Rubber Band Leadership

Paul Heagen

• Publisher: Defining Moments Consulting
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780578841564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Tension-the right kind, at the right time, not too much, not too little-is the most powerful influencer in whether things get done. Ignore it, and it can imperil your best intentions. Master it, a nd you have unlocked one of the most significant but misunderstood elements of human endeavor.

This book is intended to unlock the mystery of this overlooked thing called "productive tension" and open up a new understanding and mastery of how it can transform your every interaction, conversation, initiative and decision in your personal and business life.

The author will explain the drivers of tension - perceived challenge and perceived ability - and the role those two factors play in the level of tension we or others experience: Apathy, Power, or Stress.

Tension has been there all along. It's time to make it something that works for you and the people you lead.

CHAPTER One:
Get A Little Tension Going On

Hold a large, thick rubber band between the outstretched fingers of your hands.

Got it? Now, before I even said what to do next, what did you do naturally?

My guess is that you held that rubber band with just a bit of tension. Too loose and it draped uselessly across your fingers; too tight and it either started to dig into your fingers or you had to worry it might snap.

What you just experienced—naturally and in just a few seconds—is the role of tension in doing anything. Not too much, not too little—just enough to let you know it’s there and it has some stored energy for the work ahead. Tension is not a static condition; it is always changing, always modulating. The rubber band has jobs to do. So does tension. And it does them well, whether we realize it or not.

Consider then that having that rubber band too tight or too loose felt like an unnatural condition; it is either under-serving its purpose or over-extending (literally!) it. You knew those two extremes were outside its normal functionality and design. Having the right amount of tension felt, well, natural.

Because it is.

We see tension as a negative, but tension is all around us in a natural state. Surface tension is what forms water into perfectly spherical droplets (the ideal construct, having the greatest mass with the least surface area, thank you very much Laplace’s Law!). Water tension is what allows those little insects (“water striders”) to skitter across the pond without drowning. Tension within the cellulose fibers of a tree trunk are what keeps it from slumping over to the ground. Tension within the gluten fibers of flour is what allows a dough to contain the carbon dioxide gas from feasting yeast so bread will rise in the oven. Without tension -- just the natural attraction of molecules and cellular structures — the physical world would fall apart.

Tension, by scientific definition, is the application of opposition forces along the length of an object. You can pull on a rope, but you sure can’t push it. It is a force pulling against natural inertia. More deeply, consider tension has something that changes the natural qualities of an element. A cluster of water molecules, if left to their own devices, would just scatter to a subatomic mist, but water tension (and molecular magnetic attraction) prompts those molecules to gather into that droplet. In that sense, tension is a force—an external force—that changes how things behave.

The world of human behavior is no exception. Consider something as elementary as riding a bicycle. To push down the pedals, the muscles in the back of the thigh—primarily the biceps femoris—tighten or come under tension. To straight that leg, the muscles on the front of the thigh—mostly the triceps femoris—tighten. This role in this potential for movement is why they are called, respectively, flexors and abductors. If either of these muscles, by the way, is too tight, we are not going far either. Same if they are too flabby or too relaxed. It has to be the right amount of tension in the right relationship between load and strength. Without that natural tension, we would be about as adapt at bike riding or walking as a boneless chicken. Tension helps things move.

Too often, tension is treated as a malady, when in fact it is integral to our body’s ability to sense, process and respond to stimuli. We are wired to respond to tension.

A dive into the literature makes the point.

Behavioral research dating through to the early 20th Century bears out the influence of tension on whether we step up and act—either to change our condition or accomplish something.

In the earliest depiction of this dynamic, Harvard professors Robert Yerkes, PhD and John Dodson, PhD, proposed that an individual responds (takes action or activates) when tension (also called arousal) rises to an optimum level. Tension here can be physical (“This room is too warm.”) or emotional (“I am tired of feeling this way.”) or environmental (“This situation is not okay with me anymore.”).

FIG. 1 - Yerkes-Dodson Model

Too little tension, no activation. Why?”

Because we pay attention to our tension.

There is plenty of other stimuli going on in your lives. Until something cracks through that wall of white noise in life, it is not likely to get our attention, and subsequently, our willingness to act. Tension is that sound that is louder than the white noise. We are wired biological to shrug off tension that is below our threshold of awareness, but we jump to a level of alertness and anticipation when the tension crosses that threshold. Otherwise, we would wear ourselves out responding to anything an everything that comes to our senses. At a primal level, tension awareness is a survival tool.

FIG. 2 - ZONE OF ACTIVATION

As that level of tension rises, the likelihood of it triggering action on our part increases, largely proportionately. At that optimum level, we are all in, we have marshaled our energy, resources, capacity to address whatever is represented by that tension. This point of activation is like the sprinter on the starting line. They can crouch into their starting position, brace against the blocks, peer intently at the lane ahead, but it is when that starter gun fires that they snap into motion. This point of activation might be as sudden as that, or simply be a reasoned weighing of our situation—but we all know what it’s like to finally make a move we have been thinking about for a while, or springing into action in a split second. When we act, we know, can feel, we are in that “zone.”

However, as you can see, if we somehow pass through that “zone of activation” without taking action—either because the tension rose or amplified much faster than our ability to respond (or somehow we forced ourselves to ignore it)—we fall into another zone, one in which the tension seems to overwhelm our ability our respond and we fall away.

In a simple analogy, imagine sitting in a quiet coffee shop. All good, you get to have a nice conversation with your companion, or perhaps do some reading. Then, they turn on the music on the overhead speakers, at first very low, maybe some insipid “elevator” music. You may not even notice, or if you do, you don’t really care. Why? It’s basically “white noise.” Remember, we pay attention to our tension, and there is nothing about soft, background music that violates our threshold.

Now, have them turn that music up a bit (a pet peeve of mine in what used to be a great place to have a quiet conversation!) and you might start grousing about it, raising your voice to overcome it, or even glance over to the counter hoping they might catch your annoyed look and turn the music down. You have moved from bare awareness to keen awareness because the tension increased.

Now imagine they have that cranked up even higher, or the music is grating, or they ignored your cue to turn it down. Well, if you are by yourself, you might just resign yourself to the din, cover your ears, or flee the place. You have capitulated to the reality that there is nothing you can do, other than retreat or let it drive you nuts. You are out of control to influence the situation. You can leave in a huff, but you are defeated by the challenge to change it.

Essentially, what has happened is we have seen the path from apathy to activation to stress. This progression came comes over time. Think when an issue continues to grow in complexity or consequences, or it can happen in a flash. What is important to note, though, is that nothing happens in apathy or stress—not in the former because there is not enough tension, and not in the latter because there is too much.

This ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• CHAPTER One: Get A Little Tension Going On
• Chapter Two: Tension -- The Common Denominator in Action and Change
• Chapter Three: Level 1 -- Apathy
• Chapter Four: Level 5 -- Stress
• Chapter Five: Level 3 -- Power
• Chapter Six: Level 2 -- Power/Apathy
• Chapter Seven: Level 4 -- Power/Stress
• Chapter Eight: Getting your Sense of “Tense”
• Chapter Nine: Reading the signals of tension
• Chapter Ten: Get a Move On
• Chapter Eleven: Putting It All To Work
• Paul Heagan