Ed Batista

Role Clarity and Role Confusion

A theme in my practice is the vital importance of a sufficient degree of role clarity--a shared understanding among colleagues that allows them to answer a set of questions that are rarely made explicit and yet are ever-present in organizational life:

• Who are we to each other?
• What are our relative positions in this environment?
• In what ways are our roles similar? In what ways do they differ?
• And how might any of this change over time, or in certain settings?

Sufficient role clarity is necessary in all professional relationships, but it's particularly important in the rapidly growing and dynamic organizations where most of my clients are senior leaders. In the absence of sufficient role clarity--when we're unable to answer the questions above, or when our respective answers are mutually incompatible--we experience role confusion. And a challenge faced by most of my clients is that their organizations inevitably generate role confusion as a consequence of growth and change. What are the typical causes of role confusion, and how can leaders establish (or re-establish) sufficient role clarity when necessary?

Overlapping Relationships

A major challenge to role clarity occurs when two people simultaneously occupy different roles with respect to one another: The grad school classmates who became co-founders. The spouses who are also colleagues. The former co-workers, still friends, who are now in a reporting relationship. These situations are by no means insurmountable problems, but they tend to pose problems nonetheless, which is why they come up so often in my practice. One option, of course, is to avoid such situations in the first place, or deconstruct them when they occur by prioritizing one set of roles over the other. For example, it's not uncommon for friends to grow distant after becoming colleagues, particularly if there's a status difference between their professional roles. But choosing one set of roles over the other may be undesirable or even impossible--so what else can be done?

The first step is recognizing the overlap in these relationships and bringing a heightened degree of conscious awareness to interactions. In some cases this simply means setting some boundaries so that the working relationship doesn't overwhelm the personal one. (Occasionally the personal relationship gets in the way of the work, but that's unusual among my clients.) Friends who became co-founders and spouses who are also colleagues will undoubtedly spend a lot of time talking about the business--and they also need to spend time together while not talking about the business and interacting with each other in their respective personal capacities.

In other cases this entails identifying the roles being occupied in a given moment and being mindful of the norms that are appropriate to the relationship at that time. One way of distinguishing personal relationships from professional ones is that in the former we expect to be less emotionally regulated--that's what makes them personal--while in the latter we expect the opposite. [1] This has substantial implications for the norms governing our behavior in each setting, and if we're unclear about the roles we're occupying we may show up in a way that generates confusion for ourselves and others by acting too formally or informally, too rigid or too loose.

Relative Status

A second source of role confusion results from changing perceptions of status, an issue of tremendous importance in human psychology that we often discount in contemporary organizational life. One of humanity's signal advantages as a species is our ability to co-exist in relatively large groups compared to other primates who were our distant ancestors' competitors. [2] The downside of this capability is the intensive nature of intra-group competition, which we regulate by cultivating strong relationships and attending closely to social status. [3] We feel better when our status increases, and the converse is equally true--encountering someone who we perceive as higher status makes us more likely to feel threatened. [4] It's essential to recognize that attention to (and competition for) relative status is a fundamental aspect of our psychology--it's not something we can "turn off," even as we strive to regulate it, [5] and this evolutionary inheritance has significant implications for role clarity and confusion.

One of the most significant ways we establish role clarity in organizations is through formal hierarchies and reporting relationships, which often allow us to answer the questions above quite readily, even as they remain implicit. But even as these tools create greater role clarity, they set in motion a process that eventually generates role confusion. The key issue is the steady upward pressure experienced within a hierarchy to maintain and increase one's relative status. A common form this takes in my practice is what we might call "title inflation"--the instant a CEO awards the organization's first C-level title, almost every other person who reports to the CEO wants one, too. (At times this isn't possible, which is why SVPs and EVPs exist.)

A closely related dynamic is the tension that exists between the need to keep the senior executive team small with a clearly defined and fixed membership, and the intense desire on the part of everyone just outside that circle to be included as a member. These forms of upward pressure undermine role clarity as the organization evolves, and, left unchecked, result in role confusion as people of different status find themselves occupying similar ranks in the hierarchy. The essential task for the leader is to recognize the importance of status when making and modifying these arrangements. It's easy to assume that they're empty symbols, but in my experience leaders who think titles are free are inevitably surprised when their hidden costs are suddenly revealed.

A further complicating factor is the sense of status derived from our various social identities. As I've written before,

In some cases our status relative to the other party...is a clear and mutually understood function of our respective positions in a hierarchy. But because contemporary culture often seeks to diminish hierarchical distinctions--despite the fact that human beings continue to rely on hierarchy as a fundamental organizing principle--our relative status may be unclear...

A form this can take in organizational life is when one person is perceived as higher status because of their role or title, and the other is perceived as higher status because of some aspect of their social identity: age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, physical characteristics, etc. Although our perceptions of status deriving from these dimensions of difference continue to evolve, the ability to pretend that they no longer have an impact on our perceptions is itself a privilege of high status. [6]

The key here is being able to acknowledge and discuss social identity as a source of status--which, of course, is profoundly difficult and often fraught. That said, ignoring such complexity doesn't make it go away--it merely increases the likelihood of role confusion--and the more practice we get in holding such conversations, the easier they become over time.

Decision Rights

A final source of role confusion relates not to the vertical dimension of hierarchy in organizational life, but to the horizontal dimension of responsibilities and scope. What tasks are yours, and what tasks are mine? Where does your job end and mine begin? And in the absence of mutual understanding, who makes the decisions needed to answer these questions? In the early stages of an organization's development such questions may be superfluous and even counter-productive. They signify a distinction between an individual's personal preferences and what's best for the business, and early-stage employees should be focused on the latter (and properly incentivized to do so). The last thing an early-stage leader wants to hear is, "That's not my job."

But I often see organizations that allow this lack of structure to persist well past the point of diminishing returns, resulting not only in heightened role confusion, but also an increased number of disputes that the leader must resolve, as people clash over their respective responsibilities and seek ad hoc resolutions in the absence of decision-making systems. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that early-stage companies rush to delineate perfectly clear lanes for all employees--that will yield greater role clarity, but it may also create gaps where tasks get dropped. Instead, I often talk with clients about "the judicious imposition of structure," ensuring that the evolution of the organization itself is keeping pace with the complexity of the work being undertaken. As I've noted elsewhere,

Growing organizations require increasing routinization of work. Tasks are transformed into processes, which are then combined into systems. This trend can be counterproductive, and I’m not suggesting that organizations should rush to embrace bureaucracy. But the fluidity and ambiguity that foster creative problem-solving in an early stage startup will feel like chaotic dysfunction at a later point in the company’s development.

At times a sufficient degree of role confusion stemming from unclear decision rights can only be resolved through changes in organizational hierarchy and reporting relationships, with the attendant challenges discussed above. But in many cases a provisional accommodation can be made simply by clarifying the process by which a given decision will be made, which is much easier than rewriting job descriptions or rearranging the org chart in order to restore role clarity. In this context I find the framework developed by management thinker Jurgen Appelo immensely valuable--it's written from the perspective of a leader determining how to involve others in a decision, but it can be used to add role clarity in any working relationship:

• TELL: The leader decides, and there's no discussion.
• SELL: The leader decides and seeks to convince the other person.
• CONSULT: The leader seeks the other's input and then decides.
• AGREE: The leader and the other person decide together.
• ADVISE: The leader suggests, and the other person decides.
• INQUIRE: The other person decides and then informs the leader.
• DELEGATE: The other person decides, and there's no need for discussion. [8]

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Tyranny of Feelings

[2] Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates (Robin Dunbar, Journal of Human Evolution, 1992)

[3] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, pages 33-34 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)

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

[5] The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 131-132 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)

[6] Resolving a Protracted Conflict

[7] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More

[8] Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management

 

Photo via PXhere.

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

Sometimes we're prevented from achieving our goals by factors beyond our control--the performance of a competitor, or the misdeeds of an adversary, or simply random chance and bad luck. But all too often we pay insufficient attention to the obstacles of our own making--the traps we set for ourselves. In my work as a coach to senior leaders (and in my own life), these traps tend to fall into three categories:

Magical Thinking

Then close your eyes, and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself: There's no place like home!

