Ed Batista

Bosses and Birthdays (The Importance of Small Talk)

When a leader engages an employee in meaningful small talk that involves the appropriate level of detail--neither too generic nor too personal--the meta-message being delivered is: I see you. You matter to me. And this relationship matters to me. In short, let's trust each other.

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From my perspective as a coach working with CEOs and other senior leaders, the ability to make small talk with employees is one of the most useful management tools--and one of the most under-appreciated. Small talk--the brief, informal exchanges that precede and follow meetings and other formal events--can play a uniquely valuable role in our professional relationships, although its importance varies widely from one setting to another.

Why can small talk have such a big impact? Possibly because it's a highly evolved form of "social grooming"--a common behavior among mammals that is believed to serve a range of functions transcending basic hygiene. Research by anthropologist Robin Dunbar and others indicates that social grooming in primates is a function of group size, suggesting that it helps maintain harmonious relationships in larger social units where individuals may have less frequent contact with each other. [1,2]

Dunbar has even proposed that human language evolved from social grooming, and while this theory remains controversial, it's clear that "vocal grooming" can play a significant role in effective relationships. [3,4] As science educator Kate Fehlhaber has noted, "Social grooming [in humans] can take on a completely non-physical form due to our extensive spoken and written language and is probably [our] dominant form of social grooming. A few kind words are often all the 'grooming' it takes to strengthen social relationships." [5]

So what does this look like in organizational life? As I wrote in "Five Levels of Communication," exploring a model developed by my Stanford colleague Richard Francisco, the most basic form of communication is "ritual," the simple interactions that allow people to acknowledge each other, such as our daily greetings and goodbyes in the workplace. Despite its simplicity, ritual serves a meaningful purpose--as Francisco has noted, ritual allows us to feel more at ease with each other even in a fleeting exchange. The next level in Francisco's model is "extended ritual," which includes all of the longer exchanges that can occur when we come together with colleagues, and small talk in professional settings takes one of these forms. [6]

Such conversations are generally confined to a short list of unofficially sanctioned topics, and this norm serves a useful function. While extended ritual provides an opportunity to talk at greater length, it should still be a predictable interaction in which there's minimal risk of surprise or misunderstanding. This insures that the exchange promotes a greater sense of comfort and safety, strengthening the relationship to allow it to accommodate more challenging topics in the future.

Other norms that determine the role played by small talk in a given setting are determined such factors as the nature of the event bringing the participants together, the participants' respective roles, and the surrounding organizational and national culture. [7] Within these norms, in any particular interaction the more senior person generally sets the parameters for small talk--whether or not it occurs, how much time will be devoted to it, and the topics to be addressed.

So if you're the the boss, every interaction--no matter how fleeting--is an opportunity to connect with an employee and build a stronger relationship. For these interactions to be meaningful while adhering to commonly shared expectations, it's important to have clarity on what topics are useful for this purpose. A challenge is that some are so generic that they're unlikely to have the desired impact (e.g. the weather or traffic), while others are so fraught that they could easily derail the conversation (e.g. any number of political issues), and still others are useful with some people but not with others (e.g. sports and other recreational pursuits).

But a topic that's uniquely meaningful and personally relevant to almost everyone is family. And this is where birthdays come in, because if you're the boss and you want to make thoughtful use of these opportunities to connect with your employees, being able to make small talk with them about the people who matter in their lives will usually pay off. This isn't always true, of course, and it's absolutely essential to know when family is a topic to be avoided, but in most cases people find it gratifying to be asked about this aspect of their lives. That said, even a conversation about family can feel trite if you simply ask, "How's the family?" It's helpful to know something about each of your employees and to have this information readily at hand, although the degree of detail necessarily varies by level. Here are some suggestions:

Direct Reports

Know whether they have a spouse, partner or SO. If they do, know that person's name. Bonus: Know that person's profession.

Know whether they have kids. If they do, know their kids' names and approximate ages. Bonus: Know their kids' birthdays.

(It's perfectly acceptable to have your EA keep track of this information.)

Skip-Level Employees

Know their names. Bonus: Know whether they have a spouse, partner or SO.

Know whether they are parents. Bonus: Know their kids' names.

(It's perfectly acceptable to not know the names of their family members and ask how they're doing.)

Double Skip-Level Employees

Know them well enough to greet them on sight.

Bonus: Know their names.

(It is perfectly acceptable to forget their names and to respectfully ask to be reminded.)

