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Your brain on stress

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by Patty Azzarello

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As a leader it is vitally important that you maximize the energy you bring to your work.

When your energy is low, you are just not very good at your job.

So you need to be clear that part of your job is to make, and keep yourself OK, despite the stress of the job, and the many things that line up to kill you each week.

As we all plan for the new year, let’s consider how we can be happier and less stressed, so we can be better at our work and better at our life.

Brain Science and Happiness

I have come across some really interesting pieces of information about brain science, as it affects attitude and positive energy.   I wanted to collect them in one place, because together they tell an interesting story.

The punchline of the story:  You need to do stuff on purpose to be happy.

1. How long can you stay angry?

From Jill Bolte Taylor’s book:  My Stroke of Insight, she talks about the fact that there is a physiological response to anger.

She writes: Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over.  If however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.

Basically, if you get angry, you’ve got 90 seconds of real anger that is a physiological experience.  If you stay angry after 90 seconds, it’s entirely up to you.

After 90 seconds you are using up energy specifically to stay angry.

2. The Default Mode of the Brain is Negative

A friend of mine is studying the brain science of meditation, and told me two fascinating things, that made a lot of sense to me.

The brain’s default mode is negative. So all those stories, sequences, decision loops, doubts, and obsessions that your brain puts you through — all the negative processing, is actually the default mode of the brain.  Yuk!

The fear response

The other shoe to drop on this negative-default topic, is with regard to the amygdala. The amygdala is the oldest part of our brain that has not evolved since we were cave men waking up at 2am because a tiger came into the cave. Actually it’s not evolved since way before then, which is why it’s often referred to as the lizard brain.

The amygdala is responsible for the fight or flight, survival response — the raw, paralyzing, fear response, that puts you at your most threatened and defensive.

When that response is triggered, blood actually rushes to your limbs (to get stronger for the impending fight or flight), which means it rushes out of your brain! So in the moment of threat, you are actually less mentally capable.

The new piece of brain science emerging from this, that my friend told me about, is that long periods of extended, severe stress can make the amygdala response part of your default brain response.

If this has happened, and your brain has recruited the amygdala to participate in it’s default, negative mode, then even the  slightest nudge or input (think, dropped phone call vs. tiger in the cave) would trigger an extreme anger/stress/threat response. How painful would that be? You can see how stress can build upon itself to the extreme, if you don’t get a break from it.

3. How to get a break? Trade one stress for another!

The third thing I have come across was actually some research from a colleague of mine, Vonda Mills, who is a noted psychologist, and management consultant, which showed that working professional people with children actually had lower overall stress than working professional people without children.

The reason was that the people who had children were forced to “turn off” the work stress because their children required their full attention during parts of the day.  The people who did not have an alternative stress to switch over to, those who alternated between stress and “rest”,  actually ended up more stressed than the people who got to alternate between different sources of stress.

There is more science to say that a stressed brain, gets more useful rest given something else to work on vs. being idle. Remember, idle/default mode is negative.

(This made me think of something I often say — that happy people make bad art.  Perhaps many of the great artists created their works because they intuitively knew they needed to give their  brain something to focus on instead of the stress that was causing their despair.)

4. Stress and laziness

I was traveling through an airport a few weeks ago, and caught a news story about how distracted we all our by the amount of information we have to contend with on all our electronic devices, social networks, and many browser windows (and televisions in airports).

The point that leapt out at me, (which I typed into my blackberry on the spot), was about a study of highly distracted, stressed people… “[in mice] under stress, the areas of their brains associated with habit formation grew, while those linked to decision making and goal achievement shriveled.”  I found the source info here.

Wow, so stress adds real estate to the part of our brain that wants to be a couch potato and shrinks the part of our brain that is required to make new things happen.  Yikes!

OK, so now what?

What this all means to me is – the broken record part from me –

Do stuff on purpose

Actively do things to keep your brain out of the default negative mode.

Acknowledge that happiness is not the easy, default state. It requires effort.  Focus on things that make you happy or bring you fulfillment, and do them on purpose.  On purpose = actually schedule time in your life to do the things that fuel your energy.

Be careful of anger

Remember that you have an excuse for only 90 seconds – a physical process that makes you angry, after that it’s up to you.

