Ed Batista

Things To Be Thankful For

Alyson Madrigan and Kate Billing are two people who've taught me something about gratitude over the past few years. Alyson is a friend here in San Francisco I get to see every few months, while Kate is a consultant in New Zealand I've tweeted at but never met, and they've both made an effort to express and share their gratitude for things in life that most of us typically take for granted.

Alyson's nearing the end of a year-long project on #littlejoys, one post each day on something that brought her joy, like a view from a mountaintop in South Africa:

Kate's often posted about #3goodthings, usually accompanied by a photo of a note on which she describes three positive things that happened to her that day. One of my favorites includes 1) "Having our fab bus driver save us from certain death," 2) a "crazy intense thunder, lightning and hailstorm while I'm tucked up," and 3) a memorable Class of '84 reunion. I love it:

The Thanksgiving holiday is a perfect moment to be reminded of Alyson and Kate as I look back on this past year, because it's been a difficult one for me and Amy. We've both dealt with with physical ailments, professional challenges and personal frustrations, and we frequently just wanted 2013 to be OVER.

But while I can certainly get caught up in my mini-tragedies, I'm well aware of all the things I have to be thankful for on this day, which include...

• Waking up without intense pain, a gift I never appreciated until it was taken away from me and, six months later, restored.
• The full (if imperfect) use of four limbs, two eyes, two ears. My knees, my sight and a shoulder are fading, but they still get me through the day.
• A childhood that instilled me with self-confidence and self-compassion.
• The opportunity to enjoy an adult relationship with my parents and to see the world through their eyes.
• Two brothers and their families who I love so intensely, who I am so proud of, whose success and happiness mean more to me than my own.
• An astounding number of teachers and mentors, from high school to post-MBA, who took an interest in my growth and development.
• The opportunity to be of service as a coach, to help others feel more fulfilled and effective in their professional lives.
• My clients and students, who welcome me into such meaningful conversations and who provide a sense of purpose in my own professional life.
• My own coach, Mary Ann Huckabay, who has made the difference in my life at so many important junctures.
• And Amy, without whom none of the rest would matter at all.

Thank you.

What I Learned in Touchy Feely (This Time)

The most popular elective at Stanford's Graduate School of Business is formally titled Interpersonal Dynamics, but everyone calls it Touchy Feely. The school offers the course to 360 students every year, and there are roughly 400 students in each graduating class. The course is an intensive experiential learning process conducted in T-groups--"T" for "training"--a method developed by German psychologist Kurt Lewin [1] in the U.S. in the late 1940s and popularized in the '50s and '60s by Lewin's proteges, who founded the National Training Laboratory (known today as the NTL Institute) for that purpose. [2]

Each T-group here at Stanford includes 12 MBA students and two facilitators, who not only guide the group as leaders but also participate as members. The course provides a conceptual framework in the form of traditional lectures and readings, but most of the work is done in T-groups, which meet for three to five hours each week.

Group sessions sometimes include formal exercises but typically consist of open, unstructured time in which members switch among discussion topics, giving each other real-time feedback on interpersonal skills and communication styles, with a particular emphasis on emotion. As I've written before,

The class highlights the fact that our interactions with others generate all sorts of feelings that influence how we express ourselves in the workplace and which have a significant impact on our working relationships. If we want to improve those relationships, it's important to be able to better understand, express and manage our emotions and to help others do the same. This doesn't mean just expressing "warm fuzzies" and getting everyone to feel good--far from it. It means taking some risks and being more candid about our feelings--both positive and negative--so we learn more about how we respond to others and how others respond to us. [3]

The course culminates in a three-day retreat that includes 17 hours of T-group time, and we bring in a third facilitator, the "weekend trainer," to help support the group. I first took Touchy Feely as a student at Stanford in 1999, and I first facilitated in the course in 2007--and I've done the course two or three times every year since. But ten days ago I served as a weekend trainer for the first time, and it was a rewarding but also very intense experience--I felt like a novice surfer who was enjoying the ride but was never entirely sure how it would end. Here's what I learned in the process:

1) Without empathy, no conflict can get resolved. With sufficient empathy, any conflict can get resolved.

