How is Your Workplace Limiting Your Emotional Freedom?

We’ve read a great deal about employee engagement in recent years.  Great talent is supposedly in short supply. Many organizations are looking to attract and retain the best people, especially in anticipation of economic challenges that are the new normal.

We scrutinize what constitutes great leadership.  Phrases like “Culture eats strategy for lunch” (or is it breakfast?) are organizational memes.  Yet, we still can’t seem to get some basics of creating healthy organizations right.

One fundamental problem is that most organizations don’t see themselves as dynamic systems.   Most strategies and remedies are still based on parts thinking.  While some organizations acknowledge their internal and external connectedness, they still largely function along segregated lines.

According to Peter Senge, author of the seminal book on organizational systems thinking, The Fifth Discipline, “Organizations are living phenomena in a very real sense and they were appreciated in that spirit for a very long time. It was only a couple of hundred years ago that our view of organizations—and particularly business organizations—really began to change. When we started to harness the power of machines in the early years of the industrial era, gradually we started to see more and more of life as machine-like. It leads us to see everything, including ourselves, as nothing but an elaborate set of mechanisms.”
Few would disagree that cultural forces are instrumental to shaping organizational life, but it’s challenging to understand the impact of culture on daily human experience.   After all, organizational culture is the aggregate of shared thinking, beliefs and values and it is – dynamic.   That dynamic is most powerfully influenced by the vision and practices of organizational leadership. Because emotional contagion is real, the thoughts, feelings and actions of organizational leaders are constantly reinforcing or shifting the dynamics of an organization’s direction.

It’s Viral

John Wenger, author of the excellent blog, Quantum Shifting, writes, “We are so infected by the culture of our organizations that we lose awareness of it. Ask a fish what they think of the water and they will say, “What water? In the same way that a fish is unaware of water, we are largely unaware of the influence the systems in which we live exert upon us.”

The constant demands organizational life makes on our emotional psyches are both overt and obscure.  In the blizzard of tasks that string a work day together, many people are simply reacting to events as they are presented.  But within the undercurrents of communication, culture is influencing feelings that are shaping behavior.

As a result, each organization develops an emotional landscape. Conveyed by the formal and informal norms of every organization, department, team and workplace relationship, what is emotionally acceptable to express and what is taboo is quickly learned.

While organizational structure and processes are always impelling feeling and action, employees are often not aware of how. Commonly at the root of conflicts, internal and external, are the underlying forces of these systemic influences.   Because we’re not looking at the macro picture to understand the micro dynamics, we miss the real drivers of behavioral outcomes.

The past two decades have brought a new understanding of the brain and especially of experience-dependent neuroplasticity. Simply put, we now know that brains are socially interdependent. They are in a sense – systems within systems.  In fact, the emerging field of “organizational cognitive neuroscience” (OCN) is the cognitive neuroscientific study of organizational behavior.  OCN lets us start to understand the relationship between our organizational behavior and our brains.

How Organizational Demands Impact What We Feel

Emotional prohibition and freedom within organizations is determined by a multiplicity of forces. How individuals will be emotionally affected by those forces will depend on their needs, beliefs and values.

While some people can tolerate and adjust in restrictive emotional environments, most will contract and often resist.  In many cases, this is occurring unconsciously. Because much of the emotional adaptation takes place out of awareness, dysfunction is often the result. From an individual, group and organizational perspective, it is vitally important to understand the forces can impede or encourage emotional freedom.

Some organizational forces that inhibit emotional expression:

• Dishonesty. The singular value that most clients identify as being critical to effective performance is honesty. That’s why the dishonesty has such a deleterious effect on employee participation and vital workplace relationships.  Nearly every organization has its “truth” norms and every employee has to crack the code of what is allowed. Often this occurs unintentionally. Even if senior leadership intends and professes their allegiance to transparency, an employee’s relationship with a manager can set the tone that overrides willingness to honesty share thoughts and feelings.  At the macro level the mismatch between what an organization says and what it does also determines “safety levels” for self-expression.
• Lack of Trust.  The correlate to honesty. Charles Green, author of the Trusted Advisor (book and blog) points out that “trust is too vague a term to work with. To do something practical, we need first to identify the trust realm; are we talking about personal trust, or business/organizational trust, or social/institutional trust?” Trust is after all an idea about a set of behaviors that either reinforce our sense of comfort and safety or alert our brains that the “risk” is too high.  Lack of trust influences what we feel and the actions we take. It is the cornerstone of decision-making. Low trust produces feelings of anxiety, apprehension and fear.
• Coercive Power.  The nature of organizational hierarchy and power has been under the microscope for decades. The shift, however slow, has been to move away from more autocratic styles of leadership to collective communication and greater autonomy, Too many institutions are still dominated by central authority and coercive behaviors that conform to the will of its senior leadership. Global interconnectedness and instant communication, however, have increasingly made the  top-down approach less viable and desirable. One question central to evaluating coercive power arrangements must focus on the effect coercion has on emotional expression.
• Peer Pressure & Bullyism.  Findings in neuroscience show that the brain is constantly on alert for what it perceives as threat and reward.  While most people understand that peer pressure has real consequences, most workers don’t yet comprehend its brain-altering impact. Workplace behaviors that range from subtle coercion (often couched in humor) to outright bullying can place people in emotionally defensive positions.   Because many people within the workplace have not developed their collaborative and conflict management skills, communication, especially when differences occur, can resort to dominant groups (or individuals) imposing their will on others.  Autonomy is not simply a nice idea, but an essential domain of healthy brain functioning.
• Stress.  Most workplaces are pressure cookers. Overwork is epidemic. No matter what “strategies” people use, lack of rest, movement, activity and poor nutrition will result in allostatic load. The term describes the physiological consequences of chronic exposure to stress which can cause cumulative strain and damage the body in the long run. Under these conditions, it’s not uncommon for the brain to be activated in a low-level fight or flight mode. Unresolved emotional issues are easy to trigger and re-trigger under these circumstances. Impatience can trigger frustration which in turn can trigger anger. Physical and mental exhaustion sets the stage for these emotions to overwhelm personal performance and interpersonal relations.
• Morals & Ethics. Our personal beliefs and values play a major role in how we experience and act in the workplace. The disconnect between organizational practices, senior leadership and individual performance is often very high.

An employees’ real “engagement” is not possible without the emotional resonance that comes from a belief in the integrity of an organization and its’ leaders.  There will always be emotional spillover from an individual’s personal needs and feelings into organizational culture.

Self-development and greater skill in self-management can go a long way to helping that stay balanced. However, nothing can influence individual performance and interpersonal relationships as powerfully as institutional culture; especially it’s leaders.

I’m sure you heard the attractive phrase, “A fish rots from the head down.”  The phrase underscores the importance of leadership, at least from the perspective of centralized authority. Whether controlling or open, leaders and the organizational culture they shape set the tone for emotional expression.  And the people will either follow – or withdraw.

Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication Consultants
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 Image: Marcus Spiske, Unsplash