Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1478

Why We Love Narcissists

Have you ever wondered why selfish, arrogant, and entitled individuals are so charming? These narcissistic people have parasitic effects on society. When in charge of companies they commit fraud, demoralize employees, and devalue stock. When in charge of countries they increase poverty, violence, and death rates.

And yet, there is no shortage of examples to illustrate the cultural appeal of narcissistic antiheroes, whether fictional (Walter White of Breaking Bad; Batman, and James Bond), all-too real (Silvio Berlusconi, Steve Jobs, Kanye West, and too many professional athletes to name), or a mix of both, such as the so-called Wolf of Wall Street. We are attracted to them despite their self-absorption — or perhaps, even because of it.

Why?

After decades of scientific research, psychologists have begun to deconstruct the seductive power of narcissists, explaining the precise mechanisms underlying their charm and ability to get ahead in all domains of life. Here are the key findings:

1. Narcissists are masterful impression managers: Thanks largely to their intense self-obsession and self-adulation, narcissists excel at managing initial impressions. They care a lot about their appearance and dress to impress, which signals status and makes them attractive. As Kaiser and Craig note in a recent review (“Destructive leadership in and of organizations”), “it is the obsessive focus on the self that links the narcissistic personality with charisma.” Furthermore, narcissists’ desire to make a great initial impression enables them to disguise their arrogance as confidence, which they often achieve through humor and by being entertaining or eccentric. Unsurprisingly, narcissists perform well on interviews and they are excellent social networkers – you can even spot them by their social media activity (e.g., more Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or a higher Klout score).

2. Narcissists manipulate credit and blame in their favor: Through a mix of shameless self-promotion and a guilt-free, Machiavellian agenda, narcissists are quick to take credit for others’ achievements and blame colleagues and subordinates for their own failures. As Ben Dattner notes, narcissistic managers “lead with the main purpose of receiving personal credit or glory. When things go wrong or they make mistakes, they deny or distort information and ‘rewrite history’ in order to avoid getting blamed.” What makes narcissists so effective at this is their complete conviction that they are actually special. In Dattner’s words: “they believe that they deserve credit for simply being who they are, regardless of their actual contributions or achievements.” Such delusions of grandeur allow narcissists to be more effective manipulators than individuals who are politically savvy but inhibited by their inability to distort reality or morality in their favor. It is always easier to fool others when you have already fooled yourself; it is always harder to feel guilty when you think you are innocent.

3. Narcissists fit conventional stereotypes of leadership: Because of their ability to accumulate power and influence, narcissists enjoy a prominent spot in laypeople’s views about leadership. However, the idea that leaders must be overconfident, charismatic, or selfish in order to be effective is in stark contrast with reality. Yes, these characteristics help them emerge as leaders, but they are also the cause of their dishonest and incompetent behaviors once they get to the top. Whether in sports, business, education or politics, effective leadership requires building high-performing teams and, when it comes to that, the critical ingredients for success are competence rather than confidence, altruism rather than egotism, and integrity rather than charisma. In other words, the real essence of good leadership is the exact opposite of what the Hollywood version of leadership implies. Until we understand this, we will unfortunately continue to invite narcissists to the top while overlooking more competent and healthier alternatives. In Eastern and collectivistic cultures narcissism rates are lower because society condemns it – we should follow that model in the West.

Importantly, there are different degrees of narcissism and, though we tend to use the term categorically, it is more appropriate to refer to people as either more or less narcissistic. In fact, some people may display relatively benign levels of narcissism, while others may resemble true psychopaths.

Interestingly, a small degree of narcissism may not be detrimental for leadership, at least in corporate America. In a recent meta-analytic study, managers with moderate narcissism scores did tend to outperform not only managers with high, but also low, rates of narcissism. This finding reminds us of some of the bright side characteristics associated with narcissistic leadership, such as effective communication skills, strategic vision, and ambition. No wonder we find narcissistic people appealing, despite themselves. However, if such competencies can also be found in non-narcissistic individuals – and they can – the derailment risks will decrease.

It is useful to recall one of the unique characteristics of narcissistic individuals, which is their inability to prolong their seductive powers for too long. Much like crack cocaine, the charm of narcissists produces an intense but short-lived high; and, unlike crack cocaine, it is far from addictive, except for narcissists themselves. As a seminal study in this area showed, the charisma of narcissists wears off after a mere 2.5 hours. Their initial flamboyance, charm and confidence soon morphs into deluded self-admiration, defensive arrogance, and moral disengagement. It is this rapid expiry date of narcissistic charms, which keeps narcissists always on the hunt for new fans — or victims.

