When sports psychologist, culture coach and author Dr Pippa Grange was recently tasked with helping a tense team navigate a high-stress acquisition discussion, she intervened with a surprising activity.

“I took them trampolining. Everybody said it was ridiculous, but within 10 minutes they were all laughing. It broke the tension and helped them regain perspective,” says Grange, who is a keynote speaker at AHRI’s upcoming National Convention and Exhibition in Melbourne, and is also conducting a masterclass on identifying and leveraging deep wins at work.

“Fun is a form of release. It’s a neurological, chemical and hormonal reset, and an opportunity to rebalance from over-performance and stress.”

Grange has worked as a psychologist with high-level soccer, AFL, rugby league and Olympic teams, with extreme endurance athletes, and with businesses all over the globe. 

One of her career highlights was working with the England soccer team at the 2018 World Cup. 

“They got to the semis after a long period of underperforming and the nation celebrated with them,” says Grange.

No matter her client, she has one core aim: boosting performance while also fostering a healthy, supportive culture.

“HR and sports psychology complement each other. Both are about helping people find their best and perform well. In this way, leaders are like coaches, and vice versa – always seeking the balance between output and wellbeing,” she says.

She believes the key to high-performance cultures is building strong relationships through honest connection, storytelling and genuine feedback, whether on the sports field or in the office. 

“The quality and character of relationships that we have with each other will determine the level of performance that we’re able to output,” says Grange, who, after working in Australia for 20 years and Los Angeles for two, now lives in England’s Peak District.

She was originally attracted to sports psychology because she liked the idea of working with motivated people.

“I thought this would provide opportunities for both one-on-one and systems work. It felt like an opportunity to create real change.”

As she got into the field, she realised that motivated humans are complex. 

“Most of the work I’ve done is about the human being, not their performance. [I’ve helped] people understand who they are, how they operate best, what they want and how they can get there.”

It’s not about her coming in and being a performance “guru”, she adds.

“If you’re not focused on both the person themselves and the system they’re operating in, you won’t find high performance.”

Team bonding for improved performance

On the sports field and in the workplace, performance starts with teamwork, says Grange. But this can’t be imposed from the top; it needs to come from the ground up through mutual understanding and clear communication around goals.

“Start with understanding what actually motivates your teams. It might not be what you think. Motivation builders are communication, purpose and feedback. Discipline builders are clarity, feedback, clear methods and skill building.

“In sport, it’s not all about the end goal, it’s also about what we’re working on this week. And that’s a nice translation into some workplaces too. It’s about a group’s clarity of purpose over a block of time.”

Keeping a team on track requires regular debriefs, she says.

“The ‘hot debrief’ after weekly or daily performance and ‘emotional hangover work’ after big events both speak to strong, cyclical feedback cultures that normalise continuous conversations about performing and succeeding while being human.”

“We used to see resilience in terms of bouncebackability and grit. For me, it’s a lot more to do with adaptability and being allowed to be a whole human.” – Dr Pippa Grange, sports psychologist and author

Busting misconceptions about high-performing teams 

Over her career, Grange has sought to unpack, break down and replace some of the destructive narratives that shape our lives.

Part of that work has manifested in her book Fear Less: How to Win at Life Without Losing Yourself, which is about living with less fear and more freedom.

“Fear is amplified or lessened in cultures and environments as much as in individuals’ minds. There’s a lot you can do in systems and processes, and with symbols, language and power dynamics, to lessen it and build confidence,” she says.

Just as fear can hold us back, so too can a constant pursuit of productivity.

Grange maintains that high-performing teams shouldn’t come at the cost of wellbeing, and having good, caring cultures shouldn’t come at the cost of winning. High-performance and good culture aren’t mutually exclusive. 

“Workplaces are under so much pressure for profit or shareholder values, and this creates a downward flow where people can [feel like] never-ending productivity machines. The level of burnout we’re seeing is not random.”

To rejuvenate their minds and spirits, people need space to both rest and recover, which are two different things, says Grange. 

“Recovery is about finding the space to regenerate our creativity and curiosity, our humour and our energy.

“Creating ‘psychological space’ for people means they don’t have to perform constantly and can regenerate. Compromising on wellbeing is only a short-term gain for a person and an organisation.”

So how can companies help employees find psychological space to recover? It can be as simple as giving permission, setting good boundaries around working hours and allowing the sharing of stories and experiences, she says. 

“When companies start talking about what high-performance looks like, they need to recognise that it’s a triangle of work, rest and recovery. It’s not just a line between work and rest.”

What generates motivation, she says, is people’s ability to be authentic and share their stories with each other.

“Everybody who walks through the door of a workplace is asked to buy into a story, a vision and a purpose. Stories shouldn’t just come from the top, but also from the shop floor and the home offices. They should be an exchange. It’s making everyone feel like they genuinely belong and are part of something.

“You need practices that genuinely build on belonging, not just inclusion.”

Building more resilient teams

While some people may feel that ‘resilience’ has become somewhat of a buzzword that’s tightly linked to output, Grange says its meaning has evolved.

“We used to see resilience in terms of bouncebackability and grit. For me, it’s a lot more to do with adaptability and being allowed to be whole and human while performing, versus living in roles, categories and boxes. It’s about minimising drama [while] being real and honest, allowing emotions to arise, but still processing them.”

How do you help employees and teams foster resilience? 

“It’s principally about quality relationships that provide a social web for all challenges. Cultures that embrace courage, vulnerability, challenge, care and the will to change are resilient,” she says. 

Anticipatory guidance and foresight helps boost resilience, she adds. If something tough has happened, such as a round of redundancies, giving people space to ask questions, air concerns and share perspectives is important. 

“People find it much tougher to maintain resilience when they get ambushed by circumstances, or if they’re kept in the dark. Telling the truth about where things are at and allowing people to participate in being resilient makes a big difference.” 

Culture work is unlike other kind of organisational work, says Grange, and culture leaders often need different timescales, methods and measures to drive real change. 

