How to Become Strong By Understanding Disadvantage

Posted on by Stuart Murray
2012 Marine Corps Trials Day 2.  Photo courtesy of DVIDSHUB.

We hear lots about excellence these days.  So what are the opportunities for persons with disabilities and disadvantages to drive excellence?  It may be that those who are in the throes of disadvantage might not have a fair shot at success.  But there are opportunities for everyone to aspire to excellence, through the cultivation of empathy for those who are disadvantaged.

This is a touching article about a doctor who was concerned about his own mother during her  disabling illness.  The illness was Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that affects movement.  In the Times article, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is rigged with a device that allows him to personally experience the sensation of his muscles turning to jelly, like those who have Parkinson’s, like his mother.

Why would he do such a thing?  Because he always wanted to understand his mother’s perspective during the illness.  Devices are also available that replicate the effects of emphysema, psychiatric illness, and nerve disease related to diabetes.

While I haven’t experienced it yet, I have also heard rave reviews about a similar effort called Dark Table.  Dark Table is a restaurant in Vancouver where food is served and eaten in a room which is completely dark.  The servers are blind or visually impaired, and the guests commit to keeping their gadgets off and eating their meals in the dark.  The dark dining experience increases the awareness of other senses such as hearing, touch, and taste.  It creates jobs for persons with disabilities.  And it also helps people empathize with the perspective of the visually impaired.

Emotional Intelligence in Workplace Conflict

On the human resources side of the fence, it’s possible to develop greater empathy for those we are in conflict with.  The nurturing of empathy is important for industrial relations, the professional development of managers, performance conversations, and the general growth of all staff.  How do you teach workplace empathy?  I have been involved in complex roleplay scenarios called Conflict Theatre.  The theatre scenes are designed so that each scenario is integrated into well-developed back stories and emotional perspectives of the actors.

The theatre is presented so as to invite audience members to step into the shoes of an individual actor and attempt to change the course of the conflict.  It’s one thing to sit back and observe from and armchair, and develop an opinion about how things should be done.  But the real expertise is to understand the full emotional context of each player in a conflict, an understanding which is far more vivid when experienced directly.

Empathizing with diverse perspectives turns out to be a key attribute of those who face conflict with dignity and grace.  It takes you beyond the negotiations that resembles bartering for trinkets, and even beyond the interest-based bargaining of those vying for a win-win solution.  You have to learn how to understand people as individuals based on their perspective and story, not their category or “type.”  This includes understanding their perspective when they struggle with ability, whether it’s professional ability or impairments.

Using Emotional Intelligence to Improve Workplace Culture

The thing I find fascinating about these initiatives is their scientific and cultural back-story.  The Parkinson’s device was built in response to well-documented complaints that patients perceive their nurses and doctors lack empathy for their hardships.  Blind dining is traced back to Switzerland by a man named Jorge Spielmann, whose concept was imitated in restaurants in London, Paris, and New York.  Conflict Theatre in Vancouver comes out David Diamond’s Theatre for Living, which itself comes out of Theatre for the Oppressed, created by Augusto Boal in Brazil in the 1970’s.  Theatre for the Oppressed, as you might guess from the name, arises from social critiques and movements to overcome repression, with an intellectual legacy dating well back into the 50’s.

To affect society on the larger scale we need to reach into the emerging science, the social experiments in many countries, and the lessons learned many decades into the past.  The knowledge and confidence of those with power and privilege can pale in comparison to the universe of individual experiences.  In order to take full advantage of the best information when advancing ourselves in this world, we need humility about how right we truly are, curiosity for knowledge that is new, and sensitivity to the lessons from other cultures and other moments in time.  Only then can each of us aspire to excellence.

The Innocent World of Comfortable Ideas

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Discomfort of Innocence, by Mohammed alalawi - Copy
Discomfort of Innocence.  Photo by Mohammed Alalawi

Why do you hang out with people like you?  Because you have to be friends with your friends’ friends.  Society does not give you permission to dislike (or not know) your friends-of-friends.  It’s called the forbidden triad.  There is a complex quantitative puzzle involving triangles with plus and minus signs, all coded and ready for an elaborate statistical analysis.  You can peek at the math in this October 2016 overview of the research by Dustin Stoltz, a PhD candidate at University of Notre Dame.

But back to people.  The main problem is cognitive dissonance, that feeling you get when you are obliged to maintain two contradictory opinions at the same time.  An example may be that you both love and hate a particular family member, politician, or manager in your workplace.  Cognitive dissonance makes you uncomfortable, and you aspire to greater comfort.  Therefore, you will choose between contradictory opinions and let one prevail over the other.  So, you decide that you like that complex person.  If you then meet a third-party who dislikes that person, you have to even-out the triangle.  You will be motivated to change the third person’s mind, change your own mind, or just stop hanging out with the third party.    If everyone does this, friendships and world views will evolve within cliques that are internally consistent, comfortable, and smug.  But that’s not so clever.

That is because social networks are held together by people who choose to maintain contradictory opinions.  They foster civil dialogue, cultivate plurality, and agree to disagree.  It’s not so much that they are smarter, although that may still be the case.  It’s that the exploration of the best information and the most diverse opinions guarantees contradiction.  You will find attributes that seem contradictory but not mutually exclusive, such as sensitivity and courage.  You will find rival facts, such as the prevailing research on global warming and colder winters in your own locale.  And there will be facts that change quickly, such the price of oil or a change of government.

