Setsights

How does a song from a musical teach us about being happy at work?

David Lurie — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:14:08 +0000

If you’re reading this post via RSS or Email, please come and visit the website this week – it has been re-launched with a brand new redesign and a narrower focus on the services and consultancy I provide. I would appreciate comments!

As long-time readers of the blog know, I’m a strong believer in making psychology applicable to real life, which is why the training I design and the coaching I deliver are based, whenever possible, on academic psychology.

What I mention less often is my passion for telling stories, although this is a substantial part of my credo that, “Training is like cooking: if you use the wrong ingredients, it doesn’t work”. I’ve just got back from seeing Matilda, and one of the songs really struck me about being applicable to work.

The song “naughty” is all about knowing when you need to be a little bit naughty to change your story, and there are two parts of the song that I find particularly fascinating. Firstly, the bit about “being naughty”. I don’t condone breaking most rules in the workplace – after all things like discrimination laws are critically important – but in order to improve things at work we all have to be willing to break the unwritten rules. Just because something is “not done” doesn’t mean we can’t do it if it’ll lead to improvement down the line!

And secondly (and more relevant to today’s post) there is the bit about “changing the story”. We really can change our own stories in the workplace. Perhaps we change jobs to one that is more fulfilling or we learn to challenge our managers more effectively.

One of the recent articles I’ve read in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, that is due to be published soon, reinforces some important lessons. If people enjoy something they tend to be better at it, and hence you are better off getting into a role that you really enjoy.

If you work for a big company, that’s easier than in small companies without leaving, but even if you can’t change role, the other finding has been that getting better at something makes you enjoy it more too. That creates a win-win situation in which you will be happier and successful at your job, and getting stronger skills (so that you then enjoy the job more) is far easier than looking for an alternative job or internal transfer… plus the study suggests this even works for non-enjoyable activities.

That makes sense to me; after all, I seem to get a strange enjoyment out of ironing nowadays…

References

PHILLIPS, L., & CHAPMAN, G. (2011). Enjoyment and Success: Reciprocal Factors in Behavior Change Journal of Applied Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00849.x

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On Schemas at Work

David Lurie — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:03:26 +0000

I haven’t blogged in a while – it has been an extremely intense couple of months here and clients always come first. But did you assume that’s why I hadn’t been blogging?

We all view the world through our own set of schemas. While simplified, we may have a schema that say that a prototypical blogger tends to start off with frequent posts (once or twice a week) and after a while these posts tail off and stop. In this case, an individual with this schema would have thought I’d got bored.

On the other hand, it’s fairly obvious this blog exists because of Setsights Ltd – and not for the sake of blogging alone. So there might be a schema in which you think that organisations blog, but tend to let the blogging fall to the wayside when work gets too busy… and in this case, the schema would have been correct.

But let’s switch back to the workplace.

I’m a big proponent of learning at work, and the ability to learn how to avoid making these assumptions is astoundingly important to progression. I recently worked with a very recent graduate – about 22, and a few months since his graduation – who said the following about a very senior leader in his company.

“He can’t spell. How did he manage to get into a position of such responsibility when he doesn’t understand simple grammar. He must be stupid”

He was relying on a schema that suggests that ability to spell and leadership ability are on parallels… but of course, they’re not. Here are some explanations for the poor grammar in an email:

They are dyslexic
They typed the email too rapidly and didn’t check what they had written
They didn’t actually write the email, their secretary wrote it from dictation
They find a specific grammatical rule hard to understand (defence/defense, or the use of semicolons)
English isn’t their first language
They’re stupid

Considering they’re a senior leader, most of us would – hopefully – assume it’s one of the first five, not the last one.

Assuming the worst has dangers – undermining others in this way correlate with negative outcomes of workplace achievement (Duffy, Ganster & Pagon, 2002) and therefore it is a strong predictor for this individual that he will not, unless something changes, be a potential leader himself.

So a question for you to ask yourself – and please do, whether you use the comments section below to respond or not – do you have negative schemas and stereotypes about anyone at work? And if you do, what do you think the effect will be…

P.S. Stay tuned, the Setsights website redesign is imminent, as all the rest of our materials etc. have now been rebranded with much less neon yellow!

