Taking Action and Middle Way Management

In my last post, I discussed many aspects of fear in the workplace. It’s been a while since that post for several reasons. First, I’ve been super-busy consulting and bringing the practice of Middle Way Management to organizations in the real world. Second, I’ve been ruminating on the mitigation of fear in the workplace and the management of its attendant emotions once it arises; both of these require pre-emptive action and reactionary moves.

As you may have noticed, I’ve exchanged the idea of “intervention” (from psychology) with “action”. I chose this exchange based upon my own experience and from recently reading an article in which the authors actively promote the idea of combining conviction with compassion, resulting in a scholar who “dares to care.” In this article, they advocate for the passionate, courageous researcher who not only speaks out, but acts out. We are taught at the university to view management and leadership in purely scientific ways, which are, at the end of the day, pretty dispassionate means for viewing just about anything. An activist scholar is a rare things these days.

What the authors of the article are really calling for is action, a kind of positive action based upon fundamental, closely-held values that require the courage of holding convictions dear as ideas are presented to the world. By creating an assessment instrument, consulting with organizations about how to apply it, and writing fairly extensively about it, it has been my intent to put Middle Way Management into action. Is this a courageous act? Only time will tell.

Back to the mitigation of organizational fear.

Pre-emptive Mitigation

I am not now nor have I ever been an advocate of pre-emptive war. The pre-emptive mitigation of fear is another matter entirely. The most critical aspect of any pre-emptive action is a necessarily overriding concern with making the right move at the right time. As you can imagine, it is never possible to plan for or prevent every possible cause of fear, especially in a workplace with so many souls who all have their own ideas about what makes them fearful. The best we can do is take action to clear the air of anything that might create an environment (i.e., culture) of fear.

 When taking action to clear the organizational air, deciding about what does and does not cause fear is crucial to a successful effort. In the context of organizations, several actions and, frankly, inactions create a culture of fear. For instance, feeding and then allowing the rumor mill to take its own negative course is a deadly concoction of action/inaction that will create a fear-filled environment and destroy morale across the board. A great way to accomplish this is to lay off several employees with no open discussion about why they were laid off or what the future holds for everyone else in the organization. This seems like common sense, yet you would be shocked at how many organizations mismanage even this seemingly obvious task.

The Heart of the Matter

At the heart of every negative emotion lies a black, smoldering core of fear. For example, a manager who feels he should have been promoted to vice president by now is driven by the fear of failure and of how his colleagues, peers, family members, and friends view his apparent failure with organization. In his mind, he has so tightly linked and defined himself by his job title that he has no choice but to create his own suffering by thinking he is not measuring up to preconceived idea about where he should be in his career at any point in time. In this way, he lets fear rule his life by conquering his mind with thoughts of inadequacy.

I call this “Willful suffering.”

Such thoughts and attitudes can be changed, yet many of us choose to measure ourselves against a fanciful standard that does nothing more than create suffering. Of course, we should all have goals, yet those should never create anger, frustration, sadness, embarrassment, or other emotions that lead to suffering. The magic is clearly in how we view ourselves as we pursue our short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals. If you are content with your progress, you will avoid the type of fear-based suffering that leads to hasty decision-making, bad choices, and deep personal misery.

As a Middle Way Manager, you must constantly value the progress you have made and are making. This is not dwelling in the past; rather, it is a recognition that remaining mindful and living in the present have worked to put you in a position where you can realize more good, meaningful accomplishments in the present and moving forward. You are a model to those you lead and it is encumbent on you to present a clear, coherent vision to your team members that helps them manage their own emotions with patience, empathy, kindness, and compassion.

So, go now, and management with compassion!

Onward! Darin

Article mentioned in this post:

Adler, N. J., & Hansen, H. (2012). Daring to care: Scholarship that supports the courage of our convictions. Journal of Management Inquiry, 21(2), 128-139.

Copyright © 2009-2012, Darin R. Molnar, PhD. All rights reserved.

Middle Way Management and Fear

In my last post, I considered how boundaries create respectful fences that help us develop healthy self-compassion and reduce overcommitment and other behaviors that can lead us into stressful situations. In this post, I discuss how fear as conscious and unconscious process acts as an inhibitor of creativity and innovation in the workplace.