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that every formal interaction be preceded and followed by small talk, or that small talk should take up an undue amount of time. The appropriate cadence and duration will be informed by the factors noted above, particularly the nature of the event and the surrounding culture. But in my experience leaders who fail to make this effort wish they had when a relationship is struggling and they have to have some tougher conversations. [8]

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Footnotes

[1] Functional significance of social grooming in primates (Robin Dunbar, Folia Primatologica, 1991)

[2] Group size, grooming and social cohesion in primates (Julia Lehmann, Amanda Korstjens, and Robin Dunbar, Animal Behavior, 2007)

[3] Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Robin Dunbar, 1998)

[4] Group size, vocal grooming and the origins of language (Robin Dunbar, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2017)

[5] Social Grooming: It's not just for monkeys and prairie voles! (Kate Fehlhaber, Knowing Neurons, 2013)

[6] Five Levels of Communication (2015)

[7] Erin Meyer on Culture and Communication (2015)

[8] Better Working Relationships (2018)

Photo by R. Nial Bradshaw. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Learning How to Learn

A theme in my coaching practice is that a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance is a hallmark of successful entrepreneurial leaders because it enables them to be exuberant optimists while remaining keenly aware of all the risks they face. [1] A further advantage of such tolerance is that it can play an important role in learning. As psychologist Elliot Aronson has noted,

An extremely high drive to reduce dissonance would lead man to weave a cocoon about himself; he would never admit his mistakes and would distort reality to make it compatible with his behavior. But if a person is ever going to grow, improve, and avoid repeating the same errors, he must sooner or later learn to profit from past mistakes. One cannot profit from one’s mistakes without first admitting that one has made a mistake. And yet, the admission of error almost always arouses some dissonance. [2]

By definition entrepreneurial leaders are doing something for the first time (and in some cases they're leading for the first time), which inevitably entails making mistakes. If they fail to learn from their mistakes, they won't be leading for very long, but this requires accepting the dissonance that comes from acknowledging a mistake in the first place. There's a connection here with the work of Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who developed the concept of "fixed" and "growth" mindsets:

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success--without effort. They're wrong. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work--brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. [3]

Our mindset has substantial implications for our ability to learn from mistakes. [4] When we hold a fixed mindset and believe that our abilities are inherent, we view mistakes as character flaws, and we have a strong negative emotional response to setbacks and failures. As a consequence we're less comfortable with risk and prefer to compete in settings where success (and approval) are assured. In contrast, holding a growth mindset and believing that our abilities are can be actively developed allows us to view mistakes as learning opportunities. We still respond negatively to setbacks and failures, but we're less distressed by the experience. And as a consequence we're more comfortable with risk and tend to seek out bigger challenges.

Recent neuroscience research shows different patterns of activity in the brains of people with fixed and growth mindset that's relevant in this context. A study led by Jason Moser of Michigan State indicated that people with a growth mindset pay closer attention to mistakes and are more likely to improve their performance as a result, suggesting a relationship between a growth mindset and a higher tolerance for dissonance. [5]

Our tendency toward a fixed or growth mindset derives from our formative experiences as children and our early education and professional training, and we all have a fixed mindset in some circumstances. But Dweck's work suggests that it's eminently possible to adopt a growth mindset, and this begins with simply being aware of the difference between the two mindsets and their implications for our learning and performance. [6] So what steps can we take to continue this process? How can we learn how to learn?

A Work-In-Progress

The concept of mindset is a type of mental model--a conceptual framework that we employ to explain some aspect of the world to ourselves. In this case, mindset is a model about ourselves that we use to understand our abilities and how we perform. Mental models are not neutral--they have a significant impact on our experience--but in most cases they're adaptive, enabling us to navigate situations and accomplish our goals more effectively. As a result our mental models typically operate automatically and unconsciously--we don't think about them any more than we think about breathing.

The key step here is simple in theory but often challenging in practice: To surface and examine this particular mental model, and to deliberately and consciously see ourselves as a work-in-progress. An obstacle here is the traditional view of human development, which holds that our brains cease growing after adolescence along with the rest of our bodies. But an extensive body of research in recent years on neuroplasticity has demonstrated that our brains actually retain the potential for developmental growth and change throughout our lives. [7] The idea that we're a work-in-progress, which is the essence of a growth mindset, isn't merely a metaphor--it's the literal truth.

An Ongoing Conversation

Greater familiarity with neuroscience research can make us more open to a growth mindset, but we still need to actively engage ourselves in an ongoing conversation about our performance in order to learn. We need to do much of this work on our own in the form of reflection [8] and journaling [9], but it's also essential to talk with others about our experiences. [10] And it's particularly important for leaders to cultivate and maintain relationships that are sufficiently safe and trustworthy to talk openly about setbacks and mistakes. [11]

But note that these activities rarely occur spontaneously without advance planning--particularly dialogues with trusted partners--and even then they can easily be pushed off the schedule unless we protect them from more urgent (but not necessarily more important) demands on our time and attention. If you truly value learning, you should be able to look at your calendar and know when it will happen on a regular basis. [12]

The Power of Reframing

Even when we're open to the idea of a growth mindset and actively engaged in practices that support our learning, our emotional response to mistakes can pose a barrier to progress. A generally accepted principle in psychology regarding the source of our emotions is known as "cognitive appraisal" or simply "appraisal theory," and psychologists Ira Roseman and Craig Smith provide a concise summary:

According to appraisal theories, it is interpretations of events, rather than events themselves, that cause emotions. Since the same situation can often be interpreted in different ways, there are few if any one-to-one relationships between a situation and an emotional response. Because appraisals intervene between situations and emotions, different individuals who appraise the same situation in significantly different ways will feel different emotions; and a given individual who appraises the same situation in significantly different ways at different times will feel different emotions...

