[Source: FlickR CC Photographer: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino]

ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2009) — The International Research Institute of Stavanger (IRIS), which is based in Norway, have studied which leadership qualities could help employees return from sick leave early. Being considerate, understanding and able to maintain contact with the sick-listed are the most important leadership qualities, according to the study.

“The manager has a key role when it comes to sick leave. He or she is often the best available measure for promoting health in these cases. A manager with good qualities can have a great impact on how long the employee is off sick”, says senior researcher Randi Wågø Aas, at IRIS, which is owned by the University of Stavanger and Rogalandsforskning.

Norway has the highest sick leave figures in Europe, and the authorities are constantly looking for new measures to get numbers down. The latest research effort from IRIS on the topic studied the relationship between the employees who are signed off sick, and their managers. Part of this work has now been published in the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation.

Previous research has revealed a strong link between management and sick leave.

The risk of long term sick leave rises proportionally to the lack of support from the manager.

“That is why we think it is interesting to look at which qualities in managers are considered important”, says Ms Wågø Aas. Researchers followed 30 people on long term sick leave over the course of eight months. Both the employees and their managers were asked which management qualities they felt were the most important in the follow-up work. Researchers got 345 descriptions of important qualities, which were naturally grouped in 78 specific management qualities. The three most often mentioned were Ability to make contact, Consideration and Understanding.

In other words, the study shows that people on sick leave first and foremost need to feel cared for.

“The employees find it important that their managers are understanding, supportive, attentive, empathetic, warm and friendly. When they are on sick leave, people are in a position of vulnerability. Many of them talk about feeling suspected, and say their problems are not taken seriously”, says Ms Aas.

The 78 manager qualities which emerged from the investigation were divided into seven categories, which each represent a given type of manager. The one mentioned the most frequently, is nicknamed The Protector, who has caring qualities. Number two is The Problem Solver, who is the best at adapting. The third most important is The Contact Maker, and then it is The Trust Creator, The Recognizer, The Encourager, and The Responsibility-maker. Each of these types contains groups of qualities which emerge in the interviews. Ideally, managers with staff responsibilities should have a bit of each of the seven in them, but what is the most important will vary.

“The perfect manager can take steps which are tailored to the individual’s needs. The survey shows that there are great differences in what the individual considers good follow-up. It is also clear that a combination of different management qualities is needed. A great many people need both a pat on the shoulder, and to be welcomed back to work”, says Ms Aas. According to her, it also seems that contact ability is a necessary quality in order to achieve the combination of protection and problem-solving.

Researchers also found age differences in the individual’s needs while on sick leave. Younger employees had the greatest need for protection and recognition, while those over 45 were more concerned with problem solving and being held responsible.

“Older people are probably more concerned with adaptation of their work environment, to make sure they can get back to work. Younger employees are possibly more vulnerable, and need more encouragement”, she says.

A third important find in the study, is the difference in what the employees and the managers thought was important. The employees emphasised recognition and encouragement more than the managers, who were more concerned with accountability, and problem solving.

“If employees have different needs from what the managers are aware of, and this is not communicated, there is a big problem. It is easy to view management as mainly about adapting all practical and formal matters for the employee. For most employees however, it is more important to be understood and included. For instance, many managers think they are protecting the employee by telling them that they do not need to work. In reality, they are simply extending the sick leave, since the employee does not feel included. After all, many are able to do things even though they are ill”, says Senior researcher Ms Wågø Aas.

IRIS will continue to study the interview material. They also wish to develop a feedback tool, which aims to improve communication between managers and employees on sick leave.

Here are the types of managers identified in the study:

1. The Protector

Protects the employee, understands the situation, helps and includes. Shows compassion, is discreet, warm and friendly.

2. The Problem Solver

Professional, solution oriented and creative. Can, among other things, change the tasks or in other ways adapt them so that the employee can continue to work. Takes responsibility, and gives individual treatment.

3. The Contact Maker

Gets in touch with the employee to inform of what is happening in the workplace. Is also interested in how the employee is doing, and proves a listening and able conversationalist.

4. The Trust Creator

Is discreet, predictable, attentive, honest and open. Creates trust and a feeling of safety.

5. The Recognizer

Behaves acknowledging, confirming and without prejudice towards the employee.

Shows respect and confidence.

6. The Encourager

Has a positive attitude, and is generous and happy. Motivates, inspires and is available. This type of manager has a sense of humour, as well as being just, patient, and encouraging.

7. The Responsibility-maker

Assertive, fearless, challenging, and direct. Is honest, to the point and not afraid to establish boundaries or confront. Gives the employee challenges and responsibility for his or her own situation.

Adapted from materials provided by The University of Stavanger.

Source FlickR: Peter McDonald

How we use Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Quotient in teams and organizations matters.

While we will be dealing with metrics, alignment, and implementation, initially we need to consider the fundamental purpose of emotions and how they work when at work.

Let’s see how EI can improve sales teams for a starter. And an environmental approach to keep talent.

Rather than look at Goleman’s or Bar-On’s overwhelming contributions to EI initially, I would like to start on another more empirical track, and hopefully we’ll converge along the way and see how these threads tie together.