I'm reminded of Brené Brown's work on empathy and shame:

Connection is our ability to forge meaningful, authentic relationships with other people. I believe that connection is the essence of the human experience. It is what..gives meaning to our lives. If you think about connection on a continuum...anchoring this end of of that continuum is empathy. It is what moves us toward deep, meaningful relationship. On the other side of the continuum is shame. It absolutely unravels our relationships and our connections with other people... Empathy is about being vulnerable with people in their vulnerability. [4]

When we empathize with others we can envision ourselves in their circumstances and we vicariously experience their thoughts and emotions. This inevitably brings us closer together, even in the midst of conflict, and that feeling of closeness not only makes conflicts easier to resolve but also makes them seem laughable, even absurd.

2) How much pain do we need to see or hear to feel empathy? How can we become more sensitive to others’ vulnerability?

Despite the importance of empathy in resolving conflict, a challenge is that our empathic feelings may not be triggered by mere verbal disclosures or subtle cues. We can easily miss someone's expression of vulnerability, particularly if the conflict has triggered a threat response, which diminishes our capacity to take in and process information.

But we can work to improve our skills in this area. Some recent research and clinical experience suggest that empathy can be learned, and the process involves slowing down, listening more closely, and heightening our awareness of others' emotions and our own. [5] By managing our threat response and sensitizing ourselves to others' vulnerability, we can feel empathy sooner and more strongly.

3) How fully can we express our vulnerability? Especially in a conflict, can we take a risk and be more vulnerable with the other person?

The flip side of this dynamic is that when we express our vulnerability more fully, we make it easier for others to empathize with us. This often feels risky when we're in a conflict, and so we tend to hide our vulnerability--or we disclose it in a sterile, non-emotional way, dampening the facial expressions, tone of voice and other cues that help others sense our feelings.

Here's where we may need to "unlearn" some long-held beliefs about vulnerability and safety. In some cases those beliefs are well-founded--not everyone is equally trustworthy. But when we're habitually over-cautious, we never learn how to calibrate, and any expression of vulnerability feels unsafe and out-of-control. Taking the risk to express vulnerability more fully helps us practice doing so with greater control and allows us to discover who we can trust in a conflict.

4) Intimacy requires deep trust & safety, which are easier to achieve when issues of status and power are acknowledged.

Trust and safety are important not only in resolving conflict, but also in any experience of intimacy, which I've described as "a willingness to make the private public." [6] The more I trust you, the safer I feel with you, the more of my thoughts and feelings I'm willing to share with you. As trust and safety are established, we share more with each other, and a sense of intimacy is created.

But the often unacknowledged elephants in the room are our mutual status and relative power. If you have higher status or more power than I do, I'm less likely to trust you until those differences are recognized. This need not require a diminution of your status or power, merely an acknowledgment that they exist.

5) When I acknowledge my privilege, you’re more likely to acknowledge my individuality.

As a straight, white, married, well-educated, able-bodied, middle-aged American man, I know I lead a privileged existence. The world I live in is run, for the most part, by people who look like me, and as I go about my daily routines I generally feel at home, rarely reminded of my various identities in a way that would make me feel other or unwelcome.

That said, I'm more than just the sum of those identities--I'm an individual, and I want to be recognized as such. But I make it easier for people of other identities to see me as an individual when I also recognize the many privileges I enjoy. What this looks like in practice will vary depending on the situation and the relationship, but the first step is for us to simply be aware of our various identities, the privileges they bring in difference circumstances, and their potential impact on those around us.

6) We can’t avoid mistakes. We can make smaller mistakes & recover from them faster, but the key is repairing when we inevitably screw up.

Working on any of these issues involves taking risks and getting out of our comfort zone, so mistakes are inevitable. I'm not suggesting we should be heedless or fail to take responsibility for our mistakes, but when avoiding mistakes becomes our primary goal we cheat ourselves (and others) of the learning that would result. We need to embrace mistakes as a natural part of any learning process, and to do that we need to loosen the hold of the embarrassment and shame we feel when we make them. We need to adopt a growth mindset with regard to our interpersonal skills and admit that, like everyone else, we're doing the best we can, making it up as we go. [7]

 

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Footnotes

[1] T-Groups, Facilitation and Experience (Mark Smith, Infed, 2001)

[2] NTL Institute

[3] T-Groups, Feelings and Management Theory

[4] Shame & Empathy by Dr. Brené Brown [8:38 video]

[5] For more on learning empathy:

• Empathy Training for Resident Physicians: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Neuroscience-Informed Curriculum (Helen Reiss, John Kelley, Robert Bailey, Emily Dunn and Margot Phillips, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2012)
• Can Compassion and Empathy Be Learned? (Dorrie Fontaine, University of Virginia Lifetime Learning, 2013)
• Can Doctors Learn Empathy? (Pauline Chen, The New York Times, 2012)

[6] Safety, Trust, Intimacy

[7] What Is Mindset? (Carol Dweck, 2012)

Photo by Mike Baird.