Appraisal provides a highly flexible and therefore especially useful emotion generation mechanism, "decoupling" emotional responses from rigid one-to-one relationships with situational conditions. Emotional response will vary with variation not only in external circumstances but also in internal needs and coping resources. Thus appraisals adapt emotional responses to the individual and temporal requirements of the situations in which they occur. [13]

Here's where we can leverage the power of reframing. Our intellectual interpretation of situations in which we've encountered setbacks or made mistakes has a significant influence on our emotional experience. One interpretation is that we lack the talent or ability--a hallmark of a fixed mindset. But an alternative explanation--a way to reframe the situation--is that we simply lack experience, and with feedback, practice, and hard work, our performance is likely to improve.

Note that reframing does not mean failing to hold ourselves accountable. Recall the study led by Jason Moser noted above--the people who learned best from their mistakes spent a substantially higher amount of time and energy focusing on and reviewing what they did wrong in order to learn from it. They didn't shirk responsibility or fail to hold themselves accountable--just the opposite.

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Cognitive Dissonance of the CEO

[2] The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective, page 30 (Elliot Aronson, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1969)

[3] What Is Mindset (Carol Dweck, 2012)

[4] Note that Dweck's work has come under scrutiny and the concept of a growth mindset has been challenged. For more, see Minding Our Mindset.

[5] Mind Your Errors: Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mind-Set to Adaptive Posterior Adjustments (Jason Moser et al, Psychological Science, 2011)

[6] How can you change from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? (Carol Dweck)

[7] What is brain plasticity, and why is it so important? (Duncan Banks, The Conversation, 2016)

[8] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

[9] The Value of Journal Writing

[10] Self-Coaching Is SOCIAL

[11] The Friendship of Wolves

[12] Show Me Your Calendar, and I'll Show You What You Value

[13] "Appraisal Theory: Overview, Assumptions, Varieties, Controversies," pages 6-8 (Ira Roseman and Craig Smith, Chapter 1 in Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research, Klaus Scherer, Angela Schorr and Tom Johnstone, editors, 2001)

 

For Further Reading

Corn Mazes and Mental Models

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Carol Dweck, 2007)

The Dynamic Brain: Neuroplasticity and Mental Health (Jill Kays, Robin Hurley and Katherine Taber, The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 2012)

 

Updated September 2022.

Photo by R. Nial Bradshaw.

In Case of Emergency

This is an idiosyncratic collection of material intended to help me get through some upcoming challenges. If anyone else finds it useful, that's gravy.

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Watch This

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Read This

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don’t weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it."

~Raymond Carver, "Gravy"

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And This

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who's awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience that we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head...

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

~Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

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And This

Amy and I spent the past week on the Mendocino coast, just north of the little town of Gualala. One evening a planet appeared low in the sky as the last light of sunset was fading--you can just make it out in the top left corner of the image above. Pictures like this fail to do justice to the real thing, of course, and yet they still serve a important purpose, prompting memories of moments that shouldn't be forgotten.

After I took this shot I stood looking out at the Pacific, watching the stars slowly emerge as the sky darkened, listening to waves crash into the cove below, feeling the air swirl around me. It was a moment I've experienced many times during our trips up here, and yet there was something different about this one. Amy had gone back into the house, and I sensed her presence and her absence. I felt alone beneath the sky, before the sea, and also together, with her and in some sense with humanity.

~Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)

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And Listen to This

03 This Year

I am going to make it through this year

If it kills me

~John Darnielle

 

Photo by James Cridland.

The Cognitive Dissonance of the CEO

Most of my coaching clients are CEOs of growing companies, and a theme that shows up in my work with many of them is the stress that results from simultaneously maintaining two very different views of the world. Because my clients are constantly raising money from investors, or recruiting senior employees, or closing deals with major customers, they must be exuberant optimists, portraying a compelling vision of a successful future. And because the possibility of failure remains quite real--and those investors, employees, and customers will ask tough questions before signing up--my clients must also be keenly aware of the nearly endless list of risk factors and things that could go wrong, sometimes to the point of inducing anxiety.

One of my clients once jokingly called this state of mind "CEO schizophrenia," but to be precise it's a form of cognitive dissonance. The pioneering work on this concept was done by Leon Festinger in the late 1950s, and he described it concisely in an article in Scientific American:

If a person knows various things that are not psychologically consistent with one another, he will, in a variety of ways, try to make them more consistent. Two items of information that psychologically do not fit together are said to be in a dissonant relation to each other. The items of information may be about behavior, feelings, opinions, things in the environment and so on...

Such items can of course be changed. A person can change his opinion; he can change his behavior, thereby changing
the information he has about it; he can even distort his perception and his information about the world around him.
Changes in items of information that produce or restore consistency are referred to as dissonance-reducing changes.