~Glinda, the Good Witch of the North [1]

There's a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, rendering success more likely. [2] And yet there's a point at which unbridled confidence is merely a wish, and optimism becomes magical thinking, which can be particularly dangerous for a leader. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson notes that the risks of excessive optimism include resistance to negative data and failure to learn from experience. [3]

What can we do? Cultivate a tolerance for cognitive dissonance. This is the mental state evoked when we're confronted with ideas or data that appear to be inconsistent, which most people find so unpleasant that they modify their beliefs (and their behavior) or simply ignore certain data in order to restore conceptual consistency. When we engage in magical thinking, what we're really doing is soothing the discomfort evoked by cognitive dissonance, wishing away the risks and concerns that are inconsistent with our preferred outcomes. We don't have to become pessimists, but we need to anticipate cognitive dissonance and take steps to become more comfortable with discomfort. [4]

Self-Delusions

There is nothing...to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution.

~Harry Frankfurt  [5]

We like to think that we know ourselves well, and yet our view of ourselves is as subject to bias and distortion as our perspective on any other subject--perhaps even more so, given the host of blind spots that impede our view. This includes unrealistic self-regard and unrealistic self-criticism, and both are equally problematic. Leaders with an inflated estimation of their own abilities are staples of tragic stories in history, literature, and the annals of management practice. But in my experience as a coach the vainglorious hero who takes a fall is actually less common than the person whose perceived limitations become real ones, unable to get out of their own way. [6]

What can we do? First, adopt a fundamental attitude toward ourselves: View ourselves as a work-in-progress, open to learning and change, and seek to maintain a growth mindset in which our capabilities are plastic and evolving. [7] Then hold regular "conversations with ourselves" by making a consistent commitment to turn our abstract reflections into more concrete thoughts through some form of writing, and engaging others in coaching conversations in order to gain some critical distance on our subjective experience. [8] Finally, actively solicit feedback from people we trust to minimize those blind spots--and note that in my experience positive feedback is actually more stressful than negative feedback, but it is just as valuable in raising our self-awareness. [9]

What Ought to Be

You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.

~Marlo Stanfield [10]

We hold a set of beliefs about the way the world works, and these mental models have a profound impact on our experience of the world. [11] A subset of these beliefs involve the way the world is supposed to work, the way things "ought to be," and these ideas can be tremendously durable and resistant to modification. This makes sense, up to a point. We rely heavily on our mental models to determine cause-and-effect, predict likely outcomes, and modify our behavior accordingly, and they usually serve us well for these purposes. It would be a waste of effort to revisit them constantly. But in some circumstances we remain attached to our mental model of "what ought to be" even in the face of extensive evidence that it's wrong or out of date.

What can we do? See our mental models as just that--simplified versions of reality that enable us to navigate the world which must be updated on a regular basis. When the territory doesn't resemble the map, we have to modify the map. [12] This often involves some form of "double-loop learning," in which we look beyond the results we're achieving (or failing to achieve) and exploring the assumptions and beliefs that underpin our current goals and strategies. [13] We're also well-served by enhancing our capacity for emotion regulation. [14] When our model of "what ought to be" is contradicted by reality, we often experience a surge of righteous indignation, and even when such passion motivates us to remake reality to conform with our ideals, we need to manage those feelings to enlist others in the cause and avoid burnout. Finally, we can take an entirely different stance toward these perceived impediments--they may be there not to block us, but to teach us, and it may be a lesson that could be learned in no other manner. Sometimes, the obstacle IS the way. [15]

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Wizard of Oz (directed by Victor Fleming, produced by Mervyn LeRoy, based on the book by L. Frank Baum, portrayed by Billie Burke, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, 1939)

[2] See Dispositional Affect and Leadership Effectiveness: A Comparison of Self-Esteem, Optimism, and Efficacy (Martin Chemers, Carl Watson, and Stephen May, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000), and Impact of Leadership Style and Emotion on Subordinate Performance (Janet McColl-Kennedy and Ronald Anderson, The Leadership Quarterly, 2002).

[3] The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)

[4] The Cognitive Dissonance of the CEO

[5] On Bullshit, page 67 (Harry Frankfurt, 2005. First published in The Raritan Quarterly Review, 1986.)

[6] Three More Horsemen (How We Self-Sabotage)

[7] Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, 2014) 

[8] Conversations with Ourselves

[9] Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful

[10] Refugees, The Wire, Season Four (Written by Dennis Lehane, portrayed by Jamie Hector, HBO, 2006)

• Here's a brief clip that's worth watching.

[11] Corn Mazes and Mental Models

[12] The Map Is Not the Territory

[13] Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

[14] The Tyranny of Feelings

[15] The Obstacle Is The Way

 

Photo by insight pest.

Resources for Tough Times

For months I've been talking with leaders all day, every day about the impact of the current environment on their organizations, their employees, and their own lives, and much of my writing during this period has been aimed at helping them address these challenges:

Leadership

• From Peacetime to Wartime
• How Leaders Overcome Adversity
• Leadership in Crisis (FDR and the Rubber Band Effect)

Working from Home

• Working from Home...Together
• Working from Home...Alone

An Ongoing Series on Coping

• Part 1: Pockets of Agency
• Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
• Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
• Part 4: Wounded Creatures
• Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
• Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms

Reflection

• The Fruit of Suffering
• One Minute of Calm

Here's a program I helped to design to enable a group of 6 people to have a meaningful online experience together:

• CONNECTIONS: Meaningful Virtual Conversations

And here are some other relevant resources I've learned about:

Virtual Experiences

• Camp Joy: "An action-packed virtual camp experience for individual adults and teams who want to take a break in their day to focus on joy." I haven't participated in one of their sessions, but it's been recommended by people I respect.
• The Growth Equation Discussion Group: A monthly video conference hosted by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness on topics related to mastery, performance, and well-being. No cost, but donations are welcome.
• Take Back Work: A workplace culture consultancy founded by my former Stanford student Val Rivera whose efforts are now focused on facilitating virtual offsites and similar events for executive teams.

Image: "We Can Do It!" by J. Howard Miller.

Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy

We should never have the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes, or to be well dressed if our stomachs were empty most of the time, or if we were continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending catastrophe...

~Abraham Maslow [1]

Part 1: Maslow's Hierarchy

Although the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow first developed his theory of human motivation in the 1940s, it remains highly relevant as we seek to understand the impact of the current environment on our lives today. [2] Maslow's ideas and the humanistic psychology movement that he influenced have been subject to criticism over the years, but I continue to find this body of knowledge a source of profound insight in my work as a coach with senior leaders. [3]

Maslow, born in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian immigrant parents, had a deeply unhappy childhood, which he ascribed in part to being the only Jewish family in his neighborhood. But a happy marriage at age 20 and a brilliant academic career in psychology transformed him, and returning to New York to teach in 1937, Maslow was a charismatic and popular professor, known as "the Frank Sinatra of Brooklyn College." [4] A 33-year-old father of two, Maslow wasn't drafted for military service in World War II, but he was deeply affected by the country's efforts in the fight against Fascism, which led to an emotional experience as he observed a parade of soldiers:

As I watched, the tears ran down my face. I felt that we didn't understand--not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn't understand any of them... It was at that moment that I realized that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table... I wanted to prove that human beings are capable of something grander than war and prejudice and hatred. [5]

The result was what Maslow called "a positive theory of human motivation," with an emphasis on what can be learned not from unwell people under the care of psychotherapists (the focus of most research at the time) but from healthy and high-functioning people. "The most important concerns of the greatest and finest people in human history must all be encompassed and explained." [6] Maslow's core concept was a "hierarchy of needs," organized according to their "prepotency" or their ability to command our attention and influence our behavior. This hierarchy begins with physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst and sleep:

Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most prepotent of all needs. What this means specifically is that in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others. A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else. [7]

But what happens to [a person's] desires when there is plenty of bread and when [their] belly is chronically filled? At once other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on. This is what we mean by saying the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency. [8, emphasis original]

As indicated by the first passage above, the basic needs that emerge once physiological needs are met are the following:

• Safety: "Security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, from anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, limits; strength in the protector... [The safety needs] may serve as the almost exclusive organizers of behavior, and we may then fairly describe the whole organism as a safety-seeking mechanism." [9]
• Belongingness and Love: "If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart...or children. [They] will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general... Now [they] will feel sharply the pangs of loneliness, of ostracism, of rejection, of friendlessness, of rootlessness." [10]
• Esteem: People "have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, usually high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. These needs may therefore be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom. Second, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige (defining it as respect or esteem from other people), status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity or appreciation. [11]
• Self-Actualization: "Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what [they], individually [are] fitted for... What a [person] can be, [they] must be. This need we may call self-actualization... This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. [12]

Often inaccurately displayed as a pyramid--an image never used by Maslow himself--the hierarchy of needs is better represented as a ladder, as discussed in a thought-provoking 2019 paper that reinforces the value of Maslow's work while rejecting its customary presentation:

