A new global study on employee engagement conducted by Right Management found the top five global engagement drivers to be:

1) I am committed to my organization’s core values
2) Our customers think highly of our products and services
3) My opinions count
4) I have a clear understanding of what is expected of me at work
5) I understand how I can contribute to meeting the needs of our customer

Notice that all five drivers reflect a state of mind - how employees feel (or how they perceive customers feel). Once again, emotion rules in the workplace.

The Marshmallow Test

Did you know that a more accurate predictor of high SAT scores (and success later in life) is not an IQ test? Rather, it's the marshmallow test. Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWW1vpz1ybo and see children struggle with the choice: one marshmallow now or (if they wait until the researcher returns to the room) two marshmallows later.

Those children who could delay gratification in this test when they were four or five, performed better in high school and scored higher on their SATs. Regardless of their respective I.Q. scores.

And the differences follow subjects into adulthood. The original children in the study are now in their early 40s - and those who could resist the marshmallow when they were young are more successful and have achieved more than those who could not.

GHOST STORY

I believe in ghosts.

Not only do I believe in ghosts, I’ve seen how they haunt individuals, teams, departments, and entire organizations around the world. And nowhere are these workplace ghosts more insidious than in the area of collaboration.

What I’m calling “ghosts” are those out-dated attitudes and behaviors about collaborative knowledge-sharing that still haunt corporate halls and factory floors. It’s an expensive haunting that causes wasted talent and underused brainpower and results in billions of dollars in lost ideas, in not sharing best practices and lessons learned, in a lack of innovation, and in employees’ not having the information needed to do their jobs.

Now that’s scary!

To explain what I’d been seeing in organizations, I wrote a book called “Ghost Story.” And I wrote it as a business fable -- just for fun.

And fun I had creating some pretty weird characters: A magpie who hoards information, a three-legged Martian who is the ultimate outsider, a 400-pound pig in an admiral's uniform who treats staff as if they were children, and the two-year-old head of IT who speaks "dribble" – to name only a few.

Actually, it wasn’t that hard for me to create these characters. Truth is, I’ve met all of them. Of course I’m speaking figuratively. The pig, for example, is the prototypical "command and control" manager who distributes information on a “need-to-know” basis. His role, he believes, is to protect people who are unable to absorb what's really going on within the organization. Let them know what's actually happening, he insists, and they would panic, freak out, and defect like rats. So, naturally, the pig is hesitant to share.

Everyone in the story, in fact, has a valid reason for not sharing information. The Martian tried to give his opinion when he first joined the organization, only to be told: “That's not the way we do things around here. It may have worked on Mars, but not here.” So, over time, he stopped contributing.

And we’ve all met the “techie” (and other experts like him) who thinks he’s informing us, but really just confuses the issue because he can’t translate what he knows into words we can understand.

Then there is Dot, the heroine of the story. After surveying 200 mid-level managers regarding the state of knowledge-sharing in their teams and departments, I found women to be at a distinct disadvantage: They are less likely to speak up in meetings, less likely to believe that their contributions are valuable, and more likely to personalize failure while externalizing success. Dot symbolizes those of us who don’t share information because we are unconsciously competent. We simply “don’t know what we know.”

One of my favorite characters in the book is a talking bonsai tree. I needed a living thing that Dot could use as a mentor, something you might find in a corporate meeting room. I also wanted her mentor to have obvious flaws. The bonsai offers a lot of good advice, but doesn't have Dot’s courage and inner strength. It’s a way of making the point that mentors, while incredibly valuable for a time, are always imperfect people . . . or plants. In the end, Dot grows in her ability to value her own insights and to rely on herself.

I was once asked if any of these characters were autobiographical. I initially denied that any of them resembled me in the least, although one, “Mr. Right” -- who has already found the right answer and so refuses to look at alternatives -- was very much like my husband. But after thinking it over, I had to admit that I’ve been just as haunted as all my characters. Under some circumstances, I’ve let ghosts lead me into any number of outdated behaviors. The trick, I’m learning, is to examine those behaviors in light of new realities.

For instance, like my character “The Miser” (a knowledge-hoarding Magpie), I’ve been haunted by the belief that “knowledge is power.” Which may have been true in an earlier, more stable time, when knowledge obsolescence took years and when hoarders created leverage and power bases by hanging onto what they knew. But today, when the shelf life of knowledge is much shorter, the new reality is that knowledge is no longer a commodity like gold, which holds (or increases) its worth over time. It’s more like milk – fluid, evolving, and stamped with an expiration date. And by the way, I’ve learned there is nothing less powerful than hanging on to knowledge whose time has expired.

How about you? Seen any ghosts lately?

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. is an international speaker, consultant, leadership coach, and the author of ten books, including “Ghost Story: A Modern Business Fable.” Her latest book is “The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work.” To book Carol to speak at your corporate or association event, email: cgoman@ckg.com, phone: 510-526-1727, visit her web site: www.CKG.com.

EMOTIONS AT WORK

Preparing for a speech to the leadership of an organization facing major restructuring, I asked the meeting planner for background on the audience.

“We’ve presented all the facts,” she replied. “But it would be much easier if everyone weren’t so emotional!”

In the business world, it seems, people are supposed to think logically and act rationally. Steeped in this belief, leaders quantify everything they can and try to present information in ways that help employees make objective decisions.