Cognitive dissonance is a motivating state of affairs. Just as hunger impels a person to eat, so does dissonance impel a person to change his opinions or his behavior. The world, however, is much more effectively arranged for hunger reduction than it is for dissonance reduction. It is almost always possible to find something to eat. It is not always easy to reduce dissonance. Sometimes it may be very difficult or even impossible to change behavior or opinions that are involved in dissonant relations. Consequently there are circumstances in which appreciable dissonance may persist for long periods. [1]

When meaningful dissonance does persist, we typically experience it as a source of pressure and stress, as Festinger noted in his primary book on the subject:

The presence of dissonance gives rise to pressures to reduce or eliminate the dissonance. The strength of the pressures to reduce the dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance. In other words, dissonance acts in the same way as a state of drive or need or tension. The presence of dissonance leads to action to reduce it just as, for example, the presence of hunger leads to action to reduce the hunger. Also, similar to the action of a drive, the greater the dissonance, the greater will be the intensity of the action to reduce the dissonance and the greater the avoidance of the situations that would increase the dissonance. [2]

More recent research suggests that cognitive dissonance evokes discomfort specifically in situations where action is required, and a conflict between competing perspectives poses a barrier to taking action effectively. Eddie Harmon-Jones has conducted much of this research, which he and several colleagues summarized in 2015:

Most situations that cause dissonance involve difficult decisions and a commitment to action. According to the action-based model, once individuals commit to a course of action, they are primed to act. That is, they are motivated to translate their intended behavior into effective action, and this approach motivation is revealed in changes in attitudes that support the commitment. These attitudinal changes help us to follow through, to effectively enact the behaviors that follow from the decision. [3]

The relevance to a CEO who's seeking not only to take action themselves, but also to influence the actions of prospective investors, employees, and customers, is obvious. And this is why it's so difficult to fully inhabit the two mindsets described above for any sustained period of time. In these circumstances most people would feel compelled to take steps to reduce the dissonance in order to move in one direction or another. They might remain committed to the entrepreneurial vision, but to do so they would discount the risks involved--and then they would likely be caught by surprise when problems arise--as they inevitably do in any new venture. Or their awareness of the risks would overwhelm their faith in the vision, and they'd opt for a safer, more secure path--which is one reason why relatively few people become entrepreneurs in the first place.

Note that I'm not referring to situations in which leaders use deception or misrepresent the truth. I suspect that these leaders don't experience cognitive dissonance, either because they readily "distort their perceptions" to find a self-serving justification for their actions, or their lack of conscientiousness borders on the sociopathic. In contrast, my clients who experience cognitive dissonance struggle with it not because their vision of success is fraudulent and they're pretending it's real, but because the possibility of success and the risk of failure are both real. As the eminent psychologist Elliot Aronson--a PhD student under Festinger--later noted, "The inconsistency that produces dissonance, although it can be logical inconsistency, is not necessarily logical. Rather, it is psychological inconsistency." [4]

In other words, my clients' faith in the potential success of the venture enables them to portray a compelling vision of that reality when pitching prospective investors, employees, and customers. But they also know that failure, in some sense, is still possible, and this requires them to thoroughly explore and understand all of the venture's internal weaknesses and external threats. These two perspectives aren't logically incompatible, but they can evoke a profound sense of psychological inconsistency--thus the cognitive dissonance of the CEO.

The ability to tolerate this dissonance while maintaining one's integrity is a prerequisite of the job--but what can CEOs and other entrepreneurial leaders do to become more effective in this regard?

Expect It

The unpleasant feelings that result from cognitive dissonance are predictable consequences of an entrepreneurial leadership role, so leaders shouldn't be caught by surprise when these feelings occur. A common theme in my work with clients is the importance of a consistent commitment to the practices that help them manage stress and anxiety, avoid distractions, and focus on their most important tasks. This typically includes self-care practices, such as mindfulness, sleep and exercise, but it also includes ample blocks of unscheduled time to allow for strategic thinking and reflection. And note that these activities don't happen by accident--they're always important and never urgent, so if the leader doesn't put them on their calendar and protect them from competing obligations, they won't happen.

Get Comfortable with It

Stress and anxiety are undeniably uncomfortable feelings, and they can't simply be turned off. While our inability to fully control our emotions poses many challenges, it's usually beneficial--emotions are attention magnets that alert us to potential rewards and threats in our environment, so it's essential that they have the capacity to interrupt conscious thought. But we can't be unduly distracted by these feelings while performing other tasks, and this requires entrepreneurial leaders to expand their comfort with discomfort. Again, this often involves a commitment to self-care practices--mindfulness, sleep, and exercise--that allow us to heighten our awareness of uncomfortable feelings without feeling driven to take some sort of action to minimize the discomfort.

