Episode 3 - Control and your Health

Demanding jobs can actually be a good thing for us, provided we have a sense of freedom and control. Without this control, the negative health effects are dramatic. This podcast includes two ideas for improving control.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to episode three of the Leadership Today podcast. Each week we provide practical advice to address some of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we’re looking at control and your health - how having demanding jobs can actually be a good thing, provided we have a sense of freedom and control.

Autonomy is recognised as one of the core motivators people have in the workplace. With greater freedom and control over the way we perform our work comes higher levels of motivation and commitment. Recent research suggests that greater job control also improves our health and reduces our likelihood of dying over a seven year period. Autonomy isn't just motivating - it might just save your life. 

We've traditionally seen stress as a killer - that high job demands have a negative impact on our health. But this research shows that this isn't always the case. In fact, job demands can sometimes help improve our health, provided we retain a sense of control over our work.

Researchers* used a Wisconsin longitudinal study to track people over a seven year period to explore the relationships between job factors and health. They looked at the impact of job demands (including workload and time pressure) and control (the freedom an individual feels they can exert over their job) on health outcomes.

For jobs where people had low control, the research showed that high job demands did indeed negatively impact health outcomes. In fact, the odds of dying over the seven year period increased by 15%. For those who did make it through the seven years, this combination led to an increase in body mass index. In short, a demanding job where you feel little control is bad for your health.

Interestingly, for jobs where people had high control, high job demands were linked to a 34% decrease in the odds of dying over the same period when compared to low demand jobs. Higher job demands actually had positive health outcomes provided people had control over their work.

These findings are similar to my own research. I looked at people who rated their job demands as high. Those who felt their job provided freedom and autonomy of how they achieve results experienced 20% lower negative stress, and 52% higher engagement than those who lacked such freedom. 

What does this all mean for leaders? Here are two ideas. 

1. Seek out and provide autonomy: We know that autonomy motivates - people love having freedom and control over their work. Seek out more freedom in your own work. Negotiate greater flexibility and build your sense of control over the work you perform. If you're a leader, provide your team with more freedom. Give them opportunities to vary the way they perform their work. Manage them around the results they produce rather than how they produce results.

2. Challenge yourself and others: Seek out greater accountability. Once you have control, it's important to ensure you are stretched and challenged. As a leader, provide your team with greater accountability alongside the greater authority you've granted. Discuss the goals people have, and vary the work to capitalise on what motivates your people.

Autonomy and challenge aren't just good for business - they're good for our health too!

*Worked to Death: The Relationships of Job Demands and Job Control with Mortality

Erik Gonzalez-Mulé, Bethany Cockburn 2016 Personnel Psychology
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/peps.12206/full

Episode 2 - Your Best Ideas

Where do you come up with your best ideas? I bet it's not at your desk. In this episode we explore the conditions that lead to our best ideas, and how we can increase the chances of us coming up with even more great ideas in the future.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to episode two of the Leadership Today podcast. Each week we provide practical advice to address some of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we’re looking at a question I love posing to people in leadership workshops: namely “Where do you come up with your best ideas?"

Of the many hundreds of responses I've heard, not one person has ever said "at my desk". In fact, most people tell me they have come up with their best ideas when they're not at work.

People often say their best ideas come when they're "in the shower", "going for a walk", "taking a lunch break", "drifting off to sleep", and "on holidays". What do all of these activities have in common? They're all low-stress activities with few distractions. When people come up with their best ideas they're typically in a relaxed state, not stressing about coming up with an answer or distracted by other work that requires high levels of focus. They're free to think in a different way - free to explore new ideas and approaches.

The 19th century German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé (Keh Coolie) pioneered our understanding of the chemical structure of benzene. He had been working with benzene for years, but the way the structure formed eluded him. Later in his life he recounted having a day dream where he pictured carbon atoms dancing, then forming into snakes that bit each other's tails, forming a ring. He woke from that day dream with the answer that had occupied him for so many years - the carbon atoms in benzene form a ring. Would he have come up with this solution with more time in the lab or at his desk? Maybe, or maybe not. But what a great example of how a relaxed mind can produce amazing insights where 'hard work' had failed.

Chronic stress largely destroys our ability to develop genuinely new and creative ideas. The very stress hormones that are great for focusing our minds on the 'emergency' at hand reduce our ability to take a broader perspective beyond the immediate. We end up suffering from tunnel vision.

As leaders, our emotional state is contagious. If we're constantly stressed and fire-fighting through our day, it's likely that our teams are doing exactly the same. We end up cursed to repeat the patterns of activity and thought that we've already established, missing opportunities for continuous improvement and breakthrough thinking.

This isn't to say that stress is a bad thing. In fact, stress plays a very important role in stretching us beyond our comfort zones and focusing our attention. But if these moments of stress aren't balanced by moments of recovery and relaxation, we're likely to see negative impacts - not just on the way we think, but also on our health. Chronic stress is a killer, but the combination of stress and recovery is the key to long-term effectiveness.

Here are some thoughts to help you to work more effectively and come up with new ideas:

• Build some down-time into your schedule: Make sure you take annual leave and opportunities to work from home. Start work a little later every so often, or finish earlier. Change up your routine. Take a longer lunch break and go for a walk.

