It's A Viral World: Is Your Learning Contagious?

Dr. Ellen Weber at Brain Based Business recently asked:

"Are you aware that the human brain comes equipped with its own plasticity … to be changed and grown by the active process of learning together daily?

What new discovery will you learn … and engage others in today?"

That's what developing people is all about.

Speaking of developing people: What are people-in-the-know saying about how to develop the next generation of people through education?

This will give you a a quick look at what at least some educators are saying:

"Just Relax!" Can Cause Stress

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
--William James

Bill may have been right.

But what happens when you are given thoughts?

The Irony of Trying to Relax

All of us have had someone suggest, "Oh, just relax." Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

There's a reason for both.

It turns out that the order to "relax"  can produce everything from anxiety to insomnia as a result of stress.

Two studies conducted by Wegner, Bloome and Blumberg found that "intentional relaxation under conditions of mental load or stress produces ironic increases in skin conductance level (SCL).

Note: Skin conductance  can be described simply as sweat gland activity. Using electrodes placed on two fingers of one hand, one can measure the tiny changes in the electrical activity of the sweat gland cells located in the deepest layer of the skin. Sweat glands are activated through inputs from several areas in the brain including the frontal lobes. Skin conductance is associated with arousal, mental activity, stress, fear, and positive and negative affect, which makes it a relatively simple yet informative psychophysiological measure.

The experiment was rather simple.

1. Participants in one group received progressive relaxation instructions.

2. Then they were told, "Now I'd like you to remember a number, and this is an important part of the experiment, so I'll keep repeating the number until you memorize it."

3. Participants in another group weren't given the relaxation instructions, just the task.

The outcome: Those instructed to relax under the high load of rehearsing a long number had higher SCL than those under a high load without instructions to relax.

What This Means for Business and the Business of Life

Mixed messages breed stress.I once watched a very well-intentioned manager a team building session by saying, "Here are the results of your 360 team feedback. I know some of the information may be thought-provoking, but just relax."

Had the statement only included the informational part, the immediately observable level of anxiety may not have occurred.

Multi-tasking as part of "Quality Time." Telling your spouse that you are going to relax while putting together your financial presentation and watching a DVD together is a lie. You may have sensed it before--now you know it's a scientific fact. Just hope (s)he doesn't have a polygraph with a couple of those finger electrodes nearby. If so, you better hope the gift shop is open late.

Telling someone to feel good may have the opposite effect. Hopefully, we all know that it is fruitless and even demeaning to try changing how someone feels by telling them how they should feel. According to the implications of the study, we can actually make someone feel worse (stressed)as a result of trying to get them relaxed while their minds are at work. This applies to managers giving performance feedback, parents disciplining children, and coaches working with clients. Healthy people are designed to live and learn by living and learning through the depth and breadth of their emotions. Attempting to alter the truth of what someone is experiencing will inhibit their process. And  you won't be seen as helpful.

You probably have some related experiences and stories; jump in and add them to the comments. We'll all benefit from them.

You Can Be A Successful Corporate Escape Artist, if. . .

. . .you read Pamela Skillings' new book, Escape From Corporate America.

I write about what's going on in the workplace and how to look at things differently or more accurately. My experience inside--and outside--of corporate life tells me that Pam has put together an accurate portrayal of what you need to think about and do to make a successful career change.

Eight Things That Will Keep You Engaged and Leave You Wanting More

1. A quick survey of your current state of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and why.

2. Statistics that help you understand you're not alone.

3. Tips to make your current situation better if you really do like your organization but feel lethargic or disgruntled.

4. A self-help guide for doing some "career dreaming" that leads to practical steps you can follow for action.

5. How to make yourself more valuable where you are right now.

6. How to go solo intentionally, practically, and successfully.

7. How to identify "corporate jobs that don't suck" as well as why they don't and why you might just like them.

8. Interviews with more than 50 "Escape Artists" who made it, how they did it, and who offer sound--and hopeful--advice.

(Any author who can get Dilbert's Scott Adams to provide tips in the same pages as Perez Hilton really is something special).

Note: This is a book to be devoured by managers and HR types as well. Every page includes some morsel that will lead to an awareness of what you need to do to get and retain good people.

Oh, yes. I highly recommend Escape From Corporate America.

Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw wish they had this one before they got on that plane.