Learning to Say "No" Is Part of Success

Success is often built on a reflexive habit of saying "yes" to opportunities that come our way. We’re hungry for any chance to prove ourselves, and when we're presented with one, we take it, even--or especially--if it seems daunting. A lesson I learned years ago was to say "yes" to opportunities that made me feel nervous because the anxiety was a sign that I'd learn something useful. We may also tend to say "yes" out of a fear that turning down an opportunity even once sends a message that we're not interested, and we'll stop getting additional chances in the future.

But success tends to attract bigger and better opportunities. As we succeed, a key challenge becomes prioritizing the many opportunities that present themselves. We often try to do this without saying "no" definitively--we still want to keep our options open. Inevitably, though, this results in a lack of clarity and overcommitment, and we wind up disappointing people, exhausting ourselves, or simply failing. To prevent this we need to learn to say "no" gracefully but firmly, maintaining the relationship while making it clear that this is one opportunity we're choosing not to pursue. And success in this effort is founded on the ability to manage the emotions that come up when we close a door or extinguish an option.

These emotions can be subtle: a twinge of regret, a trace of anxiety, a faint voice that whispers, "Are you sure you want to turn this down?" We often respond reflexively to such emotions, driven to eliminate the discomfort they evoke. So we say "yes" and feel some relief--until later, when we realize the costs of the commitment we've now made. A critical step in managing these emotions is training ourselves to resist that initial reflexive response--I often describe this to clients and students as "comfort with discomfort." We notice the discomfort provoked by the possibility of saying "no," and yet we can tolerate it. We're not compelled to take action to eliminate it.

There’s no magic formula for saying "no" more effectively, but here are three steps that can help:

• Slow down. Feelings of anxiety generated by the possibility of saying "no" can escalate into a full-blown threat response, an emotional state in which we have diminished capacity to process information and consider options. Slowing down the pace of an interaction or a decision-making process can allow us to catch up and make the choice that’s right for us, not merely the choice that alleviates our anxiety in the moment. [1]
• Recognize our emotional cues. We experience many emotions before we recognize them in conscious awareness, but feelings often have physiological markers that can help us identify and name the emotion sooner. Once we're aware of an emotion, we can take action to influence how we respond. What do we feel--physically--when we consider saying "no"? [2]
• Practice. Saying "no" is like any other interpersonal skill--it feels clumsy and awkward at first, and we improve only with repeated effort. [3]

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Importance of Slowing Down

[2] Taking the Leap (Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty)

[3] Conscious Competence in Practice

Originally published at Harvard Business Review. Thanks to Tim Sullivan for his guidance and encouragement.

Photo by Justin Wilson.

Underdoing It and Overdoing It (Assertiveness Over Time)

We often live out the pattern graphed above--at least I do, and many of my coaching clients and MBA students do as well. If our initial attempts are unsuccessful when advocating for (or against) a position or when seeking to influence others to do (or not do) something, we'd like to steadily and evenly escalate our assertiveness and emotional expressiveness as time progresses (i.e. the dotted blue line).

What we actually do can look quite different. Early in the process we tend to underdo it--we do escalate, but verrrrrrrrry slowly. "That's OK," we say, "it's not that big a deal"--even as our frustration builds. But eventually a switch gets flipped, and our levels of assertiveness and expressiveness increase much more rapidly. Soon we're overdoing it; we're unable to control our frustration, and we act too assertively--even aggressively--and we say or do things we later regret (i.e. the solid red line).

So if we do see our own experience reflected in this graph, how can we make sense of what's happening?