As stated in the introductory post, Emotional Quotient (EQ) and Emotional Intelligence (EI) has little to do with “being emotional”. Again, emotional intelligence is not how emotional a person is. It is a set of skills that enable me to be emotionally stable and mature: clever, if you will, at handling emotions.

It took several of the most brilliant medical minds of the pre-War period to understand the simple formula:

See Bear -> Feel Fear -> Run or Freeze

Through a set of extremely precise experiments psychologists, all previously medical doctors, sought the answer as to how and why we react the way we do. Especially to fear.

It led to some fundamental discoveries in the neurobiology as to how the brain and body create, react, and learn of and from emotional responses.

Bear -> Fear -> Run is otherwise known, in Walter B Cannon’s own words, as the flight or fight response. Cannon with Philip Bard proposed what has become the best known theory of emotional response. Some 50 years earlier, William James, the father of modern rigorous psychology in America and Carl Lange in Denmark both separately proposed what has come down to us as the James-Lange theory.

In the James-Lange theory the suggestions is: see bear, your body reacts before your cognitive mind does, your mind recognizes these reactions of the nervous system, and calls it fear (Or love, or whatever emotion you feel). Cannon-Bard on the other hand states that the emotions come first, i.e. your brain reacts and then your body does it’s flight or fight stuff.

Chicken or egg? A little.

And we still don’t really know the answer. What is accepted is that see bear have a physical reaction is normative. It would seem more holistic to suggest that the two are working in unison, that the amygdala (the reptile base of the human brain responsible for among other things the survival instinct) is programed to kick in both a cognitive response and a physical simultaneously as we need to survive.

What is certain is that I need my senses to recognize danger - however, just to muddy the waters, it appears, from recent experiments that the brain works faster than the physical nervous system. We seem to literally know fear before our body does - giving weight to the Cannon-Bard theory. What we can be absolutely certain of is that we do call that normative reaction an emotional reaction.

And, what has this got to do with Emotional Quotient and Emotional Intelligence?  As we will see EQ and EI are our not only about our emotional reactions, it is rather about our emotional awareness. It is from the combined efforts of Drs William James, Carl Lange, Walter B Cannon and Philip Bard that we developed a working understanding of emotion and the part of the brain that deals with and generates the neurochemical responses to environmental change: the limbic pathway.

The limbic pathway is the part of your brain that deals with emotions. Not just crying, fear, love, happiness, but rather the much more subtle and important stuff: our daily interaction and reactions with people and objects and out thoughts etc; these happen all the time, when we sleep, when we’re awake, and so on. The limbic pathway keeps on working out our emotional, cognitive state.

It is linked to both the hindbrain (the reptilian brain in humans controlling your most basic physical needs) and the higher brain functions (thought, memory, imagination) and releases dopamine (which makes you calm) and serotonin (which makes you happy).

What we are looking for at first is the correct mix of both of those neurotransmitters, if they are in balance we have emotional homeostasis.

This is a fancy way of saying we are able to be at our most optimal performance wise and keep our stronger emotions in check.

We exhibit one of the key indicators of Emotional Intelligence: self-control. We are calm. Even when driven to distraction, we are calm, self-controlled, and in check. All the time. We use our limbic pathway to keep calm, to assert ourselves without raising our voices, and we are still genuinely in relation to others - we are not artificially calm or stiff, or withdrawn, but neither are we shouting, stamping, and frothing at the mouth.

Such a person is not given to outbursts, or to total withdrawal. They have a mature developed sense of self. Their interaction with others is not based on subversive or agenda-based behaviors like narcissism, self-interest, psychotic manipulation, and so on. Emotional intelligent people are composed, detailed, focused and on point, they are calm, deliberate, but emotionally engaged. They do not sound or act like an automaton, but neither are they manic. Again, it is what we would all instinctively recognize as balanced behaviour.

In a 360° survey we might want to ask:
Does the person control themselves?
When stressed what is their reaction?
To fight? Or withdraw? Or to assert?

Assertive behaviour is more than don’t mess with me you’ll come off worse than me. Assertiveness is the ability to influence and engender respect in the other party. And here, high EI and EQ pay massive dividends. This is more than appearance and body language, it is a fundamental brain set, from the limbic pathway, that will not be rattled, that holds its position, that listens, and states clearly and precisely their position in a calm, measured, and considered way while still using emotions.

This is exceptionally useful for sales personnel who need to exude more than confidence. They need to exude professionalism, knowledge, and a keen self-awareness.

This has top line and bottom line effects.

In Strategic HR we might define this as a good indicator of maturity in young talent. They need to also show real engagement, drive, and results as well.

If the companies goal is to keep talent, and it should be a central HR goal of companies to retain the talented, the best, then helping them achieve early maturity in an excellent idea. This must be aligned with other factors such as motivation, rewards, respect, and inclusion otherwise it will be ineffective.

In the next post, we will look at other components of Emotional Intelligence and how scaling them up in an organization drives business results.

It is good to be asked back again.

When the people asking are a branch of the United Nations then it is a definite privilege and an honour.

I had a great morning with 85 post-graduate students, from a very wide range of nations including China and Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tanzania, Gambia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Malawi, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Ecuador, Peru, Latvia, and even from here in Sweden. (My apologies to those who represent countries I may have left out). Many are women. And all are exceptional.