The depiction of the [hierarchy of needs] as a pyramid, with horizontal lines demarcating the different levels, makes it difficult to imagine that people can be simultaneously striving to satisfy a number of different needs. When one is on a ladder, multiple rungs are occupied by the feet and hands, and other rungs may be leaned on as well. The ladder as thus described is far closer to Maslow’s original thinking. [13]

So although higher needs emerge as lower ones become fulfilled during the course of our growth and development, we're always working to address multiple sets of needs simultaneously on various "rungs" of the ladder, a point Maslow makes explicitly:

[It is a] false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 percent before the next need emerges. In actual fact, most members of our society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time. A more realistic description of the hierarchy would be in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy of prepotency. For instance, if I may assign arbitrary figures for the sake of illustration, it is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 percent in [their] physiological needs, 70 percent in [their] safety needs, 50 percent in [their] love needs, 40 percent in [their] self-esteem needs, and 10 percent in [their] self-actualization needs. [14]

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Part 2: Tumbling Down

Why does this matter? More specifically, why does it matter today? It matters because in the current environment many people aren't moving up the ladder, they're moving down, and I see a version of this in my coaching practice. Most of my clients are CEOs, and all of them are high-status professionals for whom work fulfills many different needs, which is also true for the vast majority of their employees. And from the perspective of my clients and their colleagues the current environment has created a profound sense of unease as needs that had been largely fulfilled long ago are now making themselves felt again, in some cases for the first time in years:

• People who were pursuing a degree of self-actualization through work feel that such an accomplishment is beyond their grasp as more pressing needs occupy their energy and attention.
• Feelings of esteem are eroded as businesses struggle and people feel less capable of achieving their professional goals, and sense their reputation or status suffering as a result.
• The relationships and sense of community that people enjoyed at work have frayed in the absence of in-person contact or as a consequence of relocations and layoffs. (I've coached more CEOs through layoffs in the past six months than I did in the past decade.)
• The ineffective response to the pandemic, as well as increased levels of political polarization and social unrest, have led to a diminished sense that the world is a secure or predictable place and undermined faith in collective institutions.
• A heightened awareness of the risks of infection and violence has left people feeling physically vulnerable, while also making it harder to achieve consistent sleep or exercise regularly.

To be clear, my clients are keenly aware of the privileges they enjoy that made it possible to move up Maslow's ladder in the first place. I feel this myself, as I've been able to move my coaching practice online and minimize my own risk of infection, when many people I know have had their businesses severely impacted or must expose themselves to potential infection in order to earn a living. But while acknowledging that others are suffering more deeply may help us put our own suffering in perspective, it doesn't make our suffering irrelevant. I'm certainly seeing a great deal of suffering in my practice, and Maslow highlighted one of its sources:

We tend to take for granted the blessings we already have, especially if we don't have to work or struggle for them. The food, the security, the love, the admiration, the freedom that have always been there, that have never been lacking or yearned for tends not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed. This phenomenon of failing to count one's blessings is, of course, not realistic and can therefore be considered to be a form of pathology. In most instances it is cured very easily, simply by experiencing the appropriate deprivation or lack, e.g. pain, hunger, poverty, loneliness, rejection, injustice, etc. [15]

If a failure to appreciate our blessings is a form of pathology, a more realistic appraisal may well be a step toward psychological health--but that doesn't make it less painful, particularly when the the process of moving down the ladder is accompanied by a number of stressors, as Maslow acknowledges:

Living at the higher need level means greater biological efficiency, greater longevity, less disease, better sleep, appetite, etc... Higher need gratifications produce more desirable subjective results, i.e. more profound happiness, serenity, and richness of the inner life. Satisfaction of the safety needs produce at best a feeling of relief and relaxation...[and] a greater value is usually placed upon the higher need than upon the lower by people who have been gratified in both. [16]

So moving down the ladder to address gaps in needs that were previously addressed can have a substantial psychological and physiological impact. Life is harder, it's less fulfilling in the process, and there's a sharpened sense of loss for the higher needs that were once met or becoming fulfilled. Further, the changes we're experiencing at societal and global levels are eroding our individual ability to pursue basic needs effectively, no matter what our personal circumstances:

The actualization of a person's real potentialities is conditioned upon...all those factors now called "ecological," upon the "health" of the culture, or the lack of it, upon the world situation, etc. Growth toward self-actualization and full-humanness is made possible by a complex hierarchy of "good preconditions." These physical, chemical, biological, interpersonal, cultural conditions matter for the individual finally to the extent that they do or do not supply [them] with the basic human necessities and "rights" which permit [them] to become strong enough, and person enough, to take over [their] own fate. [17]

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Part 3: Climbing Back Up

So what can we do? My previous posts in this series offer some suggestions: Seek out and create pockets of agency in which we can experience a greater sense of control. And heighten our awareness of our emotional state, take action to regulate our threat response, and accept the inevitable limits on our control (because those pockets will extend only so far.)

And Maslow himself offers another starting point: Gratitude. Counting--and truly appreciating--the blessings we enjoy but have so often taken for granted. A few years ago I wrote a "gratitude checklist" that begins as follows:

I'm alive.	☐
I'm not in pain.	☐
I can think clearly.	☐
I can see, hear, and walk.	☐
I'm warm and well-nourished.	☐
I'm protected from the elements.	☐

All of which relate to the very first rung of Maslow's ladder, our physiological needs. Being grateful for these things sounds absurdly easy, but it's actually quite difficult, and Maslow explains why: the blessings we enjoy tend "not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed." They vanish from our consideration as we move up the ladder to focus on higher needs, and it feels beneath us somehow to be attending to them again. It is, in a word, humbling to be compelled to acknowledge that these needs matter.

Yet that is a path to gratitude, if we're willing to take it. And in this context being attuned to suffering--others' and our own--can play a meaningful role in helping us count--and appreciate--our blessings. Over the past few days I've been monitoring a wildfire in Napa and Sonoma Counties as it advanced on Santa Rosa, just 15 miles from the farm where I live. Knowing people are losing their homes so close to mine makes me realize more fully what it would mean to not be protected from the elements, to not be warm or well-nourished.

A colleague is suffering from mobility issues, and a family member is in the late stages of dementia, and they make me realize more fully what it would mean to not see, hear or walk, to not think clearly. I'm just emerging from six weeks of constant back pain, the result of an old injury and new stress, and I'm vividly aware of what it means to be in pain--and how truly thankful I am that this latest episode is ending. And having lost one of my best friends to an accident just before the pandemic descended on the U.S., I'm acutely aware of the value of life and grateful for my own, even--and especially--in the current environment.

So gratitude can be found even when we tumble down to the lowest rung of Maslow's ladder--but where do we go from there? The point of gratitude isn't to lower our aspirations (and Maslow would suggest that it's not possible to do so, as he believed that all of the needs described in his hierarchy had an instinctive basis.) How do we begin to climb back up? We must reach out to others.

Maslow notes that our physiological needs are inherently self-centered--we rely on others to help meet our needs for food, housing, or medical care, but the process of fulfilling them is focused on our individual experience of satiation, shelter, or health. But all our other needs can be fulfilled only by working in collaboration with others to help them meet their needs:

To some extent, the higher the need, the less selfish it must be. Hunger is highly egocentric; the only way to satisfy it is to satisfy oneself. But the search for love and respect necessarily involves other people. Moreover, it involves satisfaction for these other people. [18]

Our needs for safety are truly met only when those around us also feel safe. Our needs for belonging and love are fulfilled only by enabling others to feel that they belong, to feel that they are loved. Our needs for esteem are founded upon the reciprocal exchange of esteem with others. And our needs for self-actualization invariably involve helping others become their best selves.

The challenge is that when we've tumbled down a few rungs on the ladder we tend to feel vulnerable and self-protective, and that's understandable. We may need to steady ourselves and heal for a time before we're ready to reach out. But bear in mind that we'll climb back up again only in partnership with others--and sometimes we'll be in a position to offer help, and sometimes we'll need to ask for help ourselves. This will require connection. And vulnerability. And courage.

 

This post is the third in a series on coping in the current environment:

• Part 1: Pockets of Agency
• Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
• Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
• Part 4: Wounded Creatures
• Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
• Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms

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Footnotes

[1] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 24 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[2] Maslow first published "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Review in 1943. This paper remained essentially intact as a foundational chapter in his first and most influential book, Motivation and Personality, not only in the 1st edition of 1954, but also in the 2nd edition of 1970, which was published shortly before Maslow's death. A revised 3rd edition was published in 1987, and it includes some worthwhile additions by psychologists James Fadiman, Robert Frager and Ruth Cox, but I consider the 2nd edition a more definitive presentation of Maslow's views, and the passages quoted above are from that volume.