So, when dealing with charismatic individuals, a good rule of thumb is to delay making decisions — whether to hire that person, promote them, or take them on as clients — until you work out who they really are. Not all charismatic people are narcissistic, but many narcissists are charismatic, and the more charismatic they are, the more time it takes to spot them.

Chile’s Attempt to Cut Traffic Meets the Law of Unintended Consequences

Within months after Santiago, Chile, implemented a drastic overhaul of its antiquated bus and subway routes with the intention of reducing car use, congestion, and pollution, many commuters abandoned public transportation in favor of cars. In part because the 2007 implementation of the hub-and-spoke system required many more transfers, average daily commuting time increased from 77 to 90 minutes, demand for taxis doubled, the stock of private vehicles rose 5% to 8%, and carbon-monoxide levels rose 27%, according to a team led by Francisco Gallego of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Why It’s Hard to Be Entrepreneurial

For many years, I have talked with business executives about the need to reorient their attitudes toward failure. If they want their organizations to generate more good ideas, monetize the best of them, and in general innovate faster, they need to not only tolerate but celebrate the fruitless pilots and instructive flops that are an inevitable part of the process.

So I was dismayed to learn, from a recent survey focusing on entrepreneurial activity inside corporations, how big an obstacle this continues to be for companies. In fact, it was the biggest disconnect the study revealed. Although 42 percent of the corporate professionals surveyed said that management’s tolerance of failure was “very important” to fostering an entrepreneurial attitude in an organization, only 12 percent thought their own companies were good at that. (See chart.)

It’s easy to make the logical argument for how an intolerance of failure cripples an organization’s innovation efforts. The saying “nothing ventured, nothing gained” dates back centuries, after all. But our survey provides some fresh statistical evidence of the impact. A depressing 27 percent of employees told us they had consciously chosen not to pursue an idea they felt had promise at their company, for fear of negative consequences.

What did employees themselves point to as the single biggest impediment to entrepreneurial activity in their organizations? The largest number (36 percent) blamed workloads that kept employees too busy to focus on entrepreneurial ideas. In second place, 20 percent thought it was the lack of management support for trying new things. Third most often cited (by 13 percent) was a lack of adequate incentives for pursuing entrepreneurial ideas.

Our findings were not all doom and gloom. In spite of the challenges, the majority of employees report having initiated an entrepreneurial pursuit at their companies (52 percent) and that their companies are more supportive of entrepreneurial initiative than they were five years ago (55 percent).

Looking more closely at these employee innovations, however, the overwhelming majority had to do with internal programs and processes; 54 percent were limited to the workings of the business unit in which the employee worked while another 31 percent improved processes or created programs that crossed unit boundaries. That leaves just 15 percent whose pursuits were focused on externally-focused products – the innovations that companies are most rewarded for in the marketplace.

One interpretation of these findings is that employees have an entrepreneurial impulse that even time constraints and unsupportive management can’t destroy, but it is being channeled in a direction that doesn’t match their companies’ urgent need for market-facing innovation. And what’s responsible for the diversion? Again, I would point the finger at the typical company’s unhealthy response to any foray that visibly fails.

If your objective is to nurture and enable an entrepreneurial culture, you should think about establishing some new rules for yourself and your team. Among them:

Communicate constantly that innovation is valued – and valued most when it serves customers directly and excites the marketplace.
Reward efforts, not just outcomes. Provide financial and nonfinancial incentives for the entrepreneurial behaviors the company wants to see more of – not only for the ultimate success that a precious few initiatives will achieve. (This is clearly not the norm today: 77 percent of people we surveyed said the rewards for entrepreneurial initiative come only when ideas have been implemented and proven to work.)
Learn to fail faster. Speed up the process of moving ideas to test phases where it’s possible to get an objective sense of their potential. The more you invest beforehand, the harder it is to see the truth – and the fewer ideas you can put to the test.
Cull ideas – without killing initiative. Focus is essential for new ventures to succeed, so hard decisions will have to be made on which to pursue. It is critical that the people whose ideas aren’t selected not be so discouraged by the experience that they don’t try again.
Celebrate learning. Nobody likes to see an idea they believed in fail. But remind them that any experiment that leaves the company smarter constitutes valuable progress.

Of course, good management is always a matter of striking the right balance. It’s easy to imagine the dangers of encouraging risk-taking, rewarding activity versus outcome, or celebrating failure too much. In today’s climate, however, that threat seems manageable. The more urgent problem is to spur greater levels of innovation, and to do that, most companies must encourage more entrepreneurship in their ranks. Only when they learn to fail, and more importantly to learn from failure, will they hold the keys to success.

