Dr Rob Archer

Find Your Passion At Work! (Just Don’t Expect to Feel Passionate About It When You Do)

Posted on December 1, 2012December 1, 2012 by Dr Rob Archer

One of the reasons I left consultancy is because I felt that the work was meaningless. In meetings I would try not to fall asleep as people droned on about project dependencies and stakeholder management and at the weekend all I did was dread Mondays.

It wasn’t unpleasant exactly, it was the lack of something that bothered me. I wanted to feel passion and meaning at work, instead I experienced a sense that I did not care about the low hanging fruit as much as other people seemed to.

Now, many years later, I have created a working life which I do feel passionate about. Some nights I have to force myself to go to bed – like a child on Christmas day – because that will make the next day come faster. Some days I work with a client and it will hit me: I love this.

So for all the people who write about finding your passion at work: good for you. It is possible. It is necessary. Well done!

But your books are still at best horribly misleading and at worst, dangerous…

The thing about passion at work is that it is rarely characterised by feelings of passion. It is, if anything, characterised by feelings of anxiety and doubt, particularly in the early days. For me those years were filled with thoughts about whether this was really the right thing, whether I could do it, whether I was falling behind my peers.

Even today those moments where I feel passionate about what I do are rare and fleeting. Working with people who are stuck can be draining and usually I am assailed by doubts about my own ability to help, my mind telling me what a terrible psychologist I am. Plus it can be very painful working with people who are themselves in pain.

Is this what I left consultancy to find? Is this really passion at work?

Well, yes. I am truly passionate about what I do and I am so thankful that I get to do it (well, most days).

But if I had not been show how to grow more willing to respond flexibly to painful thoughts and emotions, then I would have never have reached where I am now.

In short, if I had defined passion as feelings of passion then the journey would have stopped long, long ago.

Psychological Flexibility in Difficult Conversations

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Dr Rob Archer

It struck me that psychological flexibility is very powerful in relationships, and particularly in having difficult conversations. However, this is something I rarely talk about on this blog (Rachel maybe more so). So I thought sharing a personal example of how psychological flexibility has helped me could be useful.

Earlier this year my Grandfather died and I wrote a bit about that at the time. Having dreaded his death for much of my adult life I am grateful for the skills that psychological flexibility gave me because they helped shape my response to his decline.

In May 2011 I went home to Liverpool to visit my Grandfather, who was then aged 92. He had been moved to a home, much to his disgust. He was grumpy because he felt he’d been locked in there against his will. He was surrounded by old women, many of them even grumpier, so we went outside for a cup of tea.

It was cold outside and windy. For some reason, we got onto talking about the gloomiest of subjects – unusual because we usually kept things light and jovial. But that day we both felt low. We talked about how he missed his daughter, Rowena, who died before I was born. It felt uncomfortable and sad.

It was sad. I felt like crying.

Some years ago I would have taken this discomfort as a sign to run away. I may have cracked a joke, or left a bit earlier, or hurriedly changed subjects.

But this time I sighed and stopped and just sat there. In the middle of the day, sitting with my Grandfather, sharing time, sharing life. I gave up the struggle with it, and just shared what was.

I look back now and am proud of what we did that day. Above all, I’m so glad I didn’t just run away.

Psychological flexibility has not saved me from difficult conversations. But it has lessened the struggle I have with my own thoughts and emotions during them. That has given me more energy to focus on what matters and I have been more willing to ‘show up’ to what matters to me in everyday life.

Doesn’t the workplace need more of this?

About the same time as seeing my Grandfather I went to a workshop run by another hero of mine, Kelly Wilson. He showed me this poem, and it means a lot. But not as much as the difficult moments I shared with my Grandfather last year, drinking lukewarm tea in the cold.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Naomi Shahib Nye, “Kindness”

Why Happiness Makes Me Grumpy (aka: The Limitations of Aiming for a Happy Workplace)

Posted on November 8, 2012May 19, 2021 by Dr Rob Archer

Most serious positive psychology researchers would agree with the idea that happiness should not be an objective. But in my experience the message gets lost in translation, certainly among the many life coaches and pop psychologists who advocate the implementation of happiness strategies.

