learning

Pawn wearing a crown - metaphor for practice zone thinking as a means to reduce performance anxiety and increase mental health

Use practice zone thinking to reduce stress & performance anxiety at work

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Use Practice Zones to develop skills and insights in people ahead of when they are needed. This helps build competence and confidence ahead of taking on new roles and challenges and reduces performance anxiety at work. This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health at work..
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The challenge of everything having consequences

Performance anxiety at work is perhaps the epitome of workplace stress. It occurs when we need to perform at a particular level and we are not fully confident that we can. Perhaps it is a new challenge. Maybe we talked our capabilities up in securing the opportunity to face that challenge. Or maybe we feel we may be on our ‘third strike’ – metaphorically, or literally.
Image of person feeling criticism outside the practice zones due to performance anxiety at work - courtesy GeraltWe feel a bit under the microscope of dispassionate (even unfriendly) eyes. And we cannot drop the ball. Perhaps doing so has real consequences for our career, or our job security, or our reputation and influence.
And we feel this high level of stress as a churning inside of us.

our body, our minds, and our skin are telling us they would rather be somewhere else

Some people thrive on this feeling, even at this level of stress. They know it is a precursor to their next amazing victory. And that fires and inspires them to something extraordinary.
But most people don’t, and this can have real consequences for their mental health at work.
The challenge is difficult enough on its own. But as they confront difficult odds, even their own mind seems to be turned against them. It should be giving them experience and ideas and confidence. But instead it talks to them of what will go wrong, threatens awful consequences, and berates them for their temerity.
Coming out of lockdown and sliding into recession makes the stakes even higher. The inflated promises we make to secure a job. The implications of losing it. And here, now, on our very first run, it is make or break. That is real performance anxiety at work.

The power of practice zone thinking

Sully - Miracle on the Hudson - film poster - clip about practice zonesIn the film Sully: Miracle on the Hudson, Tom Hanks plays the pilot who landed his plane, full of passengers, on the Hudson river. In a pivotal scene he is facing a board of inquiry that, for various reasons, want to prove him in the wrong. He is forced to watch two simulations where pilots fly from the point his plane is damaged, and safely land it at two nearby airports. So he asks the board how many trial runs those pilots had before the demonstration. The answer was seventeen.

we all need practice zones

The point is, we all need space to practice. Nobody can be relied on to perform at their best the first time round. We all need time and space to learn and try things out. To have time in practice zones where we can build our confidence, and experience, and our strategies in a safe environment.  And yet, for most of us, our entire working lives are spent in the performance zone, where everything we do has consequences.

The problems of a performance mindset

And the biggest consequence is what Carol Dweck refers to as a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset shies away from challenging situations. It would rather excel at something it already knows than learn something new.  And when it encounters problems, those problems are always the fault of someone or something else.
And there are two big problems with this:
  • The first is, that when you blame something else, you psychologically throw away to opportunity to find something you can do different. You concede the power to learn and to change.

blame concedes power

  • The second is, that the future of work is increasingly all about change. Continuous learning will soon be the key skill that everyone needs to thrive and survive as people and organisations.
As routine becomes more automated, AI will play an increasingly large part of our work. Every day will include new things we haven’t encountered previously. Those who approach this with a fixed mindset will become increasingly irrelevant. And those who operate solely in the Performance Zone will become increasingly stressed. Without practice zone thinking there is a real danger that we will see increasing incidences of both disengagement and issues in mental health at work.

Practice zones – environments that encourage practice

Picture of somebody practicing for hurdles - courtesy Andrea Piacquadio via PexelsTo avoid this, we need to take a good look at how our organisations, and the people within them, respond to change. And then we need to create a practice zone environment in which it is easier and less threatening for people to engage with change:
  • Foster a more realistic expectation of people. Create a tolerance, even an expectation, of mistakes. Encourage vulnerability between people by having senior people share their own experiences of going wrong. Allow people to be more honest with themselves, and with others, about their limitations. And through this inspire people to value learning over appearance.

value learning over appearance

  • Teach people about fixed and growth mindsets, and help them to be more accepting of the reality of themselves. Prepare them with an attitude of lifelong learning, and help them to define and aspire to their own vision of the next stages in their personal development.
  • Establish practice and performance zones for people. Use a proportion of your meetings and internal projects to be deliberate Practice Zones. Periods of time where everything is safe, and people can try things out. And where the outcomes can be revisited and adjusted later. Create a culture where people build real confidence to try out the new.
  • Run simulations of situations and meetings with more junior people so that they can develop skills and attitudes to equip them for their next career step. In this way, they can make their next promotion with more confidence and less risk. Expose them to aspects of their potential future roles early so that their responses can be coached years ahead of time. (And they can build even more confidence in their current role).