Being Underwater on Your Mortgage Reduces Your Earnings

Why has wage growth been anemic in the current U.S. economic recovery, despite strong productivity gains? One reason may be that many homeowners have owed their banks more than their homes are worth, and being underwater on a mortgage depresses earnings, say Chris Cunningham of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Robert R. Reed of the University of Alabama. Specifically, having mortgage debt that exceeds the home price lowers one’s current earnings by 3.7%, apparently because underwater homeowners accept lower wages to avoid job loss, which could lead to mortgage default.

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

The debauchery-laden film by Martin Scorsese The Wolf of Wall Street is a prime example of financial corruption, excess, and corporate greed. It’s the rags to riches to rags story of a hotshot, real-life New York stockbroker, Jordan Belfort, who conned his way through life, starting at the bottom of the Wall Street pecking order and by the 1990s making millions selling worthless stocks.

Belfort’s story is also a tale of complete disregard for others, of careless spending, and of a raging drug and prostitute habit. His enormous success and affluence gave him the title “The Wolf of Wall Street.” But in 1994, the fairy tale ended, with Belfort being banned from the securities business for life, and being sent to jail for fraud and money laundering.

In cases like Belfort, it isn’t always easy to distinguish between corporate genius and psychopath. Frankly, it’s often a thin line that divides them. Some of these people rise to astonishing heights, but in the process they cause enormous damage. They can poison the workplace, putting the health of both their companies and staff at risk.

People who behave like this are what I call Seductive Operational Bullies (SOBs). Without going so far as to commit murder or arson, but unburdened by the pangs of conscience that moderate most people’s interactions with others, such people are “psychopaths lite.”

They can be found wherever power, status, or money is at stake. Outwardly normal, apparently successful and charming, their lack of empathy, shame, guilt, or remorse can have serious interpersonal repercussions and destroy organizations. Their chameleon-like qualities mean they often reach top executive positions, especially in organizations that appreciate impression management, corporate gamesmanship, risk taking, domination, competitiveness, and assertiveness.

Of course, psychopaths have always been around. Many historical figures that committed crimes against humanity fall within this category. But only a small subset of psychopaths turns into violent criminals. What we need to realize is that there exist many less extreme forms of psychopathy.

Seductive operational bullies are not blatantly violent or antisocial; their disturbing behavior is not so in your face.  They can be hard to spot, due to their manipulative personalities; they are often “hidden in plain sight.” Indeed, many of the behaviors and qualities they exhibit, that indicate mental problems in other contexts, actually appear quite appropriate in senior executive positions.

Unlike fundamental psychopaths, born without the capacity to form emotional bonds (due to possible genetic abnormalities), “lite” psychopaths are usually the products of their childhoods. Their capacity for empathetic response may have been incapacitated due to repeated disillusionment in their childhood, caused by physical or sexual abuse or other forms of maltreatment. Over time, these negative environmental experiences may have led to the deactivation or poor repair of normal human emotional, neurological pathways, resulting in psychopathic behavior patterns.

Estimates vary, but perhaps 3.9 percent of corporate professionals could be described as having psychopathic tendencies, a figure considerably higher than is found in the general population. From these observations we can deduce that many people working in organizations have a fair chance of having an experience with a pathological boss.

Unfortunately, most people working for seductive operational bullies lack the knowledge and skills to effectively respond and deal with them. Either they don’t understand the cause of their problems, or they don’t know how to fight back. To make matters worse, these psychopathic executives usually have the dedication, focus, and business acumen to create at least the appearance of success.

They are highly manipulative, discrediting others around them, deflecting the issue at hand when confronted.  They will threaten and distort the facts, all the while presenting themselves as helpful and or working “for the good of the company.” They are very talented at hiding their true motives, while making others look incompetent, uncooperative, or self-serving. The only thing that counts for these people is to win. They prey on people’s emotional vulnerabilities.

So what can be done to prevent such people can causing havoc? Ideally, organizations should fine-tune their recruitment procedures in order to avoid hiring them in the first place. Scrutinize resumes for any anomalies and put the candidate through multiple interviews. Seductive operational bullies have a tendency to tell interviewers what they think they want to hear, and different interviewers can elicit different, sometimes contradictory, responses.

What if the psychopath is already on your staff? If you see talented people leaving a project or a company, that may be a sign. A red flag should also go up if there are glaring discrepancies between how direct reports and junior employees perceive an executive and how that executive’s peers or boss perceive him or her. Lower-level employees are often on the receiving end of a boss’s psychopathic behavior and usually spot a problem much sooner than senior management. It’s also important to encourage teamwork, as that’s something that psychopaths don’t feel comfortable with; they’ll look for the door. And take steps to develop a corporate culture in which junior employees are able to express concerns about their colleagues and superiors without fear of reprisal.