And the more you choose to stay angry, the more you stay in extreme stress, the more you encourage the already negative default mode of your brain to recruit the amygdala and make it far worse.

When you need a break, try keeping your brain busy with something instead of “zoning out”. Since even switching one stress for another stress has proven to be more restful than resting your brain, next time you need to de-stress, try something that is mentally challenging but fun for you, and see if you feel better than letting your brain fester in a negative “rest” state.

Happiness on Purpose

Finally, from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, describing something from one of her teachers:

…People universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough.  But that’s not how happiness works.  Happiness is the consequence of personal effort, […] and once you have sustained a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it…

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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How will you thrive?

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by Patty Azzarello

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Give yourself this gift.

Think about what you love and hate about your job.

Think about the times in your career and your life when you were thriving. You were doing great work, it felt great and the crowds were cheering.

Now think about the people and irritants that drain your energy. What do you dread about your job?

Come up with a plan. Decide how you can change or re-define the interactions in your day to be better for you.

Re-write the drama

Fire the writers who put you in annoying situations. Re-write the screen-play for the time you spend at work.

Identify the type of work that makes you feel great and take on more of it. Create a strategy to defend against, eliminate, or change the things that drain your energy.

This is not selfish. If you focus on doing things specifically to make yourself thrive at work, you will find that you will become even better at your job, have more to offer your team, and you will deliver more value to your company. And you’ll be happier.

Have a Wonderful Holiday!

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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WHEN do you think?

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by Patty Azzarello

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The big idea…

If I could offer one idea that will have a huge impact on your success and your satisfaction with work, it would be that you give yourself time to think on purpose.

(you can stop reading here if you accept that point!)

Time to think

I work with so many executives that tell me they would be so much better at their job if they had more time to think.

Think about a typical day, week or month in your work.  How much time to you spend in uninterrupted, quality thinking time?

I know when I was a corporate executive I had the same problem.  My calendar was fully booked.

If I tried to schedule time for myself it would get over-ridden with urgent customer problems, staff crises, or emergencies from my boss to deliver something to his boss.

My personal, thinking time got wiped out.

So I needed to work differently.  I have written much on the topics of defending your time and energy, making more time, delegating better, and many other topics which help you use your time more strategically.

But today I just want to focus on this one idea:

Give yourself time to think.  Schedule it.  Protect it.

This will have a bigger impact on your success than almost anything you can do.  If you are giving yourself this time, don’t ever feel guilty about it.  If you are not, start taking it.

Key point: Remember, your job as a leader is to build capability underneath you, so your team can handle more work, and so you can apply yourself to solving higher order problems.

Enable your team to do the work

  • Let your team handle the customer escalations, you need to create the quality program that reduces them.
  • Let your team handle the marketing events and deliverables, you need to create the market-changing strategy.
  • Let your team handle the product development.  You need to create better processes to deliver more, faster.

You will never do any of this if you don’t give yourself time to think.  You will get caught up in a sea of activity and reacting.
Think about it this way:  If you stay overwhelmed with activity you are not doing a good job.

Schedule time to think and HIDE

Try it for 2 hours.  Tell everyone you are at the dentist.  The world will not come to an end.  Hide. The hiding part is important. The activity knows where to find you.

Think about how you can improve all of this chaotic, reactive, repetitive activity and do something better.
Then give yourself 2 hours a week to think.

Don’t feel guilty

I can’t tell you how many teams I work with where they all live in fear of their instant message window saying “unavailable” for a second.  It’s fascinating that no one holds it against anyone else, but each person feels this huge pressure to always be available.

I know people who work at home who are afraid to go to the bathroom because they think their company will think they are not working if they don’t answer IM’s instantly.  This is crazy.

Why not put your IM status for an hour or two as “working on a deadline” or “on a call” or “be back at 2pm”?

If you tell people to expect that you will be away from IM working on strategic projects a few times a week, no one will hold it against you.

Being over-available can backfire

If instead you stay infinitely available, but never do anything strategic, you will fail to do your job well.

I hear upper managers talking about their workhorses… “Oh yeah, we can throw anything at him,  he’ll work round the clock, he’ll travel anywhere, we can always count on him… “

Notice they are not saying, “he is someone we should promote.”