develop curiosity

  • Encourage ‘open’ attitudes in all conversations. Teach people to develop curious reactions rather than judgmental ones, and to prefer compassion to cynicism. In this way, we will not only make learning easier and more certain for them, we will also foster communities where people can feel more free and less stressed with their colleagues.
  • Create spaces for people to reflect and ready themselves to be the person they have the potential to be. Begin meetings with a time that allows people to centre themselves. To move past any stress from previous encounters. And to make a choice about how they want to be in this one.

reflect the truth that we are ALL learning

Let the environment reflect the truth that we are all learning in these new ways of working. Practice zones can help to remove performance anxiety at work and help people to feel comfortable in their own present. And also comfortable about changing themselves for the future. We can make humility safe, and through that create workplaces in which everyone can thrive and reach their potential, and maintain their mental health at work.
Share this on Linkedin –   |   Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –

Relevant Links:

Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
eople holding speech bubbles as a metaphor for feedback and growth mindset as a route to mental health - rawpixel viaPXhere

Using feedback & growth mindset to sustain mental health at work

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Learning cultures are key to avoiding an overload of stress as we face greater levels of change. Key to making them work is embracing failure and feedback. This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health at work..
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The role of culture in mental health at work

Culture is a massive factor in mental health at work. A challenge that might be seen as exciting in one culture can be the cause of great distress in another. In part this is down to influences that we have covered in previous articles:
But perhaps the biggest cultural influence on mental health at work is the organisation’s response to ‘failure’. This is also a massive influence on whether the organisation fosters a growth mindset or a fixed one.

Performance culture abhors failure

business performance culture reflected in numbers of a screenOrganisations have long tended to be performance-obsessed. The financial markets have set a paradigm where profits grow in every cycle. And they expect changes in leadership when they don’t.  This is exacerbated by media reporting, which publicly humiliates leaders who fall short in some way.
This has created a business culture where failure is seen as something to be avoided at all costs. Where those involved are tarnished and lose credibility, or even benefits. And where, as a consequence, blame, finger-pointing and conflict are rife. The first victim of any conflict is always openness and truth. As a result, learning becomes ‘in short supply’. This can have a huge detrimental impact on mental health at work.
The problem is that these organisations all see ‘failure’ as the antithesis of ‘performance’. Rather than the precursor to it. And this has permeated the culture resulting in behaviours that directly oppose and penalise growth mindsets.

is failure the antithesis of performance?

As a result, for people within those organisations, taking on risk is highly stressful. People do not want to associate themselves with potential failure. Consequentially, support for challenging or ambitious projects is difficult to enlist.
Therefore, people tend to limit themselves to safe projects – ones that build only marginally on what is already known. Furthermore they select the most capable people in the organisation, and this creates resource conflicts and limits the development opportunities for the less experienced.
Real learning, in both the individual and organisational senses of the term, is kept to a minimum. Thus the organisation not only resists a growth mindset in its people, it has a fixed mindset in itself. Even the concept of feedback gets subverted – but more on this below.

Learning culture embraces failure

However, healthy organisations with a learning culture treat failure as valuable. They rightly see it is a reflection of the degree of ambition. A natural consequence of a balanced approach to risk. And an opportunity for learning and encouraging growth mindsets.
learning culture dance as a metaphor for pushing the envelope and the need for failure, feedback and a growth mindset for real performance and sustained mental healthIn a learning culture, failure is expected. If everything you do is successful, you are clearly not pushing the envelope hard enough. Thriving organisations need creativity and ambition. And these inevitably generate failures.
Therefore, in a learning culture, the level of failure is a function of your level of creativity and innovative ambition. Both of which will be necessary for the organisation to thrive. Furthermore, embracing that failure releases new data and insight to the organisation. Creating a culture of openness around failures enables the organisation to get the information that will bring it closer to success. Success that can leap ahead of the performance of organisations with more staid approaches to risk.

failure is a necessary reality in maximising success

But let’s be clear here. A learning culture doesn’t actually prefer failure to success. It just accepts that it is a necessary reality in maximising their success. And they are not willing to limit themselves to ‘safe’ and obvious ways forward which limit and slow their performance potential.  Nor do they want their people hiding failure, and thereby denying their colleagues the insights that are available through it.
Which brings us back to feedback.