References

Duffy, M., Ganster, D., & Pagon, M. (2002). SOCIAL UNDERMINING IN THE WORKPLACE. Academy of Management Journal, 45 (2), 331-351 DOI: 10.2307/3069350

On Belbin Team Roles and Research

David Lurie — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:52:46 +0000

Belbin.

As profiling tools go, there is nothing (except perhaps Myers-Briggs, which has a very different use) which I think is more valuable.

Belbin suggests 9 team roles, which frequently are found in pairs. There are the Shaper and the Coordinator: both managers but one is more dominant and the other more people-focused. And there’s the creative two (the two that many creative learning professionals share), known as the Plant and the Resource Investigator.

The Plant is a “traditional” creative type, coming up with ideas, a bit scatty, hard to manage etc. The Resource Investigator is more into bringing research into one place, and priding themselves on always knowing someone who will have the right answer. Obviously someone who can do both is likely to be very good at bringing lots of information together and then being creative with it. Sounds like a trainer to me!

I was very interested to read recently a study dating from 2005 by American researcher Mazhil Rajendran. Although focusing on IT, his study looked at the effectiveness of teams using Belbin’s models – in effect, testing the time validity of the results.

Unfortunately, there are some substantial problems with the study. It tests an older version that doesn’t include the 9^th team role of “Specialist”, and also evaluates team on their strength across the 8 roles. A basic tenet of Belbin’s theories is that there is no “good” or “bad” – just strengths and allowable weaknesses, that if not controlled can become genuine weaknesses. A team needs a good balance of roles, but you don’t need a Plant or a Monitor Evaluator to succeed (although you need the latter if you have a strong Plant!)

As said, I have a high opinion of Belbin, but there’s a serious lack of research outside of the institute itself. If any of you are familiar with any peer reviewed work on team roles that you’d like to share, I’d be extremely interested to discuss it.

References

Rajendran, M. (2005). Analysis of team effectiveness in software development teams working on hardware and software environments using Belbin Self-perception Inventory Journal of Management Development, 24 (8), 738-753 DOI: 10.1108/02621710510613753

The (terrifying) psychology of first impressions

David Lurie — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:08:37 +0000

What do you think of this girl?

My last post about the psychology of handshakes sent me off on a train of thought that has kept me rather busy. I found myself asking lots of questions:

If I can make judgements about people based on observing them (without even meeting them), is it fair?

Are my judgements correct?

How easy is it to reframe things?

In this post I’ll be starting to answer these questions.

These are all incredibly important questions to understand from the perspective of developing within the workplace, where we often have absolutely no choice who we work with. If Jade has such piercing blue eyes that she seems “a little creepy” or Matt must be “a bit shifty” because he bleaches his hair it is saying much more about us than it is about them… and yes, there is a particular shade of blue eyes that creeps me out.

In 2006 two researchers – Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov – demonstrated that it only takes 1/10^th of a second to form an impression of attractiveness, trustworthiness, competence and aggressiveness. Quite frighteningly, more time doesn’t make a difference – that 1/10^th of a second’s impression merely becomes further cemented over the course of the first second.

And in fact, 100ms may be being generous – the same year Bar et al. demonstrated that consistent first impressions were made after 39ms. However, this latter study showed an opportunity for us to breathe a sigh of relief: impressions are not consistent on intelligence: because unlike attractiveness, trustworthiness, competence and aggressiveness, there is no short-term affect on survival from intelligence.

So how does this directly affect our employment? Right from the first job interview (Neuberg, 1989; Dougherty et al., 1994) and in this case the idea of 39ms goes straight out of the window. In fact, merely a read-through of an application form can lead to a first impression being created, which can then affect what happens in the interview room. If a positive first impression has been formed, the interviewed will demonstrate more supportive and positive behaviour, and in fact will ask less questions, a pattern of behaviours that will lead to stronger rapport being built and a “virtuous circle”.

So a lesson for us all there – our application forms and CVs have much longer lasting impact than we’re usually told, but other than making sure our CVs lead to a positive first impression (which, unless you know the person who will read it, is virtually impossible) the solution is difficult, and becomes more a matter of making sure that employers and colleagues get an accurate first impression of you. Fortunately, the CV is not the only tool in your arsenal, and I’ll be discussing the accuracy of first impressions in the next post.