Even with heavyweight researchers the message gets blurred, for example:

Organisations like Livehappier.com and Action for Happiness argue that happiness is “the eternal quest of every generation since the first human beings” and argue that we should therefore try to create happy workplaces.
On Barbara Fredrickson’s website she writes: “experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones leads people to a tipping point beyond which they naturally become more resilient to adversity and effortlessly achieve what they once could only imagine“.
Professor Tim Sharp relentlessly tweets about happiness, for example: “Stop; slow down; reflect; just be…happy” and “Live longer with happiness!”

The message is that happiness is correlated with all sorts of benefits – from health to productivity – so we should logically seek to attain happiness, right?

Well, no.

Happiness as an objective (whether individual or organisational) is hugely problematic for a number of reasons:

If we have happiness as our goal, then unhappiness has to be avoided. In this way individuals are encouraged to ignore, change or avoid negative emotions rather than accepting them as normal. This can lead to experiential avoidance – a psychological phenomena which has been linked to a huge number of mental health problems (Hayes and Masuda, 2004).
Thoughts and emotions are not within our control. As natural responses to the environment, there is very little evidence to suggest that negative thoughts can be avoided. We also have an ability to manufacture great unhappiness from pleasant events, and happiness from disaster (Gilbert, 2006).
Trying to be happier can backfire. A study by Ng and Diener found that those high in neuroticism did not benefit from cognitive reappraisal strategies and Woods (2009) found that positive self-statements provoke contradictory thoughts in those with low self-esteem.
Trying to be happy ignores context. I am motivated more often by fear, anger, jealousy and even desperation than I am by happiness. Is happiness the ‘right’ response to inequality or corruption? I would argue that the world needs a focus on happiness no more than it does on anger.
What drives happiness is often short term. For example, my mind will be unhappy at the prospect of going for a run, or of receiving negative feedback. Yet these are precisely the actions which drive longer term wellbeing, performance and meaning.
Happiness only drives some aspects of performance. Linking happiness with performance is like saying extraversion is good because it is associated with success in sales. Happiness is indeed useful for creative tasks (Fredrickson, 2005) but it is less useful for tasks like risk management (García, Sabaté, Puente, 2010).
Lack of theory. There is no theoretical reason why happiness should be exalted above other emotions. It does not tap into any theory of language or cognition which can explain how human minds work, and so no model can be empirically tested.

However, happiness sounds good and it correlates with some nice outcomes. So let’s pump it out there and hope for the best! I get grumpy about this for two reasons:

By focusing on happiness we fail to equip people with the tools to live more vital, fulfilling lives in practice. Plus we risk adding a second source of stress when people fail to feel happy.
It means the people I compete with get an easier sell than I do. And that makes me grumpy!

By focusing on happiness, Positive Psychology reinforces (whether overtly or not) the idea that we must change something within ourselves before we can be successful, productive, and healthy.

If we buy that idea we set ourselves up for a battle we cannot win – and risk creating enemies of our own minds.

What it Feels Like to Make a Mistake

Posted on October 1, 2012May 19, 2021 by Dr Rob Archer

I don’t like making mistakes. In fact most of my professional life has been spent in the service of not making a mistake, or being seen not to.

I am not alone; in fact a lot of the practical difficulty in culture change projects is created by people being (understandably) unwilling to move away from a no mistakes / ‘safety first’ style of thinking.

Whilst there’s nothing wrong with safety first, it is not always the most helpful approach to problem solving. Sometimes we need to think creatively, try something new…and risk making a mistake.

Yet so much of the language in organisations is about not making a mistake. Small mistakes are often cited in appraisals as evidence that someone did not have an outstanding year. And in comparison to creative thinking, ‘risk management’ sounds sensible, grown up and professional. It is easy to pick holes in new ideas.

So a ‘safety first’ culture often prevails where creativity is seen as a luxury and mistakes are punished. This is fine for some kind of problems, but not those which require more than past experience to solve them (what Ron Heifetz calls ‘adaptive change‘).

Therefore, when attempting to help organisations deal with adaptive change, we need to pay attention to how mistakes are treated. Clearly in this respect senior managers set the tone.

Yet so ingrained is our fear of making a mistake, the main barrier is how we ourselves feel when we make a mistake. If making a mistake is the admission price for creativity:

What does it feel like to make a mistake?

I have made a number of mistakes recently, so I thought this would be an interesting experiment. After all, if we are to encourage people to take risks and accept their feelings about making a mistake, what exactly are those feelings?

