Amygdala hijacks

A meeting between president Trump and Democratic party leaders made headlines on October 16. It is a perfect example of an ‘amygdala hijack.’ What happened during this meeting illustrates what happens when a very old structure in our brain takes over from our prefrontal cortex, the latter being the structure that defines who we are, that uses logic and reason, and thinks about consequences of our actions.  

 The amygdala are involved in our brain’s fear circuit, a circuit that has been honed to perfection over the last 200.000 years to secure our survival. Our very existence today is proof of its effectiveness – if our ancestors’ amygdala had not protected them from threat and mobilized their fear response they would have perished and we would not be here to sling insults at each other.

 Amygdala hijacks happen when we are, for a (brief or long) moment, ‘not ourselves,’ ‘losing it,’ or ‘out of control.’ This is literally true: the part that is usually in control, that defines who we are, that thinks about consequences of our actions, is our prefrontal cortex (PFC), the newest part of our brain. It is the part that makes us human, that can have empathy, that cares about relationships. When the amygdala take control away from our prefrontal cortex, we are no better or worse than reptiles, worrying about our survival in the face of a threat, and we do whatever it takes to survive: we run, we attack, we hiss or we curl up into a ball, playing dead.

 Although the amygdala are not as busy as they used to be when our survival was a daily battle, they keep practicing what they are good at: protecting us, scanning the environment for signs that we are in danger. These days, the danger (when not in a war zone or very ill) are more about psychological safety than physical safety, but the same forces are mobilized nevertheless.  We release the stress hormone cortisol and other neurochemicals such as adrenaline that prepare our bodies to do whatever it takes to survive the perceived attack. Our pupils dilate first to see if there is anything else around to hurt us, and then constrict, shrinking our peripheral vision to a small cone in front of us. Whatever bodily functions we don’t need are relegated to non ‘mission-critical’ status.

 Amygdala hijacks are common in daily life, at work, at home and on the road: road range, people pushing your button, an annoying neighbor, screaming matches between teenagers and parents, or overwhelmed parents lashing out at their terrible twos. 

I have had a few amygdala hijacks myself, some very memorable ones: decades ago at work, before the term was even coined (by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence) I ran out of a meeting that had tested me to my limits, slammed the door and threw a full coffee cup at the nearest cubicle.  I was nearly fired. And more recently, just before the 2016 US elections I had a shouting match with a relative that left me shaken for days and severely, if not irreparably damaged the relationship. I was wondering, how did I let myself go, where was my more reasoned self?  

 Although some say emotional intelligence can save us from such attacks, I do believe that even if we consider ourselves emotionally intelligent we can experience such attacks when other things have gone wrong already and we are, tired, exasperated, angry or all of the above. There are days when someone cutting you off in traffic doesn’t bother you, while other days such a situation triggers you into slinging insults, shouting or using hand gestures that you may later regret, or even deeply ashamed of, especially if you were in the presence of someone who knows and (usually) respects you. 

 Prevention is of course better than recovery, but recognizing when we are in the throes of an amygdala hijack is second best when prevention has failed.  My grandson had learned in pre-school that when he has an amygdala hijack (in preschool language this is when you suddenly feel very upset) to count slowly to ten while breathing slowly and deeply. It is good advice because it brings control back to our prefrontal cortex so we can think clearly about the consequences of our outrage, temper tantrum, the insult slinging, the yelling and screaming. We can now ask ourselves the question, is this behavior going to get me the outcome I want? Is it helping to maintain an important relationship? Probably not. So start counting to ten.

It's all about energy

We know that nothing in the world moves without energy, it’s a physics principle. Interestingly, when we talk about energy in a group, or even one’s body, energy work is sometimes (luckily less and less so) seen as fluff. In my experience there is nothing fluffy about it – it is hard, and it is hard work to shift the energy in a group, a team or oneself.

I learned from my training in Energy Leadership to always have an antenna out for the energy in the room. I look for who brings what kind of energy to the overall feel of being there at that moment. In most groups, larger than 10 to 15, I usually find some people with positive energy and some with negative energy. If the leader of the group has positive energy we are off to a good start. If that person exudes negative energy we have a problem. One can lead for a bit with negative energy, the energy of anger and threat, of intimidation and force, but it’s not sustainable. As soon as threats and fears are removed cooperation stops. Negative (destructive) energy can also be victim energy – a sense of helplessness. If the leader comes in like that, complaining about forces beyond his or her control, accompanied by resignation that there is not much we can do, then the leader can’t possibly hope to lead.

Positive energy is always accompanied by options, an openness to find other ways, listen rather than talk in order to better understand others’ perspectives, ‘stand under’ their reality. As a sometime facilitator and sometime coach, I have to be very aware of my own energy, my own tendency to label and judge (“oh, that person is a problem in this group”). I have to catch myself and try to understand where someone comes from. And the only way to do that is through inquiry, the art of asking good open questions, or, as my teacher Judith E.Glaser, the creator of Conversational Intelligence™, always said: questions for which you have no answers. Such questions open doors, and the more doors are open the more fresh winds can blow through the group: seeing more options, having more creativity as people build on each other’s’ ideas. Instead of expending energy to fight or flee, we can liberate that energy to co-create.

We know that being full of negative energy or being around people with negative energy is stressful. We know that the hormone cortisol is released when we are under stress. We also know that in the complexity of biochemistry, the creation of cortisol takes energy or chemical precursors away from making other hormones that would follow a different pathway, creating biochemical changes that would more protective and health-promoting.

Here is an experiment: in your next meeting try to sense the energy in the room and the energy individuals bring into the mix. Then join those with positive energy and see what you can accomplish. Imagine what would happen if you were to join those with negative energy. Energy, whether positive or negative is infectious. Better contaminate others with your positive energy than your negative energy; it’s the difference between building up and tearing down, nourishing and depleting.