All have been chosen by their governments, companies, and organizations to do the courses in advanced marine management. I was invited to compliment the academic with a healthy dose of leadership training. Rather tahn adopting a command-control or technical model I talked on Authentic Leadership. We had a blast.

I am very grateful to academic dean, Prof. Patrick Donner, and to all his students, for their efforts. Honestly this is why I work: to have so many people from so many nations on one site like the World Maritime University is a wonderful opportunity to talk about what leadership is becoming and how we achieve changes that will improve both work and life in the modern world.

Day Four: Keys To Success And Motivation

Pompidou Center (Flick-r Phil H)

Picking up on Day Three: after Maslow and Carl Rogers and the developments of the Humanistic school pf psychology or the third wave, the idea that emotions can be mastered, controlled, and developed was seen as an integral part of a positive, evolutionary process. This was a fundamental development that gave real results in psychotherapy and to the field of general psychology.

Rogers is a very important historical figure in psychology as he broke the Freudian mold that looks for the problems in the human psyche and rather proved by experimentation and observation, and not just by philosophizing, that all life from plant to animal to human seeks the optimal opportunities for growth if given the environment to thrive. This is of fundamental importance to work psychologists and architects: the work environment, both physical and cultural makes a fundamental difference to the overall performance of the organization. While Maslow tends to concentrate on the fundamental, large blocks, there is ample proof that even simple adjustments in the workplace seem to make a real difference.

This branch of psychology is commonly called Environmental Psychology, but may be called socio-architecture etc; and is concerned with the interaction of people and the space around them. One of the outstanding thinkers in the branch was Konstantinos Doxiades who in 1943 coined the term Ekistics. Ekistics is the study of human settlement. His masterwork “Introduction to Ekistics”, published in 1968, is still an outstanding example of what good research and a clear mind can produce. Oh, and in case we begin to think that this is purely theoretical and impractical Doxiades was also an extremely good architecture on a massive scale and responsible for much of the design of Islamabad. The capital of Pakistan was commissioned by then President Ayub Khan in the 1960s to replace Karachi and to be the model for urban living in a new, modern Pakistan.

Further, there was a fundamental shift in psychology to cognitive psychology.

This is tricky. Initially, it seems that the third wave is on to something of real standing: the human self and how we think about ourselves, and that if we are able to sort that out then we would emerge, almost as butterflies from the pupae, as evolved, stronger people. There is a lot that is entirely positive and right about this, but it also has a negative aspect. Can introspection and the desire to improve ouselves result in achievement or do we need to understand that how we think must be in relation to others around us?

Albert Bandura, working on reciprocal determinism and self-esteem, Vroom working on the Expectancy Theory on motivation, and David McClelland working on understanding the need for achievement and status all provided important new insights in social psychology and solid experimentation that threw light on work and why people succeed or don’t succeed mentally at work.

McClelland in particular. N-Ach, N-Pow, N-Affil, the Need for Achievement, Power, and Affiliation is very good modeling of human behaviour. We all show a combination and spread of all three - and the really important discovery was that too much in any one area leads not to more success but to disaster: the person who must achieve no matter what tends to take undue risk, the one who must control no matter what tends to lack emotional intelligence and is socially manipulative, and the one who has too strong a need for affiliation tends to smother, crowd in, and annoy. Too little and the person simply fails to achieve their goals and others either ride roughshod over them, or simply overtake them. So the question is: how much is enough?

McClelland found throughout his experiments that those who set targets that stretched, challenged, and gave a greater sense of motivation were the succeeders. Those who set targets that were too high or too low failed. Probably the most famous of these utilized the old fairground game of the ring toss. A wooden board with pegs that you toss rope rings onto. People were allowed to set their own degree of difficulty. The key to success was to set it so it was difficult but not impossible: even if these people failed they had a sense that they tried. As a corollary, McClelland also noted that feedback was an essential part of personnel and personal development that allowed people to develop self-awareness and to be able to judge their success in perspective.

The insights for work are obvious Goals should be high but not impossible. Do not employ those who are too ambitious, unless that can be tempered with social skills, emotional intelligence, and structured feedback and coaching. And above all, give reasons for people to want to succeed!

Day Two: Expectations And Realities - Getting To Grounded Work

Having seen on Day One that psychology could be applied successfully in organizations, today I want to look at a couple of the biggest movements in work psychology that arose out of work psychology rather than management thinking.

The first led to the OD movement, Organization Development began with action. Two types of action: Action Research and Action Learning. In a sentence both emphasize self-awareness as the key to organizations developing a strategic edge over the competition and to sustained growth and the strength to cope with change and when things go wrong.

Kurt Lewin [1890 - 1947]

Action Research was the child of one of the most brilliant minds ever in psychology, Kurt Lewin. Lewin was simply a brilliant mind, and a very good scientist. Many attribute the growth and impetus of social psychology and organizational psychology to him, and he influenced many outside of his specialist areas with his ideas and thinking.

The most famous example being his work on genidentity, also known as counterpart theory, that looks a the commonality between physics and biology to explain how objects arrive to be as they are - and whether they remain the same when the original materials are gone - for example, new cells in the human body, or the famous logic puzzle of the Ship of Thesus, where all parts of the ship are replaced - is it still the same ship? Fpr physicists these are important questions. It was no doubt this line of thought that seems to have turned Lewin from being a behavorist to a gestalt psychologist.