Finally, if you are so unfortunate as to have a psychopath as your boss or even as CEO of the company, recognize that you are unlikely to be able to get him or her to change. Attempting an ouster is likely to be difficult and will jeopardize your own career. In this case, the best course is not to stick around but to cut your losses, and move on.

Would You Play Golf on a Weekday Afternoon?

Last summer, I was invited by a few friends to meet at 4 o’clock on a weekday to play a few holes of golf on a sunny afternoon.   As I got out of my car, a guy I know waved and said, “Hey, great to see you, but don’t you still work?”  (Yes.) Over on the driving range, another man I’ve known for years, came by and said, “So, you’ve finally decided to retire?”   (No.)

Since this was the first time in memory that I had left the office early (and it wasn’t even that early) for a fun activity, I wasn’t used to these questions. I realized, of course, that both men were professionals, as were most people on the golf course that weekday afternoon, and no one was asking them if they still were employed.  So why did they ask me?

I didn’t play golf until a few years ago, but for thirty plus years I have witnessed my husband play occasional weekday golf, usually with his buddies but sometimes with industry friends; I know many male business associates who sometimes play in tournaments starting on Thursdays, and I have one female friend who plays decent golf and gets the invite to an annual broker sponsored event.  I have never begrudged them this perk as I see them all as hard working professionals who wouldn’t shirk responsibility and abuse their colleagues or their company. So I was startled when my appearance at the course got such a reaction.

Since taking up golf, I’ve mentioned to my partners each spring that I would like to leave early about once every four weeks to play some golf.  I work plenty of hours, arriving at the office before the Today show starts about twice a week, so why not?  However, I find I only leave early to play about once a year; there is always something keeping me in the office.  My reluctance led me to question why there were so few working women on the golf course – so few that we apparently look like retirees to our brothers!

I decided to survey executives with over 15 years of experience to see whether there is a distinction by gender in attitude about one’s own participation in leisure activities or if people view men or women’s golf playing differently.  While golf is a common form of recreation for business associates during the work week, it is by no means the only such activity.  However, for simplicity, I will use golf as a shorthand for them all.  Golf is so embedded in US corporate culture that there are innumerable articles describing its use as a key business asset, to which women have limited access and often feel excluded.

Among the 40 responders, there were slightly more women than men.  I found that 90% of the men, and around 40% of the women, participate in some weekday outings, generally 3-4 times per year.  And while several mentioned being encouraged to take clients out for a round of golf, the breakdown between leisure outings and business outings was evenly divided, suggesting that business may be overstated as a rationale for golf excursions.

Those who did not play golf or other sports primarily cited work as the reason. Women in the study gave this answer much more frequently than men, perhaps suggesting that they feel less comfortable being away from work than their male peers, who have generations of experience with such pastimes.  Several women also said that they were never asked to join the weekday excursions. Janine, the CEO of a financial services firm wrote, “I don’t play golf, but I fly fish competently and my male colleagues have never invited me to join them.”

Somewhat surprisingly, although many experienced some guilt, no one reported receiving real criticism from co-workers (we have colleagues above in the quote)  for taking a day here and there for golf. However, once the questions turned to speculating about how golf playing might affect someone’s career, answers varied dramatically between sexes.

47% of responders, and a majority of the women, thought their colleagues would be more critical of female leisure activity than male.  Those feeling strongest about this were at the highest organization level, perhaps because these women are of an age when exhibiting perseverance and determination has been critical to their advancement.  More women than men felt guilty about playing golf.

Yet almost all men disagreed that there would be career bias against women who were out occasionally to play a sport.  Even so, almost all the foursomes that the men played in were unisex.

To the women of the office, I say let your colleagues and business associates know that you would like the opportunity to join them on an outing.  If they don’t know you play, they won’t ever ask you. Or arrange an outing yourself.

To the men: try inviting some women along. As one male executive at a real estate firm said, “If my partner were a decent golfer, I would welcome her anytime, but she hates golf.”  I told him I play – let’s see if he asks.

The Dangerous Rise of “Entrepreneurship Porn”

Sir Richard Branson has proclaimed 2014 “The Year of the Entrepreneur.” Breathless coverage abounds: sexy stories of the young and old who threw off the yoke and started their own businesses. It’s all goodbye cubicle — hello freedom, vitality, creativity.