Feedback as an evaluation

Attitude to feedback is a key indicator of a culture’s underlying attitude to failure.
In a performance culture, ‘success’ forms a key component of individual identity. Its synonyms are regularly, if informally, used to define and categorise people. And those reputations significantly influence the opportunities and benefits of that individual.
As such, ‘feedback’ can prove somewhat of a liability.

we tend to experience feedback either as an endorsement, or as personal criticism

We all understand ‘intellectually’ that feedback is good for our learning and development. But in a culture where failure is ‘a bad thing’ we tend to experience feedback either as an endorsement, or as personal criticism. It is great when it adds to our reputation and our personal confidence in how we are perceived. But if it highlights any shortcomings, our emotional concerns tend to mask any sense of intellectual joy we may have at being presented with new learning opportunities.
As a result, while our head says we look for feedback so we can identify and address those shortcomings, our heart is saying ‘no way’. We find ourselves becoming emotionally tense inside (even if we manage to suppress the appearance of it). Often, we ‘forget’ to ask for it. We become defensive, or rationalise what we are hearing. And we find explanations that justify us in ignoring it. This not only blocks growth mindset, it also adversely affects mental health at work.

Feedback as data and insight

Feedback is an increasingly key component of the ‘future of work’. As more of the routine elements of our roles are automated, more and more of our work will concern change. And more and more of that change will be effected through the relationships we have with colleagues and customers.
Our value will be the value we add to others. And key to finding new ways to add value will be a growth mindset, our creativity and our ability to innovate. Not everything will work first time. In a learning culture feedback is crucial to learning from the impact we are having on those around us.
So how do we separate the emotional from the intellectual?

change your organisation to one that embraces failure

The first way is “work for an organisation that embraces failure”. If you have influence, then change the culture. If you don’t, then move on. The reality is that if you are stuck in a performance culture that you cannot change, then politically and pragmatically you are stuck with playing the game. However, if you can change the culture, even just your bit of it, then do so. Celebrate failure. Explain why. Champion those who over-reach and innovate. Encourage people to take risks. Reward learning over performance. All in balance of course. Basically, embrace and promote the belief that, if you are innovating, you are inevitably having some failures
And give people a better understanding of feedback.

A better understanding of feedback

Feedback is not, and cannot be, any sort of judgement of us. How can it be?
In reality, feedback can only ever be a self-assessment of the person giving the feedback. The only thing they know for sure is how they have been impacted. They are only really equipped to provide feedback on themselves and how they experienced things.

Context of feedback - learning culture diagram illustrating the range of possible factors. But growth mindset accepts our part in working with these

They may, perhaps by tradition or a lack of humility, couch it in terms of judgement and evaluation of you. But how can they know? How can they know all of the factors (including their own attitudes and behaviours) that led up to what they experienced?
They cannot.
Therefore, any attempt at an ‘evaluation of you‘ based on their experience is inappropriate, poorly informed, and probably arrogant.
However, their opinion of what resulted for them is actually vital information for you.
Whatever the reasons that led up to them having that opinion, they will act in accordance with it. And so, if they feel they got no value, they will act as though they got no value. And the harsh reality will be that no value will be transmitted through them.
Now, if that is what you intended, fine. But if you intended that they should get value, and should be able to use that value effectively to benefit the organisation, then the fact that it hasn’t happened is an important piece of information.
You might not be ‘to blame’. But you are in the best position to realise that you still have a gap to close, and that you may want to adjust some of the variables to make it happen. And if you, as a result, can improve those variables, then you have learned something.

It is not about YOU

And that learning is valuable, but not value-laden. It helps you to grow, but it doesn’t mean you were flawed beforehand. This perspective lies at the core of a growth mindset.
This understanding of feedback is key. If we, consciously or subconsciously, see it as an evaluation, that will be a barrier to learning. In such situations it can be difficult for us to accept the insight without accepting the ‘judgement’. And learning is much easier to assimilate when it doesn’t come laden with emotional baggage.
Any education worthy of the name is bound to be dangerous (Louis Néel). Real learning at the edge of our potential comes at the cost of of mistakes. But if we can see these mistakes as the inevitable steps to who we were destined to be. The fastest route to the value we can add. Then we can get the very best learning out of each one.
The best thing an organisation can do is to accept this fact, and imbue it into its people. Give them a love of feedback. Equip them with a humility in providing it. Key to this is an acceptance by all concerned that falling short is an expected and admirable consequence of reaching far.
Share this on Linkedin –   |   Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –

Relevant Links:

Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Picture of wisdom in human form

#037 – Wisdom – A word from the wise

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Broaden the insight and creativity of your team – Use TED wisdom to stretch your thinking

Please help us to get the word out in just two clicks – click here – then click the like button

The benefits of wisdom sources

Why take this challenge?