Behavorism initally looks very promising in psychology. It was, by far, the most influential movement in lab and experimental psychology in the early parts of the twentieth century, especially in America. Behavorism relies on scientific evidence, observation, and denies subjective experience. It you can’t produce the same result again it ain’t valid.

The only problem with this is that much of what psychology deals with: why do we think about things differently, what is the mind, why do we make decisions differently etc; are subjective.

Franz Brentano [1838 - 1917]

This gave rise to the Gestalt school in Berlin with its roots in Franz Brentano’s very influential lectures in Vienna from 1874 - 1895. Among Brentano’s circle that he is known to have directly influence include his most famous student Sigmund Freud, as well as the founder of anthroposophy Rudolph Steiner, the originator of the phemenology school, Edmund Husserl, which stated that all we know about the world is how our mind’s experience them, and the originator of the idea of the Gestalt, Christian von Ehrenfels. Bretano’s idea that the relation between the mind and the outside world is the relationship of the human condition was a hugely influential one.

Christian Von Ehrenfels [1859 - 1932]

Von Ehrenfels’ idea of the gestalt, along with Husserl phenomenology, found a champion of his cause in Max Wertheimer with is two of his colleagues Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka at the University of Frankfurt in 1912. Wertheimer began by looking at the phenomenon of human sight and light and kept wondering how we are able to piece together images from patterns rather than the whole.

Max Wertheimer [1880 - 1943]

These three went on to establish the Gestalt movement in Berlin. (Not to be confused with gestalt therapy also called empty chair therapy.) Wertheimer has read Ehrenfels’ work where the term gestalt (Literally: form) was coined to mean that sum of the whole is not only greater than its parts, but is also not simply put together in sequence, like say a computer, but rather arises organically from all directions. While juxtaposed to this, but in conjunction, structure does make up wholeness. It was influential thinking that and eventually would lead to cognitive psychology replacing behavorism..

In his own words:

“The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clearcut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole.”
Social Research, 11 (translation of lecture at the Kant Society, Berlin, 1924).

Gestalt was obviously a pretty useful way to think about how the mind and brain work. It was also a way to think about synergy and our social interactions in groups and organizations as surely the whole idea of the effect of an organization is to achieve something greater than the sum of the parts. It is also very sueful in problem solving as it asks who the parts relate to the whole, and how the whole relates to the parts; it also considers the gaps to be important

So back to Kurt Lewin.

Lewin had begun as a behavorist, but found in Gestalt what he had been missing: why groups work. He argued that group work should be better than it was, that group work should produce results, and that with self-awareness the group should get better and better at what they do.

Lewin began by looking at what stops us achieving our goals. He developed the idea and called it force field analysis. Asking what forces were stopping or helping us to go from our current state to our desired state helped groups to see the invisible problems more clearly - but identifying the problems alone wasn’t enough.

Lewin had the gumption to ask what about the people themselves? Aren’t we as often as not ourselves responsible for creating the force fields, for putting barriers in the way and making life difficult for the group?

Here, force field analysis helped, but the fact remained that though we see the fault in others easily we are slow to acknowledge it in ourselves.

The issue is not just how to tell someone what they need to do to change, or even get them to listen and understand that, the problem is to keep working with them effectively afterwards.

So Action Research.

Action research is a way of framing group work that allows people to create a learning environment, or in Lewin’s phrase a “community of practice”, it is both problem solving and a strategical tool that allows organizations to become more self-aware.

How does it work?

Well, it works on a learning loop. Loops are common in quality: plan, act, check, re-evaluate, we learn as we’re doing. They range from a simple plan-check-do cycle to more advanced cycles like Six Sigma and OODA loops. The latter helped fighter pilots to predict likely behavior of enemy pilots in Vietnam, six sigma developed by motorola reduces error to six parts or less in a million, handy in manufacturing.

Lewin coined the term feedback from electrical engineering to mean constructive criticism. More than that though action research is about building a non-judgemental culture in an organization where people genuinely listen to each other rather than simply pushing their viewpoint.

From the IDEAS site

Let us now cross the Atlantic to Britain.

And Reg Revans.

Reg Revans [1907 - 2003]

Revans was originally an astrophysicist studying with both Rutherford and Thompson at the Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge University. I am lucky enough to have met those who knew Revans well, and the most common trait I have heard is that he was genuinely a humble man. He chose to leave his work in Cambridge to move instead to the Essex education board as he was convinced that he was an educator. He went on to beome the director of education between 1945-1950 of one of Britain’s largest employees: the National Coal Board.

While there he developed his ideas around Action Learning.

He developed a simple formula to express why people don’t succeed at work, and what they needed to do to remedy that:

L = P + Q

L is for learning. P = programmed knowledge (What we have been taught) and Q is for insightful questioning. So learning is a combination of knowledge and good questions. There are four major questions Who? Where? What? When? which should cover most aspects of the Q part of the equation.

Revans’ and Lewin’s point is entirely valid: we would rather damage our relationships in an organization rather than use some simple tools to acquire the wherewithal to learn how to genuinely learn and develop that organization effectively.

While it helps to have a practioner as an impartial facilitator the point is to find the heart and willingness to genuinely learn from each other. Management philosophy has picked up on this as we move more and more away from command and control structures to praticipative work.

