As any student knows who has suddenly found himself studying harder as a test approaches, a modicum of pressure enhances motivation and focuses attention. Up to a point, selective attention increases as levels of pressure ratchet upward, like looming deadlines, a teacher watching, or a challenging assignment. Paying fuller attention means that working memory operates with more cognitive efficiency, culminating in maximum mental ease.
But at a tipping point just past the optimal state—where challenges begin to overmatch ability—increasing anxiety starts to erode cognitive efficiency. For example, in this zone of performance disaster, students with math anxiety have less attention available when they tackle a math problem. Their anxious worrying occupies the attentional space they need, impairing their ability to solve problems or grasp new concepts.14
All of this directly affects how well we do in the classroom—or on the job. While we are distressed, we don’t think clearly, and we tend to lose interest in pursuing even goals that are important to us.15 Psychologists who have studied the effects of mood on learning conclude that when students are neither attentive nor happy in class, they absorb only a fraction of the information being presented.16
The drawbacks apply as well to teachers and leaders. Foul feelings weaken empathy and concern. For example, managers in bad moods give more negative performance appraisals, focusing only on the downside, and are more disapproving in their opinions.17 Surely the same holds for teachers.
We do best at moderate to challenging levels of stress, while the mind frazzles under extreme pressure.18
A NEURAL KEY TO LEARNING
It’s a high school class in chemistry, and the tension in the room is palpable. Students are on edge because they know that at any moment their teacher may call on them at random, have them go to the board in front of the class, and then ask them to calculate the answer to a difficult chemical interaction on the spot. All but the brightest budding chemists fail at these questions. For the bright kids, it’s a moment of pride; for the rest, shame.
The type of stress that most activates the stress hormones, and so shoots up cortisol levels, lurks in the classroom, in the form of social threats like fears of a teacher’s judgment or of seeming “stupid” in the eyes of other students. Such social fears powerfully impair the brain’s mechanisms for learning.19
People differ in their set points for where the U tips. Those students who can take the most stress without disabling their cognitive abilities will be unflappable at the blackboard, whether they get the question right or wrong. (As adults, they would likely thrive as Wall Street traders, who can make or lose a fortune in a wink of the market.) But those more susceptible to HPA arousal will freeze mentally even at low levels of distress—and if they are unprepared for the chemistry pop quiz or are slower learners, being called to the blackboard offers them only misery.
The hippocampus, near the amygdala in the midbrain, is our central organ for learning. This structure enables us to convert the contents of “working memory”—new information held briefly in the prefrontal cortex—into long-term form for storage. This neural act is the heart of learning. Once our mind connects this information with what we already know, we will be able to bring the new understanding to mind weeks or years later.
Whatever a student hears in class or reads in a book travels these pathways as he masters yet another iota of understanding. Indeed, everything that happens to us in life, all the details that we will remember, depend on the hippocampus to stay with us. The continual retention of memories demands a frenzy of neuronal activity. In fact, the vast majority of neurogenesis—the brain’s production of new neurons and laying down of connections to others—takes place in the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to ongoing emotional distress, because of the damaging effects of cortisol. Under prolonged stress, cortisol attacks the neurons of the hippocampus, slowing the rate at which neurons are added or even reducing the total number, with a disastrous impact on learning. The actual killing off of hippocampal neurons occurs during sustained cortisol floods induced, for example, by severe depression or intense trauma. (However, with recovery, the hippocampus regains neurons and enlarges again.)20 Even when the stress is less extreme, extended periods of high cortisol seem to hamper these same neurons.
Cortisol stimulates the amygdala while it impairs the hippocampus, forcing our attention onto the emotions we feel, while restricting our ability to take in new information. Instead we imprint what is upsetting us. After a day when a student gets panicked by a pop quiz, he’ll remember the details of that panic far more than any of the material in the quiz.
In a simulation of the impact of cortisol on learning, college students volunteered to get injections that raised their cortisol levels, then to memorize a series of words and images. The result reflected the inverted U: in mild to moderate ranges, the cortisol helped the students remember what they had studied when tested on it two days later. But at extreme levels, the cortisol impaired their recall, apparently because it inhibited the crucial role of the hippocampus.21
This has profound implications for the kind of classroom atmosphere that fosters learning. The social environment, remember, affects the rate and fate of newly created brain cells. New cells take a month to mature and four more to fully link to other neurons; during this window the environment determines in part the final shape and function of the cell. The new cells that facilitate memory during the course of a semester will encode in their links what has been learned during that time—and the more conducive the atmosphere for learning, the better that encoding will be.