[3] Humanistic psychology--and Maslow in particular--has been criticized for a lack of experimental data, a fault that Maslow himself acknowledged:

It is fair to say that this theory has been quite successful in a clinical, social and personological way, but not in a laboratory and experimental way. It has fitted very well with the personal experience of most people, and has often given them a structured theory that has helped them to have a better sense of their inner lives. It seems for most people to have a direct, personal, subjective plausibility. And yet it still lacks experimental verification and support. I have not yet been able to think of a good way to put it to the test in the laboratory. Part of the answer to this puzzle came from Douglas McGregor, who applied this theory of motivation to the industrial situation. Not only did he find it useful in ordering his data and his observations, but also these data served retroactively as a source of validation and verification for the theory. It is from this area, rather than the laboratory, that empirical support is now coming. [Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page xii. Maslow was a significant influence on McGregor, who was a professor of management at MIT and is best remembered today for his work on organizational culture.]

But Maslow makes a compelling counter-critique in "Problem Centering vs. Means Centering in Science," chapter 2 in the 2nd edition of Motivation and Personality:

By means centering I refer to the tendency to consider that the essence of science lies in its instruments, techniques, procedures, apparatus, and its methods rather than in its problems, questions, functions or goals... I do not wish to underplay method; I wish only to point out that even in science, means may easily be confused with ends... Means centering tends inevitably to bring into being a scientific orthodoxy... One main danger of scientific orthodoxy is that it tends to block the development of new techniques... Another, probably more important, danger of the orthodoxy fostered by means centering is that it tends to limit more and more the jurisdiction of science. Not only does it block the development of new techniques; it also tends to block the asking of many questions, on grounds that...such questions cannot be answered by currently available techniques... Means-centered orthodoxy encourages scientists to be "safe and sound" rather than bold and daring. It makes the normal business of the scientist seem to be moving ahead inch by inch on the well-laid-out road rather than cutting new paths through the unknown. It forces conservative rather than radical approaches to the not-yet-known. [pages 11-17]

I don't mean to suggest that humanistic concepts should be always be taken at face value. In its later stages in the 1960s and '70s the movement seemed to spawn a number of grandiose, even absurd ideas that are impossible to prove or disprove, defying any sort of scientific analysis. But as an executive coach I value Maslow's willingness to address complex, thorny, meaningful questions because his answers, provisional though they might be, offer me and my clients a rich set of ideas to explore in our efforts to solve real-world problems. In contrast, much contemporary research, although methodologically sound, does not. As Maslow added, "The journals of science are full of instances that illustrate the point, that what is not worth doing, is not worth doing well." [page 18]

[4] "The Influence of Abraham Maslow" (Robert Frager), Foreward to Motivation and Personality, 3rd edition, page xxxvii (Abraham Maslow, et al, 1987). Although Frank Sinatra is remembered today as an elder statesman performing jazz classics, in the mid-1940s he was a 30-year old pop idol whose appeal to teenagers was unprecedented.

[5] Ibid, page xxxviii.

[6] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 33 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[7] Ibid, pages 36-37.

[8] Ibid, page 38.

[9] Ibid, page 39.

[10] Ibid, page 43.

[11] Ibid, page 45.

[12] Ibid, page 46.

[13] Who built Maslow’s pyramid? A history of the creation of management studies’ most famous symbol and its implications for management education, page 91 (Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019). (Note that I'm precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from linking directly to a freely-available version of this paper, but you can search for it on the Victoria University of Wellington's open access repository, which is located outside the U.S. and not subject to the DMCA.)

I highly recommend this informative and insightful paper to anyone with an interest in the history of psychology or management education. Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard show that the pyramid was applied to Maslow's hierarchy of needs many years after his initial paper in a now-forgotten business school textbook and a business-oriented magazine, whose most lasting contributions may have been this inaccurate metaphor.

They also argue convincingly that the use of the pyramid creates several problems: It suggests that people must fully satisfy needs at one level before moving to a higher level, and that satisfied needs are no longer motivational. This idea is rooted in the work of Douglas McGregor, who played an instrumental role in promoting Maslow's theory, but Maslow himself disagreed, as noted above. The pyramid is also often employed to illustrate a universal human hierarchy of needs that transcends culture, although Maslow claimed merely that it was "more universal" than alternative models and noted that culture plays an essential role in the process of translating needs into behavior.

The pyramid can also be used to bolster an elitist and exclusionary view of organizational life, with higher needs being viewed as the purview of senior management and beyond the grasp of ordinary employees, a theme that emerges in much of the management literature of the mid-20th century. The highly egalitarian Maslow did not associate self-actualization with material success, but he did view it as an exalted state, attainable only with great effort by those rare few who are fully committed to their growth and development. [See Chapter 11 in Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition.]

And the pyramid's vividness as a metaphor seems to have amplified the impact of Maslow's theory well beyond what would seem to be justified by any research, which Maslow himself acknowledged. In summary, the authors conclude, "Maslow did not say that the [hierarchy of needs] is unidirectional, that achieving higher levels makes you a superior being, that once a need is satisfied it no longer affects behavior, or that it applies to all people in the same way."

[14] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 54 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[15] Ibid, page 61.

[16] Ibid, pages 98-99

[17] Ibid, page xxv

[18] Ibid, pages 99-100

 

For Further Reading

Gratitude Checklist

Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)

The Fruit of Suffering

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

How We Connect (and Why We Might Not).

Brené Brown, Vulnerability, Empathy and Leadership

Courage Isn't Confidence

 

Photo by US Army Africa.

What Is My Vision of Myself?

Bec Stupak Diop is an artist and designer now living in Dakar, Senegal, although we met when she was working with Bay Area technology companies a few years ago. In a recent exchange she described the transformational journey that she'd undertaken since then, a process that began with this pivotal moment:

I took a look at my life and asked some important questions: What is my vision of myself and how many hours of the day go toward that? How many hours take me away from that?

It proved to be a very useful measure of how I spend my life. It's easy to draw! Just look at one day and see how many hours go toward aspects of your life that feel aligned and how many move away. Also, where do those hours fall in the day? I was squeezing my most favorite things into 2-3 hours from 5am-8am in the mornings, and then followed that with 8+ hours of nothing-very-interesting.

I've been practicing leading my life through a lens of joy. What brings me joy? Do more of that.

Important questions, indeed. Almost all of my clients are leaders in professional roles that they intend to occupy for the foreseeable future, and their positions are typically well-compensated and high-status. But those jobs are also demanding and stressful in ways that lead a number of clients to imagine alternatives.

Occasionally I work with clients as they actively navigate a transition to a new chapter. More commonly I work with them as they redesign various aspects of their professional or personal lives to be more rewarding. And Bec's questions strike me as profoundly useful in that process, no matter what changes we might be considering.

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What is my vision of myself?

Values in Action Survey of Character Strengths

One of the few instruments I use in my practice and in The Art of Self-Coaching is the "Values in Action Survey of Character Strengths;" This instrument, commonly called the VIA, was developed under the leadership of the University of Pennsylvania's Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, and the late Christopher Peterson, an influential psychologist at the University of Michigan. As Seligman and Peterson write in Character Strengths and Virtues, "We can now measure much of what is wrong with people, but what about what about those things that are right?"

The Big Picture (Self-Coaching, Values and Vision)

Our personal values serve as the foundation for our vision for ourselves. The concept of a "vision" is inherently fuzzy and susceptible to abuse--we've all read "vision statements" full of noble sentiments that are routinely ignored. But any good tool can be misused, and I want to rehabilitate this concept. I also want to distinguish between a vision and a goal. Goal-setting is an important step, providing both direction and motivation for the work that follows. [7] But even our most ambitious goals are components of a larger, more comprehensive vision. Our vision for ourselves should be more deeply rooted and enduring than any particular set of goals, and should be the product of far-reaching reflection.

Developing Your Professional Vision

Truly great professionals understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not. This rare ability to manage continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced discipline--is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision.

Leadership and Authenticity

Leaders are constantly 1) acting outside their comfort zones, 2) striving to meet the divergent needs of various groups, and 3) deciding what information should be disclosed and what should be withheld. Under these conditions it's no surprise that a leader may struggle to understand what it means to "be authentic." This challenge can be further compounded by our definition of the "authentic self" and the means by which we encounter it.

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How many hours of the day go toward that?

Importance vs. Urgency

Important activities are truly meaningful and fulfilling--to you, to the people who matter to you, to your organization, or to some cause that you believe in. They’re not necessarily time-dependent; they can be accomplished almost anytime, and if they go undone for a short stretch no one may even notice.