Work psychology seeks to bring out the best in the organization, and Lewin and Revans both spent their lives dedicated to the idea that work should not be grey, crushing, or boring.

The other major point of the Action schools is that it moved work psychology into the workplace as a strategic tool to help individuals and companies develop strategies for excellence.

Day Three: Moving Beyond Humanistic Psychologies To The Modern Workplace

Day One: Re-Evaluating The Origins Of Work Psychology

Work psychology as discussed in the Course Introduction arose out of a need to accept that profitable work meant understanding how to get the most out of people at work.

This was not just about the relationship between people but also the relationship of people to an organization, and what working together means.

To see where to start we need to see how organizations arose, and where the work psychologist came from. Firstly, where it did not come from.

Henri Fayol [1841 - 1925]

Not surprisingly the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the need to organize the work force - and for that we need look no further than Henri Fayol - he might truly be called the father of modern management. His fourteen rules, published in 1917 as Administration Industrielle Ét Génerale while he was managing director of the Compagnie De Commentry Fourchambeau Decazeville mining company, are still relevant:

1. Specialization of labour. Specializing encourages continuous improvement in skills and the development of improvements in methods.
2. Authority. The right to give orders and the power to exact obedience.
3. Discipline. No slacking, bending of rules. The workers should be obedient and respectful of the organization.
4. Unity of command. Each employee has one and only one boss.
5. Unity of direction. A single mind generates a single plan and all play their part in that plan.
6. Subordination of Individual Interests. When at work, only work things should be pursued or thought about.
7. Remuneration. Employees receive fair payment for services, not what the company can get away with.
8. Centralization. Consolidation of management functions. Decisions are made from the top.
9. Chain of Superiors (line of authority). Formal chain of command running from top to bottom of the organization, like the military.
10. Order. All materials and personnel have a prescribed place, and they must remain there.
11. Equity. Equality of treatment (but not necessarily identical treatment).
12. Personnel Tenure. Limited turnover of personnel. Lifetime employment for good workers.
13. Initiative. Thinking out a plan and do what it takes to make it happen.
14. Esprit de corps. Harmony, cohesion among personnel. It’s a great source of strength in the organisation.

(Taken from Irwin Gray’s 1987 translation)

Fayol’s thinking when aligned with Max Weber’s bureaucracy and Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management gave all the impetus that was needed for classical management to thrive. However, it was noted to have drawbacks.

Why didn’t seem to make workers work harder simply because they wanted too?

And why was reward or punishment the only way to get them to work?

How could this new science from central Europe, psychology, with its emphasis on human behaviour, help?

Hugo Münsterberg [1863 - 1916]

One of the, if not the, psychologists who established the field of work psychology was Hugo Münsterberg. Münsterberg was noted for his scientific rigour, his keen mind, and an an emphasis on experimental psychology (That is psychological evidence garnered from experiments).

He not only worked at Harvard, but he was president of the American Psychological Association. (There is an excellent page from Muskigum College, OH; on him, that has been up since 1997, here.)

In 1913 he published in quick succession firstly a German version Psychologie und Wirlschaftsleben: Ein Beitrag zur angewandten Experimental-Psychologie (Leipzig: J.A. Barth) that he produced in English (And claimed from the off was not simply a translation but was adaptated to American culture) Psychology and Industrial Efficiency.

(Just to show life is stranger than imagination: the work is dedicated to one Harold F McCormick, then Chairman of The International Harvester Company, heir to the McCormick newspaper fortune, beneficiary of Chicago University, a man who had married the prototypical US tycoon John D Rockerfeller’s daughter, Edith, and then divorced said Edith to marry the notoriously bad opera singer, the truly marvelous Ganna Walksa, who married six times, including a Russian count, two millionaires, and the leading US Tibetan Buddhist scholar of the day. Orson Welles would later say that both Harold, along with other leading industrialists, and Gatta, in particular, were inspirational for the characters of Charles Foster Kane and Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, in his 1941 classic.)

Over twenty-four chapters, Münsterberg showed through experiments with electrical railway, telephone, and shipping workers that fitting the right person to the right job produced more satisfaction that F W Taylor’s scientific management, which has sought to find universal working conditions that would make work work for everyone.

The other major problem with Scientific Management he noted was that it was open to abuse: it could be used to not increase efficiency, but rather to increase work rates, and productivity in a machine like fashion (And he wasn’t half right either).

As a footnote: it wasn’t until 1966 that J W Brehm published his famous paper A Theory Of Psychological Reactance that the other major drawback to Scientific Management was fully noted.

Reactance is a cognitive bias (Why we think in certain ways, or act according to certain cognitive processes) that says humans naturally act opposite to what they believe will curtail their personal choices.

In Taylor’s defense he never meant Scientific Management to be abused, and did honestly believe that time and motion studies, and clocking in clocking out would improve work.

I actually remain a fan of Taylor’s writings, but not Taylorism. I believe that Taylor was right fundamentally right: it isn’t what we do that matters half as much as how we do it - and there are some universal rules that make work work. What makes others see us as professional will apply no matter what type of work we do: competence, composure, commitment etc; 

Münsterberg died in 1916 and would no doubt have appreciated the Hawthorne Experiments more than most. It is a tragedy that history concentrates more on Fredrick W Taylor and the Gilbreths than on Münsterburg.