Distress kills learning. One classic finding dates back almost half a century to 1960, when Richard Alpert, then at Stanford, showed experimentally what every student already knew: high anxiety cripples test-taking ability.22 A more recent study of college students taking math exams found that when they were told the test was a practice, they scored 10 percent better than when they thought they were part of a team that depended on their score to win a cash prize—under social stress their working memory was hampered. Intriguingly, the deficit in this most basic cognitive ability was greatest for the smartest students.23
A group of sixteen-year-olds scored in the top 5 percent on a national test of potential in math.24 Some were doing extremely well in their math class, but others did poorly despite their aptitude for the subject. The crucial difference was that the high-achieving students experienced focused pleasure about 40 percent of the time they were immersed in their studies—more often than they felt anxious (about 30 percent). By contrast, while studying math the low achievers experienced such optimal states only 16 percent of the time and great anxiety 55 percent.
Given how emotions affect performance, the emotional task of teachers or leaders is one and the same: help people get and stay as close as possible to the top of the inverted U.
POWER AND EMOTIONAL FLOW
Whenever a meeting threatened to lapse into malaise, the president of a company would suddenly launch into a critique of someone at the table who could take it (usually the marketing director, who was his best friend). Then he would swiftly move on, having riveted the attention of everyone in the room. That tactic invariably revived the group’s failing focus with keen interest. He was herding those in attendance up the inverted U from boredom to engagement.
Displays of a leader’s displeasure make use of emotional contagion. If artfully calibrated, even a burst of pique can stir followers enough to capture their attention and motivate them. Many effective leaders sense that—like compliments—well-titrated doses of irritation can energize. The measure of how well calibrated a message of displeasure might be is whether it moves people toward their performance peak or plummets them past the tipping point into the zone where distress corrodes performance.
Not all emotional partners are equal. A power dynamic operates in emotional contagion, determining which person’s brain will more forcefully draw the other into its emotional orbit
. Mirror neurons are leadership tools: Emotions flow with special strength from the more socially dominant person to the less.
One reason is that people in any group naturally pay more attention to and place more significance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. That amplifies the force of whatever emotional message the leader may be sending, making her emotions particularly contagious. As I heard the head of a small organization say rather ruefully, “When my mind is full of anger, other people catch it like the flu.”
A leader’s emotional tone can have surprising power. When a manager delivered a piece of bad news (disappointment that an employee had failed to reach performance goals) with a warm demeanor, people nevertheless rated the interaction positively. When good news (pleasure that the goals had been met) was delivered with a sullen expression, the interaction paradoxically left people feeling bad.25
This emotional potency was tested when fifty-six heads of simulated work teams were themselves moved into a good or bad mood, and their subsequent emotional impact on the groups they led was assessed.26 Team members with upbeat leaders reported that they were feeling in better moods. Perhaps more to the point, they coordinated their work better, getting more done with less effort. On the other hand, the teams with grumpy bosses were thrown out of synch, making them inefficient. Worse, their panicked efforts to please the leader led to bad decisions and poorly chosen strategies.
While a boss’s artfully couched displeasure can be an effective goad, fuming is self-defeating as a leadership tactic. When leaders habitually use displays of bad moods to motivate, more work may seem to get done—but it will not necessarily be better work. And relentlessly foul moods corrode the emotional climate, sabotaging the brain’s ability to work at its best.
In this sense, leadership boils down to a series of social exchanges in which the leader can drive the other person’s emotions into a better or worse state. In high-quality exchanges, the subordinate feels the leader’s attention and empathy, support, and positivity. In low-quality interactions, he feels isolated and threatened.
The passing of moods from leader to follower typifies any relationship where one person has power over another, such as teacher-student, doctor-patient, and parent-child. Despite the power differential in these relationships, they all have a benign potential: to promote the growth, education, or healing of the less powerful person.
Another powerful reason for leaders to be mindful of what they say to employees: people recall negative interactions with a boss with more intensity, in more detail, and more often than they do positive ones. The ease with which demotivation can be spread by a boss makes it all the more imperative for him to act in ways that make the emotions left behind uplifting ones.27
Callousness from a boss not only heightens the risk of losing good people, it torpedoes cognitive efficiency. A socially intelligent leader helps people contain and recover from their emotional distress. If only from a business perspective, a leader would do well to react with empathy rather than indifference—and to act on it.
BOSSES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
Any collection of working people can readily recall two kinds of bosses they’ve known, one they loved to work for, and one they couldn’t wait to escape. I’ve asked for such a list from dozens of groups, ranging from meetings of CEOs to conventions of school teachers, in cities as different as São Paulo, Brussels, and St. Louis. The lists that disparate groups generate, no matter where they are, are remarkably similar to this one:
Good Boss
Bad Boss
Great listener
Blank wall
Encourager
Doubter
Communicator
Secretive
Courageous
Intimidating
Sense of humor
Bad temper
Shows empathy
Self-centered
Decisive
Indecisive
Takes responsibility
Blames
Humble
Arrogant
Shares authority
Mistrusts
The best bosses are people who are trustworthy, empathic and connected, who make us feel calm, appreciated, and inspired. The worst—distant, difficult, and arrogant—make us feel uneasy at best and resentful at worst.