Workforce Analytics and the Workplace Culture of Curiosity and Discomfort

If you place comfort ahead of maximum information, then you have to insulate yourself from contradiction.  Yet this can be a big mistake in the modern world.  How could you possibly choose a stable mindset when the amount of information is exploding, technology is disrupting everything, and ideas and opinions go round the world in a heartbeat.  It’s a wild and crazy world we live in.  You must choose discomfort, and reject the allure of smug.

In workforce analytics, there is a great divide between colleagues and clients who are curious about new information and those who are not.  It often feels like I exclusively support those hungry for the new, who like the challenge, who want to pick up a few tricks.  Yet those who are more settled in their views or slower to change need to be brought along for the ride.  That is because at the center of the social network people are obliged to commit to, and support, prevailing views.  They tend to agree with one another just like you might do with your own friends.  Looking outward to the fringes of the network, you might see a wider variety of irregular opinions, trends, and opportunities.  The fringe is full of people who are removed from the network in some way, be it marginal legal status, geographic isolation, exclusion, or just looking different.  To bring diverse views from the fringe to the center (and vice-versa) obliges us to maintain contradictory opinions.

The prescription that we must become uncomfortable applies equally to social trends, new technology, and disruptive workforce analytics.  In your workplace, you may have had one opinion for a very long time.  When you are presented with change or new evidence, it is one thing to simply obey orders or comply with the data.  But if you really want to be clever, it is far better to hold onto that moment of discomfort for a while to get a sense of what everyone else is going through.  Only then can you talk to diverse people who think and live in different worlds.  And only then can you fine-tune new evidence to make it presentable to a broader audience.

If we are to disrupt normal ways of doing things through emerging information, we must stand at the bridge between two worlds, be prepared to disrupt ourselves, and get used to discomfort.

Sorry Sir, I’m Just Not Feeling Motivated

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Scream. Courtesy of Crosa.
Scream. Photo courtesy of Crosa.

What is the trade-off between a compassionate workplace culture and strong corporate performance?  Surprise, there isn’t one!  Corporate performance is subordinate to organizational culture and the emotional intelligence of senior leaders.

This article by Travis Bradberry of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 fame describes an interesting conundrum.  A large number of top corporate leaders have poor emotional intelligence.  The highest emotional intelligence is found amongst front-line managers and then each management level upward the leaders display increasingly diminished emotional intelligence.

Bradberry attributes this phenomenon to two factors.  First, corporate boards are selecting for leaders who deliver the numbers, such as profits, sales volumes, and stock price appreciation.  Second, the work environment of senior leaders impairs emotional intelligence and inhibits its growth.  Severe stress, lack of rest, regulatory enforcement, and a low-trust and blame-heavy environment can drag anyone into an emotional stone age (and keep them there).

What is fascinating is that corporate leaders with high emotional intelligence, although fewer in number, still perform better than others.  It may be that organizations will select the occasional gem of a leader, but otherwise we are mostly recruiting and promoting lower-functioning leaders into senior roles.  So how do mean bosses even get the job in the first place?

It is reminiscent of Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t.  Pfeffer provides endless examples of how an executive’s career prospects are often inversely proportional to their performance.  In brief, being a cold and calculating savage will motivate people to not mess with you.  It is possible to rig your career towards a poisoned and under-performing work environment where you still reign supreme.  When corporate leaders spend all day making power plays, there appears to be no beneficiary of this behavior other than the leader.  Look directly at these kinds of leaders.  How are they doing?  They seem to be doing well.  It’s just everyone around them who is falling apart.  It’s all of those people who just can’t play the game and can’t keep up; they aren’t able to deliver corporate performance.  Of course, the punchline is that downstream inability to perform is a hallmark of inferior top leadership.

There is another consideration; do major corporations have sufficient protections against leaders who have personality disorders?  The best-known personality disorder is psychopathy, which is well-documented in Robert Hare’s Without Conscience.  The other disorders are important, but psychopaths are special.  When you get to know the type, it sounds like the personality of someone who perfectly reflects the values of an emotionless profit-maximizing corporation.

Indeed this was well documented in The Corporation, a movie by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan.  Their critique is that the behavior of major corporations (as institutions) ticks all of the boxes on the checklist of psychopath behaviors for people.  If we promote leaders who reflect corporate values, and the corporate values are that we should act like psychopaths, then who is going to end up in charge?

There is a lack of insight amongst psychopaths, corporations, and many corporate leaders, and this lack of insight is at the root of poor emotional intelligence.  Let’s face it, if you got cut off in traffic by some jerk on your way to the office, and then a colleague cuts in front of you at the coffee station, it’s easy to get snippy.  Do you keep control? Are you even aware that you’re just carrying-forward a residual emotion from an hour earlier?  I mean, if it’s possible to carry-forward quarterly accounting indicators, surely it’s possible to carry forward emotions.

How can corporations be unaware of the need for a compassionate working environment?  I think it’s because hierarchy diminishes the two-directional information flow up and down the chain of command.  If the board wants numbers, executives commit to deliver, and the rest of the hierarchy snaps into line, this reveals an opinion that the best opinions come from the top.  However, this might not be how the world really works.  It is an organization’s history, geography, and people that determine the culture.  And it is the culture that determines the customer experience, the spirit of innovation, a healthy attitude towards rules, compassion during crisis, and discretionary effort amongst staff.

One does not simply demand good numbers.  Rather, we harvest good numbers from a well-cultivated culture.