Threat brain? Yes, let’s avoid it.

Threat brain is a necessary survival function that can kick in needlessly when modern anxiety gets too great.

Reading the Fast Company article “Feeling constantly stressed? Blame your ‘threat brain’” gives a lesson for your workplace kindership practice. Because part of kindership is to help everyone into a mental space that facilitates relaxed work.

There are two parts of our brains, “safe brain” and “drive brain,” where your best work happens. The terms were coined by author and psychologist Nelisha Wickremasinghe and covered in her book Beyond Threat.

Mental performance coach to Olympic athletes and executives, Colin Guthrie color codes his mental space zones: red, blue, and green, with green being the optimum for the most rewarding performance.

Whatever taxonomy you choose, we know that different mental states can make or break a day at work.

A kindership practice should work as a conduit to guide everyone into their best performance space.

What leaders can do to be the conduit might include:

Keeping the focus on goals, not tasks – how people go about their jobs is less important than the result and directing the “how” is often micromanaging behavior and highly stressful for the employee.

Managing deadlines humanely and as a team – avoid placing undue, do-or-die deliverables solely on any one person. Spread the effort across the team.

Validating feelings of anxiety, fear, and depression – the pandemic lumbers on. Work life balance is still disrupted, and uncertainty is rampant. Having an honest group gripe about individual challenges, is not waste of time. Especially if leaders listen and mete out assignments with mindfulness of the pressures.

Building in do-over time – Pandemic or not, establishing a learning organization needs to encourage errors and failures as part of the process. This gives creativity and innovation a safe space. But again, it’s up to leaders to point out “the learning” when things don’t work.

In worst case scenarios, your organization can have an epidemic of panic attacks that can be mild or serious when too many people succumb to “threat brain.” Learn the signs of panic and encourage people to not invalidate it as imaginary or weakness.

Practicing kindership with workplace approaches and policies that acknowledge human needs and positive emotion can bring the panic level to zero. And that’s a metric effective managers should aspire to.

As the Great Resignation continues, how are leaders going to attract and retain talent? The importance of emotionally intelligent and compassionate leadership right now can’t be understated.

Wall Street Journal reporter Kathryn Dill, who has been covering the effects of the pandemic on workers, reported last week on two studies suggesting that women and minorities continue to exit jobs at higher rates than other employees.

Dill reveals a common experience: women and minorities are consistently feeling a greater negative impact from the pandemic. There is an upside for them, too, in that the pandemic disruptions have freed workers to find, often, better jobs or to rethink their priorities so taking a break from work is an option.

For managers, it’s all downside as people leave.

Here’s where we need leadership to kick in.

Going back to October, Dill reported on the importance of good management in retaining women in and minorities, citing the effectiveness of empathy in managers. A human factor that could stand up to the lure of higher paying competition.

Good management traditionally plays an outsize role in keeping employees from eyeing the exits. Gallup found that it took a pay raise of more than 20% to hire most employees away from a leader who engaged them. Women with highly empathetic managers have experienced less Covid-19 related burnout, according to a study released Wednesday by Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on women’s advancement at work. The Catalyst survey also found 57% of white women and 62% of women of color who feel their life circumstances are respected and valued by their company have never or rarely thought of leaving.

To address this unprecedented exodus of women and minorities, organizations must assess their values in “contract” focused on kindness with workers including:

1) It’s a good time for everyone to ask, “why are we here?” Is our work important in some way? Is it fulfilling to ME? What is our mission?

2) Ask, “how can we make this a place where people feel heard?” Make empathy a KPI for all managers. Make sure managers get to know everyone’s home situation – childcare arrangements, special needs, family pressures.

3) Ask “how can we help people stay?” If you can afford it, it’s a good time to do development work, such as assessing employees for matches with their jobs. Whatever way you do this, the idea is to make sure people are in jobs suited for their motivational drivers, so people aren’t wearing themselves out in ill-fitting roles.

Salary increases never hurt, but also, as one study suggests, establishing this kind of employer-employee commitment may go further than simply throwing money at the problem.

They’re looking for life on Mars but can’t find Black tech workers on Earth…

Fast Company has partnered with Black startup publication The Plug for a series called “Black in Tech.” The series compiles interviews of Black professionals in the field on diversity, equity and inclusion.

