Most managers eagerly pay lip service to concepts like trust, teamwork and innovation.
But many haven’t gotten around to accepting what the latest science has to say about which kind of work environment produces these things.
“Relationships are the medium through which the best work gets done,” says John Gaspari, a licensed clinical worker in Los Angeles who advises large organizations about employee morale and workplace issues. And he’s clear about the impact of emotions on relationships, and, thus, on the ability of people to do their best work.
Gaspari cites the work of neuroscience pioneers such as Daniel Siegel, who has observed that the brain is a “social organ,” for which happy relationships aren’t simply a luxury but “an essential nutrient for our survival.”
Now, you may be a realist or a cynic who enjoys bursting the bubbles of those who preach touchy-feely management maxims about finding meaning at work. I’ll admit that I sometimes have been. The problem with this “realistic” view of management is that it doesn’t acknowledge how much work matters to the average person, and how unforgivably wide the gap is between a good workplace and a bad one.
“Work is a fundamental organizing element in people’s lives,” Gaspari says. “It provides not just extrinsic rewards like a paycheck or benefits, but intrinsic value, like identity and purpose.”
So if ambitious, high-achieving managers make no effort to infuse their work environment with a positive sense of identity and purpose, they have little chance of reaching their own highest goals.
Survival Mode Is Not Creative Mode
Sometimes the troops do need to scramble as if an asteroid will strike unless a project is completed by midnight Friday. That’s survival mode. But survival mode, Gaspari says, is different from the modes that nurture creativity, innovation and quality service. And survival mode can’t be a daily event for the long haul.
In survival mode, the focus is on fight or flight. The brain’s more primitive, reptilian regions move to the fore. The brain’s higher functions recede or freeze up. And if a person spends too much time in this mode over the course of the week or month, there are negative consequences for their physical and mental health.
When under stress, many of our middle and higher mental functions diminish: emotional balance, communication skills, empathy, insight, moral awareness and intuition among others, Gaspari says. Gone is the ability to build or to bond.
Positivity Pays Dividends
But all those traits are there, in abundance, in a positive work environment, just waiting to be tapped.
“Positive emotions are more fleeting than negative ones,” Gaspari says. “They’re less intense and less attention-grabbing. But they pay off in major ways—in building friendships and strong partnerships, in higher incomes, and in better physical health and longevity. They don’t just reflect success—they cause success.”
People and organizations with a deep well of positive emotion are “more likely to effectively meet life’s challenges and take advantage of its opportunities,” according to a study led by Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:
“… [P]ositive emotions momentarily broaden people’s attention and thinking, enabling them to draw on higher-level connections and a wider-than-usual range of precepts and ideas. In turn, these broadened outlooks often help people to discover and build consequential personal resources (cognitively, psychologically, socially, physically)” … Positive emotions widen people’s outlooks in ways that, little by little, reshape who they are.”
Rob Asghar is the author of Leadership Is Hell, available now at Amazon.