Talk About It

Finally, we know from experience that talking about difficult emotions makes them easier to manage, and recent neuroscience research has helped us better understand the processes in the brain that contribute to this result. But it can be a challenge for CEOs and other entrepreneurial leaders to find relationships in which they can productively discuss the issues referenced here. In some cases investors and senior employees are appropriate discussion partners, but the hierarchical nature of these relationships can make them less useful for this purpose, particularly for CEOs. Friends and family members can play a helpful role, but at times it can be distressing or confusing for them to hear about the challenges a leader is facing.

So it's essential for CEOs and other leaders to establish and maintain relationships with people who are appropriate partners for these conversations. One solution is working with a professional coach, although it's always important to choose a coach who's a good fit. But I also encourage my clients to engage a peer group, either on their own or through a formal program like YPO. As I've noted before, the key is insuring that these partners are "A) successful enough to avoid feeling threatened by or jealous of the leader's status, B) sophisticated enough to understand and empathize with the leader's challenges, C) invested in the leader as an individual and NOT invested in the leader's company, and D) completely trustworthy."

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Footnotes

[1] "Cognitive Dissonance" (Leon Festinger, Scientific American, October 1962, pages 93-94)

[2] A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, page 18 (Leon Festinger, 1957)

[3] An Action-Based Model of Cognitive Dissonance Processes, page 185 (Eddie Harmon-Jones et al, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2015)

[4] The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective, page 5 (Elliot Aronson, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1969)

 

For Further Reading

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People) (2017)

Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care (2017)

How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work (2017)

Importance vs. Urgency (2016)

To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions (2015)

Comfort with Discomfort (2015)

Talking About Feelings (2018)

How to Find (and Choose) a Coach) (2013)

The Friendship of Wolves (2018)

More on cognitive dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, Chapter 1: An Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance Theory and an Overview of Current Perspectives on the Theory (Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills, 1999). Mills was a PhD student under Festinger at Stanford.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory After 50 Years of Development (Eddie Harmon-Jones and Cindy Harmon-Jones, Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie, 2007)

 

Photo by Amy Elyse.

Startup Leadership: A Greater Us

The great danger that comes with growth is losing the proper balance between technology and business. At the best companies, suits and nerds alike see themselves as part of a greater 'us.'

~Robert Cringely [1]

Most of my coaching clients are CEOs of rapidly growing technology companies, and the challenge described above is one of the most important problems they face. Robert Cringely--the pen name of journalist Mark Stephens--wrote Notes from the Field for InfoWorld from 1987 to 1995, and his "industrial gossip column" (as he called it) gave him a unique perspective on a host of companies that rose and fell (and, sometimes, rose again) during that pivotal era. [2] Here's an excerpt from "Economics of Scale," a chapter in Cringely's 1992 book (republished in 1996):

For computer companies, the cost of growth is usually innocence. Many company founders, who have no trouble managing 25 highly motivated techies, fail miserably when their work force has grown to 500 and includes all types of workers. And why shouldn't they fail? They aren't trained as managers. They haven't been working their way up the management ladder at a big company like IBM. More likely, they are 30 years old and suddenly responsible for $30 million in sales, 500 families, and a customer base that keeps asking for service and support. Sometimes the leader, who never really imagined getting stuck in this particular rut, is up to the job and learns how to cope. And sometimes he or she is not up to the job, and either destroys the company or is replaced with another plague--professional management.

There comes a day when the founders start to disappear, and the suits appear, with the MBAs and their ideas about price points, market penetration, and strategic positioning. And because these new people don't usually understand the inner workings of the computer or the software that is the stuff actually made by the company they work for, the nerds tend to ignore them, thinking that the suits are only a phase the company is going through on its way to regaining balance and remembering that engineers are the appropriate center of the organization.

The nerds look on their nontechnical co-workers--the marketing and financial types--as a necessary evil. They have to be kept around in order to make money, thought the nerds are damned if they understand what these suits actually do...

But the coming of the suits is more than just a phase; it's what makes these companies bigger, sometimes it's what kills them on the way to being bigger, but either way it changes the character of each company and its leaders forever.

The great danger that comes with growth is losing the proper balance between technology and business. At the best companies, suits and nerds alike see themselves as part of a greater 'us.' [3]

It's striking how little has changed over the last quarter-century (other than the gradual disappearance of the term "nerds"), and this passage touches on a number of issues that I see regularly in my practice today:

From Family to Tribe to Village

In "Blitzscaling," Tim Sullivan's insightful Harvard Business Review interview with Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder discusses the various stages a technology company progresses through as it scales:

We see scale as a series of stages, based on orders of magnitude: A family-scale business can measure its employees in single digits; a tribe in tens; a village in hundreds; a city in thousands. A nation has more than 10,000 employees. These are estimates, not precise guides; a company often remains a family until around 15 employees, a tribe until around 150, and so on. At each level, the way you run various functions--financing the company, hiring and onboarding employees, marketing the product, and so on--changes significantly. [4]

Cringely's remarks above highlight the initial leaps technology company leaders must navigate--first from the founding family to a small tribe, and then to a mid-sized village--and I begin working with many of my clients in the midst of one of these transitions. In part this is because at this stage the company now has sufficient resources to pay for coaching, but the more fundamental driver is that these transitions typically result in a set of changes that pose difficulties for leaders:

• The leader must focus only on the most important problems, while more and more people are clamoring for their attention.
• Some of the leader's co-founders and initial executives are having difficulty scaling up, and the leader must stretch, level, or fire them.
• The informal and implicit norms that were sufficient to create a productive culture in a small, tight-knit homogeneous group are inadequate in a larger, more heterogenous group.