A re-evaluation of his major contribution to modern HR is long overdue. His idea that if you find people who will love their work you will create a brilliant organization is very valid.

Then something happened that changed the way we think about people at work. At, in a fit of irony worthy of a Greek comedy, what began as an experiment to put people into artificially lit buildings and so make GE good pocket money in the proceedings, turned into one of the most important discoveries of work psychology

G Elton Mayo, F. J. Roethlisberger, and the Hawthorne experiments for General Electric, from fall of 1924 through to the spring of 1927, remain proof that if we approach science experimentation with an open mind we can truly contribute. The idea was originally a short study to see if brightness of light bulbs affected workers’ efficiency. Not suprisingly it was thought brighter bulbs brighter workers, dimmer bulbs dimmer workers.. The experiments were sponsored by the National Research Council of the National Association of Sciences in co-operation with The Illuminating Engineering Society’s Committee on Research.

The result was unexpected and could have been ignored in favour of the original premise, luckily Mayo had scruples, and a good solid scientific background in experimental psychology. His team and he discovered that giving the workers control over the light bulbs was way more effective way to get more work out of that individual than any increase in brightness, and in fact, under those circumstances, the wattage and luminosity of the bulb mattered not a jot. What he discovered is important: we want control, we want to be trusted to take control, we value being treated as adults, we want to be trusted to be allowed to have input and control over our environment.

Being a meticulous and good psychologist it took eight years in total, until 1932 for Mayo, and two further experiment designs (Involving relay assembly and bank wiring) to provide a set of data that showed that the right to individual determination in our choices creates cultural change in organisations. The conclusions, which deserve to be read slowly, wisely, and with an open heart, are here:

1. Work is a group activity.

2. The social world of the adult is primarily patterned about work activity.

3. The need for recognition, security and sense of belonging is more important in determining workers’ morale and productivity than the physical conditions under which he works.

4. A complaint is not necessarily an objective recital of facts; it is commonly a symptom manifesting disturbance of an individual’s status position.

5. The worker is a person whose attitudes and effectiveness are conditioned by social demands from both inside and outside the work plant.

6. Informal groups within the work plant exercise strong social controls over the work habits and attitudes of the individual worker.

7. The change from an established society in the home to an adaptive society in the work plant resulting from the use of new techniques tends continually to disrupt the social organization of a work plant and industry generally.

8. Group collaboration does not occur by accident; it must be planned and developed. If group collaboration is achieved the human relations within a work plant may reach a cohesion which resists the disrupting effects of adaptive society.

Not bad, eh?

Tomorrow we will look at how the social psychology movement created new thoughts about what work can be; but we will also look a the practical problems of work, and start to ask how work psychology can contribute to make work more than just a growing experience for the individual, it can also help companies to be strategically poised.

Day Two: Expectations And Realities - Getting To Grounded Work

“We work for 45 years, we work more than we are in any other relationship. You’ll see the people you work with more than you’ll see your children, partners, or anybody else. We work more than we sleep, eat, or any other human activity.

When we are 45 years old, we have worked for 20 years already, and yet we are only half-way through work with another 20 years ahead of us. How can we keep going? What gives us long-term motivation? What will keep us going? What will stop work being grey? Crushing? Boring?”

From “The Way of Intelegance” seminar introduction.

Hi, and welcome to the new course from Business Intelegant. Spread over 5 days (With an occassional break of a day or two when work gets busy for me), this course looks at some of the main types and tools used in one of the most interesting ways to answer that quote above: work psychology.

Work psychology, also called organizational psychology or I/O - Industrial / Organizational psychology is more than simply testing and evaluating candidates, or helping HR to design good job descriptions.

It’s even more than the strategic implementation of HR, the building and fostering of culture within organizations, and the research and practical tools and work design that aim to make work better.

It’s also been for a hundred years one of the most fertile grounds for reaping new ideas about what work can be - how work can help evolve new societies, how work can be creative, sustaining, and promote integrity and drive, rather than work as grey, boring, crushing and just plain yuk.

Scientists and thinkers like Kurt Lewin, Elton Mayo, Reg Revans, Rensis Likert, Chris Agyris, Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley, and Otto Scharmer. We will talk about the theories that have driven the field in leadership, organization development, and new thinking and look at theories like Action Research, Action Learning, Organization Development, Force Field Analysis, 360° Feedback, Emotional Intelligence, Theory U, to names a few, and hopefully they’ll all be done is an Intelegant fashion -which aims for simple, intelligent, elegant approaches.

We will also look at work psychology as a academic and practical scientific discipline. It is only a slight exaggeration to say if ts human and works then it has been the subject of a paper: from induction to entrepreneurial leadership, to the interaction of work and family, to promotion, discipline, and reward, onto retirement and beyond all aspects of human behaviour at work is constantly under study.

Above all work psychology is about helping us to make work a better experience through a clearer understanding of the what work is. Ideally work should be a good experience - and a profitable one, for sure - and one that feeds and nourishes the other parts of our lives without dominating it.

I believe the more we learn about work the better work becomes. It doesn’t matter what you work with, the basic tenets that make all work workable, and the job a success, nearly always apply.

I hope you will join me on this journey and that work becomes more interesting - no matter what your aims are - as a result.

