Primal Teams

Jackie Barretta

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814434420
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Will your team work together with energy and enthusiasm, fear and frustration, or just go through the motions? With a proper understanding of how emotions work, the choice might just be up to you! Emotion, more than any million-dollar tool in your highly educated arsenal, spells the difference between stellar and mediocre team performance. Fear, anger, frustration, and other negative feelings can endanger a group's dynamic. But positive emotions have the power to transform it into a high-performance engine. Their minds sharpen. They find creative solutions. Everyone operates at their peak.Drawing on the latest research, Primal Teams shows how anyone can control potentially damaging emotions, while triggering the kind of passion and energy that supercharge performance. Illustrated with compelling examples, this groundbreaking guide reveals how to: • Transform fear and negativity• Energize primal emotional systems• Activate insight and intuition• Foster emotional bonds and team spirit• Connect the team to a deeper purpose• And moreDon't let your team's performance hinge on what side of the bed someone woke up on. With the array of insights and practical tools in this one-of-a-kind resource, you can learn how to inspire an unprecedented level of performance by harnessing the power of positive emotion.

CHAPTER 1

Hidden Energy

Unleashing Maximum Potential

Over a decade ago, IBM met a challenge that would have destroyed most businesses. IBM’s leaders, recognizing that the company could not sustain a viable future relying on the hardware that had made it a household name, initiated a complete transformation of the company from a hardware manufacturer to a global problem solver. Their new business model deployed smart teams to work creatively with clients on the development of customized solutions to complex business problems. Instead of just selling PCs to a customer, IBM now fields teams who analyze the customer’s workflow to determine the functions that equipment, such as mobile devices, could enable employees to perform optimally.

Transforming the company from building one-size-fits-all products to developing one-of-a-kind solutions to meet unique needs took courage. Such a huge and risky strategy would capsize most companies, but IBM isn’t most companies. Its employees often say they “bleed blue,” meaning the IBM spirit and culture run through their veins. Their deep emotional connection to the company helped motivate them to persevere through a difficult transition and played a key role in their success as members of smart, creative teams. The emotional connections and sensations that people feel in the workplace can empower them to come up with innovative solutions to their clients’ most challenging problems. At IBM, emotions—as much as, if not more than, IQ or any other measure of brilliance—stimulated people to make their new service business succeed in a radically altered marketplace.

In this chapter, you’ll discover that your organization already contains a treasure trove of similar problem-solving potential that you’re able to release by stirring optimal (i.e., distinctly upbeat and deeply felt) emotions in your people.

SPARKING THE CREATIVE BRAIN

I vividly recall the magic that happened one day in a software development team I was leading. The CEO of our company, a trucking giant, had challenged us to alter our computer systems to support a new railroad service he wanted to launch in four weeks. We felt highly motivated and had spent every waking moment over a two-day period straining to find a quick way to modify our trucking software to work for railroads. Sitting together in a conference room, batting around ideas, and drawing diagrams on the whiteboard long after the other company’s teams had gone home for the day, one of our teammates, Jake,¹ voiced our basic fear: “We just can’t do it in four weeks. These changes are going to take at least four months.”

Although I respected Jake, I felt we could do better. “Let’s shift our emotions,” I suggested. Several heads nodded agreement. We all needed a break from fear and anxiety. “Forget about all these alternatives and diagrams,” I continued. “Let’s take the problem and put it on a mental shelf alongside our anxiety.” I then led an exercise (which I’ll outline later in this chapter) to get everyone de-stressed, centered, and feeling positive. Once the energy in the room had shifted, I said, “Now let’s pull the problem off the shelf, leave all the anxiety behind, and see what happens.” It took only a few minutes before Jake exclaimed, “I’ve got it! I know how we can solve this quickly.” He had devised an elegant solution we could implement in a scant few weeks.

Make Creativity Job One

The success of an organization depends on those key moments when teams develop creative ways to provide greater value to customers and perform more efficiently in increasingly demanding situations. Too often, a team under pressure falls prey to negative emotions like fear and anxiety and formulates an unimaginative solution that barely gets the job done, takes an eternity to implement, and requires constant repair. However, when they replace fear and anxiety with optimal emotions such as joy and playfulness, they find it a lot easier to dream up solutions that delight customers, rapidly deliver value, and elegantly evolve along with the business.

