Creating A High-Performance workplace

A dense & informative article that explains the dynamics in my workplace and why current strategies did nothing to improve staff engagement. Highly recommend for leaders and managers.

Leaders hold the power to shape the work environment for employees who spend a good 7-8 hours at each day. They either flourish or suffocate in those few months or years of their lives in the organization. I personally feel that leaders owe it to the employees to prioritize the building of a work culture that inspires. Quoting American Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, he shares that he works for each and every one of his employees and not the other way around. Thus, leadership is a burden not many are willing to bear.

How do we start building such a work culture? Let us first understand how the social brain works.

The author shares a couple of findings which I've summarized as follows;

1. Feeling of exclusion provoked the same reaction in the brain as physical pain

Research findings show that the regions of our brain that light up when we feel excluded are similar to experiencing a physical pain. This shows that our physiological and neurological reaction is closely linked to our social interaction with others, e.g. with co workers or superiors. We are constantly thinking about others and ourselves. Leaders who seek to understand this will become more aware of how interactions in the workplace place a part, which leads me to the 2nd point.

2. Employees who learn to regulate their feelings of exclusion become less committed and engaged to the workplace.

The workplace is a social system. The feelings of exclusion comes from feeling betrayed or unrecognized at the workplace, being scolded, having been informed of a pay cut or given an unworthy assignment. The typical learnt reaction would be to "suck it up" and look forward to pay day. Employees become purely transactional in their work. Therefore the author encourages leaders to address this social brain for optimal performance.

3. Employees need an environment that promotes mindfulness

When the brain senses exclusion, the natural response impairs analytical thinking, creativity and problem solving. Leaders who trigger such a threat response will end up with less efficient employees. Research shows that the brain is highly plastic when it has mindful attention void of the presence of threat or stress. Otherwise, the response to threats will drain away neural energy. Understanding this will be helpful for leaders to implement large scale changes.

The author shares the 5 ways to minimize threat responses in any organization in the form of the acronym S.C.A.R.F.

S- Status and its discontents

Humans are programmed to care about status as it is tied to survival. For example, performance reviews and having receive feedback provoke threat responses. Conversely, picking up a skill or pitting against ourselves increases the perception of status.

C- Craving for certainty

Uncertainty profoundly cripples us and wastes our neural energy in trying to close the "gaps". Mild uncertainty often attracts interest and attention, but the perception of uncertainty that is getting out of hand provokes a threat response. One way to counter that would be to providing information frequently, make processes transparent and breaking complex projects into smaller steps.

A- Autonomy

This is the opposite of being micromanaged. They need to perceive that they have control to make decisions without much oversight. One possible way to do that would be giving employees the latitude to make choices.

R- Relatedness

Fruitful collaboration depends on trust and empathy. I especially like that he emphasizes that trust, goodwill and empathy requires time and repeated social interaction to develop. The author recommends for leaders to be intentional in putting diverse people in a group so as to minimize the potential of threat response. At the end of the day, people want to be part of the same social group.

F- Fairness

We are triggered by unfair situations which stirs up hostility and mistrust. In an environment when the re is a perception of unfairness, trust and collaboration cannot flourish. Simmilarly, fairness is served well through transparency and sharing of information in timely manner.

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/09306