Coping is not an endpoint
Assumptions
Optimal people performance is not about running them into the ground. Coping is not a valid (or sustainable, or moral) goal. Flourishing and high performance is possible. It’s about where you set your sights + build your skills. It’s about optimisation.
Let’s illustrate
When we think about doing something, it is useful to be clear about whether we are moving towards what we want, or away from what we don’t want. This direction affects not only the strength of our motivation, but it also affects how long we stay ‘on it’.
When we are close to something we don’t want (try: something we really don’t want) motivation can be acute. We feel we must move; it is just too painful to stay put. Maybe it’s physical like an illness that knocks you over. Maybe you’re experiencing burnout. Perhaps you’re getting loud + forceful feedback from clients about issues with your product or service. Or revenue from a new service isn’t coming through as fast as you’d hoped, making expenses glaringly front of mind.
So … you take action. Right now. You move away from that unwanted place with as much energy as you can muster. Organisationally, you put on a blanket travel freeze to halt some short-term expenses. To get physically back on track, you take a course of antibiotics, maybe a holiday to relax + regroup. You might give your customer service peeps a pep talk (and increased incentives) to be better with clients. You may even go so far as to coach you clients – those experiencing your improved upbeat service – on how to fill out their survey to give you a better rap! All this ‘away from’ activity can happen in a flurry, until you don’t feel the discomfort so acutely. Phew. That feels better!
Then what happens to your motivation?
The further away you get from any unwanted state, the less impact it is likely to have on you. The less motivation you have to call on your deep + precious energy resources, because it is tough. It requires more of you. But you are ok. You’re fine. So, without any other input, the motivation wanes. Expending all that energy is just too hard.
Getting from ‘making a loss’ to ‘breaking even’, in the frame of Professor Kim Cameron (Ross Business School, Univ of Michigan), is akin to closing a competence gap. Yes, it is good. But it is only one stage along a continuum. More is possible. It just requires some different thinking and some different strategies. You don’t ‘cut costs’ to accelerate financial growth, just like you don’t take more and more antibiotics to get to ‘vibrant energetic health’. You need to (a) know that a better outcome than ‘fine’ is possible, (b) be able to define this ‘better’ state, and (c) garner strategies to get you there. It is a longer-term journey, requiring focus, effort, a good plan, flexibility to learn and adapt, and possibly some different help.
Let’s get back to our people, our performance, and our premise that ‘coping is not an endpoint’.
When our people are approaching burnout, when absenteeism spikes, when there are an increasing number of tense conversations around the office, raised voices in meeting rooms, harassment complaints, managers behaving out of character, unexplained absences, balls being dropped, service in decline … then we know that there is something very wrong. On that ‘Flourishing’ – ‘Coping’ – ‘Burnout’ continuum, we are going dark.
If this happens, the strong urge is to do what we can to get to ‘Coping’ as quickly as possible. We can highlight the Employee Assistance Plan and make private suggestions to staff. Encourage a few ‘days off in lieu’. Pull out the ‘enforced leave-taking’ card. A bit of wellness training, meditation at lunchtimes, a mobile masseuse, a rebate for classes at the local gym.
But although this might give us some real short-term relief, we also need to think about where we are ultimately heading.
If we just want our people to cope, we can head-off potential catastrophe (for a while, at least) with a bit of time + space to regroup and a few sugar pills.
If we want our people to flourish, we need to have this specific endpoint in our sights + embark on different strategies.
What behaviour is prompted by our culture, our values, the behaviour of our leaders? How are we defining what ‘at your best’ looks like for our people, and supporting them to get there? What, exactly, do we expect of them? How do we reward our teams? How do we engender creativity, innovation, respect, pride, optimism, laughter … with a parallel focus on business performance?
· When our people are ‘coping’, they’ll get stuff done: things will be happening
· When our people are ‘flourishing’, it is a whole different ball game
Where is your thinking? Are you fixated on creating an environment where your people flourish?
Or will coping do?