The Only Thing to Fear is...
Fear is an emotion we must all deal with on a daily basis. While this may strike you as a bold statement, it is true: we experience fear and engage in fear reactions many times throughout our busy days. In fact, fear and the fear response are fundamental parts of what it means to be human. Without fear, we would rush into situations that compromise our integrity, our relationships, and, at worst, our physical well-being; on the other hand, it can lead to debilitating emotion and reactive behaviors that stop our progress dead in its tracks.

Fear is our greatest gift, and our greatest curse.

Fear is created in several ways. The first and most obvious is the result of an overt physical threat that sends the heart racing and the brain looking for a way out or a way to fight back. This is the classic "fight or flight" response that pulses adrenaline throughout the body, changing our physiology in significant ways. As a manager, you can experience this in the workplace as a reaction to a non-physical business situation involving a boss, a peer, a customer, a team member - just about anyone with whom you interact can push you into a fear reaction.

The second way fear is created is through our own thoughts. We can run "what-ifs" and "coulda-woulda-shoulda" scenarios on the movie screens of our minds, creating fear that is as real as any created by external sources. This can occur in the workplace as a manager considers the potential ramifications of a tough decision that might affect his own position within the organization. This sort of scenario often results in "analysis paralysis" or ends up prompting either hasty or overly cautious decisions that do not reflect the manager's true decision-making skill or personal ethics; a poor outcome, indeed.

Finally, a leader-manager has many opportunities throughout the day to create fear. Attending to one's language and understanding how one's words can land on another are crucial parts of an effective Middle Way Management™ practice. Along with this, subtle body language cues can create the type of fear that results in damage to team morale or the destruction of a business relationship (explained in greater detail below). The true Middle Way Managemer™ neither creates nor promotes fear in any form.

Regardless of how the emotion of fear is created in one's mind, it is real and we are geared as a species to react to it in very specific ways based upon brain function and neurochemistry that are the results of millennia of natural selection and evolutionary refinement of homo sapiens.

This is Your Brain on Fear
In the classical systems theory sense, the brain really is more than the sum of its parts. Pull out one component and others will surely fail, as well. We see evidence of this in people who suffer serious brain trauma. Along these lines, specific parts of the brain are implicated in the creation of and reaction to fear. When those parts are damaged or in some way incapacitated, fear can be emphasized or displaced depending on the injury. Likewise, a malfunctioning part of the brain that works with another to encode memories important for self-preservation based upon the fear response can inhibit such activity, compromising a person's personal safety.

Fortunately, most of us never experience such injuries and our fear functions remain fully intact and operational for the duration of our lives. Implicated in the creation of the fear emotion and responses are several key parts of the brain; specifically, the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex, thalamus, hippocampus and other structures (don't worry - no more brain terms will be forthcoming). The point here is that the human brain is wired to detect and react to fearful situations, even when they are created within our own minds based upon nothing more than thoughts (which are, by the way, things).

A recognition of the role of the nearly autonomic response to fear by the human brain is necessary because serious implications exist for how you deliver your daily Middle Way Management practice in light of fear's impact upon human behaviors. Two example illustrate this point nicely. First, we have evidence from neuroscientific studies that body language can induce the fear response (via the amygdala's ability to catch such signals). Based upon this, the Middle Way Manager must not only attend to language, every subtlety of every interaction must become a matter for utmost concern.

Second, we have evidence, also from neuroscientific studies, that communication between the two hemispheres of the brain via the corpus callosum (the thick, fibrous material that connects them) is inhibited as part of the fear response. This means the necessary functional components of creativity and logic are seriously hampered, thereby stifling the processes so necessary for people to provide the innovation that is a critical part of any vibrant organizational culture.

Interventions or Remedies?
In psychological terms, a solution designed to remedy fear is called an "intervention". I will not make suggestions for interventions in the post, saving them for my next submission. My point here is that there are interventions that a Middle Way Manager can include in her practice to mitigate the perceptions of and reactions to fear in the workplace. It is not always possible to avoid fear incidents, yet it most certainly is possible to practice the sort of mindfulness that allows us to recognize potential fear-inducing situations and to react to them with equanimity, patience, kindness, and compassion, all hallmarks of the true Middle Way Manager.  More to come on this topic in my next post.

Go now, and manage with compassion!

Onward! Darin

Copyright © 2009-2012, Darin R. Molnar, PhD. All rights reserved.