Words Can Change Your Brain (24 page)

Another corporate sage and renowned author is Marshall Goldsmith, recognized as one of the fifteen most influential business thinkers in the world. He teaches executive education at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, was the associate dean of the College of Business Administration at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, and has coached some of the world’s leading CEOs.

Goldsmith places strong emphasis on corporate and personal values, but he feels that such terms are bantered about with too much superficiality. Words like “quality,” “integrity,” and “respect” sound inspirational, but if action is not taken to back them up, they remain empty. He says, “There is an implicit hope that when people—especially managers—hear great words, they will start to exhibit great behavior.”
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But they don’t. The solution: get honest feedback from employees and respond to it with respect. Compassionate Communication sometimes fails in the business world because leaders do not want to give up their authoritarian control. If you don’t honor and respect an employee’s values and unique contributions, you cannot bring together a team of people and have them communicate effectively to reach mutual cooperation and satisfaction. Goldsmith puts it bluntly:

As leaders we usually preach values involving people and teamwork but sometimes excuse ourselves from their practice. Even more often organizations fail to hold leaders accountable for living these values. This inconsistency invites corporate cynicism, undermines credibility, and can sap organizations of their vitality. The failure to uphold espoused values in general (and “people” values in particular) is one of the biggest frustrations in the workplace.
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If we don’t consciously discuss the value of values within the corporate environment, as an explicit dimension of company policy, how will our behaviors improve?

Build Self-Esteem in a Week

This exercise was created by the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Ask ten to twenty people you know and trust—friends, colleagues, family members, customers, etc.—to give you a short description of the ways you add value to their lives. Ask them why they appreciate you and compose a brief essay consolidating the information you receive. You’ll be building a portrait of who you are at your best.

Maintaining the Connection

Not only do we have to communicate our values to others and act on them, we must do so in a way that shows how much we truly value them. In other words, leaders are responsible for instilling optimism and confidence in others. And this can only happen if we mutually honor each other’s inner needs.

For example, researchers in the Management Department at Drexel University recently conducted a hundred-year profile study of seventy-five CEOs of major league baseball teams.
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Those who encouraged confidence and optimism had teams that won more games and attracted more fan attendance. These CEOs also showed more concern for others than for themselves. CEOs that showed signs of conceit, vanity, and egotism ran teams that won the fewest games and attracted the least numbers of fans. Once again, we see that kindness and positive support make all the difference in the workplace. This is particularly true for the health-care professions
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and within the educational systems.
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The capacity to deeply relate to others is a key to all forms of relational success—at work and at home. If you find yourself in the position of overseeing others—be they your employees or your children—remember this: leaders who give the least amount of positive guidance to their subordinates are less successful in achieving their organizations’ goals, and the employees are unhappier with their work.
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Indeed by not taking an active role in dialogue and teamwork building, they generate more interpersonal conflicts within their groups.
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Bringing Compassionate Communication into Business Schools

Values-based leadership has become a priority in the business world, which is why Compassionate Communication was embraced by the Executive MBA Program at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. Its strategies for reducing stress are an added bonus for people who have full-time jobs and have chosen to return to school to deepen their organizational skills.

Chris Manning, a professor of finance, points to the need to use brevity, clarity, and compassion in every aspect of business, leadership, and teaching: “In the classroom, I have learned that it is essential to create as much rapport with my students as possible. When I first began teaching thirty years ago, I usually spoke too fast, attempting to cover as much material as possible within the limited class time. This resulted in students being overwhelmed by the workload—an additional stress in an already stressful and difficult university class. Grades suffered, particularly for the weaker students, and some students would even drop out of the course. This experience taught me that we, as teachers and business executives, need to do everything in our power to show students and young corporate leaders why taking time out of their busy schedule to reflect on their personal and business values will improve their management skills with others. Just taking a few minutes each day to relax and be present can make their companies more successful. And if they don’t bring these qualities into their business conversations and negotiations, sales will be lost and employees will quit.”

Compassionate Negotiation

Deborah Kolb at the Simmons College School of Management emphasizes the importance of showing deep and genuine appreciation when negotiating with others: “Appreciative moves alter the tone or atmosphere so that a more collaborative exchange is possible.” This, she adds, helps to ensure that all bargainers establish a common trust, away from “unspoken power plays and into the light of true dialogue.”
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And remember: the more you communicate in a warm, supportive, enthusiastic, and genuinely caring way, the more you will be perceived as a transformational leader.
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Mindfulness, Stress, and Productivity

Herb Benson, of Harvard University, is one of the leading researchers exploring the neural mechanisms related to mindfulness, relaxation, and stress. He is using his findings to teach people how to get the most out of their work without getting burned out.

Benson, as mentioned above, discovered that a person can use “inner value” language to reduce physical and emotional stress. His well documented “relaxation response” uses the repetition of a single word or phrase—something that is highly meaningful to that person—to generate healthy changes throughout the body and the brain.