In this case the mistake I made was sending an e-mail which contained factual errors. Here’s what happened next:

The first experience was a nasty, crackling sensation deep inside my stomach, which had a kind of shockwave effect, culminating most noticeably in a sort of pins and needles feeling in my hands, lasting about 5 seconds.
The next moment brought a slight shortness of breath combined with a leaping heart and a racing mind to create a momentary sense of panic.
The next feeling was a realisation that the mistake is real and this came (for me) with feelings of slight nausea lasting about a minute.
Interestingly, my mind then immediately raced into self preservation (i.e. excuses) mode. Can I shift the blame? Can I make an excuse? I was almost overwhelmed by these thoughts over the next 30 minutes – being aware of them did not seem to matter.
The most noticeable feature was then my mind’s ongoing attempts to try and fix the problem. Again these thoughts were almost overwhelming and impossible to stop. (Incidentally this is where I often compound the initial mistake, so overpowering is the desire to fix it immediately). This is also the period where my mind suggests a number of different lies which might get me off the hook.
Finally I noticed how the mistake had a peculiar ability to haunt me. For example, I can think about it and right now – sitting here at my comfortable desk – I can experience a kind of ‘after shock’ all over again, with a heart leap thrown in. It is as if my mind is saying ‘you need to remember this because we are not going to do that again!’

If we are to encourage new ways of thinking it seems to me that we need to help people recognise and accept what it feels like to actually make a mistake. Though this won’t be easy, the alternative is a life lived in the service of not getting things wrong.

Collaboration

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Dr Rob Archer

I live a controlled life. I live by myself, work for myself and please myself most of the time. I’ve done this all my life, having learned to retreat into my room and fix my own problems from a very early age. My early years were spent building self reliance, listening to my stereo: I am a Rock, So Strong, and today, The Mountain Goats.

And self reliance works well for me. I enjoy being able to do what I want, when I want. I value my freedom.

Yet the flipside of this is that I cut myself off from other people. Working with other people involves compromise, which encroaches my freedom. So when that happens I retreat into my room, and take my freedom back.

In the short term this absolutely works. I don’t have to deal with anyone else or risk rejection. I don’t have to be disappointed by anyone, compromise on anything or negotiate with anyone. But in the long term I pay a price.

The price I pay is missing out on ideas, challenges and input that would make my ideas stronger and which would spread them wider. And I miss out on the enduring, deepening relationships which I long for.

Collaboration is an interesting word. A collaborator in World War 2 was someone who forsook their principles for short term expedience. Funny how context matters – for me collaborator has come to mean the exact opposite.

The word collaborator comes from ‘com’ (with), and ‘labore’ (to work). And that’s the point – collaboration takes work. Work I am often not prepared to do, even when I know I can do more, influence more, grow more and achieve more with other people than I can alone. Yet I refuse to pay the price because I have to pay it now, and the consequences are not felt til later.

That’s why psychological flexibility is so relevant; especially when applied to values. Very often what I am convinced are values are actually avoidance strategies. By noticing this I can choose my behaviour more consciously and inch forward, slowly, in the direction I choose.

I may be a rock, but I choose not to be an island.

How White Dog Poo Can Give Us Hope For 2012

Posted on January 9, 2012May 22, 2021 by Dr Rob Archer

Do you remember white dog poo? It seemed to be all over the place when I was growing up, but now I can’t remember the last time I saw any. What’s going on?

The answer is that humans have decided to pick up after their dogs. In general, we carry around little black bags for the purpose and deposit them in special bins.

As Jerry Seinfeld said, if an alien ever landed they would undoubtedly conclude that it was the dogs who were in charge. But the real point is that our short term behaviour has changed, making the environment more pleasant for others, even though the immediate consequences for ourselves are unpleasant.

Why does this matter?

Because it tells us something important about human nature. Even behaviour which seems deeply ingrained and resistant to change can be changed.

Yet the thing about humans is that we forget this and give ourselves a hard time. As a species we criticise ourselves constantly, even though evidence suggests our behaviour has never been better or more peaceful. And at an individual level, when we think about behaviour change we often to chide ourselves for not having changed already. And any behaviourist will tell you that’s not a great reinforcer.

Steve Hayes once said the real question is not why are we so controlled by short term impulses, but rather how do we ever fail to be?

This puts me in mind of one of my favourite quotations of all, by Robert Ardrey but used here by Ken Robinson. I think it’s a nice reminder as we start 2012.

Happy New Year, everyone.