“Culture, like ethics, should be a verb – a doing word. It’s daily work that lives in interactions and exchanges, as well as in big initiatives,” she says.

“It’s an ongoing effort to create an environment that supports psychological safety, trust and compassion, and it’s also building systems that actually reward and resist what you do and don’t want to see in the culture. Great culture is signified by an organisation that is present, observing, focused and active in considering ‘what ought we to do’ – and then actually doing it.”

A longer version of this article first appeared in the June/July 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.

Dr Pippa Grange will be speaking on  cultivating authenticity and vulnerability in the workplace at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. Don’t miss the chance to hear from inspiring thought leaders and master practical strategies for now and the future. Secure your spot today.

The post Lessons on building high-performing teams from a sports psychologist appeared first on HRM online.

Energy drainers roam the halls of every organisation. These are people who, often without realising, strip away the fun, energy or buzz (sometimes all three) in a work environment.

These energy vampires can be chronic complainers, hectic hyperactives or negative nancies. While their behaviours may differ, the results are almost always the same: lowered morale, less productivity and increased team friction.

Shelley Johnson, People and Culture consultant and founder of Boldside HR, offers some tips for managing these behaviours, and prompts us to consider the ways in which we may be draining energy from others ourselves.

Five types of energy drainers

There are myriad ways to drain someone’s energy, but Johnson has narrowed the list down to five common types she’s encountered.

“Each of these people drain energy in different ways,” she says.

1. The pessimist – This is someone who consistently has a cynical air to their commentary and demeanor. They’re the first person to poke a hole in your idea or to tell you something will be ‘too hard’.“They’re a blocker of ideas. They have a long list of why something can’t be done, but don’t suggest ways to improve. They whinge, complain or stifle solutions,” says Johnson.”Say you’re in a meeting talking about a new project and most people are really excited, but there’s one person who’s like: ‘This will never work. It’s going to break. It isn’t possible.’ Within a moment everyone is deflated. The energy has dissipated, and the creative ideas have gone with it.”

2. The egotist – These people tend to be self-absorbed, sensitive and have an inclination to be defensive when challenged. They’re often the people who boast about how busy they are.

“They think their time is more precious than yours – they’re seen running from meeting to meeting. And they think their work is more important than yours. An egotist has a ‘know it all’ vibe. They are unlikely to admit when they are wrong, and quickly shift the blame onto others.“The egotist feels entitled to the focus and attention of their team. But they fail to replenish the energy of others. They rarely give back to the team, unless it serves to benefit them.”

3. The perfectionist – These people get so caught up in the detail that they prevent others’ work from progressing.

“The perfectionist holds unreasonably high standards of themselves and others. It can drain energy and leave people feeling as though they don’t measure up.“At worst, a perfectionist can be controlling and stop a team from taking good risks due to fear of failure. Their desire to achieve flawlessness can stall the team’s overall performance.”

4. The oversharer – This is the person who buries you in a mountain of gossip or elaborate stories from their weekend.

“Some of the worst energy drainers are oversharers. These are people who drag you into their chaotic personal lives. They pop up at your desk, and suddenly you’ve lost half of your morning while they recount their drama-fuelled weekend in vivid detail.“The oversharer can also be an emotional hijacker. They deplete the team’s emotional energy reserves. Think about one of those meetings where the oversharer goes into overdrive. Watch the body language. Shoulders start to slump. Someone rolls their eyes. [People] avoid eye contact in hope they get the message and wrap it up.”

5. The keen bean. These are individuals who are constantly bubbling with enthusiasm. It takes very little for them to become overly excited, making it hard for others to keep up or get a word in.“When the keen bean’s passion takes over, they can miss the signals of people they are engaging with. As they eagerly promote a new initiative, and can have their blinkers on to the perspectives of others.”

Behaviour is contagious

Psychologists have found that one person in a negative mood transmits their angst to others nearby within five minutes – even when they aren’t speaking to each other or directly working together. So when someone else comes into the room with a grey cloud over their head, or in a frenetic mood, we all feel it.

“How we show up is going to impact other people,” says Johnson. “Just like if we show up to work sick, other people will get sick. It’s the same concept with how we show up emotionally.”

Read HRM’s article on emotional contagion to learn more.

“The negative emotions you bring to work are more powerful than the positive ones,” she adds. “You might have a positive interaction with someone that feels nice at the time, but if you encounter someone who’s in a negative mood, that’s the interaction you’re going to remember.”

To avoid emotions spreading like wildfire, Johnson says it’s best for us to own them – and encourage others to do the same. Perhaps at the start of team meetings, you could normalise people saying things like, ‘I’m feeling a little lackluster today, so if I don’t bring my usual energy to the brainstorming meeting, it’s nothing about you all. That’s just where I’m at today.’

“It’s not about being fake – toxic positivity is so unhelpful for teams. But if you notice you’re in a bit of a funk in a meeting, call attention to it and say something like, ‘I’m having a bit of a down day’. Then everyone can breathe a sigh of relief because you’ve acknowledged the elephant in the room. It disarms some of that energy.”

Use people’s energies to your advantage

Often, people’s energy-draining tendencies simply come down to their personality. Perhaps they don’t stand out as being overly agreeable or enthusiastic because everyone else around them is on the total opposite end of the spectrum.

In this instance, it’s important for HR not to consider this to be a performance or cultural issue. You don’t want to inadvertently discriminate against someone simply because they’re an introvert, for example.

“What we don’t want is conformity on teams. Let’s say everyone is bright and bubbly and one person is more skeptical, for example. We need those traits because if everyone’s super excited, they might not challenge ideas.”

It’s about understanding people’s natural inclinations and then giving them guidance on when to highlight or soften them. 

Johnson suggests considering which of the five types of energy drainers might pertain to the people in your team, then mapping out the strengths they might bring to certain circumstances.