First we need to ask why we're so slow to assert ourselves in this particular context or relationship. It's likely one in which we're at risk of experiencing a social threat--an interpersonal situation that we perceive as threatening in some way. David Rock's SCARF model reminds us that we tend to experience social threats when dealing with people of higher status or from different social groups, in conditions of uncertainty or diminished autonomy, or when our sense of fairness has been violated. [1]

All of these circumstances tend to cause us to act cautiously--and so we underdo it. But that initial reticence makes it more likely that our efforts at advocacy or influence will fail--and so the situation persists as we keep trying the same (cautious) approach. Eventually our impatience overcomes our caution, and we start to escalate.

But by this point our capacity for mental and emotional control, always limited, is running out, and our ability to finely calibrate our behavior or choose our words has been undermined. [2] A misstep on our part or the other party's can easily trigger a threat response, and soon we're experiencing a full-blown "amygdala hijack," which Daniel Goleman describes as follows:

When [neural] circuits [in the amygdala, a region of the brain involved in processing emotion,] perceive a threat, they flood the body with stress hormones that do several things to prepare us for an emergency... Attention tends to fixate on the thing that is bothering us... That means that we don't have as much attentional capacity left for whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing or want to be doing. In addition, our memory reshuffles its hierarchy so that what's most relevant to the perceived threat is what comes to mind most easily--and what's deemed irrelevant is harder to bring to mind. That, again, makes it more difficult to get things done than we might want. Plus, we tend to fall back on over-learned responses, which are responses learned early in life--which can lead us to do or say things that we regret later. It is important to understand that the impulses that come to us when we're under stress--particularly if we get hijacked by it--are likely to lead us astray. [3]

In the graph above this is when we hit the inflection point in the solid red line--our levels of assertiveness and expressiveness shoot skyward, and suddenly we switch from underdoing it to overdoing it.

So what can we do about this? Four suggestions:

1. Assess the situation.

What's the context? What's the relationship? What's the likelihood that we might perceive some dynamic in the situation as threatening? Here Rock's model can be tremendously helpful: look at every situation from the perspective of each party's status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and sense of fairness. When any of those factors are undermined, there's a potential social threat.

2. Recognize our "tells."

Although these biological processes are universal, we consciously experience the stress of a threat response in uniquely individual ways. I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, or my hands get sweaty, but you may feel a tightness in the back of your neck or a shortness of breath or a sense of tunnel vision. Just as poker players scan their opponents for "tells"--signs of fear or overconfidence--these physical and emotional signals are the signs that we're in the grip of a threat response.

3. Question our responses.

As Goleman points out, when under stress we tend to revert to responses that we learned early in life--and those responses aren't necessarily helpful when seeking to influence others or advocate for our position effectively. It's essential to determine when our habitual behavior under stress--which probably feels quite natural and familiar to us--is preventing us from achieving our goals and needs to change.

4. Try NOT to underdo it.

I suspect that we eventually overdo it in part because we underdo it at the start. Our reluctance to be more assertive and expressive at the outset ultimately contributes to our over-assertiveness and hyper-expressiveness later on. By being so cautious at first, when we have the greatest capacity to manage our emotions and calibrate our behavior, we miss a critical opportunity to influence and assert ourselves more effectively. I'm not suggesting we should compete aggressively right away in every interaction--we're likely to be much more effective with a soft startup. I am suggesting that by being slightly more assertive at the outset--by aiming for the dotted blue line above--we may actually lessen the risk of finding ourselves in a counterproductive confrontation.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Neuroscience, Leadership and David Rock's SCARF Model

[2] White Bears and Car Crashes (Thinking About Thinking)

[3] The Brain and Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman interviewed by Monty McKeever, Tricycle, 2011)

• Here's an excerpt from the interview that was previously posted to Goleman's personal site.

Stop Worrying About Making the Right Decision

Much of my work as a coach involves helping people wrestle with an important decision. Some of these decisions feel particularly big because they involve selecting one option to the exclusion of all others when the cost of being "wrong" can be substantial: If I’m at a crossroads in my career, which path should I follow? If I’m considering job offers, which one should I accept? If I’m being asked to relocate, should I move to a new city or stay put?

Difficult decisions like this remind me of a comment made by Scott McNealy--a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years--during a lecture I attended while I was in business school at Stanford. He was asked how he made decisions and responded by saying, in effect, It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about "making the right decision" and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right.

