The science of improving your work life
Caroline Webb, author of ‘How to Have
a Good Day’ and chief executive of Sevenshift, on what you can do to have a
more fulfilling work life.
Whether
you’re working at your dream job or you’ve been plotting your escape for
months, chances are that you’ve experienced your fair share of days that simply
can’t end soon enough. Caroline Webb, chief executive of Sevenshift, an
advisory firm focused on performance in the workplace, and a senior adviser to
McKinsey & Co., has put together a guide for improving our work life with
her new book How to Have a Good Day.
Drawing
upon extensive research in the fields of neuroscience, behavioural economics
and psychology, Webb draws out key lessons on how we can make our work smarter,
productive and ultimately more satisfying. Edited excerpts from an interview:
In
the book there is an emphasis on priorities and focus. How does the science
indicate that those things are so important?
Well,
the importance of being deliberate, let’s say, about our priorities and our
goals comes from the way that our brain processes information. Our conscious
brain can only process a portion of reality around us at any one time, which is
kind of hard to accept, because subconsciously we’re filtering out most of
what’s going on around us, and we don’t really like to think of ourselves as
not being objective observers of the world.
But
what the brain decides to consciously prioritize and make sure we notice are
things that resonate with what is already top of mind for us. It means that if
you’ve decided that something is a priority, you are way more likely to notice
it than if it isn’t.
There’s
a classic study which is done with a bunch of radiologists who are looking
through a pile of lung scans and there was a gorilla printed on the last one.
The vast majority of them, 83%, didn’t see the gorilla even though eye-tracking
devices showed they’d looked directly at it. The reason is it wasn’t their
priority. If we go into a meeting looking for a fight, we’ll probably get it.
If we go in looking for collaboration, we’ll probably get that. It’s really
remarkable how the facts can appear to change once we’ve decided what our
priorities are.
You
talk about the interaction between the mind and the body when it comes to us
having a good day.
There
are reasons you want to look after your body for health reasons, but we know
that. The bit we’re much less aware of is the fact that the way you treat your
body has an immediate effect on the quality of the thinking that you do and the
way that you feel emotionally. You immediately boost your focus and your mood
by, say, doing 10-20 minutes of moderate activity. If people understood that
there’s an immediate payoff to breaks, exercise, downtime, they’d see it much
less as time out and much more as time invested.
How
can we best manage our workflow so we have a bit of downtime?
I
don’t say there’s only one time of day that you should do any particular type
of task—it’s about self-awareness and starting to notice when you’re at your
best and giving that time to your most important task. Beyond that, there is
some general advice that everybody can take.
First
of all, single tasking. If you do one thing at a time you’ll get things done
much more quickly and much more brilliantly than if you multitask. The
conscious brain can only do one thing at a time, so if you’re checking your
email while you’re trying to write something or trying to talk to someone then
you are essentially asking your brain to keep switching back and forth and of
course that’s inefficient. So going offline while you’re doing your most
important task for the day and just really focusing on that one thing means
that you get it done more quickly.
The
other general thing is the importance of strategic downtime.
All
the research suggests that the quality of your decisions and choices declines
the longer it is since you’ve had a break. That’s pretty stark. So the idea of
taking breaks being for wimps, it’s just not true if you care about the quality
of your work. So be tactical about ‘when can I get a five-minute break between
meetings, can I end meetings slightly early, can I plan more breathing room
that allows me to reflect on.
You
talk about the discover-defence axis (how we are subconsciously on the lookout
for threats and rewards) and how even small slights can put us into this place
where we’re less productive. In a modern-day office environment, feedback,
evaluation and criticism are so important. How should these things be handled?
Critical
feedback is almost perfectly designed to put a brain on the defensive and
(then) they’re not able to think as clearly because the brain is devoting some
effort to that defensive response. And obviously then what happens is the
change that you’re hoping for doesn’t manifest itself. So, how can you give
feedback in a way that doesn’t put people on the defensive? There are three
brain-friendly feedback techniques that I talk about, and one of them is to be
really, really explicit and clear and fulsome and specific about the things
that you like about what they’re doing so that the framing is: “What I really
like about this is… specific thing, specific thing, specific thing, what would
make me like it even more is….”
There
are two things going on here. One is that people talk about the ‘praise
sandwich’ and the fact that it’s a good idea to say something positive before
you say something negative, but the problem with that classic approach is that
it only solves a fraction of the problem. We’re all geared to be more sensitive
to threats than to rewards. So you have to be aware that one piece of negative
feedback will drown out positive feedback unless you make sure that the
positive feedback is believable and credible.
And
the way to do that, and this is the second thing to note, is that the brain
much prefers concrete examples to generalities. So if you hear someone say,
“You’re great, you’re great, now here are five things that I think you could do
differently….” It’s obvious when I say it like that, but the truth is that is
often the way that feedback is delivered. You think, “Well, I’m generally
saying you’re amazing, so surely that should be enough”, but no, what you
remember are the specifics, the stories, the examples. And so that’s why the
format of what I really like about ‘specific, specific, specific, and then what
would make me like it even more’ is it’s just a really good way of keeping
people off the defensive, while telling them exactly what they need to hear, so
it’s not a soft option.
If
we’re having a bad day, how can we react to that?
I
actually split (the part of the book on resilience) into three. The first one
is staying cool in the moment. You’re in the meeting and it’s going badly, how
do you stay calm? But then there’s also after the fact, how do you move on?
Because they’re almost like two different skills.
Then
there is sort of an even longer-term skill, which is just recognizing all the
things we were touching on before, which is that the way you treat your body
helps your emotional resilience over time. So there are a few different
dimensions of resilience and handling a bad day.
One
thing that I find super helpful when you’re in the middle of a situation that
isn’t feeling great is to use the distancing technique, and that’s where you
put yourself in a different perspective. I personally like the distance of
saying, “What am I going to think about this looking back in a year’s time?”
There’s a CEO I was coaching who likes saying, “If someone else was CEO of this
company, what would I advise them?” All of these distancing techniques have
been shown to reduce the level of defensiveness.
There’s
another killer technique, which is called reappraisal. If it’s a recurring
thing or is just something you’re finding hard to move on from, it’s really
helpful to use this technique. It is essentially telling yourself a different
story about what could be going on. You first home in on what the facts are and
strip it of interpretation. Instead of saying, for example, “My boss never pays
me any attention”—that’s a generalization, it’s also a tiny bit emotional—what
you do know for sure is perhaps something more like “My boss didn’t invite me
to speak at this week’s team meeting”. In fact, what you actually know given
the brain’s filtering and the fact that reality is subjective is “I don’t
remember my boss asking me to speak at the team meeting”. So the first step is
getting clear on the facts, and then you say, “Okay, what could be an
explanation of that?”
And
it almost doesn’t matter if you believe the stories that you make up, but the
very fact of starting to contemplate other explanations than “I’m being
ignored” has been shown to not only improve your resilience to specific
situations going on wrong now, but actually boost your resilience longer term
to something that goes wrong later.
Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 26 July 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
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