For example, you might rely on a ‘keen bean’ to get people excited about a new initiative that requires collective buy-in, or perhaps the ‘pessimist’ can offer value when you need someone to cast a critical eye over an idea or product before you take it to market.

If you were in a brainstorming session, however, a pessimist might be a barrier. In this instance, Johnson suggests saying something like, ‘We really value your contributions and a little further down the line we’re going to need your analytical eye, but for now we need to encourage everyone to share their big ideas without shooting them down.’

“It’s all about saying, ‘We need your skill and here’s when we need it.’ So they’re giving them space to play in the role they need to play in. It brings the value of their thinking to life.”

If a person isn’t getting to use their strengths in their role, then unhelpful behaviours can emerge, she adds.

“Often we see pessimism or negativity come out because that person isn’t working in a role that energises them. That might be where HR gets brought in – to help a manager assess role alignment. If they’re depleting the energy of others, it could be that they themselves aren’t energised in the work they’re doing, so we need to reassess if the role needs to be tweaked or adjusted.”

You may also need to clarify your organisation’s cultural expectations, she adds. 

“People may have come from a culture where chit-chat is seen as important because it’s relational, but in a new organisation it’s seen as a time-waster. So you might just need to reset the expectations and behaviours that align with ‘how things are done around here.'”

Refiling other people’s cups

We all drain people’s energy to some extent, says Johnson.

“No one is energy neutral. At different points in time, we all err towards one of the five energy drainer types. Some of us are just less aware of it than others,” she says.

“The negative emotions that you bring to work are more powerful than the positive ones.” – Shelley Johnson, Founder, Boldside HR

“We need to learn and become aware of how we drain our team’s energy and therefore what we need to do to proactively refuel our team’s energy.

“For me, I can be a pessimist, so I get really intentional about being strategic with my encouragement. My natural inclination might be to say something like, ‘We need to do better than that’, so I need to counteract that by being really intentional with my encouragement of other people’s ideas.”

Here are some other suggestions for replenishing energy levels in a team:

• Build up energy awareness in teams, says Johnson.
  “Ask people about their energy levels in regular team meetings. Invite team members to share what depletes their energy and how they re-energise. By sharing this insight, the team can better understand each other and create a more energising environment.”
• Give people space and look for energy cues. Has a colleague come out of an hour-long meeting? Maybe now isn’t the time to go and tell them about your weekend or to spam them with Slack messages.
• Create a standard approach to how you conduct meetings or brainstorming sessions, which includes agreed-upon rules such as: ‘There’s no such thing as a bad idea’ or ‘Everyone’s voice will be heard’. When employees have agreed to a set of norms, it’s much easier to enforce them.
• Cultivate a culture of psychological safety so people feel they can speak out.

We all have a responsibility to re-energise other people, says Johnson.

“When you get a hire car, you’re responsible for refilling it at the end,” she says. “We’re all getting something out of our teammates, so we all need to contribute back into the health of the team by filling them back up.”

Part of managing difficult personalities is learning now to have tough conversations. AHRI’s short course will equip you with the skills to make these conversations a little easier. Sign up for the next session on 18 October 2022.

The post 5 types of energy drainers you could encounter at work appeared first on HRM online.

Now is the perfect time for organisations to rethink their engagement and motivation strategies, says Lindsay McGregor, co-founder of Vega Factor and employee engagement and motivation expert.

“[We need to ask], what do we stand for? How can we ensure our roles are motivating and that the work is engaging? And then use that information to strengthen our teams,” says McGregor, who is also formerly a consultant with McKinsey & Co.

Organisations have spent a lot of time thinking about purpose over the last decade, she adds.

“That’s important, but when you look at the data, you find that play is about twice as powerful as purpose in driving performance. But it’s something very few of us have learned about.”

A lot of organisations think about play in a social sense, she says. For example, introducing something fun, like a company happy hour. However, McGregor says we need to think about how to infuse play into the work itself.

“That’s the next wave of employee motivation for organisations to think about.”

Embracing experimentation at work

The first step in embracing a culture of play and experimentation is to reconsider how your company approaches culture.

“Most people think building a strong culture is just about people not being a jerk – that the leader just has to be a good person. But it’s often not about that. It’s about the leader designing systems that let their people do their best work. Too many of those systems are built without play in mind and too many of them are built in a way that uses emotional or economic pressure to drive people.”

McGregor admits that a culture that embraces ‘play’ might seem difficult or far-fetched for some employers, especially if you work in an industry that you wouldn’t consider to be inherently ‘fun’. But that’s not what play is about.

It’s about giving people the opportunity to experiment, she says.

McGregor refers to a 2016 experiment she ran with her co-founder, Neel Doshi, with the branches of a retail bank.

“At the time, a huge scandal had erupted in the United States after Wells Fargo discovered its sales representatives had opened millions of fake accounts for its customers, because sales pressure was so high.”

Bank representatives would input their own contact details into the system, she says. That way, if someone from the bank’s customer service team called to check in on the ‘customer’, that employee would pretend to be them. 

“You would think this was just a couple of bad apples, but it was massively widespread. When you look into the science of motivation, when people feel under intense stress [they think], ‘If I don’t do this, I’m going to get yelled at in front of my peers, or I’m going to get fired.’ If they see everybody else around them doing it, then it becomes the norm.”

This demonstrated that the levers we often pull to motivate people to work hard, including financial incentives and emotional pressures, can be dangerous. It prompted the retail bank to reconsider its own approach.

“It had to figure out a way to get its people to be highly motivated without sales commissions. That felt impossible to them, but once we explained the science of motivation, they saw that when somebody treats you transactionally, you treat them transactionally,” she says.

When relationships are transactional, people can feel resentful and they stop going above and beyond, she adds.

“If you yell and scream or punish people, they’ll default to tactical work. They’ll follow instructions and execute what’s on their to-do list, but they won’t go beyond that. They won’t bring creativity. They won’t help others.”

“Growth shouldn’t just be about status, rank or your title.” – Lindsay McGregor, co-founder of Vega Factor

Doshi and McGregor helped the bank to think about motivators differently.