Introduce regular wisdom sessions into your team meetings

Stimulate creativity through broad insight from loosely related fields

Encourage your team to share what interests them

 

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

There is masses of free wisdom available through the internet. The issue for most of us is sifting the nuggets of pure gold from the mega-masses that aren’t. One really good way of doing that is to find sites that are consistently good at providing quality, and one such site is TED.com.

The wisdom on TED ranges across a broad selection of topics, delivered eloquently in around 20 minutes by renowned experts in their field. One such talk (included in the Pack section below) is Tim Harford’s ‘A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity’. In it he explains how the greatest and most creative thinkers throughout time had interests in a wide range of disciplines.

As he puts it “It’s easier to think outside the box if you spend your time clambering from one box into another.” And this works also for us mere mortals; I too have found this fact to be true for me in my work.

 

Graphic image reflecting the idea of a Pack of resources to support the adventurer in the challenge

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

 

Graphic image suggesting the idea of posting a record of the adventurer's journey

Let us know how you get on.
Share your experience, your insights and your observation using the comments section at the bottom of the Linkedin post.

Please help us to extend and develop our community by sharing what you are doing. Click on the links below where you are most active, and then like or share the article to your network. Thank you for helping.

And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure

Useful links:

 

Image of woman staring at futuristic images - metaphor for leading adventure in others

Leading Adventure in Others

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“The future is a different country, they do things differently there”.

At some point the future will become our place of residence. But, if we are to make ourselves at home in it … If we are to realise its potential … We will need to embrace that transition. Adventuring is about developing that readiness to journey into it.
To illustrate what I mean, I would ask you to take a look at the people around you. If you do, you are likely to find a spectrum of different attitudes to their current situation and responsibilities.
Some are stressed, disappointed, disengaged, entrenched, resistant, awkward, resentful.
And some are excited, enthused, immersed, joyful, curious, compassionate.
Some are victims of the changes that have brought them to where they are
And some are adventurers within it.
There are those who have attitudes that help them to see the opportunities in change. These attitudes are fed and reinforced by what they make of those opportunities. And this helps to nourish their mental health.
And there are others who have attitudes which focus on the risks and the downsides of change. They resist the new, cling to the old, and may be unprepared for what happens. As a result their attitude is also fed and reinforced by their experience, and their mental health suffers.

the danger for all of us is that the increasing rate of change is likely to push us in the wrong direction…

Most of us, fall somewhere closer to the middle of this spectrum.
But the danger for all of us is that the increasing rate of change is likely to push us in the wrong direction unless we intentionally increase our ability to engage positively with it. That has been the purpose of the Leading by Adventure programme.

… unless we intentionally increase our ability to engage positively with it

Over the three months from April to June 2021, Leading by Adventure focused on the ‘leading’ element of adventure. It shared a sequence of tools that can be used to facilitate the engagement of teams with the opportunities of change: SWOT, Forcefields, Fishbones, Intuition, Hopes & Concerns, Brutethink, Staying Open, PMI, Solution Effect, ORID, Kanban, and Review.  And it has also shared tailored resources to support this in the form of Virtual Flipcharts and Instant Whiteboards.
12 video stills of the Adventure series on leading adventure in others
 
These tools help to enable people to contribute better to what is happening. And through this to take fuller ownership of the possibilities. By using them, leaders can better develop the attitudes and the skill set of their people in rising above the change, and seeing its pattern and potential. They can navigate change, rather than feel subject to it. They can see themselves as adventurers not victims.
The exercises in Leading by Adventure., help us to practice the skills of ‘journey’ in ourselves and our team. Deliberately taking a few minutes out each week to try something new. To develop our intellectual and emotional ‘muscles’ in embracing a growth mindset.
To access the full set of Adventures to date, please click here.
Orb based image showing person looking back from climb - metaphor for after adventure review

#027 – Review

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Ensure you maximise your team’s learning from each adventure – Use simple review tools to capture and reinforce new insights

Please help us to get the word out in just two clicks – click here – then click the like button

The benefits of effective after-action review

Why take this challenge?