“Human beings were born of risen apes, not fallen angels.
And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles?
Or our treaties, our symphonies, our peaceful acres, our dreams?
The miracle of humankind is not how far we have sunk but how magnificently we have risen.
We will be known among the stars not by our corpses, but by our poems.”

What Kind of Life Purpose Leads to Meaning in Life?

Posted on December 9, 2011May 19, 2021 by Dr Rob Archer

Steve Jobs once said that Apple’s mission was to ‘dent the universe’. That is, he was driven to make a difference in the world above and beyond profit. Yet other people – can’t think who – seem to have far more of a ‘self-related’ purpose in that their primary objective seems to be to make as much money and to be as personally successful as possible.

In my research I decided to test the idea that there are two types of purpose – ‘self-related’ and ‘transcendent’. I also wanted to test if either type of purpose would predict meaning in work more strongly.

Using a measure of purpose originally developed at Stanford, my factor analysis found that there are indeed two broad types of purpose. Most people have self-related purpose (after all we all need to eat), but some people also seem to have a transcendent purpose as well.

Now, self-related purposes are not ‘bad’ nor are transcendent purposes ‘good’. For example, it is perfectly possible to have a self-related purpose of making money to provide for one’s friends or family. Conversely you could argue Hitler had a transcendent purpose.

The difference is simply in terms of how people interact with the world. Those with a stronger self-related purpose will focus more on their immediate surroundings. They may try to ignore extraneous information from beyond their immediate context.

Those with a transcendent purpose need to affect the world around them through their work. So over time, they must learn more about the world around them and their place within it. This is what slowly generates meaning in work.

Findings

My research found that those with a self related purpose do indeed experience less meaning in work than those who also have a strong transcendent purpose. In fact, high levels of self-related purpose negatively predict meaning in work – something I had not even dared to hypothesise.

Interestingly, not only did the item ‘My purpose at work is to make money’ negatively predict meaning in work (bang in line with theory), it was also associated with lower engagement at work. Money can’t buy you love, nor it seems employee engagement.

There was also no association of making money with psychological wellbeing, which confirms the findings of happiness researchers everywhere. However, the transcendent purpose scale did significantly predict psychological wellbeing.

The implication is clear: if you want meaning in work, then you need to work out how you can ‘dent the universe’ in some way. Then go out there and learn how to do it. Meaning will follow.

The Flaw

Posted on November 28, 2011May 18, 2021 by Dr Rob Archer

I recently watched a brilliant film, called The Flaw which explored the global financial crisis and its causes.

Capitalism is a system which, through its invisible hand is able to benefit the many via the self interest of the few. By trying to maximise their own gains in a free market, individuals benefit society, even without setting out to do so.

Yet as we look around the world it is clear that capitalism has another invisible hand, which is rather less benevolent. This ‘flaw’ was identified by Alan Greenspan, who was making a relatively narrow point about economics and the self correcting power of free markets.

But I would argue that the flaw runs deeper than Greenspan thinks. Capitalism – at least in its current form – is flawed in terms of psychology. The way that work gets structured and organised tends to distance people from their values and sense of responsibility. A combination of behavioural reinforcement, mindlessness (due to workload?) and a short term, inward focus encourages a kind of collective myopia and disconnect from our own values.

I found this myself when, as a consultant, my objective rapidly went from helping the public sector to improve its efficiency, to selling consultancy services into the public sector.

At one point in The Flaw individual bankers, traders and derivatives experts were asked whether they felt any direct responsibility for the financial disaster. Most of them fell silent. Not, I think, because they felt guilty, but more because they genuinely did not know the answer. Such was the way their role had been structured they had lost contact with any kind of individual responsibility. Their role had distanced them from their individual values without them even really being aware that that had happened. No one was responsible.

It is this flaw which allows individual bankers to argue that they did nothing wrong, whilst millions cope with repossession, debts and unemployment. It is this flaw that allows senior managers to sell packages of derivatives that no one truly understands. It is this flaw that allows News International bosses to turn a blind eye to practices which were contrary to the ethics of their own profession. It is this flaw that allows nurses and care home workers to treat the elderly and sick with cruelty and contempt.

I don’t think anyone deliberately set out to do this. But we create our organisations, and then they create us.

What Can We Do to Address The Flaw?

Our organisations have created a version of us which too easily loses contact with individual accountability and values. Instead, management focus on implementing organisational values. The problem with this is that these are not really values – they are tracks and plys.

