculating the importance of accurate and timely cascading communication systems

Clear operating guidelines

Some of the bullet points above fall under this heading. One of the best ways a leader can help a team avoid playing the waiting game is to lay down clear operating procedures from the very beginning. This requires a clear construct of all aspects of the team’s activities and responsibilities, both internally and interdepartmentally. The best way to get this picture will be to ask for input from your team. They know better than you what they do, how they do it and how long it takes. You probably know the why better than they do. And you can push back on the how and how long, perhaps even the what if something seems out of place. With this kind of dialogue and open debate, a very clear picture of overall team activity and responsibilities will begin to take shape. Everyone on the team needs to have this clear picture — each member should clearly understand what everyone else does and why and have a good sense of the how and how long. This understanding eliminates unreasonable requests from one member to another, and sets reasonable expectations between team members.

Once you have the picture, continuing the dialogue to include what core procedures must be in place to keep the team at peak performance will elicit ideas you may not think of if you do this exercise alone. You’ll have an organizational view, which is essential, but they will have priorities and preferences which will be no less vital to keeping the team motivated and happy. Working through these issues early on will ensure that everyone is on the same page and has buy-in. Clearly laying this out for your team will ensure that later on no time is wasted waiting for someone else to decide what should be happening at this point in the project.

Clear expectations

“Expectations” is not about levels of perfection. It’s about goals and objectives and deadlines and accountability. What do you expect people to do, by when, and how will they let you know it has been accomplished? How should they let you know it is NOT going to be accomplished or that a problem has developed — and by when? How much do you want to be kept in the loop along the way? Who is accountable to whom else on the team? How will that happen? How do they handle an accountability issue between teammates? If you have not laid out a very clear set of expectations around objectives, deadlines and accountability, you are asking your team to wait while you figure it out along the way. Furthermore, you are asking for a lot of wasted time while people deal with misunderstandings and ambiguity around the essential questions of Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. Do not ever be afraid to be too clear when answering those questions. And always ask people to tell you what they heard you say just in case you weren’t as clear as you thought you were.

Direct feedback

So many people struggle with feedback. They take it personally. They fear the other person will take it personally. If the other person does take it personally, they take that personally. No wonder supervisors frequently dread the annual review process. Wouldn’t we all rather just give out gold stars and call it a day?

Feedback in its simplest form is information about where you are in relation to where you said you wanted to be. You set an objective: A, and you set a deadline: B. On date B you look to see if you’ve accomplished A. If you have, great! You can talk about what happened, how you felt about it, what you learned, what happened that you expected, and what happened that you didn’t. That’s all part of extended feedback — how you felt and what you learned. What gets difficult for most of us is when date B comes along and we didn’t accomplish A.

So here are two cases: Case 1: we are close to getting A, but we’re just not there yet. In this case, we assess the original goal and see if our date was unrealistic. Or perhaps something else happened — Time management issues? Extenuating circumstances? It’s all feedback. Case 2: We didn’t accomplish A, but we did accomplish C. In this case, we can really get out of the box and ask some interesting questions. Was A necessary after all? Is C more useful in some way than A? Were we just goofing off and C is a complete waste of time? What kept us from doing A and what drew us to doing C? All of this is also feedback. And, of course, there are many other questions that the exact situation will ignite that will shed additional light on the subject.

The point is, without feedback, there will be no forward movement. The goal can be large or small, no matter. Along the way, we all need feedback so we can adjust course. That might mean carry on, or it might mean abandon ship. Either course is valid and important, but we won’t know until we get feedback.

Waiting is a part of life. We will wait in traffic. We will be put on hold while making a doctor’s appointment. And we will probably wait for a request from another department or from the powers that be above us. But within our own teams waiting can be minimized or at least be made meaningful by adopting principles and creating systems which support movement — creating the freedom to move, supporting the ability to move, enforcing accountability for movement and always, always making sure we have solicited input from the beginning so we have clarity, understanding and most importantly — ownership.