Organizational transformation starts at the top!

Leaders often face challenges and pressures that may prevent them from taking the necessary actions for organizational change. Chief executives in the public sector can be especially vulnerable when powerful unions and political maneuverings make change risky. No wonder leaders are hesitant to embark on such a perilous journey.

There are many frameworks and tools for understanding and implementing organizational change. The hardest part for many well-intentioned leaders is the question of where to start? When leaders are committed to leading transformation of their organization in a way that is not cosmetic or marginal, here are some things that they may consider.

Read more here on the LeaderNet website.

Efficiency: Desirable, possible, and doable

One disadvantage in the public service sector is that it is hard to gauge efficiency. Profit per staff member or procurements (projects) won can be determined, but there are too many factors not under the organization’s control that influence this variable. So what does efficiency in the nonprofit sector mean?

Over the last few years I have been involved in an experiment; spearheaded by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Program for Humanitarian Impact Investment developed a single indicator in order to determine whether social investors will see a return on their investment or not. The ratio is a formula that includes hours of work, per staff category, to make various orthopedic devices and total work hours per week. If people actually work a full workweek and produce many (quality) devices, the value of the indicator goes up. If people don’t, it goes down. By the way, all the variables involved in this calculation are within the sphere of influence of the rehabilitation center itself.

Read more about this here on the LeaderNet website

Streams coming together

For someone raised on a diet of languages (6) in high school and then further nourished on behavioral (Pavlovian & Skinnerian) psychology in university, the recent advances in neuroscience and epigenetics has led me through some spectacular French doors into a landscape that rivals Versailles. Not a professional landscaper or neuroscientist, I am wowed by the beauty of what I see, by the surprises when I stumble on a new perspective, without understanding the intricate and unimaginable complexity of what went into the creation of all this wonder, our neural system.

My newly acquired academic credentials, if they can be called such, come from webinars, online courses, MOOCs and books. I have become an avid student of everything that sheds light on the complex and often hard to understand behavior of people. Why do people do things that create exactly the consequences they don’t want? Why, when they know what is good and not good for them, do they postpone action that would lead to better health, more joy and more love in their lives?

Life is made up of cycles, and I find myself cycling back to things I had to read in university. The fights between Freudians and Kleinians in mid 20thcentury London seemed of little import at the time. Having been brought up, after WWII, in a pretty harmonious family, with parents who loved each other deeply, how could I relate to childhood abandonment theories, trauma and such? Now I feel drawn back to the readings that meant so little to me, and which I now realize are classics because of what they brought to the surface. That what happens early in children’s life becomes a driving force (for good or bad) in that child’s adult life.

What’s puzzling to me now is why I picked psychology when I knew so little about it, had no self-awareness and knew only two psychologists. These were the father and mother of a classmate of mine in grade school. Her mother was a child therapist and had an office (at home) full of toys, doll houses, lots of dolls. When I first laid eyes on that office I said to myself, that looks like a fun job. I want to be like that. Even though, at 13, I had no idea what psychology and therapy were all about. Her father was an industrial psychologist with an office next door. His office was a typical office with a conference table and lots of binders and folders and books. I think I may have seen it once and never returned as it was boring to a 13 year old. Now 54 years later I am struck by the merger I am finding myself in the middle of: the merger between understanding a child’s early life experience and how these then play out in and out of the office. Everything is, after all connected to everything else, in our bodies, our minds and in the universe.

Trust and vulnerability

Ever since Brené Brown disclosed her own vulnerability to the world, and began popularizing her research on vulnerability and shame, I have heard people talk about ‘building’ trust by encouraging vulnerability. There are two things really wrong with that course of action.

First of all, trust is not a building that can be assembled, plank by plank. Trust is a consequence of something else. Trust can enter when there is safety. When physical safety is not an issue, psychological safety is key. How do I know that an environment is psychologically safe? For me it means that I can say things without people rolling their eyes, interrupting me, or pretending I did not say anything worthy of attention. Stated more positively, I feel psychologically safe if people listen intently to what I say, ask follow up questions, acknowledge my contribution as worthy of attention, maybe even worthy of action – a contribution of consequence.

Secondly, being vulnerable is easy when you are the product of a trauma-free childhood. But how many people are? Millions of people have been raised in war zones, ripped from their mother’s arms, born and raised by people unfit to be parents, born drugged, abandoned or orphaned. A small group of those became resilient because of some positive force that appeared early in their life, but most, I suspect, were not. For them being vulnerable triggers behaviors anchored deep in early childhood memories of abuse, neglect, invisibility, lack of food, shelter, belonging and/or love.

Children who survive into childhood have learned to manage their fragility by developing ways of coping – the primordial defense mechanisms of all sentient beings: fight, flight, freeze or fawn (sometimes called appease). I learned these four f-words from Pete Walker who wrote a book about complex PTSD – I think the C of Complex could also be the C of Childhood, as these mechanisms get honed to perfection in childhood, and then carried, unawares, into adulthood.

I don’t insist on vulnerability anymore, and certainly not as a plank in the construction of trust. Vulnerability cannot be summoned. It can only emerge as the adult recognizes his or her childhood coping mechanisms, dares to experiment with new behaviors and can let go of those behaviors that are no longer relevant to physical safety, and may actually get in the way of psychological safety.

Self disclosure in teams

How little do we know about each other when we are working as a team? Can we really work as a team when all I know is the professional persona of the person in front of me, or his or her role representing a particular constituency?