I’m paraphrasing, but my memory of this comment is vivid, and his point was crystal clear. Before we make any decision--particularly one that will be difficult to undo--we're understandably anxious and focused on identifying the "best" option because of the risk of being "wrong." [1] But a by-product of that mindset is that we overemphasize the moment of choice and lose sight of everything that follows. Merely selecting the "best" option doesn’t guarantee that things will turn out well in the long run, just as making a sub-optimal choice doesn’t doom us to failure or unhappiness. It's what happens next (and in the days, months, and years that follow) that ultimately determines whether a given decision was "right."

Another aspect of this dynamic is that our focus on making the "right" decision can easily lead to paralysis, because the options we're choosing among are so difficult to rank in the first place. How can we definitively determine in advance what career path will be "best," or what job offer we should accept, or whether we should move across the country or stay put? Obviously, we can't. There are far too many variables. But the more we yearn for an objective algorithm to rank our options and make the decision for us, the more we distance ourselves from the subjective factors — our intuition, our emotions, our gut--that will ultimately pull us in one direction or another. And so we get stuck, waiting for a sign--something--to point the way.

I believe the path to getting unstuck when faced with a daunting, possibly paralyzing decision is embedded in McNealy's comment, and it involves a fundamental re-orientation of our mindset: Focusing on the choice minimizes the effort that will inevitably be required to make any option succeed and diminishes our sense of agency and ownership. In contrast, focusing on the effort that will be required after our decision not only helps us see the means by which any choice might succeed, it also restores our sense of agency and reminds us that while randomness plays a role in every outcome, our locus of control resides in our day-to-day activities more than in our one-time decisions.

So while I support using available data to rank our options in some rough sense, ultimately we’re best served by avoiding paralysis-by-analysis and moving forward by:

1. Paying close attention to the feelings and emotions that accompany the decision we’re facing.
2. Assessing how motivated we are to work toward the success of any given option.
3. Recognizing that no matter what option we choose, our efforts to support its success will be more important than the initial guesswork that led to our choice.

This view is consistent with the work of Stanford professor Baba Shiv, an expert in the neuroscience of decision-making. Shiv notes that in the case of complex decisions, rational analysis will get us closer to a decision but won’t result in a definitive choice because our options involve trading one set of appealing outcomes for another, and the complexity of each scenario makes it impossible to determine in advance which outcome will be optimal.

Two key findings have emerged from Shiv’s research: First, successful decisions are those in which the decision-maker remains committed to their choice. And second, emotions play a critical role in determining a successful outcome to a trade-off decision. As Shiv told Stanford Business magazine, emotions are "mental shortcuts that help us resolve trade-off conflicts and...happily commit to a decision." Going further, Shiv noted, "When you feel a trade-off conflict, it just behooves you to focus on your gut." [2]

This isn’t to say that we should simply allow our emotions to choose for us. We’ve all made “emotional” decisions that we later came to regret. But current neuroscience research makes clear that emotions are an important input into decision-making by ruling out the options most likely to lead to a negative outcome and focusing our attention on the options likely to lead to a positive outcome. More specifically, research by Florida State professor Roy Baumeister and others suggests that good decision-making is tied to our ability to anticipate future emotional states: "It is not what a person feels right now, but what he or she anticipates feeling as the result of a particular behavior that can be a powerful and effective guide to choosing well." [3]

So when we’re stuck or even paralyzed by a decision, we need more than rational analysis. We need to vividly envision ourselves in a future scenario, get in touch with the emotions this generates and assess how those feelings influence our level of commitment to that particular choice. We can’t always make the right decision, but we can make every decision right.

 

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Footnotes

[1] How Anxiety Can Lead Your Decisions Astray (Francesca Gino, Harvard Business Review, 2013)

[2] "Dynamics of Decision-Making" (Marina Krakovsky, Stanford Business Magazine, February 2008)

[3] "Do Emotions Improve or Hinder the Decision-Making Process?" (Roy Baumeister, Nathan Dewall and Liquing Zhang, Chapter 1 in Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decisionmaking?, edited by Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister and George Loewenstein, 2007)

Originally published at Harvard Business Review, this post is an updated version of an earlier post on this site. Thanks to Stanford's Baba Shiv and Florida State's Roy Baumeister, whose research has heavily influenced my thinking on this topic, and to Scott McNealy, whose seemingly offhand comment 15 years ago pointed me in this direction in the first place. And continued thanks to Tim Sullivan for his guidance and encouragement.

Photo courtesy of HBR.