SUPERHUM?IN? Neuroleadership in a time of heightened uncertainty

Heightened uncertainty can have a devastating impact on the performance and mental health of employees, triggering a threat response in the brain that interferes with rational thinking, collaborating and solving problems. By understanding the core psychological needs of employees, leaders can focus their efforts on the strategies that will have the greatest impact on engagement and performance.

When the coronavirus pandemic first struck earlier this year, people everywhere were suddenly confronted with more uncertainty than most had experienced in their lifetimes. Unanswered questions swirled in all our minds: What does this mean for me? Is my family safe? How will I work now? Is my job secure? How long will the pandemic last?

Heightened uncertainty on this scale isn’t just unpleasant; it also can have a devastating impact on the performance and mental health of employees, triggering a threat response in the brain that interferes with rational thinking, collaborating and solving problems, potentially undermining an organization’s overall productivity.

But as unfathomable as it would have seemed when the pandemic first struck, life has somehow grown even more chaotic since then. What initially seemed like a transitory setback — one that would end after a few months of lockdown — has now swelled to encompass rising social unrest and concern about the economy, the election and democracy itself.

Research confirms that 2020 has been a time of unprecedented disruption for employees, both professionally and personally. In the early stages of the crisis, 64 percent of employees reported that organizational productivity had been affected, another 60 percent felt stressed and worried, and only about 49 percent felt that organizations cared about their well-being.

While the initial drop in productivity is being restored, the overall well-being of employees is declining. As the months passed and levels of uncertainty remained high, pandemic fatigue began to set in. With many priorities to manage at once, we’ve become cognitively overwhelmed — a state that impairs perception, cognition and behavior. As a result, many people have started to behave somewhat irrationally and irresponsibly, from boycotting masks to throwing big parties in the face of all precautions — all products of frustration, fear and defiance in an effort to reassert control over the upended circumstances.

Why stress-induced fatigue leads to irrationality

The restrictions imposed to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, though absolutely necessary, have had the unintended consequence of making people feel that their basic needs are being threatened. As human beings, we’re driven primarily by emotions — not reason, as we might hope. In particular, we have a few core psychological needs that must be fulfilled in order for us to feel safe and secure: relatedness (the need for social belonging), certainty (the need to understand what’s going on around us) and autonomy (the need to feel a sense of control over our own lives and decisions).

The pandemic has shaken our sense of certainty in an unprecedented manner, triggering a destabilizing global domino effect of threats to our core needs.

As human beings, we rely on information to make sense of the world around us. This is because the human brain is a meaning-making machine: It evaluates and reevaluates input, detects patterns, and creates meaning in order to adjust and calibrate our behavior, emotions and actions. As a result, having access to information is vital to our sense of security.

Unfortunately, a lack of sufficient data disrupts this process. It requires tremendous cognitive energy to reconcile uncertainty, weigh risks and probabilities, and predict outcomes. When there are gaps in our information, the brain fills those gaps by making up a story.

If the story we create feels straightforward and easy — regardless of whether it’s accurate — we feel a sense of ease because the internal conflict has been reconciled. When incomplete patterns are completed, we experience a feeling of reward, triggering a dopaminergic response in the brain that we will then crave again the next time we’re in the same situation. This positive experience motivates us to carry out the same exploratory process the next time we face uncertainty, seeking to turn negative feelings into a positive outcome, to turn uncertain into certain — or, to be more precise, to turn the uncertain into the familiar.

Because of course, the future is never truly certain. We forget that uncertainty is not unique to a crisis, but a permanent fixture of life. What we tend to think of as certainty is often just familiarity, which aids predictability. But that’s OK — familiarity and predictability are comforting enough.

How the uncertainty of crisis disrupts work

Crises are usually acute — they are sudden, dynamic, volatile and riddled with compounded unknowns, forcing organizations and individuals to adjust and course-correct on the fly. Lacking sufficient data to predict outcomes, we feel untethered and disoriented and have a hard time reconciling between short- and long-term planning.

In the case of coronavirus, the lack of predictability about when the pandemic might end has thrown a wrench in our short- and long-term predictions. The time horizon for when we can expect to live “normally” again is vague and dependent on factors outside our individual control, such as the availability of vaccines and the health of the economy. With no clear and consistent plan and a time horizon that changes continually due to a lack of public compliance, we all feel stuck in a disorienting loop.

The uncertainty of crisis distorts our perception in many ways. The presence of so many unknowns triggers stress responses that color our cognition and, consequently, our behavior. We enter a self-reinforcing circle: The more unknowns there are, the more stress we feel, and the more reactive and instinctive we become. This negative, vicious cycle in turn disrupts our ability to do what we most need to do: to think rationally and deliberately in order to process information and project long-term outcomes.