Many decades ago Harry Ingram and Joe Luft devised a clever two by two framework, known as the Johari Window. The history of this important contribution to the human relations field can be found here.

I have always liked this framework as it not only shows why feedback is important but also why disclosure is important, the kind of disclosure that gives others a peek behind the persona curtain.

I have had plenty of experiences with others who I was quick to judge, rather harshly, only to find out later that their life experiences were worthy of my respect . This discovery led me to change my judgment and increased my tolerance of the behavior I previously disliked.

When people start to disclose things about themselves there is a palpable shift in energy in the room; sometimes people even move in closer with their bodies as they don’t want to miss anything about how the other is shaped by the past. People’s life stories are endlessly fascinating – that is why we humans like to write, read and make movies about other humans.

There used to be a time that people were admonished to ‘leave their personality by the door.’ As if half a person could do the work of a whole person. Some people may still believe that it is possible to do so, but I think they are in the minority now. Anything personal, and in particular feelings, had no place in organizations, at least not when I started working, some four decades ago. I am glad that this is now changing thanks to the enormous body of research on emotional intelligence and the flood of neuroscience experiments measuring the presence, surges or absence of certain neurochemicals in our blood and how that changes our behavior and our thinking.

Because self-disclosure nearly always includes information about feelings (and if not explicitly mentioned, then at least some feelings will leak out), we see a more complete person emerge, complete and faulty, just like we are ourselves. This, contrary to beliefs about workplace efficiency from the days of the industrial revolution, helps with the task that the team has at hand. There will be less interference of assumptions, judgments and other energy drains that take us away from the work we have to do together.

I have seen teams derail completely by getting to work right away, with work meaning a review of the team’s terms of reference, charter or mandate. This is especially likely if the team leader abhors self-disclosure and thus cannot tolerate time for this upfront investment of time, as it seems frivolous, unprofessional, irrelevant.

A new year of trust?

I wish all of you reading this post a happy new year. I have been mulling over this happiness wish and find it unsatisfying. We could not possible be happy all the time. The wishes I have for myself and others are not about happiness but about the caring and candor that is needed to ensure trust, in our teams, in our families, in our organizations and simply in our transactions with others. When there is trust a whole host of other things become possible. Trust is the great facilitator.

I would therefore like to make this year the year of Trust. I would like us all to think about what makes or break trust and do whatever we can to heal what is broken and strengthen what is weak. And so I wish you a trusting new year.

I have come across a practical way to address trust in a program on Conversational Intelligence™ I am about to complete this month. I learned that one can look at trust as consisting of five elements: T for Transparency, R for Relationships, U for Understanding, S for Shared Success and the last T for Truth telling, or, if this makes you nervous, you can replace this with: Testing assumptions.

The practical implications of looking at trust this way lead straight into five New Year’s resolutions:

1. How transparent am I in my work, my interactions with others, my decisions?

2. What is the quality of my relationships, both at work and in my private life? What am I doing or not doing to enhance those relationships that could be better?

3. How well do I understand others? How well do I listen to them? Am I fully present when listening or am I formulating my point of view and simply pretending to listen?

4. Have I created a shared vision with my team (your family can also be your team)? Do we have the same understanding of what success looks like?

5. Am I telling the truth? Or, if you prefer, am I testing my assumptions when I draw conclusions about others, judge them? Is my judgment simply an opinion or is it based on facts that others can verify?

Imagine the possibilities! May 2019 be full of trust.

Buy-in or ownership?

On a flight some years ago from Amsterdam to Nairobi I watched a two hour documentary on the ten year renovation of the Rijksmuseum (Holland's National Museum) in Amsterdam. It is a tale of perseverance, human frailties, citizen input, ingenuity, and, most importantly, the difference between ownership and buy-in.

Most of the papers and talks about governance mention how important it is to listen to the voices of the people affected by a project or initiative, as if that is easy. The documentary shows what you have to be prepared for when you invite those voices in – in this case the voices of the bicyclists. You can see why people prefer not to bring those voices in when there is deep controversy. The documentary shows how this citizen input complicated matters beyond belief. It also demonstrates how the ability to manage citizens' input requires very advanced conflict management skills, a good measure of emotional intelligence, patience and, in this case, also lots of extra cash.

If your focus is on buy-in, rather than ownership, then the choice seems to be about anticipating a brief and intense outcry at the end of a project (in other words, not involving people) or, if you do, an agonizing and drawn out process of arguing and trying to convince the other side, which in Amsterdam took 10 years and contributed greatly to increased cost and delays. The conflict was eventually resolved, all parties are happy now, but the price was high. If anyone calculated the costs and looked at the pros and cons of inviting the voices of the people in, I am sure the cost-benefit analysis would counsel for ignoring potential opponents and dealing with the outcry later when things cannot be changed anymore. Eventually, one may expect, people get on with their lives and the protest will die down, except for a small very vocal minority which one could choose to ignore.

I am a fervent proponent of listening early on to the voices of those affected and involved to avoid problems down the line. The documentary showed clearly why we should never go for buy-in if we can go for ownership from the get go. Getting buy-in is selling. In a highly politicized environment such selling tends to pit groups against each other into adversarial roles, amplifying parochial and narrow self-interest.

Getting ownership starts with the creation of a shared vision of what success looks like; where everyone can see that their interests are recognized, even if not fully realized, for the sake of working towards an overarching aspiration that can serve as a magnet for the investment of resources (including human energies).

What's wrong with exhortations?

Improving leadership, management and governance behaviors is all about behavior change, in particular changing habits and raising people’s self-awareness of behaviors that they often know have negative consequences.