Growing into Leadership

While some of my clients have extensive professional backgrounds, it's not uncommon for others to find themselves in precisely the situation described by Cringely: lacking leadership experience or training, but suddenly responsible for an organization that's generating millions of dollars in revenue, supporting hundreds of employees and their families, and serving thousands of customers.

For some leaders, this can trigger an intense period of doubt and uncertainty: Now that the job has changed, do I have what it takes to keep it? And if so, do I still want it? And if so, for how long? In these circumstances there's no stasis--leaders either grow into the role or move on with their lives (or struggle until they're asked to move on involuntarily.) For those who elect to stay and challenge themselves, that growth can take many forms, but I see several common themes among my clients:

• A recognition that growing companies need leaders who do less (and lead more), which typically requires a fundamental shift in understanding how they add value.
• The ability to let go of personal accomplishments, focus instead on motivating others, and grow comfortable with power without becoming self-aggrandizing.
• A commitment to leadership as a practice, which generally entails a new approach to personal habits and self-care practices, specifically mindfulness, exercise, and sleep.

Getting to "Us"

When I taught Interpersonal Dynamics (aka Touchy Feely) at Stanford, one of the first readings on my syllabus [5] was "Getting to 'Us,'" by George Halvorson, the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, who drew on a body of research known as social identity theory [6] to discuss the implications of group distinctions in organizational life:

Humans are social creatures; we fall readily into group loyalties. We instinctively divide the world into "us" and "them" and treat others very differently according to which category they’re in. Activating us-versus-them energy is the oldest leadership tool in the box. In business settings, the effects can be wonderful. But they can also be terrible, giving rise to warring factions internally and cutting off collaborative possibilities externally. It’s surprising how many business managers are not very thoughtful about wielding this tool...

In the 1970s the social psychologist Henri Tajfel gave us the concept of social identity--the understanding that an individual’s identity is powerfully shaped by group allegiances... Researchers since have shown that when people in a work setting have a strong sense of being an us, morale and productivity rise...

Many workplaces default to a version of kinship based on function. A group’s shared identity reflects a common characteristic of its members—everyone’s an engineer, or everyone’s a radiologist. Doing similar work under the same conditions is enough to make an us. But it doesn’t provide much impetus for the group to align its energies and take bold action. [7]

This highlights the key dilemma noted by Cringely above--as a technology company grows, it's inevitable that the organization will subdivide into distinct identity-based cultures. Cringely's "nerds vs. suits" paradigm is far more stark than the dynamics I typically see in my practice; my clients who are highly technical still care about the company's financial success, and those who lack in-depth technical expertise aren't simply in it for the money. And yet some version of this divide persists in almost every one of my clients' companies.

As Halvorson makes clear, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Group identities based on functional domain can create a sense of esprit de corps and create opportunities for fruitful competition. But these benefits can easily be outweighed by the risk that people will identify more with their sub-group than with the organization as a whole, or the possibility of internal competition becoming a distraction from the company's larger goals. There's no simple solution to this issue, but the leaders I work with who do achieve "a greater us" pay close attention to these factors:

• The establishment and maintenance of a sense of cohesiveness among senior executives that transcends functional rivalries.
• A balance between accountability and empathy throughout the organization, starting with their management of their direct reports.
• The importance of clarity regarding decision-making and a shared understanding of the process being applied in any given situation.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Accidental Empires, page 250 (Robert Cringely, 1996, 2nd edition)

[2] Who Is Robert X. Cringely?

[3] Accidental Empires, pages 249-250 (Robert Cringely, 1996, 2nd edition)

[4] Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman interviewed by Tim Sullivan, Harvard Business Review, 2016)

[5] Interpersonal Dynamics

[6] For more on social identity theory: Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination (Henri Tajfel, Scientific American, 1970) and Social Identity Theory (Gazi Islam, Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 2014)

[7] Getting to "Us" (George Halvorson, Harvard Business Review, 2014)

 

For Further Reading

Startup Leadership: Are We Video-Gaming or Ditch-Digging?

Startup Leadership: Are We Rowing or Rafting?

 

Photo by Hien Nguyen.

Talking About Feelings

My work as a coach often involves encouraging clients and students to talk about their feelings--a process known to psychologists as affect labeling--in order to manage difficult emotions more effectively. Experience tells us that this is a useful practice, but why? How does talking about feelings make them easier to manage?