Urgent activities have a deadline attached to them that matters to someone—although not necessarily to you. They are time-dependent, at least in someone’s mind, and if they go undone that someone is going to be unhappy. They’re not necessarily meaningful or fulfilling, and accomplishing them may not actually make a significant difference.

Growth, Profitability and Return on Attention

When considering different tasks, projects and opportunities, how should we decide where to focus our time and energy? If our attention is our most precious resource, how can we determine where to invest it and what returns we should expect?

Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

Success is typically a function of our passion for work and accomplishment—my clients and students are generally "happy workaholics" who love what they do and wish there were more hours in the day to get things done. (I view myself this way as well.) The concept of life/work balance isn’t that helpful for us, because there’s always more work to do, we’re eager to do it, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. In some cases, particularly in junior roles early in our careers, this tendency can be exploited by a dysfunctional culture or an uncaring manager, and at those times we need to protect ourselves to avoid burnout. But as we advance professionally we’re less subject to those external forces, and we need to protect ourselves primarily from our own internal drive.

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How many hours take me away from that?

The Trap of Competition

We've evolved to think extensively about other people and to be keenly attuned to competitive dynamics. This gives us a tremendous advantage as a species--but can leave us deeply unhappy as individuals. What can we do about it?

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

You're a senior leader in the prime of your career who's attained a degree of professional and personal success. You're keenly aware of the advantages you enjoy and feel grateful for the opportunity to do meaningful work that's well-compensated. You still have financial goals and would enjoy earning more, but that's no longer a primary driver. And yet despite these accomplishments it's not uncommon for you to feel a sense of restlessness or disenchantment. If so, you're similar to a number of my clients.

Show Me Your Calendar and I'll Show You What You Value

Money is a less meaningful measure of value than time. Money's relative nature makes it less helpful as a guide to what truly matters to each of us. Time, in contrast, is a more accurate metric. We all have the same number of hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year. And how we allocate that time says everything about what we value. I'm keenly aware that having (and lacking) money has a substantial impact on how we spend our time--and yet even when our decision to allocate time to an activity or task (or not) is influenced by our financial affairs, we're still saying something about what we value.

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Thanks to Bec Stupak Diop for the inspiration.

Photo: Drake's Head, Point Reyes National Seashore.

How to Stay Grounded in Chaos

1. MANAGING emotions ≠ SUPPRESSING emotions.

When we talk about managing emotions in times of crisis, it's important to understand what we mean by manage. Managing emotions means regulating emotions; it does not mean suppressing emotions. We can suppress an emotion for a short period of time, but not indefinitely. Not only is emotion suppression difficult and draining, it can also be counterproductive. Trying to suppress an emotion can actually exacerbate and heighten the feeling. The effort to ignore what we're feeling can remind us that we're feeling something, and those emotions may come roaring out later.

But if we think of managing emotions as regulating emotions, there are productive ways to approach that process. It starts with learning more about our emotional tendencies, understanding how we're likely to respond in certain circumstances, and preparing accordingly. When I'm about to have a conversation or enter a situation that I may experience as triggering, I can prepare by expecting that emotional response. I can ensure that my calendar is clear both before and after this event. And I can make sure to get a good night's sleep in advance. [1]

2. The power of reframing.

There are also steps we can take in the moment to regulate and manage emotions more effectively, such as seeking to "frame" the situation in a way that's going to be most useful for our emotional response. Framing, or what psychologists call "cognitive appraisal," refers to the meanings that we assign to a given situation or set of circumstances. For example, am I assuming that this is going to be a hostile or contentious interaction? If so, what am I basing that on? Is that an accurate assessment, or am I just making unfounded assumptions?

A related term that we use in coaching is "mental models," which are the set of assumptions that we make about the world around us to help us make sense of the world and navigate it more effectively. These models are largely accurate, which is why they help us get through the day. But they're less accurate in certain circumstances, particularly when we're under stress. So in a given set of circumstances, we can step back and ask ourselves, "What are my mental models here? What are the assumptions and interpretations that I'm bringing to this situation? And if they're not contributing to a useful emotional response, how might I reframe the situation by adjusting those models as needed?"

3. Get MESSy to build capacity.

We can also take a number of steps to build our capacity to regulate emotion over time. In The Art of Self-Coaching I encourage students to "get MESSy," which is the only cheesy acronym I use in the course. [2] The M is for Mindfulness, and although meditation is the most effective mindfulness practice, there are a number of ways to pursue the process, such as going on a reflective walk or some forms of exercise. [3] The E is for Exercise in the form of consistent regular physical activity. [4] The first S is for Sleep--not only regular bedtimes and sufficient amounts of sleep, but also higher quality sleep can make a difference. And the second S is for chronic Stress--if we can identify and diminish sources of low-level, chronic stress in our life, we're going to be more effective at emotion regulation in those moments when we need it most.

4. The impulse to hurry is a signal to SLOW DOWN.

Under stressful conditions we often experience what's known as a threat response or a "fight, flight, or freeze response." This response can manifest itself as sense of urgency, or a feeling that we need to hurry up. And although in certain circumstances that's obviously quite useful, the problem is that very rarely do we experience a literal threat to our safety that requires an immediate physical response. But we often experience situations that we interpret as threats to our safety, and we speed up as a result. And that speed, that sense of urgency, in those situations is usually counterproductive.

So the impulse to hurry should often be interpreted as a signal to slow down. We can then train ourselves to interrogate our sense of urgency and ask, "Is that really useful here? Is it going to be helpful--or is it going to spur me to some counterproductive action?" When we can remind ourselves to slow down and assess what's happening more deliberately, we're likely to navigate the situation more effectively. [5]

5. OPTIONAL endings are good practice for the MANDATORY ones.

I often work with leaders who are going through some type of transition, and many people have a negative emotional response to endings. This is reflected in a line from an old Tom Cruise movie, Cocktail, in which he says, "Everything ends badly. Otherwise, it would never end." In a sense, endings are symbolic deaths, and they remind us that this existence itself will end. Whatever we may believe about what transcends this existence, we're understandably attached to this existence, and it can be quite dislocating and unnerving to be reminded of that ending. But our negative emotional response to endings causes us to lean away from endings, as opposed to leaning into them. And we thus miss opportunities to practice and to gain something from each ending in order to to help us prepare for the much larger series of endings that we will inevitably encounter over the rest of our lives.

A line from Nietzsche is equally relevant here: "The end of a melody is not its goal. Nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end, it would not have attained its goal, either." And I believe that's true for every experience we have. It's true for the course that I teach--the end of the class is not the point, but if we hadn't reached the end, we wouldn't have gained the experience. It's true for the students who I work with--the end of graduate school is not the point, but if they didn't reach the end, they wouldn't have achieved the goal.

And we can apply the same concept in a larger philosophical or spiritual sense to our entire lives. The point of a life is not to reach the ending, and yet if we hadn't reached the ending--if this existence weren't finite--it wouldn't have the same sense of meaning. So it's important for us to acknowledge the finite nature of all experience, and recognize and lean into the very uncomfortable emotions that endings stir up, in part because it's good practice. It helps us learn something from every experience that ends, as a way of preparing us for the larger endings that are to come. [6]

 

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This is the first in a series of videos I recorded for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The others are The Strategic Importance of Empathy and Four Ways Good Leaders Become Great Ones.

Many thanks to my Stanford colleagues Allison Felt and Beth Rimbey for the invitation, the professional support, and all the work that went into the finished product.

Footnotes

[1] The Tyranny of Feelings

[2] The Art of Self-Coaching (Public Course)

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

[4] Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)

[5] The Importance of Slowing Down

[6] Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

Photo by Aron D. Photography.

Attitude and Behavior

We often assume that our attitude drives our behavior, and that we act as we do because of underlying thoughts and feelings. This way of understanding ourselves can pose a challenge when we perceive a conflict between the activities necessary to realize our goals and the thoughts or emotions associated with those activities at a given moment. We may conclude that our state of mind prevents us from engaging in desirable behaviors (or compels us to engage in undesirable behaviors), and as a consequence we feel like prisoners of our own psychology.

We're unhappy, so we sink into lassitude and indulge our sorrows. We're demotivated, so we work halfheartedly or don't work at all. We're annoyed or angry with someone, so we avoid them--or we stumble into a confrontation. We know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it--and our common beliefs regarding the causal relationship between attitude and behavior put the former firmly in control of the latter.