Yet when it comes to people actually changing their behaviors, after this or that workshop, seminar or program, I notice that often they don’t. In all the years I have helped people to improve their leadership skills, I can’t begin to count the times people said that communication is critical, that good listening is essential for a leader, that planning is the proper thing to do. Yet I observe over and over that these pieces of good advice, to ourselves and others, are not followed, or at least not all the time, and not consistently or consciously.

I have pondered why this is happening for a long time and started to delve into neuroscience to look for answers. We all know our brains have something to do with habits and behavior but how? (A good read about how our brain influences our behavior and our behavior influences our brain is ‘Behave’ by Robert Sapolsky). Why can't we just tell people what they should do different?

Neuroscience has gone through an enormous growth spurt thanks to the advances in neuroimaging technology. Yet the field is still relatively young, with daily discoveries, plenty of questions, much controversy and a lot of neurobabble (sweeping statements about the brain that are actually not supported by compelling evidence).

Here are some things I am discovering that have some bearing on this complex phenomenon of the behavior of leaders, managers and those who govern.

Fast and slow

David Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), Elkhonon Goldberg (the Executive Brain and other newer books) and many others have written about how we make decisions. The adult brain has stored many routines and short cuts that keep our Pre Frontal Cortex (PFC), the latest evolutionary development of our brain, from overload. If slow thinking is the work of the PFC, the conductor in our brain, then fast thinking is the product of sloppy work by other parts of our brain. They make lots of mistakes, such as taking a cellphone for a gun. Fast thinking is responsible for biases, impulsiveness and simply making poor decisions. Yet is serves a function – we couldn’t be slow thinkers all the time – we would get exhausted.

Our PFC consumes much more energy than any other part of our brain. If we could not rely on routines, templates, shortcuts, we would get overloaded, and maybe blow some fuses, and surely exhaust ourselves. And yet, the prescriptions we bring to our clients and counterparts presume that all decisions are made in a way that can only be done by PFC. It is our PFC that recruits all those areas of our brain that need to chime in on a decision we have to make (including a habit to change). Another labeling of these brain phenomena are the Default Network (DN) and the Executive Network (EN). Marcus Raichle from The University of Washington first coined the term Default Network which describes the mode to which our brain defaults when not on task.

The interaction between the EN and DN has been wonderfully described by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack in their book ‘The Net and the Butterfly,’ (Chapter 2). In their reconstruction of how the Rolling Stones’ hit song ‘Satisfaction’ came about they illustrate how the DN and EN work together. The DN team that creates the breakthrough consists of Leonardo Da Vinci, Sun Tzu, Joan of Arc, Sherlock Holmes, Amelia Earhart, Napoleon, Euclid, Marie Curie, Michelangelo, Teresa de Avila, Erasmus, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. They are in the skunk room surrounded by Post-It Notes, clay, notepads, music, toys soldiers and airplanes, pens, markers, whiteboards and more. Keith Richards is like a CEO (if you can imagine that): he (granted, unwittingly) formulated a challenge and then goes to sleep, or does some mindless task so as not to interfere with the team’s creative problem solving. The interplay is critical, as is our ability to not always be ‘on.’ Hence, an exhortation to be creative, rational, on-task, is unlikely to work all the time (or at all), and may even be counterproductive. ‘Take a walk in the woods’ would probably result a better yield, yet in most organizations this would be perceived as slacking. Yet we know enough about the brain now (and meditation experts have known this forever) that such a walk can calm down our frantic brain; calming it down enough to look at multiple and novel options, whether these are about hard decisions or new strategies.

Fear and self-protection

When we are in a bad place, either because we are not well, someone close to us is suffering, or when we have experienced trauma, it is hard to get excited when our boss or chief executive talks about our vision or mission, the good we do in the world or the importance of our jobs. When we are in a bad place the most primitive part of our brain is activated. The limbic system which lies deep in our brain is the (evolutionary) old brain that served us a long time ago. It was primarily preoccupied by survival and belonging. This part of the brain is activated when strong emotions occur, emotions that accompany thoughts like ‘I am going to die’ (or my incompetence will be exposed) or they will kick me out of the tribe (I will be fired). While nowadays most of such threats are psychological in nature, they still activate these (fast acting) parts of our brain and put us in protect mode. When an individual, a team or an entire organization is in protect mode, and leaders need productivity and creativity, it is unlikely that exhortations will work. The first order of business is to create stability and safety. Once these basic conditions are in place, people can start to come out of their corners. But don’t expect them to become enthusiastic and energetic co-creators, which is what we usually want, and want it now (‘that’s enough slacking, back to work!’).

A receipe for productive meetings of minds - part 2 (facilitation)

We have all seen people in charge of a meeting who act like a traffic cop, giving the floor to this one and then that one without synthesizing or drawing conclusions. You may also have had the unpleasant experience of attending a meeting or an event during which powerful voices clash with one another and the rest of the participants are bystanders as personal agendas are played out.

Thus, a second important requirement for good meetings is skillful facilitation. The meeting chair needs to know how to facilitate the interactions between the people in the room in such a way that it reduces negative dynamics and helps people to listen to each other’s ideas in a respectful manner. We need meeting chairs to help people build on each other’s ideas rather than diminish them and draw people together around common goals and/or a shared vision; a goal or a vision that requires everyone’s good ideas, not just those from a few powerful and loud-voiced individuals.

Participation does not happen by itself, it needs to be structured

Think about structure: self-selected groups versus assigned groups, which depends on how much trust or safety there is in the larger group; working in small groups allows for parallel processing (several groups working on the same task in parallel). If you do this, make sure you budget adequate time for group presentations. Include time for individual thinking time (the introverts and minorities in the group will thank you for that). As a rule of thumb start with individual thinking, then paired sharing or sharing in a small group, then large group sharing. This ensures that everyone contributes independent of gender, rank and status.