Fed by media and online coverage of an idealized lifestyle, this “entrepreneurship porn” presents an airbrushed reality in which all work is always meaningful and running your own business is a way to achieve better work/life harmony.

But the reality of starting and running a small business is different from the fantasy – and I should know, because I run one, and am married to a long-time entrepreneur. Starting a company doesn’t mean being freed from the grind; it means that the buck stops with you, always, even if it’s Sunday morning or Friday night.

Moreover, it’s just not possible that every smart young graduate can launch her own successful enterprise. Part of me wants to cry every time I meet a smart young student and the notion of joining a respected, existing institution cannot compete with the thought of creating her own.

Very few of the talented young people I meet want to work for something that already exists. On the contrary, they want to create new enterprises. They want to work according to their own rules, not a boss’s rules. Part of this may be youth, but surely part of it is what these young people have seen: their parents and older friends grinding it out, feeling unrecognized and judged on the wrong criteria. Women leaving high-powered jobs once they have children and stifled in a desire to be both a good mother and good worker, and men who cannot express their need to have a life at home and at work.

I went to graduate school to study why people — women in particular — leave work, and how employers can help them to stay. I also went to graduate school to escape my own struggles with a frustrating corporate environment; I quit 10 jobs before I was 31. In the years since, I’ve spent hours interviewing both experts in human capital and the men and women who’ve left firms.

I’ve come to suspect that the rise of “entrepreneurship porn” is at least as much about escaping a company as starting one. Most Americans don’t like their work. Data on Americans’ dissatisfaction regarding their work – in corporate environments, in particular, show:

2 million Americans voluntarily leave their jobs every month (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
74% of people would today consider finding a new job
32% of employees are looking for a new job
Only 47.3 percent of currently employed Americans are satisfied with their position (Conference Board)
The majority of American employees are disengaged from their work (Gallup)
Entrepreneurs are more likely to have an optimistic view about their futures than other employees (Gallup).

Entrepreneurial escapism thrives in such an environment. A joint study from INSEAD/Princetonshows that “Non-pecuniary motivations are more important than monetary motivations for people to start a new business. One is autonomy: People want to be their own boss. The other is identity fulfillment, which is more about people having a vision about a product or a service. But their employers do not give them the freedom to develop within the company structure. That is a key driver.”

Despite these noble yearnings, the data show the most effective workplaces with happy employees are not necessarily startups. The criteria that define happy workplaces are work-life fit, autonomy, job challenge and learning, a climate of respect and trust, supervisor task support, and financial security. None of these spells “small business” to me.

The longer the fantasy of entrepreneurship continues and the media continues to churn out entrepreneurship porn the weaker our established institutions become. The data on creating effective workplaces are clear, and can basically be boiled down into simple tenets: Create an environment that treats employees like grown ups. Focus on accountability, not face time. Allow men and women to live whole lives.

A good friend who runs a professional services firm told me with some shock that his most profitable employee is a single mother who works part time. So this year, she got a big bonus. Despite working for someone else, she feels recognized and rewarded. And by being part of a larger organization, she gets to have more time with her kids. This sort of story is rare – but it doesn’t have to be.

Entrepreneurship may always be a sexy story for the media to tell, but our needs as working people are about much more than zeitgeisty startups. We can’t all start the next Facebook, but we all deserve a work life that recognizes our diligence and unique contributions. What if 2014 could be the “year of working for someone else — and loving it”?

The Relationship Between Anxiety and Performance

I choked.

It was just a middle-school tennis match against a manifestly worse player, but I became overwhelmed with anxiety. Before we’d started, the most important thing was to win. But during the match, I just wanted to get off the court fast. Burping uncontrollably, afraid of throwing up, I hit balls out. I hit them into the net. I double-faulted. And I lost 6-1, 6-0. After shaking hands and running off the court, I felt immediate relief. My distended stomach settled. My anxiety relented. And then self-loathing took over. This was a challenge match for a lower-ladder JV position. The stakes were low, but to me they felt existentially high. I’d lost to the overweight and oleaginous Paul (not his real name), and the result was there on the score sheet, and on the ladder hanging on the locker room wall, for all to see.

This sort of thing—purposely losing matches to escape intolerable anxiety—happened dozens of times throughout my school sports career. My coaches were baffled. How could I look so skillful in practice, they wondered, and yet so rarely win a significant match?

Choking when you’re expected to perform—whether you’re squaring off in tennis or vying for resources or key accounts or a desirable role at work—is actually surprisingly common. It happens with some regularity to probably around one-fifth of the population. Since this response is at least partly hardwired (more on that later), it’s not something you tend to outgrow as you mature and gain perspective. Thirty years after that match with Paul, I still struggle with it. A lot.

Who chokes, and why?

People who choke can be peak performers in some settings, trembling mice in others. The list of elite athletes who have choked spectacularly is extensive. Greg Norman, the Australian golfer, became completely at the 1996 Masters, nervously frittering away a seemingly insurmountable lead over the final few holes. Jana Novotná, the Czech tennis star, was five points away from winning Wimbledon in 1993 when she disintegrated under pressure and blew a huge lead over Steffi Graf. And then there’s Roberto Duran, who famously lost his world welterweight championship to Sugar Ray Leonard. With sixteen seconds left in the eighth round—and millions of dollars on the line—Duran turned to the referee, raised his hands in surrender, and pleaded, “No más, no más [No more, no more].” Until that moment, Duran appeared to be invincible. Since then, he’s been widely considered one of the greatest quitters and cowards in sports history.

That may sound harsh, but just about the worst epithet one can sling at an athlete—worse, in some ways, than ”cheater”—is “choker.” To choke is to wilt under pressure, to fail to perform at the moment of greatest importance. A technical definition, as laid out by Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago cognitive psychologist who specializes in the topic, is “worse performance than expected given what a performer is capable of doing and what this performer has done in the past.”

In any performance arena, from sports to the military to the workplace, choking is produced by anxiety and, ipso facto, viewed as an absence of fortitude, a sign of weakness.

Of course, it’s not that simple.

Research shows a strong correlation between your genetically conferred physiology and how likely you are to crack under stress. For instance, a person’s allotment of neuropeptide Y (NPY), a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates stress responses, among other things, is relatively fixed from birth, more a function of heredity than of learning. People high in NPY tend to be unusually psychologically resilient and resistant to breaking down in high-pressure situations.

But that said, there’s also an element of “nurture” at work here. Psychological resilience is a trait that can be taught; the Pentagon is spending millions trying to figure out how to do that better. It’s possible that those who thrive under pressure have learned to be resilient—that their high levels of NPY are the product of their training or their upbringing.

According to the explicit monitoring theory of choking, derived from recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, performance falters when you concentrate too much attention on it. This runs counter to all the standard bromides about how the quality of your performance is tied to the intensity of your focus. But what seems to matter is the type of focus you have. As Beilock puts it, actively worrying about screwing up makes you more likely to screw up.

To achieve optimal performance—what some psychologists call flow—parts of your brain should be on automatic pilot, not actively thinking about (or “explicitly monitoring”) what you are doing. Beilock has found that she can dramatically improve athletes’ performance, at least in experiments, by getting them to focus on something other than the mechanics of their stroke or swing. Having them recite a poem or sing a song in their heads, distracting their conscious attention from the physical task, can rapidly improve performance. Chronic chokers—especially those who are clinically anxious—are too distracted from the task at hand by a relentless interior monologue of self-doubt: Am I doing this right? Do I look stupid? What if I make a fool of myself? Can people see me trembling? Can they hear my voice quavering? Am I going to lose my job?

When you look at brain scans of athletes pre- or midchoke, says sports psychologist Bradley Hatfield, you see a neural “traffic jam” of worry and self-monitoring. Brain scans of nonchokers, however—the Tom Bradys and Peyton Mannings of the world, who exude grace under pressure—reveal neural activity that is “efficient and streamlined,” using only those parts of the brain relevant to strong performance.

Does that mean those of us whose bodies are set to quiver in response to the mildest perturbances are doomed to choke any time the pressure is on? Not necessarily. Because when you begin to untangle the relationship between anxiety and performance, it turns out to be very complex. It’s possible to be simultaneously anxious and effective.

Take, for example, Bill Russell, a Hall of Fame basketball player who won eleven championships with the Boston Celtics (the most by anyone in any major American sport, ever). He was selected to the NBA All-Star team twelve times and was voted the league’s most valuable player five times. He is generally acknowledged to be the greatest defender and all-around winner of his era, if not of all time. No one would question Russell’s toughness or his championship qualities or his courage. And yet, according to one tabulation, he vomited from anxiety before 1,128 of his games between 1956 and 1969. His teammate John Havlicek told the writer George Plimpton in 1968, “It’s a welcome sound, too, because it means he’s keyed up for the game and around the locker room we grin and say, ‘Man, we’re going to be all right tonight.’”

Like someone with an anxiety disorder, Russell had to contend with nerves that wreaked havoc with his stomach. But a crucial difference between Russell and the typical anxiety patient (aside, of course, from Russell’s preternatural athleticism) was the positive correlation between his anxiety and his performance. When Russell stopped throwing up for a stretch at the end of the 1963 season, he suffered through one of the worst slumps of his career. For him, a nervous stomach correlated with effective, even enhanced, performance.