Day One: Introduction to the Neuroscience and Medicine of Stress

Welcome to Business Intelegant’s five day open course on stress, moods, the brain, and the neuroscience behind it all. There also plenty of sites on stress, aren’t there? But not that many that really get into the meaning of it all in well, a deeper way.

What will help us to understand the neurobiology - and what is going on? What’s happening to our physical bodies? How and why does it alter our mental state? What does it do at a, literally, fundamental level to our cognitive abilities? How do those various hormones, neurotransmitters, and proteins react, and what are they anyway? How can our understanding change?

So, let’s go instead deep into the human brain and suggesting some tools that will define stress more clearly, and show how understanding the physiology of stress makes a difference.

Before we get there we’ll need to look at an aspect of the history of medicine in the first half of the twentieth century.

Or rather one man.

Hans Selye (1907 - 1982)
Hungarian-Canadian Endocrinologist

Hans Selye was born in Hungary in 1907. He may be considered the first to understand, evaluate, and promote the meaning of stress. He even coined the term stress, much like the founder of organization development, Kurt Lewin, (see Business Intelegant’s iGuru guide) coined the word feedback in 1930s from the fact that output feedback to input allowing for self-correction in electrical circuits, from engineering. Obviously engineers use the word stress. Measured in Pascals, in continuum physics all matter is subject to forces (Gas, liquid, plasma, solid) and so stress. In tensile physics, it has come to mean how much pressure a body can withstand before it breaks. And we all get that analogy.

Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878)
The Father Of Modern Physiology

More correctly Selye borrowed from homeostasis as developed by the father of modern physiology Claude Bernard in his famous statement “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d’une vie libre et indépendante.” (A stabile internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life). Homeostasis is more than just how the body controls its temperature, it is how a system, open or closed, regulates its internal environment. And your body is an open system. Food in - Non-food out for starters.

Walter Bradford Cannon (1875 - 1945)

Walter Bradford Cannon, another major influence on Selye, invented the term, homeostasis, in 1932, in his book The Wisdom of the Body. There is a wonderful page on Walter here.

Selye had begun, as early as his second year in medical school to wonder about forces on bodies, internal and external. It is important to note that he never considered stress to be en emotive word, it was simply an indicator that something was happening, good or bad. For example, simply flexing a muscle is stress, as is a feeling of anxiety. Both exert forces.

Selye experimented on mice with various toxins and noticed that even though they developed different diseases they seemed to share some fundamental symptoms, which we will come to in a moment. These are the symptoms of stress, or the General Adaptive Syndrome.

Selye went on to notice the same held good for humans: many different diseases, but the same symptoms boxes were consistently there along with those symptoms peculiar to that specific disorder. He died in 1982, having set up with Alvin Toffler (See Business Intelegant’s iGuru Guide for more details) and Richard Earle, the Canadian Institute of Stress.

For an outstanding personal reminiscence of Hans Seyle look no further than fellow Hungarian Dr Istvan Berczi’s wonderful accounts of his experiences. Just wish all webpages were so good at recording personal history.

OK. So far, so good.

So, what are the symptoms we’re talking about?

Well, Selye describes these, based on observation. He noted that before any major disease was fully apparent patients

“felt and looked ill, had a coated tongue, complained of more or less diffuse aches and pains in the joints, and of intestinal disturbances with loss of appetite.” They also generally “had fever, enlarged spleen or liver, inflamed tonsils, a skin rash.”

So, what are these symptoms caused by? That’s the right question. We have a set of observable symptoms, all common, across the sample population (Our observed patients), who then all go on to develop different conditions.

So, our first conclusion, is that it’s something that’s happening internally.

Generally, but not always, as a result of external stresses.

How do we know that?

Because some sick people with the same diseases seemed to not develop these symptoms, and the observation was that they seemed far more at ease. But we’re jumping some 10 years ahead of ourselves.

His initial observation was that their homeostasis was better. They were, literally, more in control.

Ironically, he was only a second year medical student and admitted quite cheerfully that with more education he would have had no interest in these general symptoms. His intelegant moment lay in the question: why in the history of medicine had so little thought been given to the “syndrome of just being sick”. He observed later in life that it was only observation and deduction, and could have been made anytime after the Renaissance.

Even more ironically, his ideas were poo-poo’d by the supervising staff at medical school. Until ten years later. Like any good scientist he never forgot his Prague patients.

The scene now switches to Canada, where Selye lived the rest of his life. And he got lucky. His real interest by this time lay in the endocrine system. Think glands.

The clever thing about glands is they work whether there are nerve endings between organs or not. They are molecules that signal each other. You could say that the glands are the flight towers and the molecules the planes and they’re going from a specific airport to airport. They’re carried in the blood.

They include steroids, (Androgens, estrogens, glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, progestagens), peptides and proteins (Lots of amino acid residues including, for example, insulin from the pancreas, follicle-stimulation, and any hormone from the pituitary gland - more on that later), and the rather significant amines (Such as noreprephine, epriphene, dopamine, and throxine) which are floating around the brain and perform the marvelous trick of being neurotransmitters too. (They make the neurons fire across the synaptic gap and so create the electricity that makes our brains, well, conscious. Smart, huh!)

So Selye looked at these symptoms and the endocrine system. And had his Eureka! moment. Being a good scientist he did test it for on while on small, furry creatures, and his initial hunch was confirmed. Yes, hormone release, when thrown into overload causes the unhealthy symptoms of stress.