References

Bar, M., Neta, M., & Linz, H. (2006). Very First Impressions. Emotion, 6 (2), 269-278 DOI: 10.1037/1528-3542.6.2.269

Dougherty, T., Turban, D., & Callender, J. (1994). Confirming first impressions in the employment interview: A field study of interviewer behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79 (5), 659-665 DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.79.5.659

Neuberg, S. (1989). The goal of forming accurate impressions during social interactions: Attenuating the impact of negative expectancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56 (3), 374-386 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.56.3.374

Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face Psychological Science, 17 (7), 592-598 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01750.x

The Psychology of Unusual Handshakes

David Lurie — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:59:21 +0000

I’m currently in a hotel outside of London, and in the bar tonight was a group of executive coaches. I knew they were executive coaches as one of them said so when I said hello: which inevitably led me to pay far more attention to their body language once I’d returned to the comfort of the sofa I was pretending to read on.

On two occasions their handshakes caught my attention. In the first case, one gentleman shook hands with another with a two handed grip, which was held a little too long.

In the second case, a different man had a two handed shake with a woman – his right hand held her left hand and vice versa. For all intends and purposes, they were just holding hands.

It was strange.

What research has been carried out on handshakes within first impressions? Personally, I would have found both handshakes creepy, and would only have utilised the former one in a negotiation environment… fortunately, someone else has already asked the question.

In 2000, William Chaplin and his colleagues investigated the relation of handshakes to personality and first impressions, A firm handshake was positively correlated with Extroversion (both genders) and Openness (women only) and negatively with Neuroticism, although unfortunately there was no correlation with the other two aspects of the Big Five. They concluded that for both genders – and especially for women – a firm handshake could lead to a more positive first impression, especially as much previous research has explored the relationship between career success and lower levels of neuroticism.

More recently, Greg Stewart explored handshakes specifically within employment situations and again confirmed that a firm handshake was positively correlated with extroversion, with effects on employment suitability once again being stronger for women than for men.

So at this point we’re aware that the handshake has much power – more of an effect than I ever realised. But we still haven’t answered the question of handshake types: after all, both the handshakes I saw earlier could have been ‘firm’ despite their unusual manner.

But my question hasn’t yet been answered, although a general consensus is that a two handed handshake is either seen as aggressive or as ‘sleazy salesman’ (wonderfully portrayed in The Oatmeal) and the shaking of two hands separately is perhaps a cultural thing (the man sounded from one of the northern European countries)… in the end, perhaps it is just about catering to the handshake desires of another person – and that is perhaps a topic for a future post.

References

Chaplin, W., Phillips, J., Brown, J., Clanton, N., & Stein, J. (2000). Handshaking, gender, personality, and first impressions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (1), 110-117 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.79.1.110

Stewart, G., Dustin, S., Barrick, M., & Darnold, T. (2008). Exploring the handshake in employment interviews. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93 (5), 1139-1146 DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.93.5.1139

The power of feedback in the workplace

David Lurie — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 21:56:49 +0000

One of the big drivers in life is often the drive to be ‘better than we are’ or a ‘perfect’ person. Back in 1985 a seminal study was authored by Higgins et al. who analysed three types of self-perspective. They called these the “actual”, “ideal” and “ought” selves, and in this post I’ll be discussing the first two.

The actual self is who we really are.

And the ideal self is who we think we should be. Who we want to be. The person we stress out about not being.

Let’s look at this chart below. This is (albeit slightly adjusted) the person I wish I was, in purple: the ought self. And in yellow, the actual self (randomly generated and then adjusted to look sensible). All aspects are scored on a scale of 1-10:

N.B. This slide shows the new design for the website, coming soon!

A typical response to looking at this would be to worry about all that yellow and purple that’s visible. It would be best if everything was orange – i.e. the actual and ought selves matched up. But they don’t. In some cases – the yellow areas – the numbers are higher than desired. In others – the purple areas – the numbers of lower than desired.

Clearly a lot of room for self-improvement.

We can see how much when we look at the differences:

Two possible thoughts: firstly, there is more here than I would expect anyone to be comfortable with. But secondly, it’s not really that much in the grand scheme of things, is it?