“We said, ‘Let’s get rid of the economic and emotional pressures that come from commissions and instead talk about play, purpose and potential.

Read HRM’s article unpacking McGregor and Doshi’s research into play, potential and purpose here.

“To find play, the staff would get together each morning and think about experiments they could run. They’d say things like, ‘There’s usually a long line for our customers, which frustrates them, so how could we help them get what they need without standing in a line? Or make the process of standing in a line a little more fun?’ 

“The next day, people would share what worked and what didn’t. Not only did this make work more fun, it also scaled learning across the organisation.”

Next, they focused on their branch’s purpose, which was to improve the financial health of their community.

“They’d tie what each person was working on to their branch goal. That meant people didn’t feel like they were just showing up to collect a paycheck.”

The combination of these three elements, and the absence of emotional pressures and inertia, is what McGregor and Doshi call a ‘TOMO culture’ – meaning a total motivation culture.

Rethinking growth opportunities for employees

The third element, potential, is about helping individuals to constantly grow.

“When people change jobs, they often say, ‘I needed a new challenge.’ People leave jobs when they’re not growing new skills,” says McGregor.

That’s why it’s so important to facilitate learning and growth opportunities. However, a lot of employers make the mistake of assuming this means simply offering promotions, says McGregor.

Read HRM’s article on a concept known as ‘managerial blues’ – that is, when new managers struggle to enjoy a recent promotion.

“Growth shouldn’t just be about status, rank or your title,” says McGregor. “In the retail bank, we found it was about people saying, ‘I want to learn how to make personal finances easy to understand, so let me build my skills in teaching.’ 

“Another person might choose something like developing their empathy, so people feel comfortable opening up about sensitive financial matters. Those are the kinds of skills that stay with you for your entire career.”

She also suggests thinking about learning opportunities differently. They don’t always need to be formal programs or webinars; it can happen on the job. For example, if you have people who are looking to develop the same skill, they could sit with one of your executives who can teach it to them.

“One leader we worked with was phenomenal. She started her career as an engineer, and then moved into customer service and became the head of customer service for one of the fastest-growing startups of all time.

“She realised she was great at customer service because she could see what was going wrong with the tech and realised that not everyone else knew how to investigate what was causing the bugs. So every Thursday she hosted a 30-minute Zoom call where people could log in and just watch her solving tickets [customer enquiries]. That was something she was going to do anyway and it was a really effective way to upskill people. So ask yourself how you’re offering teaching moments like that.”

Does everyone feel they add value?

While McGregor says employees should try to identify their own play elements at work, she says a lot of that responsibility lies with employers, as they’re designing the work experiences that their people will either flourish or flounder in.

“Think about what demotivates people at work. It’s often things like budgeting or performance review processes. Or the way they try to solve problems might feel horribly slow or full of bureaucracy. Those things can suck the play out of work.”

“To feel truly engaged, people have to feel that if they don’t show up to work tomorrow, something they care about isn’t going to happen.” – Lindsay McGregor, co-founder of Vega Factor

To identify these play-sucking elements of work, she suggests thinking about where people might feel like they’re not adding value. What are the tactical tasks required in your organisation – such as administrative functions – and who is doing the bulk of them? 

If you notice a portion of your people are consistently engaging in tactical work and not getting the opportunity to jump into adaptive work (tasks that require expansive thinking and problem solving), in some instances, that should be treated as a red flag.

“When I think about the Great Resignation, that’s one of the first things I think about: where do people feel replaceable?” 

She refers to an example of an engineering firm that was concerned about losing its talent, so it constantly rotated its engineers onto different projects, so everyone knew how each project worked. While there’s certainly an argument to be made for diversifying knowledge across teams, in this instance it made all the engineers feel replaceable.

“So they switched things up so each engineer could own a unique problem, and that made a big difference.”

This isn’t to say tactical performance is a bad thing. It certainly has its time and place.

“Tactical performance will reduce people’s stress and emotional pressure. It’s really important to have good tactical performance for your team to feel organised [and] they don’t have to waste time reinventing the wheel.

“If you’re working on invoicing, for example, the tactical work would be about having a process that you follow, but the adaptive work might be asking: ‘What are the three big opportunities for us to improve how we do invoicing? What’s a creative way we can fix our problems?’

“When a culture is high in total motivation, people feel a lot of play, purpose and potential for the actual work that they’re doing. So that’s not saying, “I work for a great non-profit, but I hate my job as an accountant,’ but being able to say, ‘The day-to-day work I’m doing as an accountant gives me play, purpose and potential.’ When you’ve done this, you’re able to motivate people to do both the tactical and the adaptive work.”

It’s about employers taking the time to ask: “Does everybody have an interesting, meaningful problem to solve?” she says. 

“[That means a problem] where they can come up with ideas and experiment with those ideas. So many organisations have big, grand mission statements, and those are important, but to feel truly engaged, people have to feel that if they don’t show up to work tomorrow, something they care about isn’t going to happen.”

A version of this article appeared in the May 2022 edition of HRM Magazine.

How do you approach motivation and employee engagement? AHRI members can seek the opinion of their HR peers by joining the LinkedIn AHRI Lounge.

The post Want to increase employee engagement levels? Try facilitating a TOMO culture appeared first on HRM online.

Humans are hardwired to avoid failing. We hate the feeling of getting something wrong or making a mistake at work; it often feels personal when it’s not. 

Schools, universities and workplaces are all structured to punish failure and lionise success. 

But are there long term gains to be made from failing early in your career? And does the old adage ‘fail early, fail often’ actually hold water?

The long game

New research from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management gives credence to the cliche that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. 

The researchers studied two groups of junior scientists who were “statistically indistinguishable”. Both groups applied for grants with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).One barely scraped through (the narrow win group) and the other just missed out on receiving a grant (the near-miss group).

