Many leaders are finding it hard to drive performance in today’s environment and it’s only going to get harder before it gets better. Sometimes leadership can feel a bit more like running a kindergarten than a professional team of people.
It feels like so many people in the workplace are now spending more time looking to be offended, than actually just getting down to do the work.
Leaders are saying that this oversensitivity in the workplace is costing a lot of energy with people not wanting to offend others, and therefore putting off conversations that need to be had to drive outcomes.
And if this is hard enough for seasoned leaders to navigate, spare a thought for emerging leaders – most of whom haven’t ever had any formal leadership coaching and spend more time second-guessing what they should be doing, than actually doing anything to lead people properly. And fair enough – they have probably been promoted on their technical ability, and haven’t been supported when they move into their leadership role – which is generally a whole new job in itself.
What is causing this oversensitivity in the first place?
In Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, he puts together a fantastic synthesis of the research which is finally starting to emerge on the use of social media and devices, and how this is impacting global mental health.
He discusses how children’s brains aren’t developing correctly due to lack of play in the real world, and too much online time.
This is adversely impacting social skills as children aren’t learning basic skills of negotiation and conflict resolution. In the online world you resolve a conflict by hitting the “block” button. You can’t really do that in the workplace.
Mental health isn’t anything amazing by the way. The definition of mental health basically means that you can hold down a job and can deal with normal everyday stress. Nothing about that definition screams high performance. And what is frightening is that mental health has been on a sharp decline since 2010 – especially for people under age 35.
Compare the above to the definition of psychological capital. This includes hope, resilience, self-efficacy and optimism. This is way more than mental health. It allows people to think flexibly. It allows people to embrace and adapt to change far more easily.
So long story short, we can’t be leading people like they have the psychological capital of 2005, because basically – they don’t have the same psychological capital. It’s that simple.
So what do we do?
While it might be tempting to throw our hands up in the air, the good news is that we can take measures to close the expectations gap between the generations in the workplace.
In great news, we can coach people to build their psychological capital and we can all take responsibility to do this. We have enough neuroscience to support that we can train our brains to think more helpfully.
Research supports that if we coach people in the neuroscience of how this is possible, and then provide frameworks for them to implement in a way that feels most authentic to them, people can take responsibility for building their mental fitness. And the even better news is that Gen Zs are embracing this approach and doing some great things to help themselves.
Providing leadership programs and coaching for emerging leaders will prove invaluable for your business.
So often we see very senior leaders getting caught in the weeds. When emerging leaders haven’t been coached on how to set clear expectations, hold people to account to achieve outcomes, how to promote respectful disagreement, and the list goes on…unproductive behaviours are allowed to creep in slowly. Coaching your emerging leaders to lead properly will significantly cut down the leadership time required of senior leaders, who are paid the bigger bucks to deal with bigger issues.
Limit social media use in the workplace, and ideally encourage people to work with their phones out of reach with notifications switched off.
As just one of a number of examples, I recently presented at a conference to a national accounting firm and then facilitated three breakout sessions afterwards where I explained what social media and notifications are doing to the brain, mental health and productivity. I was so impressed that in each breakout session, many of the younger staff came up with the idea that they should switch off notifications and keep their phone out of reach when they are trying to do their deep focus.
So as long as we explain the neuroscience, we are seeing that we can trust younger staff to make smart choices. And of course it’s much better when it’s their idea than when the leaders just randomly impose a social media ban during work hours, which will likely backfire.
Leadership strategies that worked in 2005 are no longer appropriate. And if you think it’s hard now, just wait until around 2030 when the tsunami of Gen Z will be entering the workforce with a significant deficit in communication, conflict resolution and negotiating skills.
This will be massively problematic for the workforce and leaders if we don’t do things differently.
The workplace landscape has changed significantly in the last 5 years and will continue to do so in the next 5 to 10 years.
It’s not all bad news. The landscape is also changing in so many great ways. So long as we embrace the great bits, and use some neuroscience to help with this, the future is very bright for leaders and staff. It’s just important to make sure that do things differently. Leadership strategies from 2005 aren’t really a thing any more. The “next evolution” of leadership coaching is required.
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?