Those contrasting sets of attributes map well on the kind of parent who fosters security on the one hand, and anxiety on the other. In fact, the emotional dynamic at work in managing employees shares much with parenting. Our parents form our basic template for a secure base in childhood, but others continue to add to it as we go through life. In school, our teachers fill that position; at work, our boss.
“Secure bases are sources of protection, energy and comfort, allowing us to free our own energy,” George Kohlrieser told me. Kohlrieser, a psychologist and professor of leadership at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, observes that having a secure base at work is crucial for high performance.
Feeling secure, Kohlrieser argues, lets a person focus better on the work at hand, achieve goals, and see obstacles as challenges, not threats. Those who are anxious, in contrast, readily become preoccupied with the specter of failure, fearing that doing poorly will mean they will be rejected or abandoned (in this context, fired)—and so they play it safe.
People who feel that their boss provides a secure base, Kohlrieser finds, are more free to explore, be playful, take risks, innovate, and take on new challenges. Another business benefit: if leaders establish such trust and safety, then when they give tough feedback, the person receiving it not only stays more open but sees benefit in getting even hard-to-take information.
Like a parent, however, a leader should not protect employees from every tension or stress; resilience grows from a modicum of discomfort generated by necessary pressures at work. But since too much stress overwhelms, an astute leader acts as a secure base by lessening overwhelming pressures if possible—or at least not making them worse.
For instance, a midlevel executive tells me, “My boss is a superb buffer. Whatever financial performance pressures he gets from headquarters—and they are considerable—he does not pass them down to us. The head of a sister division in our corporation, though, does, subjecting all his employees to a personal profit-and-loss evaluation every quarter—even though the products they develop take two to three years to come to market.”
On the other hand, if members of a work team are resilient, highly motivated, and good at what they do—in other words, if they have high tipping points on the inverted U—a leader can be challenging and demanding and still get good results. Yet disaster can result when such a high-pressure leader shifts to a less gung-ho culture. An investment banker tells me of a “hard driving, bottom line, 24/7” leader who yelled when displeased. When he merged his company with another, “the same style that worked for him before drove away all the managers in the acquired business, who saw him as intolerable. The company’s stock price still had not risen two years after the merger.”
No child can avoid emotional pain while growing up, and likewise emotional toxicity seems to be a normal by-product of organizational life—people are fired, unfair policies come from headquarters, frustrated employees turn in anger on others. The causes are legion: abusive bosses or unpleasant coworkers, frustrating procedures, chaotic change. Reactions range from anguish and rage, to lost confidence or hopelessness.
Perhaps luckily, we do not have to depend only on the boss. Colleagues, a work team, friends at work, and even the organization itself can create the sense of having a secure base. Everyone in a given workplace contributes to the emotional stew, the sum total of the moods that emerge as they interact through the workday. No matter what our designated role may be, how we do our work, interact, and make each other feel adds to the overall emotional tone.
Whether it’s a supervisor or fellow worker who we can turn to when upset, their mere existence has a tonic
benefit. For many working people, coworkers become something like a “family,” a group in which members feel a strong emotional attachment for one another. This makes them especially loyal to each other as a team. The stronger the emotional bonds among workers, the more motivated, productive, and satisfied with their work they are.
Our sense of engagement and satisfaction at work results in large part from the hundreds and hundreds of daily interactions we have while there, whether with a supervisor, colleagues, or customers. The accumulation and frequency of positive versus negative moments largely determines our satisfaction and ability to perform; small exchanges—a compliment on work well done, a word of support after a setback—add up to how we feel on the job.28
Even having just one person who can be counted on at work can make a telling difference in how we feel. In surveys of more than five million people working in close to five hundred organizations, one of the best predictors of how happy someone felt on their job was agreement with the statement, “I have a best friend at work.”29
The more such sources of emotional support we have in our worklife, the better off we are. A cohesive group with a secure—and security-promoting—leader creates an emotional surround that can be so contagious that even people who tend to be highly anxious find themselves relaxing.
As the head of a high-performing scientific team told me, “I never hire anyone for my lab without them working with us provisionally for a while. Then I ask the other people in the lab their opinions, and I defer to them. If the interpersonal chemistry is not good, I don’t want to risk hiring someone—no matter how good they may be otherwise.”
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 32