This isn't an entirely inaccurate picture. One of the most important functions of emotion is to interrupt conscious thought and orient us toward potential threats and opportunities, as the late psychologist Daniel Wegner noted:

It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... Emotions are built in by evolution, not to be tampered with, because hundreds of generations of humans before us have survived their friends or acquaintances who were able to shut down their emotions. Disgust keeps us from eating icky things; sadness helps us notice our losses; fear reminds us to run from predators; joy keeps us coming back to our friends and sex partners. It is good, in other words, that when we feel an emotional state, our normal purposes and interests succumb to an influence beyond our control. The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality. [1]

As a result, emotions are attention magnets [2], which alternately attract and repel us, and this elegant system, the result of millions of years of evolution, is a "feature" of human psychology, not a "bug." [3] This is consistent with what neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio have learned in recent decades about the role emotions play in logical reasoning. Rather than acting antagonistically, emotion and reason usually work together in concert to enable us to make good decisions and navigate the world successfully. [4] Usually--but not always.

The challenge is that emotions are a "quick and dirty" signal, in the words of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux [5], which allow us to process vast amounts of information rapidly, but at the cost of occasional accuracy. Although "the priority of emotions over will" is necessary in order for us "to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality," in most instances our interpretation of "reality" is highly contingent and subject to any number of biases and distortions. [6] As noted above, we know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it--and at these times the power of our emotions may not serve us well. So what can we do?

We can start by replacing the simplistic framework above with a more complex view of human psychology. Rather than being a one-way causal relationship, it's a two-way street: While our attitude obviously informs and influences our behavior, our behavior also informs and influences our thoughts and feelings in a dynamic and cyclical process:

Psychologists and neuroscientists have struggled to determine the precise mechanisms by which this process occurs, [7] and there are limits to its efficacy. We can't simply will ourselves out of profound dysfunction caused by clinical depression, anxiety or trauma. But we do have much more power than we typically realize to consciously choose behaviors that will affect our attitude and influence the everyday emotions that can get in the way of our goals and objectives. And while science can't yet (and may never) identify the ways in which specific behaviors alter specific attitudes across the population at large, we can still apply the general principle and craft a set of experiments to best meet our individual needs.

An important element in this process is known as cognitive dissonance: When our attitude and our behavior are inconsistent, we experience discomfort and even distress, and we modify either our attitude or our behavior to reduce the inconsistency. The original research on the subject was conducted by Leon Festinger, who noted that "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." [8]

So despite the power of our emotions, we need not allow our initial attitude to dictate our behavior. Instead we can leverage the power of cognitive dissonance by choosing to act differently, which in turn can shift our attitude. As Ignatius of Loyola put it nearly 500 years ago, "Perform the acts of faith, and faith will come." [9]

More recent research has helped us learn more about how this process works in the brain, with one team of neuroscientists concluding that people who behave in ways that are in conflict with their attitudes "change their attitudes to be more consistent with the counter-attitudinal behavior. Dissonance has been shown to be a negative emotional state accompanied by autonomic arousal; it has been shown that people change their attitudes and restore consonance to specifically reduce the negative affect." [10]

What does this look like in practice? While we can draw upon research from psychology and neuroscience, the limitations of this research require us to actively experiment in order to discover the specific behaviors that effectively alter specific attitudes for each of us as individuals. For example, the issues noted above occur commonly in my work with senior leaders--unhappiness and demotivation result in disengagement, or annoyance and anger result in avoidance or conflict--so I often talk with clients about experiments that involve the following:

• Engaging in a range of "happiness strategies," small-scale intentional activities that can improve our sense of subjective well-being.
• Committing to exercise routines, a mindfulness practice, and good sleep hygiene, all of which can enhance our capacity for emotion regulation and in some cases directly alter our moods.
• Actively journaling and talking about our emotions.

But the precise nature of these activities can vary tremendously from one individual to the next, and figuring all this out takes work--and we're not always willing to invest the effort. All too often we want to be told what to do--we want a shortcut. I frequently see this response in students who are looking for universal laws derived from research--I have to remind them that as human beings they're far too complex to be accurately represented by any model, no matter how sound. [11] There are no algorithms, only heuristics.

Compounding the challenge, not only are our emotions not subject to willful control (a good thing, as Wegner reminds us), but a predictable set of problems are triggered when we seek to influence how we feel by deliberately engaging in desired behaviors (or refraining from undesired behaviors):

It feels taxing. We have two distinct ways of thinking, known as System 1 and System 2, [12] and psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes the former as operating "automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control," while the latter "allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it... The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration." [13] System 2 thinking is a finite mental resource, so we've evolved to experience it as taxing and fatiguing, which motivates us to preserve it for truly important activities. Efforts to direct our attention toward (or away from) certain activities or objectives consume System 2 processing, which is why this conceptually simple task can feel surprisingly difficult. There's no easy solution here, but a mindfulness practice can provide a "workout in attention management."

It feels phony. Deliberately engaging in behaviors intended to alter our attitude can evoke a sense of inauthenticity or can lead others to experience us as insincere, which runs counter to the emphasis contemporary culture places on "being yourself." To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we should suppress difficult emotions--but emotion regulation is not the same thing as suppression, and we make a serious error when we define "authenticity" as "ease." Author Brené Brown is often viewed as a champion of authenticity, but she rejects the idea that this means simply "being yourself": "Authenticity requires almost constant vigilance and awareness about the connections between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It also means staying mindful about our intentions. Real authenticity actually requires major self-monitoring..." [14] Active efforts to influence our attitude compel us to observe ourselves closely (or "self-monitor") and to experiment with new behaviors until they become integrated into our repertoires.

It feels forced. When this process feels taxing we can build up our psychological stamina, and when it feels phony we can reframe our understanding of authenticity--but it's essential to enter into the experience willingly, with a sense of agency and choice, rather than as a duty or obligation. The neuroscience research cited above notes that when people "attribute their counter-attitudinal behavior to payment or coercion...conflict between behavior and prior attitudes is reduced, and [they] experience less cognitive dissonance and do not change their attitudes." [15] We can't compel a change in attitude--we can only invite it by establishing psychological safety, by creating the right conditions, and by treating ourselves with compassion.

 

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Footnotes

[1] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123 (Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)

[2] To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions (Harvard Business Review, 2015)

[3] "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" Trite--or Just Right? (Nicholas Carr, Wired, 2018)

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, page 163 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)

[6] When Heuristics Go Bad

[7] For example, an influential study suggested that the act of smiling could stimulate feelings of happiness, but these findings later failed to replicate, and yet it now appears that the failure may have been the result of changes in the experimental conditions. The initial work on "power posing," which suggested that altering one's physical stance could induce heightened feelings of confidence, also failed to replicate, and it does appear that there were substantial flaws in the original research. However, the "power pose" researchers also highlighted problems with the replication efforts, although one of them subsequently retracted her support for the concept. While the ongoing "replication crisis" should give us ample pause before we take any single study at face value, I don't believe it renders social science invalid, and it's up to us to be more thoughtful consumers of research as we put it into practice. (Further thoughts on this here.)

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

[9] Cited in From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, page 39 (Jacques Barzun, 2001)

[10] Neural activity predicts attitude change in cognitive dissonance (Vincent van Veen, Marie Krug, Jonathan Schooler and Cameron Carter, Nature Neuroscience, 2009)

[11] The Map Is Not the Territory

[12] Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? (Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 5, October 2000)

[13] Thinking, Fast and Slow, pages 20-21 (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)

[14] My response to Adam Grant’s New York Times Op/Ed (Brené Brown, LinkedIn, June 5, 2016)

[15] Van Veen, et al.

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For Further Reading

Lyubomirsky's Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic

• For more on recent research on happiness and well-being, see Understanding "The Pie Chart" in The How of Happiness.

Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)

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

A compilation of readings on sleep.

The Value of Journal Writing

Talking About Feelings

Self-Monitoring and Authenticity

Conscious Competence in Practice

Why Change Is Hard

Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

Three More Horsemen (How We Self-Sabotage)

• For more on self-compassion, I recommend the work of University of Texas psychologist Kristin Neff.

Books on related topics:

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (Oliver Burkeman, 2013)

How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life (Caroline Webb, 2016)

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (Brad Stulbert and Steve Magness, 2017)

This is an extensively revised version of a post first published in 2010.

Photo by Steven Depolo.

Feedback Is Not a Gift

Feedback is a gift.

We've been told this over and over, as if it were gospel. I've even preached it myself. [1] But as I noted some years ago, I stopped using this phrase because it "fails to acknowledge how difficult the experience of receiving feedback can be. This can lead us to ignore our stress levels in feedback conversations, or, worse, feel required to tough it out even when we’re distressed past the point of effective learning." [2] Feedback is often stressful, confusing or unwelcome. Some gift.