A common theme is how Big Tech’s leverage—its money, its control of information, its visibility—could be transformative. Yet it’s not. While companies might pour money into highly visible PR oriented statements of DEI, there’s not much of that happening within the companies, nor in their product.

“Tech companies have built computers that can recognize faces, right? They are working on going to Mars,” says Mimi Fox Melton, who is CEO of Code2040, a non-profit focused on advancing Black and Latinx careers in tech.

“This industry [is full of] wild goalsetting and striving to accomplish things that are inconceivable in the moment,” said Melton. “So, to look at a social problem, and throw [their] proverbial hands up and say, ‘Well, I guess this is just how it is,’ is inexcusable, and it’s offensive.”

Surveillance expert Chris Gilliard is a Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center Visiting Research Fellow. He sees Tech talking about diversity but often creating anti-Black product – think Nazi content on social media, while the platform is endorsing Black Lives Matter. Or, in Gilliard’s own field, facial recognition software that has been found to incorrectly identify and indict Black faces.

Gilliard suggests that having Black and Latinx involvement in development would be open to asking how a new technology might have a negative impact on minorities.

“These are among the richest companies that have ever existed in the history of the world. So, what seems like a staggering number—let’s say someone gave $50 million, $100 million,” said Gilliard. “And so, it’s money well spent. But the other thing is they haven’t changed their practices. Google is busy firing ethicists, high-profile Black women. Facebook is under investigation for being a serial offender in terms of like creating an anti-Black workplace.”

Now let’s zoom out

Big Tech is highly visible now, but it’s not just Big Tech that’s faltering on DEI. It’s all the other “Big” industries that we’re all part of. Think of all the profit-driven innovations in your own industry and consider how that same development power can create a diverse workplace, management team and leadership.

We, as individual professionals, need to bootstrap the transformation from the inside.

When your company is hiring:

• Share the opening with your influential and diverse network.
• Ask your hiring manager if they’re reaching out to HBCUs.
• Discuss ways your workplace is or isn’t inclusive and make suggestions to improve.
• Rethink your boiler plate job prerequisites–maybe certain life experiences are more valuable than advanced degrees.
• Study how your industry sector does with diversity and discuss it in your business groups and trade associations.

We all like to think we’re working in a meritocracy, but that’s a myth if “the merit” – top schools, choice internships, study abroad — is out of reach to disadvantaged workers in the first place,

Illustration: Adobe Stock

Is it “only burnout”? This usually suggests you just need to pace yourself, pet your dog, have sit-down dinners with your family and walk more. People just need to take better care of themselves, right?

No, the employers need to remove the stressful demands. It’s a simple fact and it’s not new, but the pandemic makes it more critical to our health and ability to do good work.

Olga Khazan wrote about this in March in The Atlantic. Her article, “Only Your Boss Can Cure Your Burnout,” stakes out a situation that blames the victims of burnout – which makes it appear that the victims may be suffering from clinical depression – instead of leaders and management who can actually do something about it.

“…burnout is a work problem. Though wellness influencers might suggest various life hacks to help push through pandemic torpor, actual burnout experts say that tips and tricks are not the best way to treat the condition. Instead, they say, burnout is a problem created by the workplace, and changes to the workplace are the best way to fix it.”– Olga Khazan, “Only Your Boss Can Cure Your Burnout,” The Atlantic

The demands of business will be what they are, but they don’t have to be cruel. A kinder workplace can be achieved that will lift unreasonable burdens from workers and probably improve their performance.

Leaders need to shoulder the burden of rethinking how their organizations work. It takes compassion and creativity. Here are some ways to start.

Tips to curb burnout in your company

• First, as a baseline, have managers audit how they have their teams deployed and realistically appraise volume and deadlines.
• Schedule “workload triage” sessions – use these to both prioritize tasks and help employees balance their individual deliverables. Look for overload.
• Small talk – we can’t stress this enough. Allow time on meeting agendas to hear what’s going on in people’s lives. And be aware of what you don’t hear from individuals. If someone is reticent, they might be struggling. Follow up one-on-one to find out.
• Maintain inclusive teams – the more a team approach is promoted, the more people will feel supported. Facilitate a way that members back each other up and trade workload as needed. “Phil’s overloaded, can someone take the monthly report?”
• Validation, appreciation and gratitude – continually acknowledge the trying circumstances, call out successes and continually thank people for “hanging in there.”
• Have occasional family times on video conferences where participants can introduce children, pets or a personal project.