• Use a notepad or the notes app on your phone to capture new ideas or thoughts: Given these ideas will come up when we least expect them, it's worth planning ahead to capture them.

• Work in 90 minute cycles followed by 10/15 minute breaks to exercise, refuel and rehydrate: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe this in their book "The Power of Full Engagement". Start your day with the most important work, and take frequent breaks. This will help to keep you focused, energised and far more productive. And the best bet is that you end your day with the energy needed to be successful outside work.

• Encourage your team to do the same: As a leader, share these ideas with your team. Encourage them to experiment with their routine and day. Maybe a mid-afternoon gym session works for a team member - great! Maybe working in one hour cycles followed by a 10 minute walk works - brilliant! It requires you as the leader to get over our typical obsession with 'presenteeism' where we measure performance by the hours spent at work, to a more healthy focus on productivity.

So where do you have your best ideas? I’d love to hear from you.

As for next week’s episode - Do you want to decrease your risk of dying  in the next 7 years by 34%? I’ll be looking at the research showing a dramatic relationship between control at work and our health.

Episode 1 - Leadership Habits

Much of our leadership behaviour is driven by habits. In this episode we explore helpful and harmful leadership habits, as well as how to identify existing habits and build new ones.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to episode one of the Leadership Today podcast. Each week I provide practical advice to address some of today’s biggest leadership challenges.

Today we’re going to explore leadership habits - the routines and disciplines we all have that either help or hinder our leadership impact.

The good news is that leadership is a set of skills and behaviours that we can all learn and develop. Leadership is what we do every day that helps us to achieve results through people. And psychology has taught us a lot about how to change our behaviours and to develop new skills.

So first, a question - Did you brush your teeth this morning? Well of course you did. In fact you’re extremely confident that you brushed your teeth this morning. But you may not remember doing it. 

So did you actually choose to brush your teeth this morning? That’s an interesting question. Clearly, given you did brush your teeth, you must have decided on some level to do it. But it most likely wasn’t a conscious decision. 

It’s not like you walked into the bathroom this morning and said “hmmm - brushing my teeth - do I really want to do that today? Can I spare the two minutes? Is it the best use of my time?”.

You didn’t need to consciously choose to brush your teeth this morning because it is a healthy and positive habit for you. In fact, a positive habit like this frees up some conscious attention for you to think about other priorities.

However it wasn’t always a habit - in fact, it probably took someone years to convince you to brush your teeth daily.

Habits take effort to form, but once they are formed they also take effort to change. Recent research demonstrated that people took between 20 to over 250 days to build a new habit - in fact some people even left the experiment after a year having not built a habit.

Chances are that, like me and everyone else on this planet, you also have some unhealthy and negative habits. 

I recently met someone on a leadership program who let me know that she was struggling with anxiety. It was effecting her work and her overall wellbeing, and she was clearly keen to address the issue. The next morning of the program I couldn’t help but notice as the same person walked in carrying a large, double-shot coffee and an equally large can of Red Bull - it was part of her morning ritual and routine. And it was also a negative habit. Taking close to the daily recommended amount of caffeine in one hit would induce anxiety in most people. She just didn’t connect the non-conscious habit of purchasing the same drinks every morning, with the anxiety those drinks helped to produce half an hour later. Building her awareness of that connection helped her to challenge and change that habit. But it took feedback to highlight the habit.

In the same way, we can have healthy and unhealthy leadership habits that we can identify through feedback and by paying attention to how we’re spending our time.

Some Unhealthy leadership habits that I’ve seen, include:

• Starting the day responding emails - performing those kinds of tasks that require little attention at the point when we have the most focus and energy

• Another one is not taking breaks, or eating lunch at our desk - staying glued to our desks as our attention and productivity decline

• The second shift is another unhealthy leadership habit - going home to eat dinner after a long day, then firing up the laptop for another few hours of work every night - it impacts negatively on our productivity and just wears us out

You could look at replacing unhealthy habits with healthy leadership habits, like:

• Setting aside an hour each day, uninterrupted, to get one key thing done

• Or it might be going outside for a quick walk every 90 minutes to refresh and re-energise and to rebuild our focus

• You might want to leave mindless work like emails and meetings to that mid-afternoon slump we all go through around 2pm

• Or getting into the habit of just saying ‘thank you’ when someone pays you a compliment - it makes them feel better, and it makes you feel better as well

The key to building new habits is to experiment. Try something new out - if it doesn’t work, don’t just revert back but try something else new.

You will also want to measure your results. Rate your productivity, focus, happiness - whatever you can track that can give you a sense of the impact of the new habit, and encourage you to keep going. 

This week - can I encourage you to become aware of your habits. You might want to set an alarm each hour - something that will prompt you to look back over that previous 60 minutes and diarise how you’re spending your time.

And when you’ve identified habits you want to change, or new habits you want to develop - Involve others. Their feedback and encouragement will make all the difference.

I trust you’ve found this episode on leadership habits helpful. I look forward to hearing how you go, and to sharing another leadership today podcast with you next week.