Recent neuroscience research, including a substantial body of work by Matthew Lieberman of UCLA [1], has helped us to better understand the processes in the brain that contribute to this effect. [2] Some of the earliest research on this topic was conducted by Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, and several other colleagues [3]:

Putting feelings into words has long been thought to be one of the best ways to manage negative emotional experiences. Talk therapies have been formally practiced for more than a century and, although varying in structure and content, are commonly based on the assumption that talking about one's feelings and problems is an effective method for minimizing the impact of negative emotional events on current experience. More recently, psychologists have discovered that merely putting pen to paper to express one’s emotional ailments has benefits for mental and physical health. Although conventional wisdom and scientific evidence indicate that putting one’s feelings into words can attenuate negative emotional experiences, the mechanisms by which these benefits arise remain largely unknown.

Recent neuroimaging research has begun to offer insight into a possible neurocognitive mechanism by which putting feelings into words may alleviate negative emotional responses. A number of studies of affect labeling have demonstrated that linguistic processing of the emotional aspects of an emotional image produces less amygdala activity than perceptual processing of the emotional aspects of the same image. [The amygdala is a region of the brain associated with emotion processing that plays a role in helping us interpret and respond to perceived threats, among other tasks.] Additionally, these studies have demonstrated greater activity during linguistic processing than during non-linguistic processing of emotion in [the] right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), a region associated with the symbolic processing of emotional information and with top-down inhibitory processes. Finally, the magnitude of RVLPFC activity during affect labeling has been inversely correlated with the magnitude of amygdala activity during affect labeling in these studies. Together, these results suggest that putting feelings into words may activate RVLPFC, which in turn may dampen the response of the amygdala, thus helping to alleviate emotional distress... [page 421]

The results of this study provide the first clear demonstration that affect labeling disrupts the affective responses in the limbic system that would otherwise occur in the presence of negative emotional images...

These data thus suggest that one route by which putting feelings into words may regulate negative affect is by increasing activity in RVLPFC, which in turn dampens activity in the amygdala by way of intermediate connections through [the medial prefrontal cortex]... [page 426]

In summary, this study provides the first unambiguous evidence that affect labeling, compared with other ways of encoding, produces diminished responses to negative emotional images in the amygdala and other limbic regions...

These findings begin to shed light on how putting negative feelings into words can help regulate negative experience, a process that may ultimately contribute to better mental and physical health. [page 427]

While the specific neural mechanisms involved remain unclear, it's noteworthy that this research highlights the connection between the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain most closely associated with logical reasoning, and regions of the brain involved in processing emotion. Although this may seem counterintuitive, given our popular conception of reason and emotion as opposing influences on our behavior, it's entirely consistent with decades of research by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio [4] and Richard Davidson [5], whose work emphasizes the complex and intertwined relationship between these modes of mental processing.

Lieberman also explored these neural mechanisms in work that he conducted independently [6]:

[T]here is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the process of sharing one's worry, of putting bad feelings into words, can diminish one's emotional distress at least under certain circumstances. This chapter examines the neurocognitive mechanisms of disruption effects, the process by which putting feelings into words can disrupt the feelings being verbalized... [page 188]

RVLPFC activity is associated with reduced activity in limbic regions, such as the amygdala and [dorsal anterior cingulate cortex], and [symbolic processing of affect] is associated both with increased RVLPFC activity and decreased limbic activity. [page 199]

Given that [symbolic processing of affect] appears to regulate limbic responses...this would provide a mechanism by which putting feelings into words would have benefits for regulating emotional distress and for mental health more generally. [page 200]

Numerous philosophers and psychologists have noted over the years that thinking about affect has the capacity to alter and even dampen the affect that is being thought about. This has been used to good effect in various forms of therapy, from formal psychotherapies to informal social support networks in which people talk about their feelings with friends. The reason that putting feelings into words helps has remained elusive and somewhat mystical. The work presented here describes a neurocognitive process focused on RVLPFC that provides the beginnings of an answer. Putting feelings into words activates a region of the brain that is capable of inhibiting various aspects of immediate experience, including affective distress. [page 203]

Lieberman later summarized this research in his insightful book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect [7]:

It turns out that putting our feelings into words or simply being able to label them can regulate our emotions and promote our mental and physical well-being...

Preschoolers who can describe their feelings have fewer emotional outbursts, get better grades, and are more popular with their peers. High school students who write about their math anxiety right before taking a math test actually do better on the test. In my lab we ask adults to perform a simple task, called affect labeling, during which people choose a word to best describe the emotional aspect of a picture. For instance, a picture of an angry face might be shown, and the participant would have to choose whether the word angry or scared describes the target's emotion. We have found that labeling the affective aspect of a disturbing image reduces the distress a person feels while looking at the image...