If you work tirelessly 24×7 to accomplish a goal or meet a deadline once in awhile that is OK, and sometimes necessary.  But if you work tireless 24×7 for 5 years you will be stuck.

If you never give yourself time to think about how to work better or more strategically, and just keep doing all the work as it comes at you, you will never be as successful as if you figure out how to rise above it.

How do you defend your time to think?

Tell us how you’ve been successful in the comment box below.

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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3 traits of the best leaders

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by Patty Azzarello

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Stand-out Leaders

What makes the top leaders stand out it is not their skills, or experience.

Once you get to compete for the top jobs, everyone has impressive skills and lots of relevant experience. So how do you differentiate?

It’s also not just about execution.

Execution is critical, for sure. Yes, you need to be able to set a compelling agenda and deliver on it, but again, that’s entry stakes — it doesn’t make you great.

Where is the greatness?

The higher up you go, your value as a leader is associated more with who you are as a person, than with your skills.
I’ve noticed that there are 3 traits that the best leaders have:

1. They are who they are
2. The communicate well
3. They pick the right people and make them great

1. Great Leaders are who they are

They are people whose words and actions match what they genuinely think and feel on the inside. This is sadly pretty rare.

Egos, agendas, fear, and politics all pull on us to say and do things that we don’t quite believe, but serve to please others, smooth things out, or defend ourselves.  Most people cave in to this pressure.

The best leaders stick to their values

They say and do what they really feel and think.  They bring the core of who they really are to work, and they talk about what really matters to them.  When you see a leader behaving this way it obvious that they are being authentic.   It’s not hard to spot.  You can’t fake it.

You can fake opinions or positions, but you can’t fake authenticity!

This authenticity builds trust and and makes people eager to follow

2. They communicate well

The best leaders communicate well, consistently, often, and to everyone.  They invite people in.  They let people know what is going on.  And to the first point, they tell people what they really think.

One-to-one communication

Great leaders listen.

They don’t just go through the act of listening, they listen with active curiosity because they are genuinely interested in learning the other person’s point of view.

Execs that go through the act of listening, but don’t actually respect the people they are listening to, nor really care to understand  the opinions they are hearing, may get some leadership points for the show, but they are not connecting and they are not learning.

Group communications

A steady heartbeat of communications from the top lets people know that you are there, and that you are engaged.  What you say is almost less important than the fact that you commit yourself to saying it on a regular schedule.

Communicate every week or two without fail. You will score huge leadership points with steady, quality communications.

When people feel in the loop, they are much more motivated, less worried, and more productive, and they consider you to be a better leader than someone they seldom hear from.

Persuasiveness

Great leaders are persuasive.

You don’t need to be a world class public speaker to be a good communicator.  You need to understand people and how to persuade them.  That is why listening and learning helps.

Persuasive communications light the path you are asking people to travel, and sell the reasons why they should go with you.  The best leaders do this all the time.

3. They pick the right people and make them great

The right people

There is nothing more important to effective leadership than to build a team underneath you that is so capable, that you can free yourself up to solve higher order problems.

I will repeat that for emphasis. This is really key!

There is nothing more important to effective leadership than to build a team underneath you that is so capable, that you can free yourself up to solve higher order problems.

Don’t cover for a weak team

If you are personally stepping in to do the work because you have weak spots (people on your team not capable or motivated enough to step up to do more) then you are holding yourself back as a leader.  And you are failing to deliver enough value to your business.

Make them Great

Hire stars, give them big work, support them, and let them excel.  Help them be amazing.  Create an environment where the team works really well, and the individuals can grow to solve bigger problems over time too.

Why this works

I used to wonder why I was so lucky to always have such remarkable, talented, experienced people want to work for me.  What I finally realized is that it was two things:

First, I picked the right people for the right jobs so they could work where they have natural strengths and really thrive in their work. And second, I gave them the room and support to stretch beyond their current capabilities.

So the magic of why they wanted to work for me was that they felt respected and they could be proud of their work. They got to personally achieve more than they knew they could, and got recognized for it.

People like to be amazing and they like to be recognized for it.

In contrast, other bosses did not respect and maximize their gifts and give them the opportunity and support to be amazing.