He had also observed that some general medical care seemed to help everyone: easily digestible foods, keeping the room at a comfortable temperature, relaxation etc;

The genius was to put it all together.

He recognised that stress symptoms were caused by the hormonal overload which was augmented by a non-caring environment.

That on it’s own was significant.

But luck and hard work really do make for good inductive reasoning. Selye was trying to hard isolate hormones in from the placenta at the time. Here, I’ll let Istvan Berczi tell the tale:

“For a while it was thought that the adrenal enlargement and involution of lymphoid organs was specific for a particular hormone, but attempts to purify it always failed as the activity was lost. At some point it occurred to Selye that this, in fact, could be a nonspecific response to noxious agents, and, indeed, when he performed the control experiments, that was the case. He published a short note about his findings in Nature in 1936. During the same year a longer article was published by him in The British Journal of Experimental Pathology, where he demonstrated that the involution of the thymus was in fact mediated by the adrenal gland as it was absent in adrenalectomized animals if stressed. His experiments in chickens revealed that the Bursa of Fabricius is also extremely sensitive to steroid hormones.”

In other words, he had found out that it was not one hormone, or even one gland, and that was what had been confusing everyone, but rather the work of a combination of glands. More work followed between 1936 and 1946, he published an overview as a paper The general adaptation syndrome and the diseases of adaptation in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology, which identified the ternary causes of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal glands all working together. A triple whammy as it were.

So here goes:

You get stressed because:

The hypothalamus (It is the base of your brain and acts as the link between the brain and the endocrine system)

talks to

The pituitary gland, which releases ACTH (Adrenocorticotrophic Hormone) into the bloodstream and is pea-sized and sits at the base of the brain and is responsible for control of homeostasis - ah!)

Which activates the adrenal glands, just above the kidneys, to release the villain of the piece, corticoids.

So that’s: Hypothalamus -> Pituitary -> ACTH -> Adrenal -> Corticosteroids

Hans Selye in 1974

So goodbye and thank you, Selye.

And hello, corticosteroids….. more on them tomorrow.

Day Two: Deeper Down The Rabbit-Hole: The Physiological Effects Of Stress

Well, following the Intelegant Awards of 2007, honestly thought that nothing could beat Morgan Stanley’s stunning Christmas turkey. After all, nothing goes to show what a really dedicated collective team effort can achieve like a negative profit of $8,000,000,000. Good job guys.

But, as we all know to really mess things up it takes but one truly committed individual.

The kind of losses that make African debt look minuscule couldn’t happen again within six weeks of each other, could it?

Mais oui!

In a move so financially stunning that is makes the Titanic look like Timmy losing his rubber duck in his Friday night bubble bath, rogue trader Jerome Kerviel, has single-handedly cost one of the central pillars of French banking Société Genérale a stunning $7 billion.

Vraiment, faît accomplie…

Even Yasuo Hamanaka, who previously held the personal record losing some $2.6 billion in 1996, while trading copper commodities at Sumitoma, must be green as Cu2O with jealousy.

I guess it’s one record where you’re glad to lose the title?

But I also bet that Jerry boy won’t hold the title for as long this time…

Isn’t it time that someone took compliance as a healthy option - rather than bad tasting medicine?

After all, you and I might have stopped at say $2,000,000,000 - but then again, why don’t go, literally, for broke if no-one’s watching?

While this is an outstanding effort to wipe out one of the more important European banks that should have taken strategy of M. Porter proportions, he appears to have failed to actually detonate the Big Bertha of a bomb that these losses should. Unless you count a takeover - which does look likely. Oh. Merde.

It’s early days and one cannot predict these things. Just ask Jerome. Whose obvious predilection for prediction seems destined to fall flatter than an a bevy of bungy jumping elephants with manic-depressive tendencies.

I think we can all safely predict an excellent career for Jerome as author and chat show celebrity. If he survives prison. Poor Jerome. Courage mon ami, the loss of all your friends on Facebook is only temporary - give them a glimpse of a TV camera and those same friends will come running back - just don’t be surprised if they do so anonymously.

I mean there are fair weather friends, then lousy weather, then there’s darn that tornandey just ripped Daisy straight out of her stall and took Mary Lou and the best milkin’ pail with her weather. This is the latter.

The Daily Telegraph reports that it was the death of a father and the break-up of a marriage were the triggers for the behaviour - sounds reasonable - damaged ego plus misery - work becomes everything - must have status as the biggest and best.

Ah, boys and their toys.

Just hoping, seriously, he’s got one good friend to sit up nights with him for the next couple of weeks.

And no sleeping pills.

Methinks, it’s going to be tough for one person to beat this this within another six weeks, but hey, hedge funders are getting ready to move again so you never know…

I am just about to start a five day open course on the neuroanatomy and neuropsychology of stress on Monday here on the blog, and Jerome, mon brave, if you would drop by and read it, and I do think you might be the target profile for such a course, then I solemnly promise you’ll have one friend, well, if an add on my Facebook page doesn’t cheer you up, what will…?

Prof. Richard Restak is a great author and a very good thinker around neuroscience and its meaning in the real world. Here he is speaking on some of the strange things that subliminal messaging does: