Category Archives: Performance

Failure is the new Black

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This inspiration came from my friend William Tincup.  If you don’t know him, you need to know him, he’s brilliant.  Like my head hurts after talking to him brilliant, in a good way.

He made a comment recently which was just this:

“Failure is the new black.”

Another friend of ours, Jason Seiden, has been saying this for years, in a little different way, with his “Fail Spectacularly” motto.  Either way, you get the point, it’s now ‘in’ to talk about your failures. It’s a really popular and motivating thought process for a lot of people. Basically, it’s alright that you failed, go do it again and eventually you’ll get it right.

Past generations would go to great lengths to hide their failures.  Think about your parents and grand parents, you never heard them talk about things they failed at.  Think back about how your own parents spoke to you. Was failure really an option?  It wasn’t in my household.  We’re Sacketts, and Sacketts are winners, and winners get to do what they want (oh wait, that was me weekly to my own kids!).

I’m just wondering who originally decided that it was alright to fail?

You can’t go anywhere anymore without everyone telling you “Success starts with Failure” or “The Secret to success is failure”.  This comes from the concept of traditional scientific theory.  Have a theory. Test theory. Fail. Try another approach. Fail. Keep trying and eventually you’ll be successful.  Straightforward. Makes sense.  But that really only plays out when you’re testing scientific theories.

Can we agree real life might be a bit different?

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book David and Goliath talks about the concept of failure and what it does to the brightest college students in the world.  His research found that the top 50  PhD students going into schools like Harvard, are all smarter than the smartest kid going into Missouri.  But at the end of their schooling the brightest kid at Missouri is more successful than the number 50 kid at Harvard.  Why is that?  The number 50 kid believes they are a failure because they are not as smart as the 49 kids above them at Harvard. While the kid at Missouri, who wasn’t as bright as all the Harvard kids, became a rock star at Missouri. That success, that confidence, led him/her to more and more success.  Put that same Missouri kid at Harvard and he/she would have failed miserably and may have even dropped out of the program.

Let me give you an example.  Your kid goes up to bat.  Strikes out, which is a failure. Goes up the next time and strikes out.  Goes up again and strikes out. Continues game after game, never hitting, only striking out.  Continued failure will not lead to this kid’s success.  In fact, continued failure will lead to more failure as their confidence is shattered.

The path to success, for most life situations, is not through failure, it’s through success.  Continued little successes that will eventually lead to big successes.

Celebrating failure, like it’s some sort of a success, doesn’t lead to success.  Is it alright to fail?  Of course it is. But should we be celebrating it?  I have children.  I want them to be successful at anything they do.  When they fail, we don’t throw a party.  We talk about where failure leads, what we/they need to do to ensure we don’t fail the next time.  Many times that entails a ton of hard work.  Failures enemy is hard work.

I don’t like that we are getting comfortable as a society with failure.  That failure has become something to celebrate. Something that is now cool.   That we give a trophy to the team that lost every game.  It doesn’t make us better as a society.  It doesn’t make our organizations better.  Failure leads to more failure, not to success.  Here’s hoping ‘Success’ becomes the new black!

How To Tell An Employee They Suck

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You have an employee who sucks don’t you?

I know, I know, you’re wondering how I knew that, aren’t you?

Well, you came to this post and we all have employees who suck! (Dear My Employees – this is for effect — none of you really suck! Just everyone else reading this post has employees who suck.)   I’ve been out on the road quite a bit lately meeting with HR pros.  I meet with people under the reason ‘we can’t find talent’, but usually what I find is ‘we can’t get rid of people who suck, so we hire more people to cover up their suckiness’.

Don’t feel bad.  Almost every organization I know has a problem getting rid of people who suck.  We hire people. They become a part of the family.  We find out they suck.  Like your drunk uncle who ruins holidays, these employees are similar.  You don’t stop asking your uncle to come to Christmas, and we don’t ask these employees not to come back to work.  So the sucky employees keep coming to work.

We meet with them and have ‘conversations’ and tell them we need them to “step up” and “reach higher” and “give maximum effort”.  What we never say is “Hey! Stop Sucking!”

We don’t do this because we’re professionals!  Also, we would never allow their managers to say this, that could very well hurt the feelings of these employees who suck.

So, do you want to know how to tell an employee they suck?

Here’s 3 ways you can do it:

1. Send them a personalized cookie with the words “Stop Sucking!” Kind of like a Happy Birthday cookie, but instead replace Happy Birthday with Stop Sucking! For those really outgoing, caring HR Departments you can actually order “Stop Sucking” cookie bouquets that spells this out in letter cookies. How fun!

2. Offer FREE “Stop Sucking” tattoos, but only to them.

3.  Decorate their cube or office door after they leave at night so the next day when they come to work they’ll get a big Stop Sucking surprise!

These also sound ridiculously stupid, don’t they? (except of the cookie bouquet – that’s a good one)

Almost as ridiculous as not getting rid of employees who suck and hiring additional employees to cover up for an employee who doesn’t carry their own weight…

I get it. We don’t hire employees to fire them.  We hire them to productive contributors to our organizations.  The problem is, sometimes we make mistakes.  Sometimes our selection process fails.  Sometimes we make bad hiring decisions.  Sometimes the hire we thought so highly of, sucks.  We usually know it right away, but we give it time, we hate believing what our gut is telling us.

Telling an employee they suck is an awesome experiment, with no downside.  One of two things usually happens when telling an employee they suck. They will either realize you’re right and you can start making departure plans, or they’ll want to show you your wrong and work to demonstrate they don’t suck.  For me, this has really gone about 50/50.  I’m not saying that the employee 50% will stop sucking.  They’ll try not to suck really hard, but at their core they suck.  I love seeing the passion, many times that alone will bring them up to a performance level to at least get by, but rarely do you go from sucking to rock star.

A third thing might happen when telling an employee they suck.  They won’t agree with you. That’s okay as well.  It’s not their call.  You’re the leader.  Your opinion is what counts.  If you feel they suck, they do, for you at least.  Let them go and be ‘great’ somewhere else, like your competitor.

 

 

The 5 Whys

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There’s an interactive questioning technique called The 5 Whys.  The theory is that if who continue to ask ‘why’ enough times you’ll get to the root cause of every issue.

Timmy is a bad performer. Why?

He doesn’t follow through on anything. Why?

It seems like he gets things started well and then moves onto other things before the first thing is finished. Why?

He likes the energy of starting new projects. Why?

He thinks if he’s on the front side of project he’ll have more influence in the direction the project is going. Why?

Because that has been his experience with our organization.

Oh, so he might not be a bad performer. He just has an opportunity area that we might be able to help him out with – getting projects across the finish line.  And we’ve taught him to behave in this manner.

I don’t know if you have to use to 5 whys each time, I do think you have to ask at least 3 whys to get past the emotion of any decision.  We tend to make most decisions with some element of emotion.  Getting to the third why will get the emotion out in the open.  That is important in any decision making process.

Does this technique seem a little ‘parental’?  It does, which is why you probably don’t want to make a habit of using this technique too often.  It is definitely a tool, though, that can be very effective for a leader to use from time to time.

“We need to change our hiring process!”

Why?

“We have had 3 consecutive failed hires.”

Why?

“Well, one person was a referral from an executive, so we hired without really checking references. One hire totally aced our pre-employment testing, but had a sketchy work history, but tested off the charts. One was a knock out in the interview, marginal testing, and just didn’t pan out.”

So, do we really need to change our hiring process? Or should we just start following our hiring process?

3 Whys takes the emotion out of any decision making process.  It gets out everyone’s inner issues about the problem.  We tend to lead with a crisis statement that will lead to action.  If we take action based on incomplete information, we will unnecessarily start doing things that we might not need to do, or make changes that really don’t make sense to the organization.

Next time you are facing a tough decision, start asking ‘Why’ and see where it leads you, you might be surprised where you’ll end up!

 

7 Hard Truths That HR Must Learn To Accept

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In a perfect world we all get a seat at the table,  all of our employees go online and fill out their open enrollment forms on time, and all of our hiring manager give us immediate feedback on each candidate resume we send them.  Unfortunately, none of us live in a perfect world, there are some hard and fast truths in our profession that we have to accept, and by accepting those truths, it allows us to let go and move on with trying to better our organizations each day.

Accepting these truths doesn’t mean we are giving up, and not trying to change our profession, our organizations and ourselves for the better.  Accepting these truths gives us permission to accept our reality, and it allows us to work towards, little-by-little, making the HR profession better.

Here are the 7 Hard Truths HR Must Learn To Accept:

#1 – Focusing on compliance, will never allow you to become strategic.  Operations in our organizations have long known this, and this alone allows them to control most of the decision making power in your organization.  A compliance focused department, will never be innovative, it will never creative, it will never be Strategic.

#2 – Your Performance Management system, will not fix everything.  In fact no system or process will fix everything – we drive a people business – thus we deal with a very nebulous product – people.  As soon as you create a process or implement a system, some hiring manager or employee will find a way to find a flaw in it. It’s OK not to be perfect.

#3 – You’ll never get all the resources you need to do the job you want to do.  People are your most important asset, but shareholders/stakeholders need a return on investment.  Thus, resources are always going to first go to where that return is highest, and sorry but HR isn’t first on the list.

#4 – Your companies Deepest Secrets are only a Tweet away. And your social media policy and lock down of social media sites isn’t going to stop these secrets from getting out, if you have a rogue employee who wants to get them out.  This is similar to the reality of you will probably more likely die on your way to work in a traffic accident, then in a plane crash on your way to vacation – but we tend to worry more about the plane crash.

#5 – Your employees and managers will never fully support themselves on Self-Service Modules. It’s a dream, sold to you by software vendors, and you buy into it because you hate dealing with the daily administration of HR.  No matter what, we’ll always have some of this to do – it also, is OK, it’s not what we do all day, every day – no job is perfect.  Pull up your big boy pants and help them out – you’ll live.

#6 –Fraternization will always happen.  We manage adults (even if they don’t act like adults), and until the end of time adults, put in close proximity of each other, will eventually be attracted – blame G*d, blame laws of the universe, blame your parents – I don’t care.  It’s a fact – deal with it.

#7 – You’ll Never get the full respect you deserve.  This is a function of organizational dynamics.  HR doesn’t make the money, operations makes the money – respect will be given to those who actually keep the doors open and the lights on.  If you got into HR for your deep need for respect, sorry, you picked the wrong career.  On the plus side, we get a lot of conference room cookie leftovers!

Top Cities To Find The Best Workers

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Movoto Blog (a real estate blog) recently listed the Top 10 hardest working cities in America.  The data is based on number of people working full time, unemployment rate, commute time and number of residents in a household who hold a job. Here’s the list:

  1. Miramar, FL
  2. Corona, CA
  3. Mesquite, TX
  4. Olathe, KS
  5. Grand Prairie, TX
  6. Alexandria, VA
  7. McKinney, TX
  8. Pembroke Pines, FL
  9. Rancho Cucamonga, CA
  10. Hampton, VA

I’m sure a lot of time and research was put into this list.  I also don’t believe any of these cities have the hardest working people!

Here’s my criteria of how to find the hardest working workers in America:

1. Don’t look in California.  I like California, the weather is great, but let’s be real, no one truly believes the hardest working people live in California. That eliminates numbers 2 and 9.

2. Texas is big and friendly – but if you’re looking for hard working you don’t need to look at Texas suburbs, or any suburbs for that manner. That eliminates numbers 3, 4, 5 and 7.

3. No one really works that hard in South Beach, which eliminates numbers 1 and 8.

4. If you work for the government, or are connected to the government, clearly hard work is missing. This eliminates most workers in number 6.

5. If you live within 3 miles of a beach, or work in a beach community you really don’t work that hard. This eliminates our last city at number 10.

So, what is fundamentally wrong with this list?  The theory that a low employment rate in a city would equate to hard working workers.  This is a completely no causation with these two things.  Also, that commute time equates to hard working, if anything I could argue long commute times lead to less hard work because the worker believes that their commute time is part of their work time.

So, what cities do have the hardest workers?  That’s easy!  Think of the crappiest places ever you would not want to live!  If you’re working in Gary, IN, you really want to work!  If you’re working in Fairbanks, AK in the dark and cold for most of the year, you have work high ethic!  If you show up to work in any city where there is good chance you’ll see gunfire throughout your shift — Bingo — you’re a hard worker!  If you work in a company and in a position where daily you might lose your life or a hand, you’re a hard worker!

Want really hard working people for your company?  Find the worst places in the world to work, and recruit those workers.  They’ll love you, they’ll show up each day and they’ll work their butts off.   Want some workers who have to leave at 4pm to make their 10U soccer coaching gig, or don’t show because the surf is up, or just feel like they should use one of their 47 PTO days — you might not have such good luck on the hard working side!

Cool New HR Tech…that you might even be able to afford

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(I just returned from the 2013 HR Technology Conference where I got to see all the latest and greatest HR technology, and speak to some wickedly smart people.  So, for the next week or so, my plan is to share some of the products and insights I gained from this experience. So we are clear, no companies I write about have paid me to write about them. Enjoy…)

Here’s a run down from the HR Tech Conference Expo:

BambooHR: Tagged as your “1st HR system” or “we love you, if you use spreadsheets as your HR system” – Ben Peterson, the CEO, was by far the coolest and nicest and real CEO (and maybe person) I met all week at HR Tech.  They don’t like to use ‘HRIS’ because small and medium sized businesses and HR shops don’t even really know what that means.  BambooHR is an easy to use HR system and nicely designed, for a very, very cheap price.  Don’t let the price scare you off — cheap, in this case, doesn’t mean they try and a one-size and process fits all perspective down your throat – they’ll customize for you – and still be cheap!  If you are looking for your first HR system, or to up grade your old system, and you don’t look at these guys, you should be fired as an HR professional.

Blissbook: “Employee Handbooks to Smile About”.  I know, I know — Tim, you’re talking handbooks!?  Here’s the deal.  They have a super cheap, super cool UI (user interface — BTW, no one at HR Tech talks English, they only talk tech).  So, you can put your handbook online and add video, and hyperlinks and all kinds of stuff, and they make it really easy.  Don’t think PDF of your handbook on your careers site, it’s more than that.  Think of it as a cultural narrative of your organization having it’s own website.  One issue I see them having, the examples they show are really cool and hip.  So you think you can do the same thing, the problem is content isn’t easy to write to be cool and hip.  If you aren’t creative, neither will your Blissbook.

SumTotal: SumTotal is like BambooHR, if BambooHR was a gigantic enterprise total HR solution for your business.  Let’s be clear, SumTotal is a big company, like Oracle, ADP, SuccessFactors, etc. Big companies have the resources to do some really cool things, and Sum Total did that this year.  They added the industry’s first Context-Aware user experience. What’s Context-Aware?  You know when you go online to a store and look at a really nice pair of shoes you want, you put it in the cart, but last second you decide, I just can’t get these today.  We all do it.  Context-Aware marketing is the Ad a few days later on the side of another site you’re reading where those exact same shoes you were looking at pops up and now are 10% off!  How does this work in an HR system? Let’s say you have an employee who is not reaching their sales goal.  SumTotal’s new addition will recognize the employee is missing their goal, and without prompting or any HR or manager interaction at all recommend a training course for this person to take to better help them make their goals and maybe even a mentor in the company they should speak with who could help them become better at their job.  I don’t do this justice — trust me, it was super cool!

Work4Labs:  Work4 does Facebook recruiting, in an industry where no one has really figured it out yet (do you hear that Facebook?).  Work4 makes an solution that makes it really easy for companies to get their jobs posted on their company Facebook page and help them navigate, very easily, how to search for talent on Facebook’s Graph Search.  Also, they do this for a rather cheap price!  (Cheap meaning the cost of one or two headhunting fees, so you can see a very quick ROI)  Matthew Brown, Head of Product and co-Founder, might be 24 years old, which also helps let you know these guys get Facebook!

WePow: Formerly known as Wowser.  WePow is a video interviewing platform.  They’re really good at branding.  They gave out royal blue Converse Chuck Taylors at their booth and had pairs for all the big name pundits in our industry: Kris Dunn, Steve Boese, Gerry Chrispin, John Sumser, William Tincup, Laurie Ruettimann, etc.  Those kinds of things make a splash and get a good buzz going about their product.  Apparently, I’m not a big name in the industry, I didn’t get a pair of shoes (which is really the only reason they get mentioned here!).  Also, apparently, they are “like HireVue” when I asked their booth crew what they did.  Thanks HireVue for being so good at marketing you now have become the Kleenex of video interviewing.

YouEarnedIt:  New up and coming awards and recognition firm, designed around delivering a product that small and medium sized businesses can use.  Think Achievers, for smaller companies, and a lot less money.  Much more accessible for smaller companies because you aren’t forced to purchase their catalog of merchandise/awards which usually carry an industry standard 20% markup.  They do have that as well, but much more cost effective than the giants in the industry.

More next week – I’ve got two companies – one really well known and one hardly anyone knows doing some really cool things!

The #1 Isssue At Every Organization

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(I just returned from the 2013 HR Technology Conference where I got to see all the latest and greatest HR technology, and speak to some wickedly smart people.  So, for the next week or so, my plan is to share some of the products and insights I gained from this experience. So we are clear, no companies I write about have paid me to write about them. Enjoy…)

There are a few things we just come to know as fact in organizations.  If you were to ask anyone, at any level of your organization to come up with just one issue they have at their organization, hands down, without a doubt, across all organizations, the number one issue would always be communication!

Before I traveled to the HR Technology Conference, Halogen Software asked me to complete a Myers-Briggs Assessment (MBTI).  It had been many years since I did one, and they wanted to show off some upcoming additions to their talent suite and how they are utilizing MBTI to address the communication gap found in all organizations.  Halogen didn’t tell me anything about what to expect, so my guess was they were going down some lame path of using my Myers-Briggs in some sort of new selection functionality, but what I found was really something completely different and awesome!

By the way, my MBTI was ENTJ (What the what!? Don’t you love acronyms!) Basically, ENTJ, is one of 16 possible Myers-Briggs profiles of an individual and one of the most rare.  ENTJ is an executive profile, they get things done, they make decisions quickly and move forward.  Yep, that’s me.  My good friend, Kris Dunn, also took the assessment and was profiled as an ENTP.  Only one letter difference separates us, so basically we are the same in many ways: quick thinking, extroverted, creative, well read, etc. The one letter difference means I like to get things done and KD likes to talk about getting things done! 😉

Why do I bring Kris into the mix of this communication tool that Halogen added to their product?  Because communication happens between two or more people.  The reason all organizations have communication problems somewhere in their organization is because we try and solve communication individually.  “It’s Tim’s problem, he’s just a bad communicator.”  “Our managers don’t know how to communicate.”  “Our executives don’t know how to communicate.”  Halogen found out a way to put a tool in the face of every single person in your organization that helps them become better communicators, with every other single person they work with!

What Myers-Briggs does is not only show us how we are from a personality standpoint.  It also shows us how we like to receive and give information.  Halogen has integrated the assessment within their product, but took it a few steps further from a development standpoint and it allows you as an individual to compare your type to a co-worker’s type.  So, I’m having trouble getting along with Kris.  I go in, compare my MBTI type with Kris’s type, and the software gives me ideas and examples of how I can better communicate with Kris. Simple and effective. As a manager this is awesome, because I can now see how do I communicate with my team on an individual basis.  It was really powerful, and I didn’t see anything else like this being done from any other company.  It was one of the cooler advancements into an existing product I saw at HR Tech this year.

I can’t tell you how many times I meet with company executives who are looking to try and make their organizations better, or their leaders better, and it always comes back to communication and them wanting me to help them make individuals (or their organization as a whole) better at communicating.  The problem is, and which MBTI points out, this isn’t a one-way problem.  It’s two-way!  Want to solve your communications issues?  Find out how you get both sides to communicate like the other wants.

 

 

 

I Once Got Fired In A Burger King Bathroom

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It didn’t escape me this past Sunday that USC head coach Lane Kiffin was fired in a private room at an airport.  Kiffin and the USC team were just returning from a loss at Arizona State University and the AD thought the best thing to do was fire him in the airport.  An airport seems like an odd place to perform a termination of a Division 1 Football coach. I mean, why fire him at the airport, why not bring him into the AD’s office, the next day or that evening, and have that conversation?  Make sure you have all of your paperwork and have talked through everything with your legal team.

It wasn’t that I was surprised.  Being in the HR field for 20 years, I’ve had my share of odd places to fire people.  For the most part you can call an employee into their bosses office, an HR conference room, etc. to be fired.  The tricky ones are when you’re dealing with an employee who is off site, a remote worker or the supervisor and worker reside at different locations.  Sometimes leadership termination locations can be tricky as well.

I started to think where were some of the odd places I’ve had to terminate an individual?  Here’s the top 4 I could come up with:

1. My Car.  Yep, right there in the front seat of my Hyundai.  I was a Regional HR Manager and was mostly on the road working out of my car.  I once had to fire a manager in my car.  From a spacial standpoint it was a little uncomfortable. Think about any serious conversation you’ve ever had in a car. You have to turn sideways, you’re only inches from the other person.

2. A Burger King.  It wasn’t the bathroom!  But afterwards, I joked with an HR coworker of mine that ‘I got busy in a Burger King bathroom’ doing HR (Digital Underground shout out!). Many times we don’t want to terminate someone onsite at your own work location, so you set up some elaborate scheme to get them offsite and terminate them there.  The problem is, you’re in a public location!  You might have the best intentions and you show up at 10am at your local Burger King just as they have a class field trip going through and learning about the new “Satisries!”  It’s recipe for disaster, but everyone I know in HR has at some point made the decision to go offsite to terminate someone!

3. A Starbucks.  Starbucks might actually be the official SHRM location for Terminations!  Starbucks should sell official naming rights for a termination spot.  Nothing says ‘Termination’ like a nondescript meeting notice at Starbucks on a Friday afternoon around 3pm.  Coffee shops in general are great firing locations.  Quiet, you don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want, and it seems semi-plausible that you might actually just meet an employee there to discuss work stuff.

4. A Walk-in Freezer.  When you work in restaurants, sometimes the only private place you have is the walk-in cooler and/or freezer.  The freezer works best for two reasons: 1. You want these conversations to go quickly; and 2. Tears will freeze.  Plus I think the extreme cold helps to break the shock factor.

So, what about it HR Pros – give me your best/worst location for terminations that you’ve had to use!

 

 

 

 

 

The Slowest Generation Ever!

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Here’s a quick little experiment to take in your office or department:

1.     Rank everyone by performance – first to worst.

2.    Rank everyone by how fast they can actually run.

3.    Check for correlation.

I’ll be honest, I have no idea if there is any correlation, it’s just a feeling I have.  People who tend to move fast, tend to be higher performers in my 20 years of HR Experience.  Also, there was a recent article out in the Wall Street Journal that examined how 25-35 year olds have been slowing down in endurance races as compared to prior generations at the same age.  From the article:

“They’re just not very fast. “There’s not as many super-competitive athletes today as when the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s,” said Ryan Lamppa, spokesman for Running USA, an industry-funded research group. While noting the health benefits that endurance racing confers regardless of pace, Lamppa—a 54-year-old competitive runner—said, “Many new runners come from a mind-set where everyone gets a medal and it’s good enough just to finish.”

Now, a generational battle is raging in endurance athletics. Old-timers are suggesting that performance-related apathy among young amateur athletes helps explain why America hasn’t won an Olympic marathon medal since 2004.

Of the two Americans who won marathon medals that year, one—Deena Kastor, who is now 40—was the top finishing American woman at the marathon World Championships in Moscow last month. The other—38-year-old Meb Keflezighi—was the top American male finisher at the London Olympics marathon last year. Hunter Kemper, the 37-year-old winner of last month’s Chicago Triathlon, remains arguably America’s top triathlete as he aims for his fifth Olympics.”

So, how did your experiment work out in your office?  Does speed correlate to higher performance? If so, are your youngest employees faster or slower than other generations in your workplace?  Competitiveness, and incoming generations of kids who are all use to just ‘participating’ versus ‘winning’ might also have an impact to this as well.  This lack of competitiveness probably has more of an impact than anyone really understands.  More from WSJ:

“After finishing last month’s Virginia Beach half marathon in the top 2% of the 50-54 age group, Brendan Reilly was shocked to find he’d made the top 1% of the overall field—despite running 27 minutes slower than the personal best he’d set more than two decades earlier.

“I wasn’t thrilled,” said Reilly, a sports agent in Boulder, Colo., adding that “races are turning into parades.”

Is your workplace a race or a parade? 

It’s Super Not Stressful Being At The Top

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It’s common knowledge that leaders are very lonely and under super amounts of stress.  Well, at least that’s what we’ve been made to believe from 1950’s research!  There is new evidence out that has found it’s not all that bad being in a leader position.  From Scientific American:

When the executive or the general complains that they are “stressed,” we have to pay careful attention to what exactly they mean. They may have more emails in their inbox than they can get to. They may work long hours. But in most cases they can say no to requests and they can decide when and how to deal with challenges. They have much more control over how their lives are arranged than does the secretary who schedules their appointments or the janitor who cleans their office.

People so crave control over their lives that when control is scarce they will manufacture it. In studies by psychologist Aaron Kay and colleagues, people made to feel that they lacked control believed more fervently in a controlling God. They believed also in a controlling government, conspiracy theories, and superstitions. Someone has to be in control. Lacking control is associated with higher blood pressure, lowered immune function, and a host of stress-related diseases. Control is the essence of power, the linchpin binding status to stress.

So why did the executive monkeys drop dead of ulcers if control protects against stress? It turned out that the study had a fatal flaw. The monkeys were not assigned to be in the executive or helpless groups at random, which is the cornerstone of an experiment. The monkeys who learned how to use the lever to prevent shocks the fastest were “promoted” to executives. Those fast learners may have learned fast because they were especially upset by the shocks. If so, then it was not control that doomed them but their heightened stress response to being shocked. There is a lesson here, and not only in the scientific method. If you are trying furiously to control a situation because you are terrified of what would happen if you don’t, you are not really in control at all.

Turns out leaders have stress, but they also have power to control their environment more than non-leaders.  So, while we want to believe having ultimate decision making power is also powerful and stressful, it probably isn’t as much as those who don’t have any of that power surrounding you. 

Control, or better, one’s ability to control what happens to them is actually a higher stressor than just having a ton things to do, or even the feeling of being under a lot of ‘pressure’. Everyone has pressure, but those who have pressure and no ability to influence that pressure face a level of stress that can actually physically cause them harm to their health.

Want less stress in your life?  Reach a level in your career where you have more control of what actually happens!