This feels almost too good to be true, because you end up getting the best people and they move mountains for you.  And all you need to do is show them trust and respect and get things out of their way.

I guess the hard part comes along if you feel threatened by great people.

What do you think?

What do you admire about your favorite leaders? Leave your thoughts in the comment box below.
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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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Technology shouldn’t torture people

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by Patty Azzarello

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Really?

I was traveling in Cincinnati recently, and was greeted with the following in my hotel room. I was staggered.

I removed the actual hotel name, but this was real.

Is it just me, or are these 19 steps to program a wake-up call a bit much?

wake-up-call

Technology and Humans

I built a successful career in technology by following one guiding principle:

Make the technology less painful for humans to use.

Focus as much (if not more) energy on the human interface as on the technology itself.
Don’t ever show of the richness of your technology in the user interface. 

Focus completely on the user’s task. Understand how people are thinking about the task they need to do, and help them do it the way they are inclined to do it.

The point is never to show that your technology is smart and powerful, it’s to make your user feel smart and powerful.

Patty’s 3 Laws of Technology

(Break them at your own business peril.)

1. Technology should not rob people of their humanity
2. If you present technology instead of a human interface it HAS TO WORK
3. Technology should never make people feel stupid

Here is what I mean:

1. Technology should not rob people or their humanity.

Probably the best example of this are those voice automated systems that make you talk to a computer on the other end of the phone.   I don’t know about you, but I hate this. I would feel much less robbed of my humanity if I was greeted with a computer voice that said…

I know I’m not a person like you are, and that you’d rather talk to a person, but we think we can help you faster if you are willing to give this a try. We won’t make you talk to a computer and pretend it’s a person, and feel like an idiot shouting answers and phrases repeatedly because we can’t actually understand them… Please help us route your call by keying in your account number and answering ONE question – then you’ll be connected to a real person.

Any time your user interface makes a person translate something they are thinking or feeling into a narrow input that your technology will accept, you have robbed them of some humanity.

2. If you present technology instead of a human interface it HAS TO WORK

If you want me to sign up for your service on your website, don’t require a special new version of a flash plug in for me to do it.  Don’t invite me to leave you feedback, only to have a link that doesn’t go anywhere.  Don’t optimize your interface so much for one platform or environment that it doesn’t work right in others.

When something goes wrong…

A human can recover and use creativity and judgment (and opposable thumbs)  if the transaction does not work. Technology just sits there there not working, and the user goes away having failed to complete the task.

I was duped recently at the airport when I accepted a boarding pass sent to my mobile phone and got to an airport that didn’t have the ability to read it.

I was promised I could pick up a prescription after hours, from an automated pharmacy dispenser, and they had mis-spelled my name when they input the prescription so there was no way I could pick it up and no way for the machine to recover.  There was a phone support number on the machine connecting me to a line which was un-manned after hours.

Make it fool proof
Test everything.  One of the best software tests  I ever saw was a CEO who sat on the keyboard.  The system broke.  Test your technology in ways users are not supposed to use it, because they will always do things they are not supposed to do.

Use Standard (boring) components
Go out of your way to use technology components that are as standard and hard to break as possible.

Don’t try to make your screens extra-pretty, or use bleeding edge widgets and gadgets in your user interface because they amuse you, you are trying to be impressive, or you want to try something new — especially if if there is to be no-human back up when it doesn’t work.

Set your standard to “It has to work”.  Not “It has to be leading edge”.

Don’t lose customers
If you replace humans with technology, if it doesn’t work you will lose customers because you have given them no possible alternative but to go away. There is a corollary to this law which is “Don’t make people work hard to give you their money”.

3. Technology should never make people feel stupid

This issues is starting to go away as technology is actually working better and young people are immune to thinking that it is their fault if it doesn’t work.

Complexity is the enemy
But when technology is unnecessarily complicated and hard to use, it makes (us old) people feel inadequate because we can’t accomplish the task at hand.

I don’t think I have ever got through a self-checkout lane without requiring assistance from a clerk and feeling a bit stupid.