What then is the answer? Better economic regulation is key, as are changes to governance practices that promote longer term thinking, flexible perspective taking and individual accountability.

But we also need to understand how and why people lose contact with their values at an individual level. One of the major reasons is that staying in contact with our values is very difficult. It requires psychological skills that are not innate or obvious. It requires interventions that go far beyond merely promoting happiness or engagement.

It is interventions like ACT that have shown that people can be trained to deal with the psychological consequences of following their values. Whilst this is not easy, we cannot fix the flaw simply by trying to build happiness or engagement or by legislating for transparency or fairness. None of that addresses the reality of what it means to be a human. But if we can teach willingness to experience difficult thoughts and feelings in pursuit of values, then we have much more of a chance.

If ACT can help reconnect even those lost in depression and chronic pain to their values and make a real difference to their experience, it does not take much imagination to think that maybe there are things we can learn which apply directly to organisational culture change.

There is a flaw. We can fix it. But we must listen to the science.

Care with Labels (2) – Non Talent Management?

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Dr Rob Archer

And so it came to pass that one day, having been considered ‘talent’ for most of my life, and having spent most of my energy on defending this ludicrous position, I eventually became known as ‘non talent’. Anti talent? Whatever, I did not make the talent pool in my next consultancy job, and it hurt.

I only found out there was a talent pool when some whipper snapper – who I had recruited – blurted out that he was on it. And what effect, dear reader, did this label have on my performance? Needless to say, I did not handle it well:

1. My first reaction was childish. I sulked and withdrew. I stopped all discretionary effort and focused on trying to find out who was in the talent pool and what they had that I didn’t.

2. My second reaction was to believe that now, suddenly, I was not living up to my potential. This knocked my previously overinflated confidence, and may have been a good thing, except for the fact that I very quickly bought into a story that I was failing. This led what I would loosely call ‘unfocused activity’ or panic. I was thrashing about, trying to find answers to a problem that probably only existed in my own head.

3. Eventually I became depressed and stuck in career paralysis. My job became one of simply getting through each day.

I know there are benefits to talent schemes, other than profits for consultancies. But I have to ask the question whether these benefits are not hugely outweighed by the costs. On the one hand, the talent label seems to be a way of reinforcing peoples’ tendency to recruit from their own, which leads to groupthink and a serious amount of overconfidence in one’s ability. Financial crisis anyone?

On the other, the ‘non talent’ label leads to a sense that we are not worthwhile, and that we must defer to those who are. In terms of performance, this takes us back full circle. Julian McNally told us:

“Labels, including diagnostic ones, are only useful to the extent they enable constructive action”.

I’ll leave you to decide how useful the talent label is at either individual or organisational level, and whether it enables enough constructive action to justify its use.

Care with Labels – Lessons for Talent Management

Posted on November 12, 2011November 12, 2011 by Dr Rob Archer

Be careful with labels. That’s what Julian McNally warns in his excellent blog post: “Labels, including diagnostic ones, are only useful to the extent they enable constructive action”.

This got me thinking about labels within organisations. One of the most common is the label ‘talent’. This is the idea that organisations have a small number of workers who are ‘talent’ – as first decreed by Mckinsey’s in their 1997 paper The War for Talent.

Identifying the top 5 or 10% of performers allows organisations to focus their resources on developing a small number of people and to groom them for senior leadership positions.

But what else results from assigning the ‘talent’ label? This is only my view – but based on my own experience of both being identified as ‘talent’ and not, this is what I observed:

When I was first selected as talent, I thought it was tremendous. I did some great training courses and it gave me a confidence boost. But the effect of this enhanced confidence was like monetary inflation. I simply had more to say about subjects I knew too little of.
Because talent was a label assigned to me, not my behaviour, I assumed that my talent was permanent. It became my formula for success, dressed up in the weasel words of ‘strengths’. This made me far less likely to question the workability of my approach and far more likely to cling to being ‘right’.
As a result my job became one of impression management. I did not pay attention to performance but rather the appearance of performance.
The first rule of impression management is to avoid mistakes. Especially in an organisation of very bright people. But trying to avoid mistakes is not a great recipe for creativity, learning or improving performance.
Finally, being labelled as talent encouraged me to persist in goals which had nothing to do with my values. I climbed the ladder, only to find it leaning against the wrong wall.

Overall, therefore, I would say being labelled as talent hindered my performance. And in my next post, I am going to describe the effect of not being labelled talent…