In short, if you’re seeing burnout due to work stress, act to relieve it. Then, gradually “turn the ship” toward a kinder workplace model through your facilitation and own example.

People may be better than we think at taking care of themselves. Instead of shaming employees for not relaxing, quality-timing and exercising enough, it’s time for the company to give them their lives back.

Introducing Kindership. Kindness should be seen as a catalyst for successful leadership. Of course it feels good, but it also increases inclusion and engagement and builds cohesion. It emanates from individuals, and to make it a strategic benefit to the organization it needs to become knitted into the culture of the company.

Kindness is teachable. Ritchie Davidson of the University of Wisconsin has compared practicing kindness and compassion to weight training: “People can actually build up their compassion ‘muscle’ and respond to others’ suffering with care and a desire to help,” he said. Great leaders attest that it is not a sign of weakness or relinquishing authority to be consistently kind and to offer encouragement and show genuine interest in employees’ mental well-being in punishing times.

 

– Boris Groysberg and Susan Seligson, “Good Leadership is an Act of Kindness,” Harvard Business Review

Kindership™ can be thought of as a subset of leadership that functions by moving interpersonal connection to the forefront of work.

Kindership is the way we make kindness systemic for the following benefits:

• More enthused and invested participants in productivity. As kindness deflates office politics, it can reveal the benefits to helping each other.
• Improved recruitment and retention. With resources like Glassdoor, company culture is on display and known by job hunters and new talent. Today’s employees are looking for a chance to have their talent valued. An inclusive company demonstrates this.
• Competitive advantage. Most organizations don’t practice kindership. So just doing it sets yours ahead. But also, more diverse groups in positive environments will outperform homogenous groups in wage slave environments.
• Enhances the brand. The need for kindness includes your customers. Kindership can shape your brand to resonate with stressed out consumers.

Cultivating kindness

Culture is to an organization what character is to an individual. Who wants to spend time with a person of unkind character, whether its self-centered rudeness or full-on narcissism?

How do we take the individual character of kindness and propagate it through the organization so it takes root and becomes the culture?

This calls on more effort from top leadership to first model Kindership, setting the example as individuals, and also injecting a kindness quotient into the way the organization works.

As a baseline, kindness can be mandated in mission statements and employee handbooks.

Consider ideas like:

• How meetings are called in a way that respects everyone’s schedules at work and at home. Four PM might not be the best time for parents of young children to start a meeting.
• A daily allowance of solitary work time that is immutable.
• Non-judgment zones in meetings. Avoiding language that stifles free thinking.
• Managers challenged daily to seek out actions and ideas to praise.
• Make kindness a key performance indicator for all employees.

Add to this the need to acknowledge and embrace the times.

As the pandemic continues, accept that we’re in a new place and policies that are punitive or process-for-process sake are rethought or jettisoned.

This can include bereavement leave – liberally allowed without death certificates or obituaries being required – and making mental health resources available, no questions asked.

Assuring Kindership continuity

Policies and handbooks can change on a whim of new management, but healthy culture can survive and even inform through leadership succession or changes from the outside. If it’s embedded enough, it’s a lot more difficult to ignore or let whither.

Whether a company provides services or products, the concept of brand is important. In as much as brands are abstractions that result from tangible experiences, there is no reason kindness can’t be integral to the brand.

Sales calls happen in a way that respects prospects’ schedules. Customer service asks how callers are doing and concerns are assumed to be valid. The people associated with the brand – your staff – are generally in a pleasant relaxed mood.

Then you can extend this to corporate social responsibility initiatives, hopefully in a way that engages individuals to feel like they’re making a positive contribution.

Conclusion

In difficult times, we can make kindness endemic to our organizations. The immediate goal is to create a tipping point at which the initial institutional experience of pleasant tones, positive approaches and genuine interest in well-being becomes infectious. The long term goal is kinder corporate culture and an irresistible public brand.

You can. Through a human system of “installing” kindness in individual actions and organizational policies, you can see it propagate throughout your company and become part of your HR brand. More than that, we believe it’s a sustainability measure, as it helps retain personnel and attract like-minded talent.

Here’s how.

Download Lily’s article in Global Focus, the magazine of EMFD Global in partnership with FutureWorkForum.