Leadership through Change

While this blog continues being read by you, I will leave the site up.
My own interest in change in organisations has now led me to work helping organisations transition to an “office optional” approach, helping managers lead remote teams.

You can continue reading my blog posts over at the Virtual not Distant blog, and we have 200 episodes of the 21st Century Work Life podcast there too.

Thriving through Change is still available as an ebook and I do have plans to update it and release it as a paperback in 2020. Meanwhile, my colleague (and friend) have released a new book on leading remote teams: Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Distributed Teams. 
(Links to books are affiliate links.)

The Importance of Mindset.

Do you try to turn mistakes into learning opportunities (albeit painful ones)? Or do you see them as a part of life which we just have to overcome and forget about?

If you don’t believe that you can learn from your mistakes, then you subscribe to the “entity theory” that your intelligence is finite and there is little you can do to develop it. If you think that by analyzing your performance you can get a bit better every day, then you subscribe to the “incremental theory” of intelligence. (Both theories as labeled by Carol Dweck.)

Your mindset will influence how you perform: if you think you can learn from your mistakes, you will. If you don’t believe so, you won’t. This last self-fulfilling prophecy is dangerous on many levels.

If you believe that you are at the top of your game, you will avoid risks that challenge that perception. If you are not quite happy with your current performance but think there is no point in trying to improve it, you will just stay away from anything where you can possibly fail.

What happens when we make mistakes?

When we first realise we have made a mistake, the brain reacts with two signals in the anterior cingulated cortex, the area responsible for helping to monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. The first signal occurs 50 milliseconds after the error occurs and is referred to as Error-related negativity (ERN). The second signal is called Error positivity (Pe) and it takes place 100-500ms after the mistake, when we pay attention to the error.

Research has shown that the larger the ERN signal and the more consistent the Pe signal appears, the stronger the learning experience from mistakes.

Mind and Brain

Let’s go back to the entity and incremental theories of intelligence and how these mindsets affect how much we can learn from mistakes.

A recent study (2011) by psychologist Jason Morser aimed to find out whether brain activity during “mistake-making” differed between those people who thought they could learn from the experience and those who thought they couldn’t.

University students had to identify the middle letter of a series of five letters, such as MMMMM or MMNMM. To record their brain activity, the students wore an EEG (electroencephalography) cap, which records neural activity in the brain, though not the location of this activity.

Those students with growth mindset got better at the exercise as time went on, learning from their mistakes. The main difference in neural activity was the larger Pe signal, meaning that they were paying greater attention to the fact that they had made a mistake. This signal was three times as large and was correlated with improvements after a mistake was made.

So what?

Our brains are programmed not just to identify errors, but also to dwell on them. Stronger brain activity related to awareness of errors results in a greater ability to learn from mistakes.

What this science doesn’t tell us (yet) is whether our brain physiology is dictating our mindset or whether our mindset is having an effect on our brain activity. This reflects the ongoing brain/mind and nature/nurture debates. Bearing in mind that the brain is plastic and changes as we age, I think it is safe to say: a bit of both.

There is no doubt that undergoing change (at work, in our personal lives) is going to involve some degree of learning by trial and error. Making mistakes is rarely pleasant (I say rarely, because there are some activities where getting it wrong can be quite amusing) and the temptation might be to move on and forget about them. That’s fine, as long as before you start discarding them, you consider whether they have anything to offer, removing a bit of that bitter taste from your mouth.

Imagine you are out exploring in the jungle (go on, why not?). You are alert. You are paying attention to every bit of flora and fauna around you. Suddenly, in front of you, you see a lion. A threat. Your heartbeat increases. Your blood sugar level is raised. The blood flow to your muscles increases so that you can run away, fast.

Maybe you tense your jaw, to appear more fierce.

Maybe you clench your fists, to appear stronger.

You probably lift your shoulders to protect your neck area.

You run away from the lion (he is not that hungry, so he doesn’t follow you) and you return home, where you feel safe and can relax.

Now consider a more urban setting. An office building.

Changes are happening left, right and centre.

You are continuously alert as you absorb all the new information around you, as you make sure you are not operating on an auto-pilot that is no longer suitable, as you address new problems for the first time.

You attend a meeting.

You learn about some changes that will affect you directly over the next few months. You leave the room with your shoulders up by your ears. You sit at your desk and try to relax. At least your computer is familiar to you. Then you notice the intranet has changed. You are on full alert again, your shoulders creep up to your ears once more. You find what you need and start to relax. But your mind wanders back to the meeting, and you try to assess what the new information means to you. Without you noticing, your shoulders begin to creep up to your ears again.  Then you realize that the deadline for the progress report on the new project is tomorrow. Your heartbeat speeds up once again, as does your breathing.

You go home not even noticing that your shoulders are up by your ears and that you are holding your breath, as this has been the norm all day.

While the roaring lion situation is much more dangerous in the short-term, the urban setting scenario can have a long-term effect. Having your life threatened by a lion is more stressful but it is also punctual. It happens once (I hope!) and kicks off a series of physiological response, but soon these effects wear off and your body goes back to normal.

In every day life however, small stressors have an effect on your body continuously and unless you are aware of how you are reacting, the body never goes back to its original posture. This is why it is important to develop physical self-awareness, so that you know when your body is tense when it shouldn’t be and so that you can recognize the effect a new situation is having on you physically.