Making Changes? Pay Attention to High Achievers

"Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."
--Alvin Toffler

You already know that working more doesn't necessarily mean better results.

But we still do it.

In fact, we have more knowledge than ever about psychology, physiology, and well-being, but still fall into the "It'll be better if we work harder and longer" trap, followed by "We'll slow down as soon as we reach______."

Which is what people with addictions often say.

Whether you are a talented manager caught up in activity--or a talented worker at the receiving end--you may notice that, indeed, the results don't always seem to match the effort.

Maybe it's because you're talented and stressed.

Talent + Stress: Unproductive Combo

It turns out that, under pressure, talented people become distracted because the stress uses up their working memory. "Working memory" is something that highly accomplished people have in abundance; they rely on it to solve challenging problems. Under stress, they use shortcuts that undermine their normal strategies and make them less accurate.

This comes from the research of  Sian Beilock, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago as reported in Science Daily.

Professor Beilock also notes that those who start with less adequate supplies of working memory learn other ways of problem solving to compensate for their deficiencies. The downside: Although these folks aren't impacted additionally by working under pressure, their alternative problem solving strategies aren't highly accurate to begin with.

The punch line for organizations:

Watch the High Achievers

When initiating change, lots of attention is given to "the masses." It's assumed that the "best and the brightest" will embrace and lead large scale change. The research here shows that such conventional wisdom is neither conventional nor wise.

We want to believe that, under stress, there are organizational superheroes who will save the day. That kind of thinking just isn't borne out by the research cited here. In fact, putting too much of an extra burden on high performers may actually ensure decreased accuracy in problem-solving when good judgment is needed the most.

Stress levels are a somewhat personal thing, so there's no gauge that says,"When we hit 7.5, stop!" But this new information does say, "Pay closer attention to how much change can successfully take place in a given amount of time."

Ignoring the reality of the data may not only undermine a major change effort; it may also undermine the very well-being of the people needed to take the company into the future.

How do you think organizations can--and will--react to this kind of information?

Note: A tip of the hat to Shane at Zoomstart whose article got me thinking about this.

26 One-liners for Employee Engagement

When David Zinger put out the invitation for an alphabet soup of employee engagement tips, it was too good to pass up. Others felt the same way. So David ended up producing the results as the 300 Free Employee Engagement Keys eBook which you can also dowload here.

David's dedication to professional development generated an entire network devoted to the EE topic. You can look and join here for free.

The idea was to use each letter of the alphabet to offer up thoughts on engagement, so I give you:

Steve's EE, A to Z

Amour: Am I doing what I love to do?

Bingo!: We have work experiences that make us want  to yell this every day.

Croon: Our projects make us want to sing about them--at least sometimes.

Destiny: We have a sense of more than just today.

Echo: What we do reverberates across the organization. We listen, so we know whether or not to make adjustments.

Federline: We don't make the same mistakes as Britney and skip the engagement part. Which means we also understand that winning a "trip to Paris" isn't always a good thing.

Glad: We take time to celebrate when good things happen.

Harpoon: When something starts to drag us down, we nip it in the bud.

Isolate: Only problems, not people.

Java: We're skilled at drinking it while the plug-in is downloading.

Killer-apps: We know how to apply our work to real business solutions.

Latitude: What we give to our colleagues.

Mojo: What our competitors think we've got an abundance of.

Nah!: What we say when others try to tell us we're too committed.

Oh yeah!: The kind of thing we say to each other when someone does something really good.

Prada: The stuff we'll never wear because we're too engaged to go shopping.

Quirks: What we admire in each other that the disengaged choose to criticize.

Rigor: We think this is a good thing, since the opposite is rigormortous.

Serious: About our mission, not ourselves.

Telemarketing: What we don't do with good ideas because we know the importance of face time.

Utopia: What we shoot for even though we know it doesn't exist.

Vacuum: We avoid operating in one. Because of our level of engagement, we may avoid using one as well. Life challenge: Learn the difference.

Why Not?: One of the first things we ask after hearing "Why?"

Xenogamy: We practice cross-fertilization of ideas. We also never say this word out loud in meetings.

Yin & Yang: We look for the complementary relationships in opposites.

Zone: What this is all about, as in, "We want to be in the . . ."

What would your alphabet include?