Higgins and her colleagues found that a difference between the actual and ideal selves creates dejection, which we often call depressive symptoms. Focusing on the differences can be very harmful: Bybee et al (1997) found that people preoccupied with their ideal selves (and not being there) lead to anxiety, self-consciousness and vulnerability.

You can see how workplace feedback could be damaging. Done well, constructive developmental feedback can point out an aspect of behaviour that could be improved, suggests ways to improve it, and supports you through doing so. The most successful companies promote this, and the most successful managers are good at it.

But destructive feedback says that you (not your behaviour, but your actual self) isn’t good enough, and often addresses more than one area at a time, bringing the differences between your actual self and ideal self into sharp relief. And boom, there goes the dejection and your job performance.

Combine this with our natural inclination to want to improve ourselves – and the inherent awareness bubbling at the back of many of our minds that we’re “not good enough” – and the problem is magnified.

The long-term solution? Strengthening our self-esteem.

But in the short term? Working in a supportive environment, and ensuring that you become good at giving feedback yourself, is going to be critical to your and others’ success.

References

Bybee, J., Luthar, S., Zigler, E., & Merisca, R. (1997). The Fantasy, Ideal, and Ought Selves: Content, Relationships to Mental Health, and Functions Social Cognition, 15 (1), 37-53 DOI: 10.1521/soco.1997.15.1.37

Higgins, E. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94 (3), 319-340 DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.94.3.319

Higgins, E., Klein, R., & Strauman, T. (1985). Self-Concept Discrepancy Theory: A Psychological Model for Distinguishing among Different Aspects of Depression and Anxiety Social Cognition, 3 (1), 51-76 DOI: 10.1521/soco.1985.3.1.51

I’m good, you’re lucky

David Lurie — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:49:01 +0000

Flickr photo by Quasic

Over the weekend I auditioned for a pantomime, and narrowly missed out on the role of the pantomime dame. Unfortunately, a friend of mine got another lead role, leading to more jealousy than I am comfortable with, and my thoughts have gone to the psychology of dealing with things going wrong: something we all have to be familiar with in the course of our careers when we fail to get a promotion, or are beaten onto a good project by someone else.

According to Zuckerman (1979) we take credit for our successes but deny blame for our failures. I’ve certainly been doing that today – I have preferred to blame the heat of the rehearsal room, when in fact in all likelihood I just wasn’t right for the role. This is the same reason we attribute luck to someone else beating us.

There is a huge amount of fascinating reading out there about how we cope with failures, and one of the areas I find particularly interesting is the effect of self-esteem. People with high self-esteem will follow the pattern above.

Conversely, people with low self-esteem will typically enter a cycle of self-blame, reinforcement and repetition. The phrase “I must have done something wrong” comes into their heads.

In real life, of course, we don’t have “high” or “low” self-esteem, we sit somewhere on a spectrum. And there are advantages to different positions – lower self-esteem will at least open ones eyes to the opportunity of learning from mistakes (and as an introvert with not especially high or low self-esteem, I self-reflect regularly) while higher self-esteem leads us to taking care of ourselves better (see Harris and Napper, 2005).

References
Harris PR, & Napper L (2005). Self-affirmation and the biased processing of threatening health-risk information. Personality & social psychology bulletin, 31 (9), 1250-63 PMID: 16055644
Zuckerman, M. (1979). Attribution of success and failure revisited, or: The motivational bias is alive and well in attribution theory Journal of Personality, 47 (2), 245-287 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1979.tb00202.x

Relieved your interview went wrong? Feeling guilty about it? Don’t!

David Lurie — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:32:36 +0000

Flickr photo by the half-blood prince

“I felt so relieved when the interview was over”

“Even though it was the perfect job and you knew the interview had gone wrong?”

“Yes. It was strange”

That sounds like an odd story. Feeling relieved when an interview has gone wrong? Or is it than we just feel relieved when an interview is finished?

Interesting research by Kool et al. at the end of last year suggests that we might be feeling relieved if an interview goes wrong because we know that this saves us cognitive load. By not getting the job we don’t have to think about next steps, about accepting it, or the actual cognitive workload that goes along with the job.

It’s likely to only be part of the explanation, and we’re all predisposed to say things like, “it can’t have been the right job for me” or “I was too busy to prepare” but it’s human nature to avoid cognitive load much of the time according to this research, and it is not a jump of logic to assume (although this needs testing) that this applies in the job-interview situation.