If you buy wine, someone still needs to check your ID. You Fail.
If you by an item that is too large to put in the bag, the system will freeze because it can’t sense that you put it in the bag after you scan it. You fail.
If you buy organic produce, it doesn’t have a selection for organic. You Fail.

At this point you are given the choice either to wait for help (you feel stupid) or to steal money from the store because you can’t find a way to pay the organic up-charge (robbed of your humanity, and being made to work too hard to give them your money).

The good, at least mitigating, news is that most self-checkouts follow rule number 2.  It HAS to work – so they put human backup there.

Making technology better for humans is good for business.

Apple is an obvious example. But even putting Apple aside as an outlier, I can tell you that in every business where I had responsibility to bring technology products to market, focusing on the human interface was good for business.

We put extra effort on the user’s thinking process, the user interface, the install, the demo, the “start here” experience, the documentation, the customer support help desk, and the sales and contracting documents and processes.

By doing this, my businesses were able to steal share from competitors who were overly focused on the features of their technology alone, and tortured their customers and partners because of it.

What do you think?

Has technology ever tortured you? Do you think it helps business to make technology easier to deal with? There’s a comment box below, what’s your view?

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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Do you need more data?

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by Patty Azzarello

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Are you implementing your strategy
or studying it?

I was working with a management team on their strategy when we came to an interesting point in the day about their business needing a game-changing initiative.

The group brainstormed for awhile, and discussed several potential game changers.  We narrowed the list to three really cool ideas.

Then came the big question…

Which is THE one? Where will this team focus and invest to create a dramatic shift in their market?

At this point in the meeting the team decided that the next step would be to take these three ideas and study them for two weeks then come back with a recommendation of which one to pursue.

Why not decide right now?

The team had entered this meeting wanting to get aligned on their strategy and come out with clear actions to implement it.  Now they were going off for more study.

I asked the question – Why not pick now?  What will you learn in two weeks that you don’t know today?  What additional data exists that will give you more insight?

The team realized that in three weeks, they probably would not learn anything materially different than what they already knew.  That’s the thing about a being a game changer.  Leaders never have all the data.

The leaders leave a trail of data behind them.

So they decided.  They picked one.

Start moving forward

Instead of leaving the meeting with a bunch of tasks to study the choices, right there in the meeting we worked on the action plan to get a game changer started.  We evaluated the stakeholders and adversaries, cataloged resource requirements, and created the list of the first 5 questions to be answered and subsequent decisions to be made.  We put dates in place for the first draft of the business proposal.  We talked about the timeline and approach for getting employee buy-in. They were moving forward.

Think about how much time this team saved.

Without a decision, multiple people would have left the room with a task to study for three weeks. That would take a toll on their day job, AND not move the new strategy forward.  Instead they left with productive tasks to make real forward progress.

Why is it hard to decide?

When I work with groups that have plenty of data, I find two surprising reasons why they have trouble deciding.
It’s not so much that they are afraid they are making a bad choice, or afraid of the risk that comes with choice.  It’s one of two things:

1. The leader does not want to force it through
So the study is seen as an opportunity to get participation and buy in, so the leader is not seen as railroading the decision through the organization.

2. The team thinks the leader requires more information

So the study is seen as an opportunity for the team to satisfy the leader that their recommendation is valid because the choices have been fully studied and justified.

You are allowed to pick!

What is so interesting is that in many cases, the team actually doesn’t mind if the leader states his choice, and the leader does not actually require more data!  They just get locked in this default behavior to collect more data to satisfy a need that doesn’t exist.

Talk about it.  Make a decision. You are allowed.

There is time for market analysis and study, and there are times when either you know the answer, or there is no more useful data to be had.

When you think you have reached this point ask yourself these questions:

  • Why am I not deciding now?
  • What additional data is available that going to help me?
  • What will be materially different after more study?

By all means, if there is knowable data, go find it.  But if you’ve exhaused the knowable data, stop studying!  Start moving something forward and learn as you go.

Fail Quickly

If you fail, fail quickly. Then don’t try to save a bad idea by throwing more money at it.  Learn, then try something else if necessary.

The most successful companies are not the ones that do everything right, they are the ones that can fund their mistakes, and eventually come up with the winning play.

What blocks your team from making decisions and forward progress?  How have you broken through?
Leave your thoughts in the comment box!

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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