A 2010 IBM survey reported that the majority of over 1,600 global CEOs agree that the success of their companies rests on the creative problem-solving capabilities of their people. That’s the only way their companies can handle the accelerating complexity of today’s business terrain, with all of its disruptive technological innovations, quickly evolving customer expectations, constantly shifting government regulations, dramatic swings in the global economy, and overwhelming volumes of data.

You must instill creativity at every level, from the senior executive team to the help desk staff, because you cannot afford to waste valuable time waiting for decisions to travel up and down the food chain. By then, impatient customers will have switched to your competition. While executives in the IBM survey agreed that organizations should encourage creativity in frontline workers, they admitted that they did not know how to do that.²

Whether your team must solve an internal design problem or invent the next disruptive breakthrough in your industry, they won’t exceed your expectations unless you make it clear that creativity is Job One and develop an environment that fosters innovative thinking. Don’t leave creativity to chance; shape it by design. Most businesses today focus intently on enabling data-based decisions and streamlining their processes, but these tactics will never spark the creativity needed to get and stay ahead of the competition. Creativity and innovation require the right state of mind. Fortunately, new research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that you can employ specific methods to put any team in the state of mind where creativity becomes a habit.

Design for Creativity

Creative thinkers see reality in new and exciting ways. Most people looked at a cell phone and saw a small screen useful only for displaying data, but to Steve Jobs it looked like an opportunity to input data as well. His insight led to the iPhone’s touch screen features. Our teammate Jake solved the railroad problem by thinking differently about our existing software, leading him to the idea of combining database elements in an atypical way that “fooled” our existing trucking system into processing railway routes just as accurately. Our talented team had racked their brains for two days, yet the answer finally came in a flash of insight when they began experiencing optimal emotions.

It takes time and effort, but you really can encourage and develop a team’s knack for creative thinking and problem solving. Take the classic so-called candle task problem. This exercise, often used in creativity research, involves giving someone a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches. They’re asked to attach the candle to a wall (or a corkboard) in such a way that it will burn without dripping wax onto the floor. You have 10 minutes to solve the problem. What would you do?

A creative thinker would empty the tack box, then tack the box to the wall as a candleholder. Now the candle will not drip wax onto the carpet. The solution hinges on seeing the tack box not just as a storage unit for tacks but also as a potential candleholder. People naturally link the tacks and the box so closely in their minds that they can’t easily separate them to solve the problem. How can you get team members to (pardon the cliché) think outside the box? What causes a person to think of using the box in a novel way, and how do you intentionally spark this ability in a person or team?

In 1987, American psychologist Alice Isen conducted experiments that tested the effect of emotion on subjects’ ability to solve the candle task. After dividing them into four groups, she induced a particular emotional mood in each. She put the first group into a positive mood by showing them five minutes of funny television bloopers. She soured the mood of the second group by screening five minutes of a documentary film showing Nazi concentration camps. She then dampened the emotions of the third group by presenting a five-minute segment of a math film illustrating the method for calculating area under a curve. The final control group received no emotional manipulation. After the groups had viewed the films, and before they had begun the candle task, Dr. Isen questioned them to ensure that they did feel the intended emotions.

The results of these experiments clearly demonstrated the impact of emotions on problem solving. The subjects in the group experiencing positive emotions were three times more likely to find the solution than the other groups. Isen found little difference among the three other groups.³

In 2008, Carsten De Dreu, Matthijs Baas, and Bernard Nijstad published an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that provided an extensive review of research on the impact of emotions on creativity, including an account of the authors’ own comprehensive original research in which they measured the impact of mood on subjects’ creative fluency and originality while performing brainstorming tasks. The scientists discovered that emotions play a major role in our ability to see the world differently. Our emotions can either open up our minds to see new possibilities, or they can close down our minds in a way that keeps the same old thoughts swirling around in our brains. So which emotional states make us better creative problem solvers?

Apply Positivity and Arousal

According to the article by De Dreu, Baas, and Nijstad, optimal team emotions that spark creativity begin with positivity. When people experience positive emotions, they gain an expanded perspective that enables them to relate to and integrate divergent material innovatively. Emotions such as cheerfulness and optimism make people feel less constrained and more apt to take risks and explore novel solutions to problems. They also prompt the inclusive thinking that opens people’s minds to uncommon perspectives. That’s when you decouple the tacks from the box or your existing software from truck routes.

Researchers who conducted one study cited in the article asked participants in positive moods to rate how well a particular object fit within a specified category. They found that these individuals tended to include atypical items in a category. For example, they would more likely include an elevator, a camel, and feet in a category labeled “vehicle” than would a control group of people experiencing a wide range of moods. Good moods open our minds to new possibilities.

