While the popular press talks of stress as a negative to be avoided, seasoned managers know better. If you’re trying to drum up new business, get a customer’s order out on time, or hit your numbers for the quarter, a little stress goes a long way.
If you’ve been around the management block a time or two, you’ve probably also seen the other side of stress. As stress gets too high, instead of increasing momentum, it can counter-intuitively start to decrease it. You can immobilize people with too much stress.
Somewhere in between these two extremes is the ideal level of stress; one that creates positive pressure in the direction of change without causing debilitating worry. This magic zone is what John Kotter referred to as the “Productive Range of Distress.”
Your first step is to assess the current state. There are signs that the stress levels on your team aren’t sufficient to create meaningful change. Watch for people who are too comfortable with the status quo — either resisting the need to change, referring incessantly to the “way we used to do it,” or generally not applying themselves to get the job done.
The bigger challenge is to identify the people who are burdened by too much stress. It’s tricky because some people will have an obvious, frenetic, or panicked stress response, whereas others will withdraw and direct their stress inward. Because there is no single pattern, you’re looking for deviations from an employee’s normal behavior.
Once you have a sense of the stress levels on your team, you’ll know whether you need to dial the heat up, or bring it back down from a boil to a simmer. There are several techniques you can use for each scenario.
Increase the frequency and pointedness of coaching. It’s easy to stick to the status quo when no one is watching. The moment that an employee knows that you’re noticing her behavior, the stress levels will naturally rise. The secret to coaching toward an optimal level of stress is to increase the frequency of the feedback you provide, but decrease the intensity.
Connect the person’s behavior to something bigger and more important. Sometimes an employee hasn’t made the link between how they perform and the organization’s ability to achieve something critical.
Allow a natural negative consequence for a lack of action. Often, as a manager, you’re so invested in the performance of your team that you’re willing to pick up the slack from poor performance to avoid a bad outcome. That only reinforces the employees’ perceptions that they don’t need to change. Instead, allow poor performance to lead to a natural consequence.
Provide frequent positive feedback. In the low-stress scenario, you were coaching frequently to increase the sense of accountability. In the high-stress situation, you should still be spending considerable time coaching and providing feedback, but you need to change the content and tone. Your content should be focused more on recognizing and reinforcing small victories and on helping to problem solve to create momentum. Your tone should be calm and reassuring.
Break the problem into smaller pieces. You can divide the project among a group of people so each person has a more manageable chunk.
Add structure to the problem. One of the worst things you can do when stress levels get too high is to jump in and solve the problem for your team. That can send all the wrong messages and leave you with accountability issues over the long run. The alternative is to go a little further than normal in helping your team think about how to tackle the problem.
Model confidence. Whether you believe the hype about mirror neurons or not, you know from experience that emotions in the office can be contagious. The simplest way you can turn down the heat for your team is to show them with your words and your body language that you believe everything will work out.
Regardless of whether the heat needs to go up or down, your job is to monitor constantly and to make the course corrections that will keep your team in the productive range of distress. That’s the magic zone where change happens.
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Adam Grant produces at an elite level. When I met Grant in 2013, he was the youngest professor to be awarded tenure at The Wharton [School at the University of Pennsylvania]. A year later, when I started writing this chapter (and was just beginning to think about my own tenure process), the claim was updated: He’s now the youngest full professor at Wharton.
The reason Grant advanced so quickly in his corner of academia is simple: He produces. When Grant was awarded full professorship in 2014, he had already written more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in addition to his bestselling book.
Soon after meeting Grant, my own academic career on my mind, I couldn’t help but ask him about his productivity. Fortunately for me, he was happy to share his thoughts on the subject. It turns out that Grant thinks a lot about the mechanics of producing at an elite level. He sent me, for example, a collection of PowerPoint slides from a workshop he attended with several other professors in his field. The event was focused on data-driven observations about how to produce academic work at an optimum rate. These slides included detailed pie charts of time allocation per season, a flowchart capturing relationship development with coauthors, and a suggested reading list with more than 20 titles. These business professors do not live the cliché of the absentminded academic lost in books and occasionally stumbling on a big idea. They see productivity as a scientific problem to systematically solve — a goal Adam Grant seems to have achieved.
Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
My guess is that Adam Grant doesn’t work substantially more hours than the average professor at an elite research institution (generally speaking, this is a group prone to workaholism), but he still manages to produce more than just about anyone else in his field. I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).
An interesting explanation of why the intensity approach works is described by Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Minnesota. In a 2009 paper titled intriguingly, ‘Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?’, Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking — trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously — on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially: “Going from one meeting to the next, starting to work on one project and soon after having to transition to another is just part of life in organizations,” Leroy explains.
The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow — a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. The results from this and her similar experiments were clear: “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.
The concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true and therefore helps explain Grant’s productivity. By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.
When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.
Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally.
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In 2013, two University of Oxford professors published a study analyzing 702 different occupations. Of those, they determined that the role of chief executive fell within the 10% they deemed "not computerizable." There's reason to think twice about that. Here's why.
ANTI-HIERARCHICAL HEADWINDS
Broadly speaking, the push toward democratization is arguably one of the most potent social, technological, and economic forces today—one of the few, in fact, that runs powerfully through each of those fields. The U.S. Army’s recent science and technology Futures Project, "aimed at leveraging the collective wisdom and ability of the American public," to help influence how the Army will use research and development investments to prepare defense forces for the world of 2040. Another example is the "new breed of human organization" that the blockchain-governed Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO, model propounds. In these organizations, token holders vote on which proposals to accept from contractors that build products and services on the DAO's behalf. No elite decision-makers required. It's far from clear whether these ventures, in all their diversity, are exceptions to the rule or harbingers of more anti-hierarchical approaches to business, innovation, and governance to come.
While the responsibilities of any given CEO vary considerably from one company to the next, there are at least three key areas where removing human decision-making might actually make sense.
1. STRATEGIC PLANNING
Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once described the human brain as an "anticipation machine." Yet accurate, long-range foresight is pretty rare because most of us find it hard to imagine a future radically different from the past or present
2. STEERING PROFITABILITY
Managing financial decision-making and risk are two C-level tasks where hubris abounds. Stanford Business School and Wharton researchers report that "top corporate decision-makers persistently overestimate their own skills relative to others."
3. HIRING THE RIGHT PEOPLE
When it comes to directing a company's talent-acquisition strategy, often a key C-suite responsibility, it could be that computers prove better here, too. One of the goals of Goldman Sach’s "robo-recruiting" initiative, for instance, is to help diversify the business's workforce to a degree that humans at Goldman haven't shown themselves capable of doing on their own.
Ultimately, that doesn't mean we should expect to find the C-suite completely vacant in the future. But what it does mean is that we should probably temper our widely held conviction that CEOs' most critical attributes are things they've shown time and again not to be all that good at.
This way we can start focusing on prizing the sorts of qualities robots don't seem as likely to take over but that democratic-minded organizations seem more hungry for than ever—and this one in particular, which the business leaders whom PwC researchers polled last year unwisely ranked the least critical of all: Collaboration.
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