Flow and rhythm

We are most creative when there is a flow/rhythm that allows all parts of us to be engaged: our intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual sides. Thus plan for activities that engage the brain, the heart, the spirit and the body. Refer to deeply held values, acknowledge/vent emotions, make space for passion and excitement, use visuals, music, and have people move; sitting still for hours is not natural for human beings.

Learn how to ‘read’ a group

Recognize when people are getting bored or restless, notice when people walk in and out of the room a lot or are focused on their cellphones or computers. It is a sign that they are not fully engaged and find other things more important. It is a piece of data for you. Become more comfortable with silence; recognize signs of sleepiness in your audience, tension (nervous laughter, eye-rolling). Pay attention when too few people speak too much. Recognize whispering and side conversations as a sign of something else going on. Ignoring all this is at your own peril.

When in doubt about what is happening, ask!

Share your perceptions, concerns, hypotheses of what might be going on with the group or simply state – something is not right, please help me. If you were right you can enlist the group to address the issue; if you were wrong, move on, in each case you have created a break which was obviously needed anyway.

Support each new activity with visuals which spell out objectives and tasks (if any)

Some people need that kind of structure, even if you don’t. It can also serve you as a road map for the duration of the event.

Provide hand-outs

Tell people up front that you will give them copies of the slides or relevant materials. Some of this needs to be presented before the meeting, some at the beginning and some at the end. Think about this because there are choices to be made. Sometimes, when people are busy taking notes they become passive participants. In that case it is better to provide handouts with the text of slides so they don’t have to copy text from slides.

Make a habit of doing a reflection at the end of your gathering

Whether a short meeting or a multi-day workshop, conduct a reflection at the end: review what you did, what you decided and check how people felt about the process an accomplishments. Make sure you budget adequate time for this - don’t sacrifice this to save time!

Off track/recovery

Use the focus question (see part 1. Design) to refocus the discussions or deliberations when you see people going off track. Frequently look at the question (posted clearly on a flipchart or on the agenda) to make sure the group remains on track. Ask yourself if what you are doing now will get you to an answer or decision (assuming that is what you want). If you realize that the conversation is going off on a side topic re-read the question and, if you are not sure what to do, ask for help in getting back to the focus question.

Use a ‘Parking Lot’ for off-topic but important issues that arise.

A parking lot is an empty flipchart posted on the side where you can write topics you cannot discuss in the time available. You temporarily ‘park’ them there. Make sure that you agree on what to do with these topics (when and where to revisit them) in your closing reflection. If you are not doing that then there is no point in writing the topics down.

Unscheduled breaks

If you feel you have lost control of the groups (chaos) or when someone has hijacked the meeting, or if you are confused about what to do next call a 5 minute stretch break and consult with trusted colleagues on how to proceed.

Time budget

If you commit to starting and ending on time it means you have a fixed budget of hours and minutes, not one that can stretch endlessly into the afternoon or evening. Plan for late starts and afternoon energy ‘dips’ as you prepare your time budget.

Norms

Norm setting at the beginning of an event is only a good use of time if you make the group responsible for enforcing them. When people use abstract terms such as ‘respect each other’ ask them what that means and how it would manifest itself to avoid the ritual of mindless norm setting. Avoid becoming the enforcer yourself, or having a junior person identified as enforcer as they can never confront senior people with transgressions. Avoid monetary sanctions. This usually punishes the low power people as no one dares to exact fines from senior ones; besides you now have a problem of cash and who will manage it. Sometimes people will suggest that late comers dance or sing, but this tends to be enforced for a while and then no longer. The best remedy for late comers is to not wait for them before starting. If your event is exciting enough they will soon realize that they are missing out by coming late.

Be a model

Be a model to the group with regard to all stated norms. Check them regular to monitor yourself. Arrive at the venue before anyone else, start and end on time for breaks and closing. In workshops, if people keep coming in late, make it a topic of discussion and come to an agreement.

The flow of the conversations

Standing with your back to a dominant speaker sometimes helps to silence her/him; similarly walking up to, or standing right in back of a shy person sometimes draws them out. Standing in front center makes you the leader and conversations will always go via you; withdraw to the side, squat or sit down between the participants will redirect the flow of conversation between participants.

Changing perspectives

You can change dynamics and people’s perspective by asking them periodically to sit someplace else in the room. This will also break up clusters of friends or colleagues and provide opportunity to meet or get to know others.

Use the wisdom that is in the room

Although you may be the meeting chairperson, the boss, the director, head trainer or facilitator, you can never have all the answers and you don’t need to have all the answers. Asking good questions is a thousand times more useful than given an answer to every question. When asked a question throw it back at the questioner or ask someone else n the group if they know. There is often more knowledge and wisdom in the room than we recognize.

The physiology of conversations going south and how to change direction

If you have ever sat through, led or facilitated a meeting or event that you’d rather not remember, read on. I’d like to share a few thoughts and insights with you that shed some light on the role of our brain in producing or perpetuating great or horrible meetings, relationships and conversations.

I do not claim more than a superficial understanding of the neurochemistry of conversations, but what I have learned over the last 7 months has opened new worlds for me.

We don’t usually talk about meetings, relationships or conversations that have gone south, unless maybe with a trusted spouse, friend or colleague, where we can vent, spew our frustrations and be the hero of our story. I suspect with others we’d rather not advertise such meetings or conversations, especially when we were supposed to have managed them well, lest our clients, supervisors, or colleagues will lose confidence in us, give us a bad rating, and think twice about giving us a similar assignment in the future. Yet if we don’t talk about them we cannot learn or understand what happened, and in the process learn something about ourselves, our skills and what we need to better understand or work on, to avoid repeat experiences.