He calls his new technique the “breakout principle,” and it helps hardworking people control their stress levels in a way that improves productivity and creativity. Here are the basic components, as described in the
Harvard Business Review.
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First push yourself as hard as you can while working on a specific problem or a goal. Immerse yourself fully in the experience but stay aware of your level of stress. The moment you feel yourself tiring, take a break and go do something that is entirely unrelated to your work. Go for a walk, pet a dog, or take a shower. When you do this, the brain quiets down but, paradoxically, activity increases in the areas associated with attention, space-time concepts, and decision making. This can lead to sudden creative insight.

With practice, says Benson, you’ll achieve a “new-normal state” of enhanced awareness and productivity, but only if you integrate stress-reduction and mindfulness strategies into your daily life—exercises like the ones we have presented in this book.

Increasing Positivity at Work

Marcial Losada is the director of the Center for Advanced Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His groundbreaking research shows that in the business world the most successful teams are those in which individuals are the most positive when communicating with one another. When they didn’t like something that came up in the conversation, a negative person would show disapproval or sarcasm either in words (“That’s a dumb idea!”) or their facial expressions. A positive person would show support, encouragement, and appreciation toward the others, even if he or she disagreed with their plan. He or she might say something like this: “I understand what you are thinking, but let me explain why I think there is a better way.” To respond in this manner takes skill and foresight, which is why we recommend taking a few extra seconds to silently rehearse what you are going to say, especially before responding to something you don’t like.

Losada studied sixty business teams, and he found that the groups that showed a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative expressions were the most successful in business. Those that fell below a three-to-one ratio were the least successful.
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Furthermore, people with high positivity ratios form stronger connections and bonds with others. They are grateful, upbeat, and likeable, and they regularly express compassion toward others. Negative people are irritable, contemptuous, and basically unpleasant to be around. Other research has shown that people who work under the command of a highly positive leader tend to be happier with their jobs.
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According to Losada and his research colleague Barbara Fredrickson, one of the cofounders of positive psychology, fewer than 20 percent of American adults generate a five-to-one positivity ratio, where one experiences “an optimal range of human functioning, . . . goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.”
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Clearly this is a call for all of us to promote positive thinking and communication whenever possible. How high can your positivity ratio go before the benefits level out? Eleven to one.

Compassionate Communication in the Medical Profession

When you work in a fast-paced industry like sales, the strategies of Compassionate Communication can increase your ability to resonate and empathize with your customer. The same holds true for the healing professions, especially in a hospital setting, where I, Andy, spend most of my working career. In this people-centered environment, the day-to-day stress can be so enormous that the extra time it takes to speak slowly can feel like a counterproductive strategy.

I often have to run between the hospital, the classrooms where I teach, and the lunchroom—assuming I have time to eat. But this undermines interpersonal relationships. When you’re rushed, you’re thinking about what you need to do next, not about what the other person is saying. But if you don’t give your staff your fullest attention, oversights can be made that will affect their patients’ lives. We have to slow down, even though we don’t feel we have the time, or somebody may die.

Poor communication skills run rampant in the medical community, and you can see this beginning in the interview process for medical school applicants just as I see it in job applicants for my research team. Often I get one of two different kinds of applicants: those who speak too much and those who barely speak at all. Since it’s my job to hire people who quickly and deeply connect with others, I study their nonverbal communications closely.

The talkers jump right in, giving me a synopsis of their entire life story. Sometimes they even talk about the weather or complain about another aspect of the interview process. I don’t interrupt. I eventually say, “Well, the interview is over.” This kind of applicant never allows me to establish any kind of relationship, and it costs them an opportunity for employment.

The nontalkers are another matter. I ask them important questions like “How do think we could improve the health-care system at this hospital?” They respond, “It’s pretty complicated.” I sit there and wait for more, but nothing else is said. Or I ask applicants about a project they are working on that could have value for the research I’m doing. You’d think they’d be thrilled to talk about their work, but all this type of applicant says is, “It’s really interesting.” I feel like I’m pulling teeth just to get them through an interview for a position that demands intense interpersonal dialogues with patients and hospital staff!

In both cases the interviewee’s nervousness is usually the primary problem. Anxiety arousal causes some people to accelerate their speech rate and other people to freeze up.
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For this reason, Mark and I have developed Compassionate Communication programs to teach beginning health-care professionals how to loosen up, make appropriate eye contact (which many applicants fail to do), and be present enough to engage in a meaningful two-way dialogue.

Researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi use a strategy very similar to Compassionate Communication. They train graduate students to improve poor interviewing behavior by using what they call “pause-think-speak.” When asked a question, they identify the key words in the question, then make eye contact as they initiate a focused response.
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We’ve also begun to develop a Compassionate Communication stress-reduction program for surgeons at a well-known Southern California hospital. Surgery is an extraordinarily intense profession, and the burnout rate is high, but stress will also affect anyone’s ability to perform well at work. Since lives are at stake, anyone who deals with emergencies—firefighters, emergency-room nurses, even plumbers who must rush out in the middle of the night to save a house from flooding—needs to be extremely calm and focused. Here’s the technique we teach to surgeons and caregivers before they walk into the operating room or talk to a patient in need. It’s equally applicable for anyone in business who is about to enter into intense negotiations. Even a person who is about to haggle with a salesman can use this technique to negotiate a better deal.