When people label an emotional picture or their own emotional response to a picture, it activates the RVLPFC and reduces activity in the amygdala... It is still unclear what exactly the RVLPFC does to stimulate self-control. The debate typically focuses on whether this and similar regions are directly inhibiting responses in other brain regions, like the amygdala, or are helping to strengthen the nonimpulsive alternative so it can compete effectively with the impulsive response. [pages 219-221]

So while we can't explain the underlying mechanisms with absolute certainty, a highly plausible theory has emerged over the past decade that allows us to explain why talking about distressing feelings mitigates the counterproductive impact of those emotions. How can we make more effective use of these ideas?

Practice

Many of us lack experience talking about our feelings, particularly in a professional setting, and just thinking about it can trigger a sense of anxiety and unease. This response is understandable--being called "emotional" is typically a criticism in business, and yet it can be unclear what would cause that label to be applied to us. But in our efforts to avoid this outcome, we may over-correct and never disclose our feelings at work--which prevents us from leveraging the neural processes discussed above, making our negative emotions even more difficult to manage.

Psychologist Daniel Wegner quoted educator John Dewey on the importance of routinizing desired behaviors: "Habits must intervene between wish and execution in the case of bodily acts, [but] we still cherish the illusion that they can be dispensed with in the case of mental and moral acts." [8, emphasis added] The key here is recognizing that talking about emotions is a bodily act, not just a mental one. By definition emotions aren't purely cognitive processes--we often become aware of our emotions when we suddenly feel our heart pounding or a pit in our stomach. And just like any other embodied experience that involves multiple physiological systems, like driving a car or public speaking, we must make it a habit in order to grow accustomed to the challenge. But the good news is that practice inevitably increases our comfort with discomfort and reduces our self-consciousness as we grow more competent.

Expand Our Vocabularies

A consequence of our inexperience with discussing emotions--and a contributing factor that holds us back--is a limited emotional language. Even when we're ready to talk more fully about our feelings, if we lack the precise word to convey our emotion to another person in such a way that it has the intended impact, we're likely to struggle. A simple solution is to expand our emotional vocabulary.

This one-page document lists eight primary emotional states--angry, averse, caring, embarrassed, excited, fearful, happy, inadequate, and sad--and 52 synonyms. Psychologists differ on the nature and number of primary emotions--Paul Ekman defined the six basic emotions as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, while the late Sylvan Tompkins believed there are eight: anguish, disgust, fear, joy, interest, rage, shame, and surprise. [9] I've adapted this list from one originally developed by David Bradford, Mary Ann Huckabay and Carole Robin at Stanford, and I find that it works well for my clients and students.

Create a Supportive Culture

As Lieberman's work indicates, and as ample empirical evidence makes clear, merely reflecting on our feelings also allows us to regulate them over time. But the process of internal reflection appears to work less efficiently than openly discussing our feelings, and in many circumstances it's simply not possible to pause the interaction in order for us to take time to reflect. If we want to manage difficult feelings as effectively as possible, we need to talk about them with others--including those people who may be the cause of our emotions.

And yet even if we're willing to have this conversation with a rich vocabulary at the ready, our ability to do so will be significantly influenced by the surrounding culture. Note that every relationship and group has its own culture--a set of norms, often tacit and unspoken, that determine what behaviors or statements are acceptable and what will result in embarrassment or threat.

If we want to make full use of the neural processes described above, we have to create a safe, trusting and intimate culture in which talking about feelings is accepted as normal. I fully recognize that this may involve taking some risks in order to move the culture in the desired direction, and I'm not suggesting that we do so heedlessly. But what gives me hope is that the bold act of talking about our feelings is what tends to create a safer, more trusting, and more emotionally intimate culture in the first place.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Matthew Lieberman's faculty page at UCLA

[2] Twitter Study Confirms the Power of "Affect Labeling" (Christian Jarrett, BPS Research Digest, 2019)

[3] "Putting Feelings Into Words" (Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, Molly Crockett, Sabrina Tom, Jennifer Pfeifer, and Baldwin Way, Psychological Science, 2007)

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] The Emotional Life of Your Brain (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)

[6] "Why Symbolic Processing of Affect Can Disrupt Negative Affect: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Investigations," Chapter 13 in Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind (Alexander Todorov, Susan Fiske, and Deborah Prentice, editors, 2011)

[7] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (Matthew Lieberman, 2013) I highly recommend Social as a lucid and thought-provoking guide to recent neuroscience research on a wide range of issues beyond the topic of this post. When I taught Interpersonal Dynamics (aka Touchy Feely) at Stanford, I included chapters from Social on my syllabus for the first and last classes in the course.

[8] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, page 14 (Daniel Wegner, 1989)

[9] For more on primary emotions, see The Emotional Brain, Chapter 5 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)

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For Further Reading

Comfort with Discomfort

Conscious Competence in Practice

Vocabulary of Emotions

Self-Coaching Is SOCIAL

Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

Safety, Trust, Intimacy

Taking the Leap (Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty

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This is a revised and expanded version of a post first published in February 2008.

Thank you to Stephanie West Allen for helping me grasp the implications of current neuroscience research for my work as a coach, and, more specifically, for initially referring me to the work of Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, and their colleagues at UCLA.

Photo by Gideon.