Emotions are not supposed to be part of the equation. But the fact is that all employees bring their emotions to the workplace. And the more I study the psychology of people at work, the more I see how emotions are integral to everything that happens in an organization.

According to the neurologist and author Antonio Damasio, for example, the center of our conscious thought (the prefrontal cortex) is so tightly connected to the emotion-generating amygdala, that no one makes decisions based on pure logic. Damasio’s research makes it clear that mental processes we’re not conscious of drive our decision making, and logical reasoning is really no more than a way to justify emotional choices.

Emotion gets our attention. Emotionally charged stimuli (ECS) persist much longer in memory, and people remember the emotional components (fear, joy, surprise, anger, embarrassment, etc.) of an experience better than any other aspect.

Emotions dictate actions. Since our past experiences carry an emotional charge that is encoded in memory, we subconsciously assess a new situation based on past emotions – and are then motivated to act on those we have labeled “good” and reject those deemed “bad.”

Emotions drive performance. Positive emotions increase energy, learning and motivation. Worry, resentment or boredom decreases physical and mental energy and impairs mental agility. And when the pressure becomes excessive, soaring cortisol levels combined with adrenaline can actually paralyze our mental functions.

Emotions can even highjack a negotiation. When we negotiate in a positive mood, it increases our tendency to select a cooperative strategy and helps us to avoid the development of hostility and conflict. Negotiating when angry makes us less likely to accurately judge the interests of opponents and less likely to achieve joint gains.

Emotions are highly infectious and “catching” them is a universal human phenomenon. A research study, conducted by Peter Totterdell of the University of Sheffield, had nurses record their moods each day at work for three weeks. He found that the mood of different teams shifted together over time. Totterdell also found this same tendency of emotions to move in a lockstep fashion in teams of accountants and cricket players.

It’s also true that emotions flow most strongly from the most powerful person in the room to others. We monitor our leaders and are extremely sensitive to what the boss says and does. Researchers at California State University, Long Beach found that when business leaders were in a good mood, members of their work groups experienced more positive emotions and were more and productive than groups whose leaders were in a bad mood.

Good or bad, emotional responses can happen before we have time to process them consciously. In a study at the University of Tubingen in Germany, people were shown photos of happy or sad faces on a computer then asked questions to gauge their emotional reactions. Subjects reported corresponding emotions to the photos – even when the pictures lasted only fractions of a second.

So I made sure my harried meeting planner understood that, sure, we all want change to make logical sense. But we also need – and it’s a primary need – to view challenges and solutions in ways that validate and influence the way we feel about our organizations, our jobs, and ourselves.

And that involves emotions. Because like it or not, as I told her, emotions have already been driving or inhibiting the organization’s successful transformation.


Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. is an executive coach and international keynote speaker at corporate, government, and association events. She’s the author of “The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work.” To contact Carol about speaking or coaching, call 510-526-1727, email CGoman@CKG.com or visit her websites: http://www.CKG.com or http://www.NonverbalAdvantage.com.

The Fourth Cookie

The June issue of Harvard Business Review featured an article, “How to be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy.” One interesting piece of research the article cited was the “cookie experiment” that psychologists conducted in 2003.

In this study, groups were created with three students in each. Two of the students were asked to write a short policy paper. The third student in each group was asked to evaluate the papers and determine how much the first two would be paid. (This made the third student the “boss” over the other students.)

About 30 minutes into the experiment, there was a break and a plate of five cookies was brought into the room. All three participants took a cookie. That left two – the last cookie which, out of politeness, no one was expected to (nor did) take – and the fourth cookie, which was the real object of the experiment.

Question: Who would feel “entitled” to grab the extra cookie?

Answer: The boss. In all cases, it only took half an hour for the randomly chosen bosses to not only take the fourth cookie, but to chew with their mouths open and to carelessly scatter crumbs.

It could be dismissed as a silly experiment if it wasn’t consistent with the findings in many other studies. Power, it seems, does corrupt – if only to make people more focused on their own needs, less focused on others’ needs, and more likely to behave as if the rules expected of others didn’t apply to them.

To change a bad habit – stop trying.

Studies in neuroscience show how the brain constantly prunes and removes unused links. Any pathways that don’t get used slowly get disconnected.

So, here’s the new formula for changing a bad habit: Stop trying to change it. In fact, don't give it another thought. Leave the old habit alone and create an entirely new one. Take your energy away from fighting the old and give all your attention to the new – those behaviors and attitudes you want in your life.

Reinforce the new habit by linking it to different parts of your brain. You make these links when you utilize a variety of modes: Visualize it. Write it down. Talk about it. Create a strategy. Take action.

Still not easy. But a lot more productive than giving good energy to a bad habit!

Emotions and Immune Systems

An experiment done with the drama department at UCLA shows the effect of emotions on the immune system. All of the actors practiced method acting (recalling an experience from your past which hold the same emotions as the situation in the script). The experiment lasted a full day, during which time one group of actors performed using only happy memories, the other only sad.

The researchers took periodic blood samples from all the subjects, continually looking for immune “competence.” Those people who had been working with happy and uplifting scripts all day had healthy immune systems. Those people who had been working with depressing scripts all day showed a marked decrease in immune responsiveness.

So the next time you are feeling out of sorts, try "faking it" by thinking of a happier time. It's good for your health!