Very seasoned leaders are coming to us saying that they know they can get more out of their staff but they just don’t know how far to push them.
Leaders are increasingly concerned that team members are saying how busy and stressed they are when their output isn’t really reflecting that level of “busy”.
The old ways of driving performance from people are no longer working and many aren’t quite sure why.
So why is this?
The landscape has changed. It was changing 10 years ago anyway and the pandemic absolutely accelerated that change.
To many leaders it feels like people want to work less all while expecting more perks and flexibility. It feels like accountability is at an all-time low. Many leaders are seeing workflow bottlenecks and also finding it takes longer to achieve outcomes than it did many years ago.
Psychosocial hazard legislation has also been introduced in Australia. This means that things like excessive workload, dealing with negative or aggressive behavior of others, lack of role clarity, micromanagement are now specifically included as not being ok in the workplace. While this may seem like a good thing on the surface, it’s left many leaders wondering how to give feedback and hold people to account without risking the perception of psychosocial hazards.
, and many are feeling like we have a much less resilient workforce than even just 10 years ago. If you keep telling yourself how busy and stressed you are on a repeated basis, you will actually feel way more stressed, and breathe more quickly, which exacerbates the stress response in the brain in a vicious cycle.
People also still have ambiguity around their hybrid culture as they haven’t given priority to explicitly working on their culture and removing this ambiguity. Brains hate ambiguity and spend a lot of cognitive energy trying to make sense of it – that’s cognitive energy that could be better spent doing the work!
The definition of high performance has also changed to ensure that we include “without burnout”. If the performance isn’t sustainable then it’s not high performance. Of course at NEP we’ve always had that definition, but it appears people now feel more comfortable demanding the “without burnout” piece, but they may have also gotten a little lax on the performance side of the equation.
So it’s safe the say the workplace has changed, yet leadership skills have generally not evolved quickly enough to know how to lead for high performance, while also not burning out their people.
And for companies to stay in business, make no mistake, performance is the goal. We aren’t running health retreats, but we need people to avoid burnout in order to drive that performance.
It’s important to bridge the gap between the old school leadership which just focuses on driving results, and coming too far the other way where it’s all about having a great workplace and wellbeing, but performance and profitability declines.
Performance is the goal – and you need wellbeing to get there.
How should we fix this?
- Let’s be clear – burnout isn’t solved with a yoga class and a fruit bowl. People get burned out because they overspend cognitive energy. So it’s important to educate people about cognitive energy and what drains it without them realising it – and given we have eight workshops on this – there is more to this than you probably imagine!
- Move the culture away from expecting instantaneous responses to messages . This is promoting continuous partial attention, and it’s the quickest way people are draining their cognitive energy without even realising it.
- Change your meeting culture – if people can sit in a meeting without being an active participant, then of course their minds will wander for a dopamine hit from continuous partial attention. Change your meeting culture so that it is expected that if you can look at another message while you are in a meeting – you are in the wrong meeting.
- Normalise disagreement, being held to account, and receiving feedback – instead of old school leadership training, which teaches people to have “difficult conversations”. If you have a culture where people lean into disagreement and welcome feedback, and know that they will be held to account then you reduce the expectations gap. Difficult conversations only ever arise when there is a mismatch of expectations. So, in a world of psychosocial hazards, you need to be really clear about what the high-performance culture is in that team.
- Educate people about neuroplasticity and the difference between attentional default and attentional control. Most people’s attentional default is to highlight how busy and stressed they are so that they believe it. Basically they are in a constant state of overestimating the problem vs underestimating their ability to cope with the situation. Often is this perceived stress rather than real stress. Attentional control identifies when this is happening, and helps the person to reframe and stay in perceived control of their stress levels to keep them in the productive stress zone.
There is so much ambiguity around leadership and workplace expectations which have been accelerated due to the pandemic.
There has never been a more important time to ensure that your high-performance culture without burnout is very explicit. And understanding neuroscience and how to use it for leadership is an absolute must.
At NEP we firmly believe that people want to work in an environment where they get to do their best work, and meaningful work, with great outcomes in a way that also avoids burnout fatigue, mental health problems, and psychosocial hazards.
This is absolutely possible. However leadership requirements have changed, and it’s important that leaders learn how to evolve their skills, so that they can continue to drive performance without burning people out.
This is why at NEP we start with the science, and then we provide frameworks based on that science, and we help with implementation so that people can be the best version of themselves.
Of course, if you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for our next 20/20 session or one of our open workshops here
avoided adjacent use of “realise” in different senses