 

How much anxiety is too much?

At some level, it’s normal—adaptive even—to be anxious in our postindustrial era of pervasive uncertainty, where social and economic structures are undergoing continuous disruption and professional roles are constantly changing. According to Charles Darwin (who himself suffered from crippling agoraphobia), species that “fear rightly” increase their chances of survival. We anxious people are less likely to remove ourselves from the gene pool by, say, becoming fighter pilots.

An influential study conducted a hundred years ago by two Harvard psychologists, Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, demonstrated that moderate levels of anxiety improve performance in humans and animals: too much anxiety, obviously, impairs performance, but so does too little. Their findings have been experimentally demonstrated in both animals and humans many times since then.

“Without anxiety, little would be accomplished,” David Barlow, founder of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, has written. “The performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.”

So how do you find the right balance? How do you get yourself into the performance zone where anxiety is beneficial? That’s a really tough question. For me, years of medication and intensive therapy have (sometimes, somewhat) taken the physical edge off my nerves so I could focus on trying to do well, not on removing myself from the center of attention as quickly as possible. For those who choke during presentations to board members or pitches to clients, for example, but probably aren’t what you’d call clinically anxious, the best approach may be one akin to what Beilock has athletes do in her experiments: redirecting your mind, in the moment, to something other than how you’re comporting yourself, so you can allow the skills and knowhow you’ve worked so hard to acquire to automatically kick into gear and carry you through. Your focus should not be on worrying about outcomes or consequences or on how you’re being perceived but simply on the task at hand. Prepare thoroughly (but not too obsessively) in advance; then stay in the moment. If you’re feeling anxious, breathe from your diaphragm in order to keep your sympathetic nervous system from revving up too much. And remember that it can be good to be keyed up: the right amount of nervousness will enhance your performance.

This post is adapted from the author’s book My Age of Anxiety.

Culture That Drives Performance

An HBR Insight Center




The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture
There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround
The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture
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When Human Judgment Works Well, and When it Doesn’t

My last post here, the descriptively-titled “Big Data’s Biggest Challenge? Convincing People NOT to Trust Their Judgment,” generated a fair amount of commentary. So I think it’s worthwhile to devote a couple follow-on posts to the reactions, questions, and objections raised in response to my contention, which was (and is) that we should generally be relying a lot less on the judgments, diagnoses, and forecasts of human ‘experts,’ and a lot more on the outputs of cold, hard, data-driven algorithms.

A good place to start is with the simple question of where this contention comes from — why am I so convinced that we should be relying less on experts and more on algorithms? The simple answer is that both the theory and the data support this conviction.

Let’s take the data first: In my previous post I highlighted that there have been a raftload of studies comparing the predictions of human experts vs. those of algorithms, and that in the great majority of them the algorithms have been at least as good as or significantly better than the humans. In a meta-analysis conducted by William Grove and colleagues of 136 research studies, for example, expert judgments were clearly better than their purely data-driven equivalents in only eight cases.

Most of these studies took place in messy, complex, real-world environments, not stripped-down laboratory settings. Commenter Sean Kennedy pointed out that “… many of our decisions have to be made under much less than ideal “big data” conditions. Data is often lacking, low-quality, or conflicting.” This is true, and what’s amazing is that these are exactly the conditions under which algorithms do better than people.

Why is this? Let’s turn to the theory.

A number of people noted that Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman’s work, nicely summarized in his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow, influenced their thinking a great deal. Me, too: Kahneman made gigantic contributions, and his book should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand how to make themselves and their organizations work better.

For our purposes here, Chapter 22 is paydirt. It’s titled “Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?” Kahneman conducted a lot of the work underlying it with Gary Klein, who was and is quite fond of experts and their intuitive abilities — much more so than Kahneman. What’s really interesting, though, is that the two of them ended up in complete agreement about the conditions required for good intuition to develop. There are two of them:

an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

Medicine meets the first of these criteria, since human biology changes very slowly, but (Kahneman contends) the stock market doesn’t — it’s just too chaotic and unpredictable. And within medicine, some specialities provide better and faster learning opportunities (the second criterion) than others. As the chapter states, “Among medical specialties, anesthesiologists benefit from good feedback, because the effects of their actions are likely to be quickly evident. In contrast, radiologists obtain little information about the accuracy of the diagnoses they make and about the pathologies they fail to detect. Anesthesiologists are therefore in a better position to develop useful intuitive skills.”

Kahneman drives this point about learning home with his conclusion that “Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice.”