Events that produce stress, that are toxic and do not produce intended results are obviously costly. Even if all we wanted was consensus at the end and we believe we got it, consensus in such an atmosphere may not be consensus at all. I call this pseudo consensus. Pseudo consensus happens when people with divergent opinions don’t want to rock the boat, don’t dare to stand up to majority opinion, or simply feel too small to have an opinion at all.

The more serious costs associated with such events is what happens afterwards. We may feel less secure in our ability, lose confidence and experience stress that lingers, especially if we were already worried about how others see us. 

This is what happens when we are stressed: we produce hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, or testosterone that bind to receptors all over our body. These hormones mobilize our energy, increase blood flow, increase our heart rate and breathing rate, heighten our awareness, enhance our memory, and prepare us to either fight or flee. Even if we do none of those things, these hormones think we will. And if they are not suppressed, the good work of these hormones turns bad.

What I have learned to understand is that in stressful situations, whether acute or lingering, our limbic system (buried deep inside our brain) determines quicker than the time to read this sentence what is necessary for survival, which today is more likely to be psychological than physical survival. When our competence is being questioned, or when we feel psychologically attacked, the body prepares to come to our rescue as if there is an emergency. The amygdala, a section within the limbic system, detects fear and prepares our body for such emergency events and the stress hormones start flowing.

Most of us have, at some point in time, experienced what Daniel Goleman calls ‘an amygdala hijack.’ This is when we experience an overwhelming emotional response that is out of proportion to the stimulus because it has triggered a significant emotional threat. After such a hijack we usually explain our behavior to others by saying ‘I wasn’t myself.’ If ‘myself’ is how we describe ourselves when the most developed part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC), is in control, than this is accurate. 

The sooner we are aware of what is happening (the limbic system taking control and the PFC shutting down) the quicker we can recover. Our ancestors in their infinite wisdom knew exactly how to respond to this loss of control (and our grandson is learning this in preschool), which is to count to ten. The counting to ten moves the steering wheel back to the PFC and we can think with more clarity about our responses and actions and consider their consequences. But when the stress is significant this shifting of control gets to be difficult. As Amy Arnsten, Professor of neuroscience and Psychology at Yale University, describes “Under conditions of psychological stress the amygdala activates stress pathways in the hypothalamus and brainstem, which evokes high levels of noradrenaline (NA) and dopamine (DA) release. This impairs Prefrontal cortex (PFC) regulation but strengthens amygdala function, thus setting up a ‘vicious cycle’.”

For people living in toxic environments, either at work, at home or both, stress is a constant. This causes a continuous spraying of stress hormones in their bodies. These hormones, which are helping with survival in small doses, start doing the contrary when they are not turned off. We already know that stress makes us sick, but here is why, according to Dina Aronson:

“Cortisol functions to reduce inflammation in the body, which is good, but over time, these efforts to reduce inflammation also suppress the immune system. Chronic inflammation, caused by lifestyle factors such as poor diet and stress, helps to keep cortisol levels soaring, wreaking havoc on the immune system. An unchecked immune system responding to unabated inflammation can lead to myriad problems: an increased susceptibility to colds and other illnesses, an increased risk of cancer, the tendency to develop food allergies, an increased risk of an assortment of gastrointestinal issues (because a healthy intestine is dependent on a healthy immune system), and possibly an increased risk of autoimmune disease.” 

For me the takeaway from all these neurochemical processes is that we need to be aware of our own fight or flight responses, and stop the limbic brain from being in control. When confronted with an environment that causes stress Judith Glaser, organizational anthropologist and author of Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results, suggests we move to a higher level of conversation. We can do this by:

1. Trying to silence the voice that judges ‘those others who don’t get it,’ because the judging causes reactions in the other that produce the kinds of hormones that will spoil the broth;

2. Stop trying to convince others that we know Truth, that we have the answer or solution that the others need and stop telling (or selling or yelling) to make others use our stuff;

3. Start asking the kind of questions for which we have no answers; questions that show we are curious, that we care, and that we are open to influence.

All these behaviors will shift the energy in the room and change direction to go to the proverbial north (as opposed to 'south'). By inviting others to share, to discover new possibilities and show that we truly care, we release oxytocin instead of cortisol (or adrenaline or testosterone). Oxytocin is known as the bonding or cuddle hormone. A good spraying of oxytocin invites others to care as well, to open up, which then bolsters their courage to give voice to what concerns them, to be candid and become vulnerable. And when that happens everything becomes possible, or to use Judith Glaser words, “To get to the next level of greatness depends on the quality of the culture, which depends on the quality of the relationships, which depends on the quality of the conversation. Everything happens through conversations.”

Structuring (self) reflection

Personal transformations can happen in a very short time. I have seen people grow in confidence in front of my eyes during the many TOTs (training of trainers or facilitators) I have orchestrated during my many travels abroad. I have seen mousy and shy young women suddenly stand up straight, project their voices and confidently explain ideas and concepts that were completely new to them only a little while ago. As if I needed this assurance, it shows one should never give up on people and judge them by their cover.

I have been a happy witness to many such transformations all over the world: in Nepal, in Mongolia, in Ghana, in Kenya, in Cote d’Ivoire, in Madagascar, in Sierra Leone. It has been the most rewarding part of my career: seeing people liberate themselves from their self-imposed judgements that include self-talk such as “I can’t” or “I am not good enough.”

But the confidence that accompanies the transformation is a little fragile at first. Feedback and handholding are important for continuing the path that the transformation has indicated. Before I fly (at least physically) out of their lives, I look for ways or structures that will encourage continous reflection. We sit in a circle and talk about what went well, what could be improved and what was not a good practice. The quality of the feedback people give to each other usually gets better and better to the point that I have little to add. My part is to structure the conversation for safety and intimacy. The rest they do themselves.