The reason managing uncertainty is so disruptive to the brain is that it is both cognitively taxing and subjectively aversive. That’s because the brain is wired to value certainty the same way it values sex, food and social contact.

The brain’s most crucial function is to keep us alive — a task it accomplishes by surveying the environment, evaluating sensory input and assessing whether the stimuli it encounters constitutes a threat to survival. Since it’s less costly to overestimate danger than it is to underestimate it, the brain’s threat detection networks are designed to err on the side of caution. As a result, the brain categorizes anything that’s novel or ambiguous as inherently aversive — and views uncertainty as a source of deep discomfort.

This is a costly cycle to manage since it requires us to reconcile conflicting emotions and states: “I want to be safe, but I don’t want to be restricted.” “I feel scared, but I also feel annoyed and fed up.”

The good news is that, as humans, we evolve, adapt and learn from adversity — and in times of crisis, we can manage our need for certainty by finding clarity where we can.

How SUPERHUM?IN? Neuroleaders can support employees

First, organizations must understand that the stress of uncertainty affects not just employees, but leaders as well. No one is immune to the impact a chronic state of uncertainty has on cognition and behavior.

The stress of uncertainty, combined with the fact that hierarchical power can blind us to the perspectives of others, means that in times of crisis, leaders may have less capacity to empathize and engage in perspective-taking to understand their employees. That’s why the traditional approach to crisis — asking leaders to project strength and courage and to mask any signs of weakness — is misguided, serving only to create distance between them and their workforce.

In fact, one of the hallmarks of SUPERHUM?IN? Neuroleadership is an understanding that without compassion, resilient leaders fall short, even inadvertently signaling contempt for employees who are struggling or underperforming due to the stress of crisis. It’s crucial that leaders avoid this unintended trap, especially in a time when we all have a greater need for social connection.

Second, leaders should make a point of displaying vulnerability. No leader has total knowledge of what’s going to happen in the future. That’s why the hallmark of leading in this era of prolonged uncertainty is being able to say: “I don’t have the answer, but we’ll figure it out together.”

In our recent SUPERHUM?IN? research study, we found that in times of crisis, employees need their managers and leaders to do three things:

• Be transparent about what decisions are being made and why.
• Be clear about how managers can support employees.
• Role model behaviors that are productive rather than destructive.

In our Neuroleadership Executive Programs, Leaders will understand on how to help employees stay healthy and productive through times of uncertainty with a few brain research-based and pragmatic strategies. For example:

 1. Be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.

First, leaders can help employees shift their mindset, learning to see crises as opportunities to learn, grow and adapt. When they shift their mindset in this way, employees feel equipped to rise to the occasion and handle whatever challenges arise.

Specifically, employees can reframe the way they view a crisis, coming to view prolonged ambiguity and uncertainty as an opportunity to develop skills they would not otherwise acquire. Brain research shows that reframing challenging circumstances in this way builds resilience — the ability to withstand, adapt and learn from adversity, developing an ever-evolving shield that prepares us for future adversity.

2. Focus on clarity over certainty.

Second, leaders can help employees manage the threat they feel in response to rapidly unfolding changes by offsetting the decrease in certainty wherever possible by focusing on questions that actually can be answered.

Neuroleaders should be intentional about finding ways to increase employees’ sense of certainty. By simplifying options, articulating timelines and anchoring on core principles, they create the structure, order and predictability employees need to restore their sense of control.

3. Be essential, not exhaustive.

Finally, as stress, anxiety and fatigue rise, creating a risk of burnout, leaders can focus on the essential instead of trying to be exhaustive.

Leaders should let go of the need to have all the answers. When novel situations arise, as they inevitably will, focusing on the essential eliminates distractions, reducing the burden on the brain’s cognitive capacity.

The good news is that research shows that panic and paralysis aren’t inevitable reactions to crisis. By understanding the core psychological needs of employees — the need to belong, the need to know and the need to have a say — leaders can focus their efforts on the strategies that will have the greatest impact on engagement and performance. When push comes to shove, individuals and organizations can adjust, even achieving tasks that may have seemed impossible under normal circumstances.

 The economic landscape has changed and work environments have become more complex than we ever imagined, with the pressure to perform more with less. New advances from different scientific fields are helping us better understand how our brains & bodies function and the incredible impact they have on the way we lead.

While some people are natural leaders, we can all increase our leadership potential by ensuring we have a healthy brain and body. Embracing the idea of overall health (and making this care available and affordable) is crucial as at SUPERHUM?IN ?, we develop the Neuroleaders of the future. Beginning the sometimes difficult conversation about brain health is the first step to becoming a healthier human being--and SUPERHUM?IN? Leader