The problem is compounded when we view feedback as inherently true, inscribed on tablets of stone and delivered from the mountaintop. [3] But if feedback isn't a gift, what is it? It's data. About our impact on a particular individual at a particular point in time. And while it may be "true" in the sense that the feedback-giver is accurately representing their perspective, that doesn't make it The Truth. Because feedback always says as much about the giver as the recipient. It's filtered through their reality-distortion fields, reflecting their personal values and priorities. Rather than reminding us of the scene above, feedback should really be viewed like this:

The challenge, of course, is that we must bear these factors in mind while also remaining open to the possibility that there's potential value in any feedback we receive, even--and especially--when it's stressful, confusing or unwelcome. This is particularly important when we consider the impact of power dynamics, which may be explicit in hierarchical relationships but exist in all relationships and rather than being fixed are often contingent on the circumstances.

The power we possess at a given moment distorts not only what others choose to tell us, but also what we choose to hear. The more power we have relative to someone else at a given moment, the more distortion there will be in the dialogue. So when we receive stressful, confusing or unwelcome feedback from someone with less power, we should take great care before rejecting it out of hand--it may not be The Truth, but it's still potentially useful data (and even if it's not entirely accurate data, it may be useful or of interest simply because it's rare.)

This often comes up in my coaching practice in the context of a 360 review for a CEO or senior executive. I no longer conduct 360s, but I have in the past, and I still work with clients today to help them determine how to make use of their feedback in a 360 report conducted by another coach or consultant. This is often a stressful, confusing or unwelcome experience, typically because the client focuses on the negative feedback and ignores the positive, a predictable psychological response. [4] But, as I've noted elsewhere, the process of providing feedback anonymously can contribute to this dilemma--for example, 360 feedback providers often feel free to blame to the recipient for a problem, but rarely take responsibility for their own contribution to the situation. [5]

And yet despite these inherent flaws in the 360 process, there may still be value in the data simply because a lack of psychological safety in the organizational culture or the working relationship has led the feedback provider to believe that they will be punished for speaking up and raising their concerns directly with the recipient. [6] So while we should acknowledge that the resulting data is likely to be distorted in order to determine whether and how to act upon it, the fact that it exists at all should be appreciated (and the distortion itself is valuable feedback, even if the giver doesn't realize it.)

This perspective is at the heart of the impulse to call feedback "a gift." The idea is that it's better to have the data at our disposal than to be "unconsciously incompetent," blindly stumbling into unforced errors, and we should be grateful for the enlightenment. [7] But a further problem with the "gift" framing is that it can create a feeling of obligation to accept it. If feedback is a gift, it would be rude to refuse. And yet here the reminder that feedback is merely data can be useful in another way, because even when feedback is accurate, it's not a commandment that must be obeyed.

The key here is to apply a "cost-benefit analysis" and assess the "return on investment" with regard to any prospective behavior change. At the heart of any piece of negative feedback is a request for change and a hope for a different way of working together. (This is often obscured by poor communication skills, heightened emotions, or a lack of practice, but it's as true for the clumsiest feedback as it is for the most graceful.) It's up to the recipient to determine the cost of the change being requested--including the cognitive effort required--and weigh it against the potential benefits--including the likelihood that other people might have similar feedback--and whether the resulting ROI is sufficient to be worth it.

This alternative framing--feedback is data--allows us to be more judicious and intentional about whether and how we respond to it. And this matters because change is hard.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Five Leadership Lessons

[2] Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful (Harvard Business Review, 2014)

[3] Exodus 31:18

[4] Bad Is Stronger Than Good (Roy Bauermeister, Catrin Finkenauer, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen D. Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001)

[5] The Problem with Anonymous Feedback

[6] Make Your Employees Feel Psychologically Safe (Amy Edmondson interviewed by Martha Lagace, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 2018)

[7] Conscious Competence in Practice

Thanks to my friend and colleague Kevin Martin for the funhouse mirror metaphor.

The Fruit of Suffering

While I'm a great admirer of the Stoics and take much consolation from the work of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus [1], I don't share their belief in a cosmic plan that determines the procession of earthly events. I'm not opposed to this idea, nor do I feel any need to disagree with those who hold such a belief. I know many people who subscribe to one version or another, and I find it easy to co-exist happily with them.

But I resist the idea that a cosmic plan should be interpreted as "everything happens for a reason." This seems to me an ineffective way of seeking to dismiss our natural responses to horror and tragedy, and it can be viewed as a variation on the widespread belief in a "just world," a concept first explored by psychologist Melvin Lerner:

Individuals have a need to believe that they live in a world where people generally get what they deserve. The belief that the world is just enables the individual to confront his physical and social environment as though they were stable and orderly. Without such a belief it would be difficult for the individual to commit himself to the pursuit of long range goals or even to the socially regulated behaviour of day to day life. Since the belief that the world is just serves such an important adaptive function for the individual, people are very reluctant to give up this belief, and they can be greatly troubled if they encounter evidence that suggests that the world is not really just or orderly after all. [2]

But belief in a just world is either a luxury, a form of privilege enjoyed by those who've never experienced horror or tragedy, or it's a coping mechanism, a way of discharging the cognitive dissonance that results when the inescapable reality of injustice and randomness in the distribution of horror and tragedy can no longer be avoided.

While by most standards I've lived an immensely privileged life, I've also experienced and observed sufficient horror and tragedy to convince me that the world is not just, that injustice is in fact common and all too random. So in writing now about the "fruit of suffering"--the benefits that may be derived from horrible and tragic experiences--I am not in the least suggesting that such suffering "happened for a reason," or that such fruit provides a "silver lining," or that any of this occurs in a "just world." And yet to deny the existence of these fruits would be to rob ourselves of a potent source of meaning. As Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, has written,

There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or enjoy one's life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. In other words, life's meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering...

[In Auschwitz] the question that beset me was, "Has all this suffering, all this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends on such a happenstance--as whether one escapes or not--ultimately would not be worth living at all." [3]

The last few weeks have been a time of great suffering indeed. In the midst of the profound upheaval caused by the global pandemic, one of the best friends I ever had died in an accident--and while I've walked and talked and cried with other people who knew him well, we couldn't even hug each other for fear of catching a potentially deadly disease. One week later my brother David closed his bar in Washington DC, before the official order, to protect his customers and employees from COVID-19, and he won't be able to earn a living until he re-opens. And I'm keenly aware that many people around the world have suffered far more than I have. I don't know what fruits other people may have derived from their suffering, but I'm increasingly aware of those that have been bestowed upon me:

Clarity

My values, the things that really matter to me, have never been more clear. The difference between needs and wants has never been starker. I need to stay healthy and to take good care of myself. I need to have thriving relationships with the people who are most important to me. I need to be of service to my clients and feel a sense of purpose in my work. Everything else is a mere want, a desire that may or may not get met--if so, I'll enjoy it, and if not, I'll survive.

Connection

I feel closer than ever to the people in my life--Amy, my family and friends, my clients. Just the other day I had the most heartfelt conversation with my Mom that I've ever had--and I'm 52! I've discovered new depths of friendship and shared countless stories with others who were close to Erik, our friend who died. I'd all give it all back to have him with us again, but I can't--so instead I cherish the way that he continues to have an impact on our lives after he's gone.

Gratitude

This isn't new for me, but even so, I have a heightened sense of appreciation for small moments of peace and beauty and light. Amy and I are adhering strictly to San Francisco's stay-at-home order, but we can still safely walk around our neighborhood, and we regularly stop to take in the ivory glow of calla lilies and the scent of jasmine. Yesterday we had to drive up to Sonoma to check on Merlin, Amy's retired horse, and it was a wonder to spend just a few hours in those green hills

Meaning

As an executive coach, my work has always provided me with a deep sense of purpose. But I've never felt more needed or more useful now that all day, every day, I spend my time talking with leaders about one of the greatest challenges they've faced in their professional lives. And I'm reminded of something I wrote on February 8th, the last day I saw my friend Erik, reflecting on mortality without grasping just how close at hand it was: "I find myself considering how I spend my time--and with whom--and the image of a candle burning down readily comes to mind. Instead of adding items to a 'bucket list,' I feel motivated to let things go, to devote less and less time to activities I find unrewarding, and to focus my energy on the people and experiences I find most meaningful." [5]

So having begun by rejecting one of the Stoics' core beliefs, I close by affirming the value of another, as articulated by Seneca:

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is--the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. [6]

A newfound determination to bear this in mind, to invest my limited time wisely, to make the life I have left as meaningful as possible, may be the most valuable fruit this suffering has yielded.