With this background, we can now see two main reasons why algorithms beat people. The first is that, as Kahneman writes, “Statistical algorithms greatly outdo humans in noisy environments for two reasons: they are more likely than human judges to detect weakly valid cues and much more likely to maintain a modest level of accuracy by using such cues consistently.” In other words, people often miss cues (i.e. data) in the environment that would be useful to them, and even when they are aware of such cues they don’t use them the same way every time. In other words, the fact that most real-world environments are messy and noisy does not favor human experts over algorithms; in fact, just the opposite.

The second reason is that fast, accurate feedback is not always available to a human expert. To continue Kahneman’s example, a radiologist won’t always know if the lump she was looking at eventually turned out to be cancer (the patient might have moved on to another care provider, for example), and she certainly won’t know quickly. Similarly, an interviewer won’t always get the feedback that the person he hired flamed out on the job two years down the road.

But well-designed algorithms can and do incorporate feedback and results over a long time frame, which helps explains why algorithmic approaches to pathology and talent management work so much better.

So where does this leave us? Well, if Kahneman’s theory is right, and if people don’t have any inherent data collection or processing superiority over automatic means, then we’re in this situation:

But if there is still something special about our innate data collection and/or processing abilities (and I think there is, at least for now), then we’re here:

Which one do you think it is?

How to Find, Assess, and Hire the Modern Marketer

As a marketing leader, your new normal doesn’t necessarily look entirely like traditional “marketing”. The field of marketing has embraced a significant amount of change, and right at the heart of that change is a new era of data (and big data) and analytics—and a new type of marketer has emerged.  To be competitive, the modern marketer possesses a different set of skills and experiences when it comes to data and analytics (not simply metrics).  Finding, assessing, hiring, training, and motivating this new type of marketer are now critical factors for those of us building an analytical culture and the marketing organization of the future.

Who is the modern marketer?

Regardless of the role in marketing, the expectations related to data and analytics need to be consistent. While there will always be more advanced analytical and technical positions, there is a new baseline for all marketers. The skill set includes a knowledge of data management principles and analytical strategies, and an understanding of the role of data quality, the importance of data governance, and the value of data in marketing disciplines. Today’s marketer needs to go well beyond reporting and metrics, and be more proficient in a full range of analytics, which may include optimization, text, sentiment, scoring, modeling, visualization, forecasting, and attribution.

Marketers need to have experience with the technology, tools, and design approaches that leverage data and analytics. Campaign design, multi-channel integration, content performance, personalization, and digital marketing can all be driven by fact-based decision-making, ideally with direct accountability to results and the ability to very quickly react and adjust to the demands of the customer and the market. The marketers I am referring to have a distinct blend of creativity and reasoning talents; they are inquisitive, inventive, and enthused by a culture that is advanced and agile.

How do you interview and assess for the modern marketer?

When assessing marketing candidates, there are some techniques that could help you “test” for the modern marketer. As you evaluate their experiences, look for examples of campaigns, projects, and other key accomplishments that highlight the role that data and analytics had in decision-making and evaluation. It is time for all marketers (not just the creative side) to have a “marketing analytics portfolio” that could demonstrate the use of data in the design phase, the types of analytics employed as part of strategic decisions, the testing strategies applied, and the performance assessment. It is important for marketers to be able to articulate and demonstrate how they know they influenced change and learned from failed efforts. Marketers tend to focus on the visual and the message, which are both critical. Modern (and analytical) marketers can explain the what, how, and why, or why not.

It is important to use both verbal and written assessments to gauge a candidate’s technology and analytical “IQ” in addition to their marketing savvy. I would suggest requesting written responses to questions such as:

How do you approach decision-making as it relates to marketing planning and investments?
What is the difference between metrics and analytics?
What analytic approaches have been most beneficial in your marketing efforts?
How would you describe “marketing data”?
What role does technology played in marketing?
How does marketing deliver value to the organization?
How has data and analytics changed for marketing?
What type of advanced analytic techniques have you been exposed to in your marketing career?

The modern marketer needs to be think more like an architects, engineers, or scientists. Designing, testing, diagnosing, analyzing, and adapting can and should be daily functions in the marketing environment. Evidence of this evolution is shown in the titles that marketing has begun to adopt: experience architect, data scientist, web engineer, web curator, marketing technologist, marketing analytics manager, and customer experience manager.  Marketers today are managing a customer life cycle, dialogue and relationship in an environment where almost everything is measurable. The ability to use data and analytics to thoroughly understand, personalize, and constantly improve that relationship is fundamental to their success. It is an amazing time to be a marketer—and to hire them.

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