Relationships or numbers?

I have been reading Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger Cycles. It is a collection of short essays she has written over the last 5 years or so. The essays are of the kind that make you think and that change you. I am changed but not just because of the book. Nora’s essays found fertile ground in my head and heart because of what I saw here in Madagascar.

Last week we covered about 1200 kilometers, a few hundred of these over roads that looked more like dry riverbeds than roads. We went to places where foreigners are rarely seen, which meant that I created quite a stir – stares followed by smiles and waves from older kids and adults, fearful cries from the small ones.

We went to visit teams that had participated in a leadership development program (LDP) sponsored by the USAID Leadership, Management and Governance (LMG) Project. It started nearly a year ago in the region of Haute Matsiatra. The local facilitator team had selected the five best teams – best defined as ‘those who had achieved their measurable result.’ These results consisted of more women who came for their first prenatal visit, more women delivering their babies in a facility, more children vaccinated. The teams had selected those as leadership challenges that stood in the way of achieving the indicators set forth by CARMMA, the African Union’s campaign to accelerate the reduction of maternal and child mortality.

As we interviewed the teams on how they had managed to increase the numbers it became quickly clear that it wasn’t actually the numbers that were important. It was the relationships that made the positive changes possible: relationships that either had not existed before or that were of poor quality. The participants in the LDP had created relationships were none existed or improved relationships that were bad. They had moved these relationships from mistrust to trust. Contrary to popular opinion that trust, once broke, is as hard to put back together again as Humpty Dumpty, we saw that trust could be established or re-established easily.

Nora Bateson’s book and my experience here brought something sharply into focus, best illustrated with her words “Within the great whirl of life there is culture; in culture there is language; in language there is conversation; in conversation there are two beings; in the beings there are frames of perception and, in their communication, a kaleidoscope of unpredictable repatterning."

What had happened is that people had realized that it was only through the relationships, and thus through conversations, that they could hope to make things better. And in those relationships they changed as they learned about the other. The simple act of approaching and asking changes everything. It led to sharing and discovery, finding out that one’s point of view was not the only one and not necessarily the right one because it came from an expert. When interactions are based on trust rather than mistrust all things become possible that were not possible before.

And in this process people changed. We heard the same echoes wherever we went: “I changed from dictatorial to cooperative; I changed from impulsive and careless to caring and thoughtful. Ask my wife!” Those wives were often present or nearby as we interviewed the doctors at their health centers. They confirmed the changes. There was much laughter.

As a result of this trip I am changed too. I am also changing my vocabulary. I have become suspicious of words like ‘solutions.’ We ought to know by now that the problems that catapult poverty in our living room are not solvable from the mindset we have. It was Einstein who observed that problems cannot be solved from the same mindset that produced them. This quote is often cited but the deep meaning of it seems to be lost.

The mechanical, engineering mindset (every problem has a solution) is deeply anchored in our culture and it is easy to be sucked into its promises of engineering a better world. Yet I know that a better world cannot be created using an engineering framework simply because we are not made of steel and bolts. And now we are talking about systems, and system approaches and systems thinking, but they are still anchored in mechanical thinking: arrows and boxes, cause and effect, if this then that. Old wine in new bottles.

When Nora Bateson searched images for systems on Google she noticed that she had to scroll down through hundreds of images of circles and arrows and boxes before she found a picture of a human.

Indicator improvements do not make for better health care, although they may show that dollars entrusted to us were well spent. But the numbers don’t guarantee that they will continue to get better or at least stay where they are after we are gone with our extra resources, per diem, attention. I have come to believe that health care will only improve if the local relationships improve so that mistrust can be replaced by trust. It is only when people can talk together in ways that recognize that no one can do the difficult work alone and that we all need one another to improve whatever it is we want to improve.

Measuring up

Over the years I have come to see a few patterns in human behavior around me that appear to be critical to team or organizational success. One such pattern is behavior that used to puzzle me: people who seem to have a lot going for them behaving in ways that appear counter-intuitive or even self-defeating. Curiosity led me to coaching and coaching led me to understanding.

After some 100 hours of coaching individuals, during which I have had the privilege learning about those things people usually don’t talk about I discovered one thing that stands out consistently among all others: people seem to be trying to measure up to standards which drives the no longer puzzling behavior.

Standards may be one’s own as we might see in a highly ambitious person who set challenging goals for him or herself. But such standards usually have a history. They are often unconsciously or consciously adopted from a parent, a spouse or a friend. Sometimes these are only imagined.

I am reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and see a life determined by imagined standards of the protagonist’s childhood friend. I see presidential candidates (and presidents) driven by a need to prove something. I see children bully or withdraw, being loud or quiet to prove something to self or others. I see colleagues get into trouble because they blame others for their ‘not measuring up.’ I see supervisors unwittingly reinforce standards that ignite childhood feelings of inadequacy.

Entire lives are determined by this desire to measure up or avoid altogether measuring up. It drives people to be on a relentless chase to get to the top, to do risky things, to hurt others, to be disagreeable, to fight or do the opposite: to run or fall into depression, to avoid risks, to stay in low jobs, to please or appease.

There are interpretations and assumptions as well as limiting beliefs that often stem from our childhood and the dynamics that played out in our families. These determine whether we will advance or hold ourselves back. We bring old standards into our current life and project them onto others, usually authority figures, who become the new standard setters. In hierarchical structures, supervisors and managers often unwittingly become the screens on which we project these old standards.