And I know that personally before I graduated I messed up some interviews for no rational reason, even while thinking ‘why is this coming out of my mouth?’… and I suspect I’m not alone.

Comments very much welcomed, as always!

References

Kool, W., McGuire, J., Rosen, Z., & Botvinick, M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139 (4), 665-682 DOI: 10.1037/a0020198

Why you need to fix your attitudes before you fix your job

David Lurie — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:13:43 +0000

Flickr photo by katerha

A short post this week, as I want to make sure you all read it: as psychological ideas go this is as critical as they come to the goals of coaching.

It’s a peculiarity of the way we exist that we benefit from – or suffer from – emotional plasticity.

Regulated predominantly by the Big Five of personality (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) our standard emotional level is set. We might be particularly sensitive to things (high Neuroticism) or not, but we return to a baseline level of happiness termed Subjective Well-Being (SWB).

On the one hand that causes us to race on the hedonic treadmill, that frustrating pattern of behaviour that leads us to need a slightly faster car, a slightly better house, a new model of iPhone etc. just to achieve the same level of happiness that we had before.

On the other hand, it also means that we revert back to the same level of dissatisfaction. If you’re the type of personal reflected in what Transactional Analysis calls an “almost” life script, then no matter what you do there will also be a little more you need. Or if you have a “healthy” script – if such a thing exists – then it takes a lot of things going wrong to make you happy.

And this causes a problem. If you’re in a perfectly OK job right now, but you’re fed up, can you be sure that you won’t become fed up in the new job? If you’re always looking for the ‘perfect’ career, will you ever achieve it or will you always convince yourself there’s something slightly better out there?

Long before I started up Setsights, when I first became interested in the links between psychology, coaching and training, I realised that virtually every single person I knew who did have career changes did so for the wrong reasons: to escape one thing, rather than in the knowledge that they had to sacrifice both good and bad things in order to achieve an overall higher level of satisfaction… and that inevitably a year later everyone felt exactly the same.

Coaching, CBT, self-awareness – whatever approach you take, fixing the attitude you have towards your career and your job is necessary before changing your job. Otherwise you’ll be doomed to repeating the same things again and again. You’ll not just be on the hedonic treadmill with the rest of the Wester world, you’ll have been strapped to the career treadmill too… and that’s why it’s called the rat race.

References

Diener, E. (2000). Subjective well-being: The science of happiness and a proposal for a national index. American Psychologist, 55 (1), 34-43 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.34

Why being happy at work makes you more successful at work

David Lurie — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:20:56 +0000

Flickr photo by albertogp123

There are three types of learning at work.

Taught Learning – training courses and their ilk
Guided Learning – coaching, mentoring, peer support programmes etc.
Experiential Learning – learning from experience – so this includes learning on the job, learning from mistakes, learning from self-study, etc.

As probably makes sense, the ‘right’ distribution depends on the stage of career you’re at – so an induction programme is usually heavy on the taught learning, but a senior manager is more likely to require guided and experiential learning.

Regardless of the stage of career, the dominant form of learning is likely to be experiential learning.

A recent study – and by recent, I mean available for less than 3 weeks – by Jo Ann Abe at Southern Connecticut State, explores the role of positive emotions (such as happiness) in experiential learning.

Abe tested participants’ learning journals (or field journals as termed in the study) to obtain scores for Emotional Intelligence (EI) and for the usage of positive emotion words. Focusing here on the scores for the usage of positive emotion words, although a correlation wasn’t found with how much benefit the students reported they had received from the learning, there was a correlation with the ratings they were receiving from their supervisors – and in the workplace, of course, promotion and financial rewards will be based very much on your supervisor’s opinion.

So what lesson can we take from this? This means that positive emotion is likely to eventually link to reward at work, and that therefore – to simplify – being happy means more success at work, at study – at whatever it is you’re currently putting your focus into.

And how do you make sure you are happier when learning at work (and therefore use more positive emotion words)? That’s a kettle of worms (to mix a metaphor) for some future posts.

Citations:

Abe, J. (2011). Positive emotions, emotional intelligence, and successful experiential learning Personality and Individual Differences DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.07.004