Maximise the potential of every experience for your future potential

Work with your team to increase its learning and growth

Establish a culture of continuous improvement through review

 

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

Einstein said “Once you stop learning, you start dying”.

Learning is our way of fully engaging with our life, its experiences, and its opportunities. It is how we embrace our situation and those around us. And also how we effect change in both.

If we simply let our lives pass by us, immune to its possibilities. Then, for that moment at least, we die. Conversely, we live to the extent that we embrace life and its potential. A wonderful vibrant symbiosis in which we shape each other’s destinies. And we shape life itself.

The 26 adventures to date have hopefully been part of that learning and living for you. Opportunities to engage different perspectives, and see the effect they have on you. But more than that, to see the effect that deliberately and routinely adopting new perspectives has on you.

But I wonder if you have been getting as much out of them as you could? Or indeed out of all of the other things that you are routinely engaging with?

Have you been reflecting on the learning that is actually available to you? Asking yourself questions that help to make full use of the insights available, and to reinforce them in a way that they are more accessible going forward.

That is what this week’s adventure is all about. The questions and the reflection that helps us better utilise the learning available.

 

Graphic image reflecting the idea of a Pack of resources to support the adventurer in the challenge

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

 

Graphic image suggesting the idea of posting a record of the adventurer's journey

Let us know how you get on.
Share your experience, your insights and your observation using the comments section at the bottom of the Linkedin post.

Please help us to extend and develop our community by sharing what you are doing. Click on the links below where you are most active, and then like or share the article to your network. Thank you for helping.

And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure

Useful links:

 

Picture of one person helping another on a climb - metaphor for trust

The Tyranny of Trust

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Imagine yourself in the following situation …
Your company has recognised the importance of trust to effective teamwork. You have been part of numerous trust and teamwork exercises, where people have been vulnerable, and learned and grown together. It has been tough, but it has been fun, and much has improved as a result. And recently, the shared narrative has become: “We no longer need anonymity in any form of feedback, because anonymity undermines the trust and openness we now have!” What a wonderful place to be.
But you know it’s wrong.
Your boss said it, and nobody chose to challenge it. To do so seemed somehow disloyal. To break trust. And nobody seemed confident in mustering the arguments to effectively ‘oppose’ it. Or indeed, looking around the table, to count on their colleagues for support in this.
The fact is, we are all human, we all have issues and insecurities. And for some of us, those issues and insecurities can make the challenge of leadership uncomfortable – particularly within older (but still very prevalent) paradigms of leadership. And as a result, we can become defensive, and use force of reason and partial truths to cow the challenges we encounter – particularly if the challenger feels exposed and fears their honesty might be held against them.

Trust is a journey

But not all challenges are there to be beaten, and not all truths can be understood by logic alone. Let’s face it, we do not even have words for much of what we are thinking and feeling. Concepts like belonging, confidence, identity and love are key to our mental health, happiness and success but are difficult to articulate and argue (or even understand clearly). And yet these concepts are essential components of the trust we seek.
Trust is not a destination – it is far too complex for that. Trust is a journey. And nowhere along that journey is there a point where anonymity does not add value. At times, it may not be necessary, and you will be able to see this when the anonymous feedback directly mirrors the in-person feedback. But even here it acts as a bellwether: Either providing us with confidence that we are where we think we are; or highlighting where reality is drifting from the current narrative.

The paradox of anonymity and trust

Giving up all forms of anonymity is not a sign that you have achieved ‘trust’, it is rather a precursor to inevitably losing it. But losing it in a way where the ‘tyranny of trust’ pretty much blocks your ability to do anything about it.
So, if you find yourself in the hypothetical (but all too real*) situation described above, my hope is that this brief article equips you with the arguments to gently, but firmly, stand against it.
After all, if ‘trust’ is real, what is there to fear from anonymity?
*I seem to recall one actual line was: “No! We have worked hard to build trust, and we have it now, and any form of anonymous feedback would be a step backwards!” The thing is, often the people who say these things really believe them. For them it is a convenient truth – something that gives them comfort against their hidden internal dread of ‘being found out and exposed’. But the thing is, that dread is usually far worse and more damaging than the reality of what might ensue. Trust lies, not in the facts, but in having faith in your colleagues’ responses to you, after the facts. 
St Augustine put it well:  “The act of faith is to believe what we cannot see. The reward of faith is to see what we believe”. And this is as true of our relationships with each other as it is with the Almighty. Trust is built on faith.