Over the next ten years, they monitored the success of both groups’ research papers. While the people in both produced a similar amount of work, there was a difference in the amount of ‘hit’ papers (a paper defined as placing in the top 5 per cent of citations received in the same year and field).

Interestingly, the group that experienced setbacks early in their careers were more likely to produce a ‘hit’ paper down the line, at an average rate of 16.1 per cent for the near-miss group compared to 13.3 per cent for the narrow-win group. 

Co-author of the study, Dashun Wang, an associate professor of management and organisations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, was surprised by the results. He told the New York Times, “When we first saw these results, we were like, ‘Oh, that can’t be right, this is counter to everything I’ve learned.’ We just tested everything we could think of, but every time we tested, the results come back the same.”

After controlling for various factors and running through different experiments, such as analysing both groups’ performance in the second five year window only, they arrived at the conclusion that the near-miss group outperformed the narrow-win group by 21 per cent, and did so with less overall funding. 

While the researchers acknowledge that failures can hurt a career, they were able to show in their findings that it can also be a mark of success as early failure was likely to teach the scientists valuable lessons.

This supports the idea of supporting staff who fail, especially juniors, as it may eventually pay off in the future. As the researchers note, the celebration of a ‘fail-fast’ mindset is alive and well in Silicon Valley. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told  Business Insider, “failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right.”

Does a culture of failure work?

The findings in this research paper are interesting, but it’s worth highlighting that they were looking at near failures – people who missed by a whisker. If people submitted catastrophically bad papers, they might not have such impressive results down the track. 

But the essence of what the researchers are saying – that we can mine valuable lessons from our mistakes – is something employers should pay attention to. So how do you do that in a way that’s sustainable?

Silicon Valley employers are regularly held a pedestal for their progressive approach to failures, but there are many who are ready to call bull. In an article for Forbes, management consultant Rob Asghar calls the Silicon Valley’s ‘fail fast, fail often’ mantra nothing more than a bunch of hype. 

He refers to an entrepreneur that he was speaking with who said the pressure to succeed paired with the high stakes of these tech companies, and the high pay packets of those working there, means failure sometimes isn’t an option.

Asghar highlights another ‘fail fast’ cynic, Mark Suster, who said, in response to those who claim they have no fear of testing the waters, “Tell that to the person who wrote you $50,000 of their hard earned money and entrusted you to try your best. Fail fast? How does your brother-in-law feel about that?”

It’s not just the unicorn companies that hoover up investor money only to go bust.  Silicon Valley stalwarts have also been accused of having an unhealthy relationship with risk. Except it’s not investors, but the public that ends up paying for it. 

Instead of embracing failure, Asghar said we should be cultivating resilience – embracing the ability to bounce back. 

To do this, it’s important to analyse what kind of failures are occurring. At AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition this year, keynote speaker and senior partner at Innosight, Scott Anthony, broke failures down into three categories:  

1. Preventable failures – these you should punish, as it’s foreseeable and should have been stopped by appropriate training, he says.
2. Complex failures –  these aren’t foreseeable and those making the mistake should learn from them.
3. Intelligent failure – these are the kind of failures you want. It’s about taking smart risks, that will lead to interesting results regardless of success.

So rather than conducting ‘fail fast’ exercises, we should think about failing more intelligently. 

Another convention keynote speaker, Dom Price, a futurist at Atlassian, wrote about this concept in a blog post.“Can’t we do better than grease the wheels of the failure bandwagon?” he asks.

He thinks we shouldn’t celebrate failure – because it’s inherently uninspiring – but rather celebrate the wisdom won from failure.

“Some things go well, and you double down on them. Some things don’t, and you study why they didn’t and share those lessons with your peers and teammates,” he writes.

Price says we should reframe the celebration of failures. Workplaces should aim at an environment that encourages the testing of hypotheses, unpacking assumptions and consistency of feedback.

To do this, Price pulls three tips from the Atlassian playbook. Once the mistake/failure has been made:

1. Write down all the lessons you can draw from it. Be honest (that’s important) and share them with your team.
2. Conduct a “post-mortem” of the mistake. Price suggests using a health monitor approach to get a holistic understanding of the problem.
3. Before taking on a new project run a “pre-mortem” to prepare for any potential issues that could arise.

We shouldn’t shy away from failing, but we should be conscious of how we’re talking about it in the workplace. If you’re encouraging a ‘fail fast’ attitude you might also be facilitating a culture of unacceptable risks. Failure isn’t wonderful, but its lessons can be. So be transparent about mistakes and encourage team wide dissection of the lessons, and pair conversations about failure with resilience. 

Now, go forth and fail, well.

Want to hear more insights from future thinkers? You can register your interest in AHRI’s 2020 National Convention and Exhibition now!

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Two new studies suggest that some trends in workplace motivation aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The first demonstrates the benefits of giving rewards immediately upon completion of a task, rather than later. The other research found that, surprisingly, workplace mindfulness practices can be demotivating.

Upfront rewards for long-term gains

Many organisations reward staff with a bonus or a promotion at the end of the year – often after an annual review – taking into account any successful projects they’ve completed. But this might be the wrong approach, according to research from a recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Assistant Professor of Marketing Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach, the authors, suggest that one way to boost staff motivation levels is to offer quicker rewards.

In one study people were shown two different images and asked to spot the difference. By introducing an immediate reward, Woolley saw a 20 per cent increase in participants’ eagerness to continue doing the same task when compared to those who expected to receive a reward a month after the completion of the task.

Not only does rewarding sooner rather than later motivate the employee to do a better job in the immediate sense, the research also demonstrated long-term motivational increases. Due to their previous award, employees were likely to continue the same tasks in the future with similar gusto.

Woolley explains to the Cornell Chronicle: “If you have a hobby – say you like to knit or quilt – the process itself is enjoyable, it’s intrinsically motivated. You’re doing it just for the sake of doing it, rather than for the outcome.”