 

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Footnotes

[1] How I Read Stoicism

[2] Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead (Melvin Lerner and Dale Miller, Psychological Bulletin, 1978). For more on the "just world hypothesis," see Belief in a Just World: Research Progress Over the Past Decade (Adrian Furnham, Personality and Individual Differences, 2003).

[3] Man's Search for Meaning, pages 114-115 (Viktor Frankl, 1946/2006)

[4] I Will Miss You So Much, My Friend

[5] The Final Third (On Mortality, Values and Spending Time)

[6] On the Shortness of Life

Photo by Torsten Behrens.

Working from Home...Alone

The night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

~Ernest Hemingway [1]

Recently in Working from Home...Together I discussed the challenges faced by people who now share working quarters with a host of new "colleagues"--their spouses, partners, children and/or roommates. But what about the opposite problem? What about people who may be compelled to work from home for an extended period of time and live alone? I haven't lived alone for 30 years, but for most of that time I've worked alone, usually from home, as employee #1 of three new ventures, as the only West Coast employee of a Washington D.C. consulting firm, and as a one-man coaching practice since 2006.

The primary theme of yesterday's post was that people who now find themselves living and working together need to establish effective boundaries, a concept explored over a decade ago by my former colleague Michael Gilbert, who drew on his training as a biologist:

Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy. [2]

While groups of people in close quarters need to manage their boundaries to support differentiation, people living alone need to manage their boundaries to support integration. They must be intentional about "letting the right things through." As I've written before, three different types of boundaries--temporal, physical, and cognitive--promote "wholeness and synergy," and here's how they might be employed by someone living alone who's working from home for an extended period. [3]

Temporal boundaries designate certain times for certain activities.

While an organization that has rapidly moved from an in-person office to mandatory work-from-home will hit some rough spots as employees master new tools and develop new norms to support their use, we know it can be done. And if you're living alone you'll have help in these efforts, because all of your colleagues are facing some version of these challenges. Resources will be dedicated to get everyone up to speed and coordinated, and schedules and routines will be re-established. The organization will establish the temporal boundaries it requires in order to function.

But as an individual who has rapidly moved from an in-person office to mandatory work-from-home you will also hit some rough spots as you re-organize your life in the absence of predictable routines, including "going to work" and "coming home." And you may have no help in these efforts, because most of your friends, family and colleagues are all trying to figure out how to re-organize their own lives. While the organization will provide you with the temporal boundaries necessary to support work, what about everything else?

• To make work-from-home sustainable for a period of weeks or months, it will be necessary to continue to engage in the other activities that support your wholeness and fulfillment as a human being. But during a crisis work can expand to take up all the time and space that we make available, and those other activities can easily get forgotten or pushed off the agenda. As strange as it may sound, you now need a calendar for your personal life that's as well-organized as your professional calendar.
• Note that this need not entail "life-work balance," which may not be possible in the midst of a crisis and may not be of interest even in ordinary times if you're like most of my clients, who I think of as "happy workaholics" (an identity I share.) But as I've written before, "The amount of undisturbed time we preserve for [non-work activities] will vary and may be quite small, but what matters is that we create and maintain a functional boundary around that time. [4]
• One of the most important non-work activities--especially during a crisis--is sleep. [5] A challenge you may face living along is the temptation to keep working late into the night. This may be necessary at times, but if it becomes a consistent practice you'll quickly begin to undermine your effectiveness at emotion regulation and decision-making. As former Intel CEO Andy Grove once noted, "My day always ends when I'm tired, not when I'm done... A manager's work is never done." [6] And as I regularly tell my clients, the workday doesn't begin when we wake up--it begins when we go to sleep.

Physical boundaries designate certain places for certain activities.

As I wrote the other day, "Back when we 'went to work,' the physical boundaries were embodied in the corporate campus, the downtown building, a series of rooms, a series of desks. We entered and engaged these spaces and we were 'at work'... The dilemma we face now is that those boundaries have been collapsed--or at least severely compressed. There is no 'at work' or 'at home'--it's all the same place." [7]

An advantage of working from home while living alone is that you don't have to worry about how to share space with other people in a way that feels fair to all parties--which is one of the main challenges faced by your colleagues. But a consequent disadvantage is the risk that work takes over your entire living space, which will make it harder to disconnect and engage in other activities (and may ultimately make your home feel more cramped and smaller.) The key is being as deliberate with your space as you need to be with your time:

• To the greatest extent possible, designate workspaces in your home and keep them distinct from spaces you use for other purposes. If you have a dedicated home office, count your blessings--and be mindful of the impulse to conduct other activities there. If you don't have a separate room for work, consider utilizing spaces for that purpose that you're unlikely to use for relaxation and personal activities.
• Small investments in these spaces and the tools you'll be using can yield significant benefits. Get the best office chair you can afford. Upgrade your webcam and your microphone. Pay attention to the background behind you, because that's what your colleagues will be seeing.
• While communities will begin to impose restrictions on movement outside the home to slow the rate of infection, be sure to get outside on a regular basis while adhering to these mandates and practicing social distancing. This is important under normal circumstances, and it will be essential if work-from-home is to be sustainable over time.
• One very specific point: Do not work in bed. When we go to sleep, we need to stop thinking about work and allow our attention to roam freely. For "happy workaholics" this can be difficult under ordinary circumstances, and it can be harder than ever during a crisis. Working in bed leads us to associate that space with problem-solving and other challenges that will make it more difficult to get to sleep or enjoy high-quality sleep.

Cognitive boundaries direct our attention toward an object of focus (and away from distractions).

This has always been a challenge in the workplace, one made worse in recent years by open offices [8] and all the tools in our work environment that have been designed to capture our attention. But at the root of the issue are several fundamental aspects of human psychology: Attention and deliberate focus are finite mental resources, and in order to conserve them for important situations, we've evolved to experience their expenditure as depleting. And emotions are vitally important in orienting us toward perceived opportunities and threats, so as a consequence emotions are "attention magnets." [9]

The primary challenge faced by your colleagues who now find themselves working alongside family members and housemates is avoiding the distractions posed by those other people in order to focus on work. The primary challenge you may face as someone living alone is avoiding the distraction posed by work in order to focus on everything else. This will likely be more difficult in the current situation because work is providing many of us with a sense of contribution, a feeling that we're doing something to help even though we're not actively involved in fighting the pandemic. And yet if you're going to make working-from-home sustainable, you're going to need to disconnect from work on a consistent basis and direct our attention elsewhere. So what can you do?

• The temporal and physical boundaries discussed above are all ultimately intended to help support cognitive boundaries that allow you to direct your attention as productively as possible. In the current situation it won't be possible to perfect your temporal and physical boundaries--like everyone else, you'll have to do the best you can. But a helpful start is simply being aware that attention and deliberate focus are limited resources, and to mindfully observe where your attention is being directed (and when it's being pulled back toward work.)
• Recall that good boundaries "let the right things through and keep the wrong things out,"and as someone living alone one of your most important needs will be to stop thinking about work and to stay connected with the people in your life other than colleagues. Temporal and physical boundaries can help here, such as a schedule reminding you to check in with people, or phoning a friend or loved one while taking a walk outside.
• And even if work isn't absorbing all of your attention, the pandemic and COVID-19 may well be. Cognitive boundaries are essential in helping us regulate our consumption of the news and its impact on our state of mind. We have to manage our "information diets" so that we're not constantly distracted in order to be truly present in the rest of our lives. [10] It will be difficult, particularly as the crisis worsens, but it may be some of the most important work we can do to survive it.

In Closing

I'm keenly aware that countless numbers of our loved ones and neighbors do not have the luxury of dealing with these problems because their work cannot be conducted online. My brother David voluntarily closed his bar in Washington D.C. to support social distancing, and he will not be able to earn a living until we can return to normal social activity. I don't know how to help in your community, but here in San Francisco we can give to the Season of Sharing Fund, or the city's Give2SF fund.

 

This is a companion piece to Working from Home...Together.

Thanks to Ian McMilan for the inspiration.

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Footnotes

[1] A Farewell to Arms, page 216 (Ernest Hemingway, 1929/2014)

[2] Good Fences: On Boundaries, Agency and Wholeness in Work-Life (Michael Gilbert, 2008)

[3,4] Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

[5] A compilation of readings on the importance of sleep.

[6] High Output Management (Andy Grove, 1983/1995)

[7,8] Working from Home...Together

[9] The Uneasiness of the Open Office

[10] A Better Information Diet

Photo by Luca Volpi.