Living through Historical Times

Geopolitical instability hurts us all through fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but the stress also inhibits innovation and growth. What can be done about it? Behavioral interventions can help.

In times of global political instability and social unrest, it is natural to feel stress. Even if we are not in the direct line of fire, the burden of world events is weighing on everyone. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt that characterizes our current era impacts the quality of decisions being made because these emotions inhibit creativity, fuel distrust, and cause impatience. Combined with the prevalence of remote work and other consequences of the pandemic, the disconnect between colleagues, leaders, teams, and clients makes it difficult to sustain focus on creativity, innovation, and growth.

What can be done about it?

Leaders need to be trained to lead during turbulent times. When training a pilot, flight simulators are an integral part of the process. It gets them beyond the theoretical work that happens at a desk but precedes an actual cockpit. But when a pilot begins training, should the simulator simulate real-world conditions including stress-inducing turbulence so that the pilot can develop a “feel” for the real-world, or should it be artificially constrained, without turbulence, so that they can focus on learning the controls? Which would you choose: mirror the real-world environment or artificially constrain it? Before reading on, questions like this may not seem immediately obvious, but the choice affects the efficacy and reliability of the training. The answer is counterintuitive to most. Despite the name “simulator,” research reveals that the best method of the two is the artificially constrained environment, so that the pilot can learn the basics before more complexity is introduced.

How can we design organizations that prepare leaders for managing people through periods of incredible stress and turbulence? How can we design organizations so that leaders can begin their journey with simpler controls to prepare them for leading through times when complexity increases?

Questions like this can be overlooked in the development of organizational operations. Oftentimes the leap into management doesn’t include a period of operating basic controls and learning how to drive with simple inputs and outputs, before being confronted with turbulence. As a consequence, when it strikes, managers burn out trying to juggle foundational learning with real-world complexities. Too often change, whether from devastating externalities such as a pandemic or geopolitical turmoil, or positive ones, such as mergers, lead to organizational paralysis as people become overwhelmed by the circumstances.

To mitigate this, organizations benefit from preparing a solid foundation of easy real-world conditions, followed by implementing resilience mechanisms that prepare them for turbulence.

A solid foundation includes defined business processes, clear workflows, and use of Responsibility Accountability Matrixes (RACI) to help delineate between who is accountable for a task versus and who needs to merely be informed. This documentation allows us to audit the processes for informational gaps, decision-making biases, organizational barriers and bottlenecks, and unnecessary bureaucracy (sludge). Routine evaluation allows us to then optimize our processes to enhance quality and speed of decision-making. And employing metrics with evaluation allows for the opportunity to consider innovation, or radical changes to the processes altogether.

But creating a stable organizational environment through solid processes is not enough. The artificially stable infrastructure then needs to be paired with resilience mechanisms that work to prevent or minimize the effects of turbulence.

Our research on the factors of creating a successful remote work environment are useful to consider as we navigate through the pandemic and turbulent geopolitical events.

Four behavioral interventions to help are:

· Establishing alignment with colleagues through shared understanding:?Information bias (the tendency to seek more and more information even though it won’t affect our actions) can exacerbate a lack of share understanding, which is a psychological sub-construct of collaboration. Online collaboration suffered when teams didn’t have a clear understanding of project goals, deadlines and team member roles. Shared understanding is of critical importance for both remote work performance and satisfaction. Further, trust in your peers is just as important as trust in your employer for remote work performance and satisfaction.

·?Creating quality peer relationships: Our research found that employees who were able to build and nurture meaningful relationships with colleagues while working remotely were better equipped to tackle challenges, improving both their performance and satisfaction. In a large field study with employees in a division of a global chemical company, researchers found that both direct knowledge (learning about the personal characteristics and behavioral norms of colleagues) and reflected knowledge (learning about one’s own personal characteristics, relationships, and behavioral norms by interacting with colleagues) enhanced feelings of closeness with remote co-workers. Structured conversations around the same topic (a book, article, or TED talk) can lead to increased direct knowledge, while allowing for discussions to reflect on one’s own way of interacting can enhance reflected knowledge. Remote work has allowed for people to have more alone time to ideate and be creative which is a plus, but then if they can’t openly share those ideas then the ideas can’t flourish.

·?Changing the ways we communicate:?As we wrote about in our Business Insider piece?“No more Water Cooler Conversations’: 5 Ways Managers can adapt to the Work-from-Home-Force Now, Because it’ll be Here for Awhile”?(March 2020), we need to adapt to new ways of communicating. our computers now house multiple applications for different types of communications, from email to chat to apps like Slack. But with the choice comes the burdens of distraction, task switching, and the stress of providing immediate responses. People need to know that they can respond in due course. One change is to adapt to “bursty” communications, which means allowing for periods of silence interrupted by flurries of communication. Second, with the challenges presented by working from in-home, people are working at different times of day or across time zones, and they need psychological permission to respond to — or send — messages at different times of day. To address this, I have added the tag line to my communications: “Your work hours may be different from mine. There is no need to respond immediately.”

· Making space for psychological detachment:?In a study with over 3,800 participants, researchers found that psychological detachment is negatively associated with (i) perceived expectations for availability to deal with work-related issues outside regular work hours, and (ii) use of the smartphone as a work tool during off-work hours. Many employees felt they couldn’t stop thinking about work during non-working hours. This inability to psychologically detach from work had a detrimental effect on remote work satisfaction, but it did not significantly impact remote work performance. Making sure after-work smartphone use expectations are known to everybody in the organization and reinforcing them with social proof cues can help mitigate their negative effect on psychological safety. Further, in these perilous “history-making” times, we need to recognize that people are feeling frazzled and will need additional space to process their feelings.

Organizations need to do these things and be good at them when times are relatively stable in order to protect their people when things become unstable. Ideally, this work should have been done preemptively, but nevertheless here we are.

Ultimately, we need to recognize that the people on our teams are living through exceptionally difficult times. We don’t operate in a vacuum and the global context we work in affects our decisions and performance. Leaders must respect the stress that these circumstances put onto people, even if we are thousands of miles away from direct conflict. Businesses depend on their people and we must contend with the realities of a complex and challenging world. Behavioral science provides insights and tools that can guide leaders through these difficult times. The more we can understand people, the better we can engineer practices and environments to foster their key needs and promote their well-being. The more resilient we are, the better our organizations, and the world, will be.