“The idea that immediate rewards could increase intrinsic motivation sounds counterintuitive, as people often think about rewards as undermining interest in a task. But for activities like work, where people are already getting paid, immediate rewards can actually increase intrinsic motivation, compared with delayed or no rewards.”

Timing is more important than size

In the same article for the Cornell Chronicle another study by the researchers is referred to. In it, participants showed a 35 per cent motivation increase when receiving an immediate reward as opposed to a 19 per cent increase for those who were given larger rewards, such as a higher bonus, at a later date.

So taking a “little by little” approach to staff bonuses may boost engagement in daily tasks, benefitting an organisation in the long run.

Take away the zen focus in the workplace

Mindfulness has been a trending topic in the workplace for some time, with organisational giants such as Nike and Google offering their staff dedicated meditation areas in which they can switch off. In a recent New York Times article, experts Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, suggest that this may not be the best way to instill optimum levels of motivation within your organisation. In fact, it could be working against you.

Vohs and Hafenbrack quote a study in which participants were divided into two. One half received a beginners guide approach to mindfulness, being gently coaxed through the various exercises – remember to keep breathing, focus your mind on one thing, bring your attention to how your body feels. The other half of the participants were instead encouraged to let their minds wander or to read or write something during the session.  

Following this, participants were given a mundane task to complete, similar to something they’d do within their day-to-day work routine. Before completing their task they were asked to rate their levels of motivation regarding this specific task.

Those who had undergone the uninterrupted meditation session reported lower motivation levels than their counterparts. They didn’t want to put as much time or effort in – they “didn’t feel as much like working”.

The writers suggest that meditation put the subjects into a state of calm and serenity, where they weren’t as focused on the future. While it sounds wonderful, this state is not that conducive to getting work done.

Boosting performance with motivation

These studies didn’t show a correlation between meditation and poor quality work. In fact it suggested that on average mindfulness had little effect on employee outcomes whatsoever, which contradicts previous studies.

While there are obvious positives to gain from mindfulness practices, such as a decrease in overall stress levels which can increase your focus, HR professionals should be aware of the correlated loss of motivation.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that rewards should be given “before” the completion of a task and not after. This was a misinterpretation of the research being referred to. We apologise for the error.

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The interminable round of meetings that never seem to achieve anything is a phenomenon well-known to office workers. Meetings are often held by default and can give birth to follow-up meetings and breakfast meetings until it seems as if the meetings themselves are an alternative to work.

It’s what motivational expert and leadership and change management expert Dr Jason Fox calls “the pantomime of busyness” and it’s just one of the many things that happen every day in the modern workplace, sapping enthusiasm and stalling productivity.

Conventional theory dictates that if you want to motivate staff and drive productivity, you need to change employee attitudes and beliefs, or increase incentives and rewards. But increasingly, says Fox, those methods are irrelevant to the modern workplace where creative and conceptual work takes time and can’t be easily measured.

However, there is a third way. Fox is part of a new breed of management and behavioural scientists who say the answer lies in the work itself. People such as US management guru Daniel Pink and Columbia University social psychologist Dr Heidi Grant Halvorson say that if our jobs are inherently interesting, or if we can see they are contributing to something bigger than ourselves, we are more likely to work hard. And it’s our managers who can influence our behaviour by designing better jobs.

“I think most of us have things back to front,” says Fox. “We try to motivate people from the inside out. We look at attitudes and goals and beliefs, and assume that something has to be fixed inside.

“I think that if you want to fix motivation, you fix the work. You design the work to be inherently motivating. This is what we call motivation design.”

The beginnings

After completing his undergraduate studies at Perth’s Murdoch University, Fox undertook a PhD in self-efficacy and goal attainment, which he completed in 2010. At the time, he was lecturing at several universities and noticed some of his students were struggling with exams. So he started holding lectures for students about how they could cope better under exam pressure. High schools heard about his work and invited him to speak to their students, and from there he joined the motivational speaker circuit.

But he thought some of the ideas he heard from other speakers were dangerous and outdated, and that’s when he decided to share what he knew about the science of motivation on a professional basis.

Fox argues that the old tool kit for motivation – things such as SMART goal setting where goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based – might work for some people and some situations. But when it comes to higher levels of management and leadership, we need to go beyond that.

Increasingly, machines will do work in higher orders of complexity. So how do we do the kind of work that can’t easily be replicated by machines?

Design thinking

Motivation design calls on managers to design jobs that are stimulating and inherently rewarding. As we move into what is now being described as the conceptual age – where workers need skills, such as design, storytelling, empathy and curiosity guided by the right hemisphere of the brain – managers need to automate or eliminate simple, repetitive and boring tasks, says Fox. He also advises managers to keep meetings to a minimum, avoid excessive reporting and shield staff from unnecessary administration and emails.

Even when staff are focused on their primary task, enthusiasm might wane. But Fox warns managers not to assume the problem is a lack of staff motivation.

“Ask yourself if there is some other reason why they aren’t hitting their goals. Ask yourself if you have been clear about what behaviour you want from them. Don’t use vague words such as ‘be strategic’, ‘be agile’, ‘be collaborative’.Everyone nods when they hear these phrases, but no-one really knows what they mean.”

Managers need to think deeply about what could be triggering unwanted behaviour. Has the project created friction with other staff? Has a project team received clear and timely feedback on work already done? Have the goalposts changed?

“Remove motivation from consideration – it’s a distraction – and instead ask yourself what’s helping or hindering your people. This is much more important than cute clichés and throwaway motivational statements.”

“Managers need to shine a light on meaningful progress, the things that otherwise would not be noticed or measured, but which are ultimately really important.

“It’s important for all of us to understand what meaningful progress is or you can be swept up in a delusion of progress. A state wherein we are busy, efficient and productive, but neither effective nor progressive.”

Fox agrees that, even in the best workplaces, no-one will be motivated all the time.

“That would be hard to sustain. Rather, assume that people are motivated, but don’t rely on motivation. In other words: design work for low motivation.”

