Sunday 29 March 2015

Staffordshire University conference on Resilience, 26 March 2015

This proved to be an informative and entertaining insight into the latest thinking about resilience, in both sport and business.

The day kicked off with the opening presentation by the England footballer, Earl Barrett, (now coaching at Stoke).  His stories about having to cope with adversity in his career ranged from racism to injury to being dropped from the team.  And this set the tone for the day; resilience is one of those things that we all recognise, but is actually quite hard to define and to measure.  Does what it takes to recover from injury tap on the same resources that it takes to perform well in a key sales-pitch?

Research shows that resilience can and does change with context.  It varies within and between individuals and is influenced by internal factors like personality and also with external factors such as environment and culture.  The good news is that it can be learned.

Resilience is a key factor in coping with stress and each speaker was able to advance our knowledge on building resilience.  Even a change in perception can produce dramatic results.  Perceiving a situation as either a challenge or threat can have profound effects on performance.  Similarly, choosing the right type of social support at the right time can also affect stress levels.

A different slant at the topic was given by Rune Todnem By on what people need to hear from their leader in times of trouble or stress.  Turns out it's not the chest-beating, 'more cow-bell' motivational speech but something that attends to the needs of the audience.  

They need to know that what their leader requires of them is possible, worthwhile and appropriate, to name a few of the key elements, if you want motivated staff.

The event finished with a case study from Roy White, Head of HR at Sony Mobile.  Roy showed how the company had designed and delivered a resilience training programme for staff, built on the three pillars of 'Body', 'Mind' and 'Spirit'.  

Thanks to all the speakers for laying on such a useful event, particularly the staff at Staffordshire University, Marc Jones, Jamie Barker and Martin Turner.   I would also like to recommend Jamie and Martin's book, 'What Business can Learn from Sport Psychology' (Bennion Kearny).

Also a quick shout out for another upcoming event if you are interested in this area of research.  The author and consultant, Ted Garratt is running a workshop on 13 May on 'Coaching for the Zone' http://www.tedgarratt.co.uk/.  Well worth a look if you want to look at practical application theories on approaches to achieving excellent performance.


Tuesday 24 March 2015

Choking under pressure

The Staffordshire University conference on resilience in sport and business is this week, and it reminded me of the flip side of this.  What happens to us when we freeze under pressure or give sub-optimal performance on the 'big day'?

A great place to explore this topic is by reading Sian Beilock's book, 'Choke'.  It's packed with research on why people, who are more than capable of performing, fail to live up to their potential when it really counts.  Beilock gives examples from sport, music and education, to name a just a few. 

Choking isn't random - it happens under certain circumstances and will happen more to some people than to others.  The key element is what we do with our part of the brain that governs working-memory (the bit that keeps information on a 'mental scratch pad' while we process it).  It turns out that when we feel the pressure, our anxiety takes up valuable resource in our working-memory, leaving less capacity for us to use for performing well.

If our performance also involves a motor skill, we can also fall prone to what Richard Masters calls 'reinvestment'.  Reinvestment is where we start to concentrate consciously on something that we had previously rehearsed so much, we didn't need to think about it at all. 

Reinvestment makes the unconscious conscious and when we do this, we try (in vain) to control our muscles and movements, leading to sub-standard performance.

The good thing is there are things we can do to prepare for these situations and Beilock's book contains many useful techniques to help you prepare for the big event.  Rehearsal, re-intepretation and even distraction tasks like singing a song to yourself, while you (don't) concentrate on the main task, can all help.

The conference on resilience is at Staffordshire University, 26th March 2015.  Watch this blog to get a summary of the day.


Thursday 5 March 2015

Laughter is good for the soul... as long as you are not trying to kill me


What's the most fun you've had with your boss?  Have you ever laughed out loud, together, as equals?  Or have you had the experience where your boss's so-called humour has left you feeling uncomfortable or even humiliated?

Some interesting research has shown that humour can be a form of leadership and a way of establishing effective working relationships between boss and follower.  BUT, it has to be the right kind of humour.  There are two types of humour; affiliative and aggressive.  Affiliative humour is seen as a positive form of humour designed to amuse people.  Aggressive humour is much more 'Win-Lose' and is intended to mock people or to emphasise differences in status.  It can include sarcasm, 'put-downs' or inappropriate subject matter.

Affiliative humour has been found to improve relationships by improving satisfaction, team cooperation and commitment.  It is thought to act as a declaration of self-disclosure by the boss, which helps to establish trust and openess and encourages reciprocal behaviour. 

These kind of relationships were not found in leaders who exercised more aggressive forms of humour.

In short, the findings of the research show 'that humour is useful for creating a high-quality relationship between leader and follower when used in an affiliative way but not if it is used in an aggressive way'.

The researchers do qualify their findings - if you are not a natural humourist then don't over-work it; you will only look inauthentic or people misunderstand your intentions.  However, it is possible to develop your funny side and the researchers mention the following approach by McGhee in their paper:

The Seven Humour Habits Programme



The research paper is 'Affiliative and aggressive humour in leadership and their relationship to leader-member exchange' by Alexander Pundt and Felicia Herrman, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2015) 88, 109-125

Monday 2 March 2015

Look who's talking - suit or self?


Featured in the digest section of the The Psychologist (March 2015) was this rather interesting finding.  Researchers (Eagleman, Pitt and Savjani) have found people consider individual and corporate actions in the same way.  Forty participants were given written scenarios to consider while their brains were being scanned.  Some of these scenarios were written by individuals, others by corporations, with the scenarios having a prosocial, neutral or antisocial bias to them.  The researchers found that the there were no significant differences in brain activity when a participant was considering either an individual or corporate missive.    It seems that we don't 'de-humanise' a message when it comes from the corporation.


However, when participants were asked to declare how they actually felt about each scenario the results were more surprising: 'Humans behaving prosocially were met with stronger approval than were corporations, and misbehaving corporations made participants angrier'.  Corporations seem to be judged more harshly.  We tend to view unethical behaviour as a strong predictor of the future performance of the organisation, but are more forgiving if the message is attributed to an individual.

The implications of this seem to suggest that we view corporations as 'behaving' in the same way as we view individual behaviour, but we are more harsh in our judgements.  What then, is the role of the leader?  Does he/she need to retain some humanity when communicating the corporate vision?   What should the leader do in times of adversity?  How much of ourselves do we need to include in our communications with our followers?