We blame others for our stuckness when the sense of being stuck comes from within. The voice on our shoulder, the inner critic, tells us we are not good enough and that we should try harder or give up. Imagine if we could brush this creature off our shoulder, tell the inner critic to shut up; if we could set our own standards of success, redefining the ones others set for us, and then pursue them, unencumbered by someone whispering, ‘you can’t do this, you are not good enough!’

This is the joy of coaching, to help others discover that they are, always, ‘good enough.”

Toxicity in the workplace

“The higher you go, the more problems are behavioral” —Marshall Goldsmith[i]

Over the years I have often been asked to work with senior leaders on their management and leadership skills. These requests don’t usually come from these leaders themselves but are suggested by other interested parties who feel that the dysfunctionality at the top gets in the way of project or program success.

I have been involved in a variety of senior leadership interventions, such as senior leadership development programs, teambuilding retreats, field visits, or executive coaching. In my past life at Management Sciences for Health, we received US government funding (when there was a lot of that) to send some of those senior leaders to the US to get a degree. Sometimes this served the double purpose of removing the person from the environment so that others could breathe again or thrive, and also to open their minds by exposing the person to other ideas, cultures and ways of working with people.

We don’t have a lot to show for how these interventions changed things. We may have some anecdotes, if we stay in touch with the people we worked with, but the impact of senior leadership development programs and executive coaching interventions is hard to measure. There is so much variation in how such interventions are done that it is hard to extract any lessons from them about how we should deal with dysfunctionality at the top. As a result we have very little guidance for people who find themselves working in situations where the quality of the work environment gets in the way of improving performance, no matter how good our interventions are.

Dysfunctionality at the top has been described well by Peter Senge[ii] in his classic ‘The Fifth Discipline,’ in particular in the chapter where he describes the “myth of the senior leadership team.” One of the ways we see this dysfunctionality expressed is in the form of ‘toxic teams.’ Toxic teams are a huge problem in organizations. Unfortunately they are quite ubiquitous around the world.

I often ask people about their experiences in working in a great team. It is troubling to see how many people have never had such an experience. Recently I asked a group of mid-level and senior leaders from six African countries the same question. Very few hands went up. When I started to talk about ‘toxic’ teams nearly everyone nodded their heads in recognition.

Most people know intuitively what a toxic team is. Toxic teams are created by toxic leaders. Toxic leaders are people who have responsibility over a group of people or an organization, and who abuse the leader–follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse-off condition than when they took on the role of leader[iii]. They harm their staff, and thus also their organization, unit, program or project “through the poisoning of enthusiasm, creativity, autonomy, and innovative expression.”[iv] They spread their ‘toxic fumes’ through over-control, believing that leading is about control. The resulting toxicity in the work environment is bad for morale, bad for self-confidence and makes it unlikely that anyone would risk proposing something new or take initiative. Ergo, we have an organization or team that functions well below its potential.

Toxic teams especially where employment is not easily found and walking out not an option, perpetuate themselves as people have no other role models than those who control and depress. Consequently when members of a toxic team move into positions of authority themselves, at best they have no other models to emulate, and at worst, there new position of power triggers a wish for revenge. We can talk about performance improvement, better results or innovation until we are blue in the face, but we are unlikely to see any of this in teams (or organizations) that are awash in toxins.

So we should be very concerned about toxic teams and help people who are the source of the toxicity become aware of the impact they have on others and then help them with tools and coaching to turn things around.

Since we cannot change others, unless they ask our help in changing (but they’d still be doing the change, not us), we can contribute to reducing toxicity in the environment by asking ourselves some questions first. We can later use those same questions to assist a toxic leader who is ready to detox:

The questions are adapted from Goldsmith’s book “What got you here won’t get you there.”

1. Do you need to win, to be right, and to be the expert, all the time?

2. Do you always have to add your opinion, your advice to someone who has an idea? Is the proposal or presentation not good enough or complete without your ideas? Do you always have to add something, even if someone else already said the same? Can you ask yourself, before opening your mouth “what is lost if I don’t add my two cents?”

3. How often are you passing a judgment, on a person, someone’s idea? How often are you using judgmental adjectives in your head when listening to someone speak??

4. How often are you using words that dismiss the other’s ideas or proposals? Do you have a tendency to make destructive comments? Or share your negative or destructive thoughts out loud, even when not asked?

5. How often do you start your sentence with “No,” “Yes, but,” or “However?”

6. How important is it to you to tell the world how smart you are, by speaking out at a meeting, giving your opinion? And how often do you make your opinions sound like there are facts?

7. How often do you speak up or out when you are angry, even if you pretend you are not?

8. How often are you withholding information that could help others do their job better?

9. How often are you failing to give proper recognition or claiming credit for something you don’t deserve?

10. How often to you find yourself making excuses when something in your performance is being questioned (by anyone who cares) – sure way to stop getting feedback about things you could improve, or passing the buck or blame to others?

11. How often to you find yourself clinging to your past successes, things you accomplished when you were in a very different (often technical) position?

12. Do you find yourself playing favorites with some people, who may be exactly the ones that suck up to you, flatter you and make you feel great? What about the ones that make you feel uncomfortable? How do you treat them?

13. How often should you have said “”I’m sorry” but didn’t, or refuse to express regrets? And how often did you miss an opportunity to say “thank you,” express gratitude or recognize someone for a job well done? Especially when this person is critical of you??

14. How often do you find your mind wandering when (supposedly) listening to someone? Are you listening better to some people and less so too others? Do the ones who are your favorites get a better ear than the ones who critique you?

15. How often do you punish the messenger of bad news?

16. How often do you say, in the face of criticism, “that’s just the way I am”?

[i] Goldsmith, M. (2014). What got you here won't get you there, Hyperion eBook. Page 41.