If the behavioural science is clear that in modern, white-collar workplaces the old-fashioned carrot and stick approach to motivation doesn’t work, why do most companies insist on using it?

Many companies are locked into short-term goals because of the need to regularly reward shareholders, says Fox. Also, everything about the modern workplace is getting faster and many people feel time-poor. “We tend to stick to those things we know how to do, that we know have some kind of track record of success, and we don’t take the time to explore the alternatives.

“Yes, there’s risk in exploring new ways of doing things, but you can control that by doing small and manageable experiments.”

So what motivates the man who says that he wants to “liberate the world from poorly designed work?”

It pains me that some of the world’s best people are being held captive to outdated notions of productivity,” says Fox.

“Some might say I’m obsessed, but it is the allure of undiscovered possibilities that fascinates me. That’s why I do what I do, to help the people who make a difference.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2018 issue of HRM magazine.

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In the early 1970s, Mark Lepper and his team of researchers at Stanford University conducted a significant study into the impact of extrinsic rewards on performance. Specifically, Lepper tested whether prizes influenced the behaviour of young children.

A brand-new activity was introduced to the children at a nursery. The teachers issued the children with white artist’s drawing paper and brand-new marker pens; the children were given time to draw with these novel materials. They had never done drawings with marker pens before. Predictably, the children took to the activity with relish. But after exactly one hour, the materials were whisked away to the disappointment of the children.

Several days later, one of the researchers returned to the class and randomly divided the class into two groups to continue the new drawing activity. One group of children were taken to another room. They were given the opportunity to continue their drawings, just as they had done before. After an hour, the researcher thanked the children in this group and took away the art material and their drawings.

On the other hand, the second group of children were each offered a prize for drawing their pictures. It was explained to this group that some special prizes would be given to the children who drew excellent pictures. This control group was given the same amount of time (one hour) as the other group to complete their artwork. At the end of the session, the researcher thanked the children as he’d done with the other group and, as promised, he handed out a prize to each child.

One week later the researchers returned to the classroom. The afternoon period consisted of ‘free time;’ the children could choose what they wanted to do with their time. The special paper and marker pens were placed on the tables and easily accessible for the children. However, the children had other options too. They could go outside and run around in the playground. They could play with the toys in the classroom. Or they could return to the drawing activity. The researchers observed the time the children spent on their chosen activities. To what extent would the prizes given to the children in the control group affect their choices and behaviour? The researchers assumed that the children in the control group, who had received prizes, would spend more time on the drawing activity.

But that didn’t happen!

Extrinsic motivation

The result was one the researchers didn’t foresee. Their findings challenged conventional wisdom about parenting and education. The children who received the extrinsic rewards for their art work, chose to spend less time drawing than those who weren’t rewarded. Conversely, the children who didn’t receive a prize chose to spend more of their discretionary time on the drawing activity. The children who were rewarded seemed reluctant to continue with the activity without the promise of a further reward. The initial reward paradoxically reduced the children’s motivation rather than increase it.

Intrinsic motivation

But what was even more surprising is this: The artwork of all the children was evaluated by a group of independent judges with no knowledge of the experiment. The result was that the pictures drawn by the children who were rewarded were evaluated as less competent than the pictures drawn by the unrewarded group.

So, in summary: The children who received an extrinsic reward spent less time drawing when given a choice and when they were rewarded, they put in less effort too.

The limit of rewards

Extrinsic rewards are limited in their ability to promote higher levels of performance. In some cases, they’re even demotivating. Most people want more from their work than promises of a bonus. For many, it can be a vehicle for personal growth, wellbeing, cultivating a sense of belonging, and providing a sense of purpose and direction in one’s life.

When incentives are used to improve performance, they can unintentionally take the employee’s attention off the work the reward is designed to enhance. The promise of a bonus, shifts the employee’s focus from the task to the prize. The work, in other words, becomes the means to the outcome – a reward.

With a bonus top-of-mind, it’s common for the employee to cut corners, do whatever it takes, or even cheat, to get their hands on the prize. As well intended as extrinsic rewards are – and as effective as they can sometimes be – they have a chance to backfire.

Using monetary incentives to induce greater performance is, however, part of the DNA of many workplaces where employees are seen as cogs in the machine. The carrot and stick are the levers to reinforce orthodox work practices.

Despite evidence to the contrary, we continue to see this motivational strategy as the answer to extracting higher performance. We still endeavour to motivate employees with a suite of inducements and apply sanctions when predetermined behaviour is not met. Work has transformed. But the way we try to kindle performance hasn’t.

This article is an edited exert from Dr Tim Baker’s latest book, “Performance Management for Agile Organizations: Overthrowing the Eight Management Myths That Hold Businesses Back”.

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by Dr Jason Fox, Wiley, $29.95

Don’t let the red beard and vests fool you. Dr Jason Fox is probably the closest thing to a modern-day swashbuckler you’ll find in business thought leadership. To use his own words, he spends his time “liberating the world from default thinking and the curse of efficiency”.

Dr Fox has already explored the science of motivation in his first book, The Game Changer, which looked at how to make progress inherently motivating with game theory. Now, he turns his attention to developing the pioneering leaders who will make things happen. This book is not heavy on research or study analyses; the only footnotes are his own asides about things like coffee or direct addresses to the reader. But it’s also far from speculation. Dr Fox has years of experience as a motivation-strategy and design expert, and he draws heavily on his work with companies like Suncorp, Telstra and CSIRO as practical case studies that best illustrate – as either dos or don’ts – the points he wants to make.

His writing is irreverent and the content injects a dose of the fanciful, so fair warning that some suspension of disbelief is necessary. This style is characteristic of his presentations, but unusual in business writing. It’s clear that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and that’s the point. Dr Fox asks readers to abandon the default thinking, delusions and conventions that plague today’s workplaces and characterises default thinking as a Kraken of Doom lurking in the murky depths of offices everywhere.