On the other hand, negative emotions, such as anger and frustration, signal to individuals that their situation is problematic and that they must take constrained, analytical action to remedy it. Negative emotions shut down their openness to novel possibilities.

Positive emotions come in different sizes, ranging from a low level of arousal to extreme passion. The research article by DeDreu, Baas, and Nijstad provides a thorough examination of the impact of emotional arousal on creativity. As in the “Three Bears,” Baby Bear emotions may be too small, Papa Bear emotions too big, but Mama Bear emotions are just right. Low levels of arousal, such as contentment, promote inactivity, whereas extremely high levels of arousal, such as excitement, reduce our capacity to perceive and evaluate information. It’s difficult to think clearly when our extreme passion creates a state of exhilaration or euphoria. At moderate levels of arousal, people feel optimally motivated to seek and consider multiple alternatives. Moderate levels of arousal also enhance working memory, which in turn enhances cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, and access to long-term memory.⁴

Primal team leaders take specific steps to help people experience the appropriate levels of arousal and the optimal level of positive emotions because they know that such a state releases the utmost creativity. They pay close attention to the emotions running through their team, and, whenever necessary, they take sure steps to reshape less than optimal emotions. While they can’t force an individual or team to think creatively, they can help them open the door for creativity.

Optimal emotions also help teams meet the other challenges teams face in today’s high-pressure workplace, including mind-boggling complexity, nerve-wracking changes that require impossibly agile responses, and other unpredictable disruptive events that can send a team into a tailspin.

DEEPENING THE IMPACT

Several years ago, Subaru launched a “Love” advertising campaign that highlighted the emotion that drivers feel for their Subarus. In a Washington Times article, columnist Marybeth Hicks berated the company for citing love as a reason for buying a car. Hicks argued that an irrational emotion like love should not influence rational purchasing decisions or any other business deliberations.⁵ Although most business leaders would probably agree with Hicks, according to new research into the connection between the heart and the brain, Subaru was on to something.

Positive, moderately aroused emotion may stimulate our brain to function more creatively, but heartfelt emotion boosts our creative ability to an even higher level. Our heart has a unique ability to put us in our most creative state.

Pull the Strings of Heartfelt Emotion

What exactly do we mean by “heartfelt” emotion? How does it differ from positive emotion? Does it deserve any role in a business environment? The answer is a resounding yes. Let’s see why. Simply put, positive emotions include pleasant thoughts and calm sensations in our body, whereas heartfelt emotions consume our attention and activate a strong sensation in the actual area of our heart. You know the feeling. Think about someone you love “with all your heart.” When you picture that loved one in your mind, don’t you feel a warm, tingling sensation in the area of your heart? Most people do.

In a team, the two types of emotion play out differently:

Positive Emotion	Heartfelt Emotion
Relief when a project is finished	Boundless delight when a completed project delivers great value to the organization
Satisfaction with a bonus or big raise	Unbridled appreciation for a supportive boss
Thankfulness when a teammate works overtime to complete a crucial task	Tremendous gratitude for your teammate’s efforts and sacrifices

Note that the list on the left suggests relatively mild feelings, whereas the one on the right embodies deeper feelings that border on love. “I love making our customers happy!” I love the way my boss supports my work!” I love it when Rick throws himself into the work.” Strong heartfelt emotions can halt our rational mental processes and connect us to people in a much more profound way than relatively mild feelings, such as relief or satisfaction or thankfulness. Heartfelt emotions make our hearts sing, and they set fire to our cognitive and perceptual abilities—traits that every business prizes.

Synchronize the Parts of the Brain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: “Since Feeling Is First …”
• 1 Hidden Energy: Unleashing Maximum Potential
• 2 Primal Emotion: Shifting Emotions at the Source
• 3 The Scary Stuff: Processing Fear and Negativity
• 4 Emotional Contagion: Spreading Coherence in a Team
• 5 The Sixth Sense: Detecting Emotions
• 6 The Engaged Heart: Connecting to a Deeper Purpose
• 7 Primal IQ: Activating Insight and Intuition
• 8 Team Spirit: Building Emotional Bonds
• 9 The Balanced Culture: Restraining Runaway Egos
• Epilogue: When the Going Gets Tough
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Free Sample Chapter from A Team of Leaders by Paul Gustavson and Stewart Liff