The business of doing business can be sterile, he says. Companies today look for innovation and creativity without confronting what that actually looks like. Everyone wants the success of a start-up, but few understand the core values that power these innovators: “By seeking to reduce uncertainty – instead of questing within it – we end up reducing the very things that allow us to pioneer and unlock game-changing strategic innovation: creativity, serendipity, imagination, diversity, experimentation and learning,” he says.

On old maps, cartographers would often mark uncharted territory with warnings of “Here be dragons”. The phrase has since been adapted as a metaphor for venturing into the unknown. This is exactly where Dr Fox thinks leaders should be heading.

Chapters are packed with exercises, diagrams and illustrations of core concepts with titles such as “Failure and the Nine Layers of Fell” and “The Importance of Pioneering”. The uniting force is the hero’s journey – the quest that leaders are on to tame the behemoths and leviathans within their organisation. 

So how do we get there? Dr Fox lists the four most important traits leaders need to progress through uncertainty as imagination and curiosity, but less predictably, doubt and wonder. 

As a refreshing counter to all the self-help “You can do anything you set your mind to” literature, Dr Fox considers doubt – the ability to constantly question your thoughts and actions, and those of others – to be a valuable asset for pioneering leaders.

His sections on quest-augmented strategy expand on doubt and wonder as uncredited champions of progress. “Wonder exists in the undivided mind, within the overlaps of both art and science,” he says. “And doubt is the black sheep of the family … yet it is one of our most stalwart companions to any quest.”

Perhaps one of his most pithy insights is that strategy has no present tense. It’s a bit of a “yes, and” statement, but indicative of how businesses hold themselves back. It all circles around to his Kraken of Doom and why we stick to the safety of the shallows. For anyone looking to brave the deep, unknown waters, this book is a useful torch.

Dr Jason Fox will be speaking at all AHRI State Conferences in 2016. To learn more, click here. 

This article is an edited version. The full article was first published in the April 2016 issue of HRMonthly magazine as “Here Be Dragons”. AHRI members receive HRMonthly 11 times per year as part of their membership. Find out more about AHRI membership here. 

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The trouble is, we’re still not very good at it.

The numbers vary in different studies, but there’s agreement across the board that a minority of employees are strongly engaged in their work. In the United States it’s about one in three, falling to about one in four in Australia, according to Gallup, the US-based performance management consultancy whose annual surveys are widely cited.

“Worker engagement is the continuing Achilles heel of modern organisational life,” said AHRI chairman Peter Wilson when delivering the Kingsley Laffer Memorial Lecture late last year.

Why does it matter? Well, Gallup’s research mirrors many studies around the world in finding that organisations with high levels of employee engagement have superior figures for productivity, customer satisfaction, staff turnover, absenteeism, safety incidents and quality defects. It adds up to improved profitability of as much as 22 per cent.

The whole game

Leaders can’t afford to be indifferent to the problem of low engagement, says consultant and author Gary Hamel. It may have been optional once, but now it’s “pretty much the whole game”, he wrote in a Wall Street Journal blog post.

AHRI research shows that Australian employers are aware that worker engagement is critical to future business success, said Wilson. But a yawning gap remains between where engagement levels are today and where they need to be to reap the benefits.

It has led to an industry of academic research, consultants and authors working on new theories and practices. One conclusion from these investigations is that it’s not about the money. Reviewing some of the key engagement themes in recent years, it’s clear that remuneration is not a motivation. As author Daniel H. Pink writes in his 2011 bestseller, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, assuming employees believe they are paid fairly and adequately, that issue is taken off the table.

What matters, says Pink, are feelings of “autonomy, mastery and purpose”. In other words, that employees don’t feel managers or supervisors are breathing down their necks (“you can’t manage people into engagement”), that they’re properly trained and equipped to do the job, and they understand the purpose.

Hamel agrees that the real dampener on employee engagement is the “soggy, cold blanket of centralised authority”. In typical hierarchical management structures, employees are disenfranchised from most policy decisions, he says.

“They lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors. When bedevilled by a boss who thwarts initiative, smothers creativity and extinguishes passion, most employees have but two options: suffer in silence or quit.”

Hierarchy change

The traditional hierarchical cascade of information, from the CEO through the leadership team and down to the employees, has gone believes Michael Rosmarin, chief operating officer at property and shopping centre giant Stockland.

“When you look at the immediacy of information now, the old approach takes too long. You need to engage more directly,” says Rosmarin.

Two years ago, Stockland was facing a difficult market and declining earnings, as well as their former CEO’s retirement after 12 years in the job. With Mark Steinert taking over the reins, the company underwent a massive upheaval. The organisation was restructured including a management shake-up, a drop in bonuses and job cuts. “We changed the way we worked,” says Rosmarin. Underlining the success of the restructure (along with a healthy property market), Stockland announced strong profit growth in its half yearly results. And, significantly, says Rosmarin, the company’s engagement scores were the highest they had ever seen.

Rosmarin says it was due to the company beginning to communicate early on, “openly and often” with its employees and involve them in refreshing the business vision and values through focus groups, surveys and storytelling contributions.

“The values we came up with really resonated with our people because they’d been involved in setting them,” he says.

“Part of the objective of my role is looking at how we can continue to have a far more integrated and aligned organisation,” he says. “If people are clear how they can contribute to delivering our strategy, how they work together with others and how they can get involved in things beyond what’s in their role descriptions, that all leads to engagement. It also leads to a far more effective organisation and quicker and better outcomes.”

For more information on motivation in the workplace AHRI is running a series of breakfast events across Australia with motivational strategy and design expert Dr Jason Fox. Find out more.

This article is an edited version. The full article was first published in the April 2015 issue of HRMonthly magazine as ‘Mind the gap’. AHRI members receive HRMonthly 11 times per year as part of their membership. Find out more about AHRI membership here. 

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AHRI members can catch Fox in person with AHRI’s Breakfast Club series touring across Australia in May and June 2015. For more information, visit the AHRI website.

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