cognition-and-the-workplace

[cognition-and-the-workplace]

How Intelligent Are Your Emotions: A Guide for Success in Managing People

What often might be overlooked in management positions is often the most important aspect of the role: the people. And aren’t people sometimes moody, irrational, nonsensical, and sometimes just difficult to work with? It’s your job as leaders, not just managers, to impact the professional stage by embracing your interpersonal skills in understanding and supporting employees and their needs. The people of your company need someone who can use not just their brain, but also their heart to understand their feelings and the purpose for their emotions. Lets take a look at some of the perspectives you can take when taking a stab at decoding the cognitive mysteries behind emotions.

Cognition and Emotions: How are we feeling, literally?

According to the functionalist approach, emotions serve a purpose—they're not random surges of chemicals and hormones that overflow into our state of consciousness and flood our cognitive processes. For instance, the anxiety felt before a big presentation is not just nervous energy; it's the body gearing up for performance, heightening focus and alertness. Digging a little deeper into our psyche, it should make sense that we feel more alerted when something big is happening to us. Psychologists can trace this function way, way back in human history. Theories such as the stereotype content model posit that our emotions towards someone, specifically whether we perceive them as warm or competent, directly relate to ancestral needs to anticipate how much or how little someone or something would threaten us (warmth) and how much ability do they really have to harm us (competence). From the functionalist perspective, our manifestations of emotions are directly tied to specific purposes.

In the work context, we can take the same approach! I implore you to understand the functions of emotions. When a team member expresses frustration, it might be signaling an unresolved issue. Addressing the root cause can transform negative emotions into opportunities for improvement. Recognizing that both pleasant and unpleasant behaviors in the workplace might stem from an emotion that is tied to what is happening in someone’s life, related or unrelated to work.

Another approach you may take to understanding employees and their emotions is the constructivist approach. In the constructivist approach, emotions are viewed as personal narratives shaped by individual experiences and interpretations. Two employees facing the same challenge may construct entirely different emotional responses based on their unique perspectives. I’m sure you see this all the time as a manager, and it can be a tricky situation! If you don’t know the person and their story, you probably don’t know how they’re going to respond to anything, and you might as well be guessing at how to manage them properly.

One thing you can do to be the best manager you can be is appreciate their story. Get to know your employees and see how they see the world! You must acknowledge diverse emotional responses to situations and tailor your management style to resonate with the personal narratives of your team members. Being a stranger to your team isn’t going to get the results you want!

Finally, we can also discuss the motivational approach, which essentially sees emotions as a source of energy. This energy drives behavior in return, and organizations should both be concerned about energy and behaviors of their employees. For instance, how can we drive your marketing department to come up with the next “Just do it” or “Taste the rainbow”? Well, you can find a team that is filled with excitement to work on the project! New faces and the right opportunities for individuals who want to step up will certainly have them rearing to challenge themselves, versus having a room full of seasoned veterans who have been around the block of “exciting” work. Lets leverage emotions and see how this can promote behaviors that change the work landscape and help make strides towards your vision. Remember to harness emotional energy, celebrate victories, both big and small, and maintain a positive emotional momentum within your team. This not only boosts morale but also fosters a motivational environment.

Emotions on the Move

Now let’s talk about why emotions are not only important to you, but should be important to everyone. Let us peer into the flood of feelings that may swamp your team with the spillover-crossover model. This model suggests that emotions transcend individual experiences, spreading like a wave within teams and even crossing the boundaries between work and home without a proper dam. You may be thinking, what does this look like? Well, let’s imagine your car won’t start, your dog is barking a storm that will be sure to wake your neighbors, and you’re running late for work without even having a sip of your coffee. Sounds like you’re having a rough day, which happens to everyone once in a while! Your stress from the morning carries over into work, and the afternoon meeting with your mentee felt like the worst 20 minutes you have ever spent talking to someone. Now you feel bad, and you’re sure you’ve lost a lot of progress in maintaining a helpful relationship with someone you looks up to you. They feel ignored, you feel bad, your work life is a stressful mess, and you bring that home with you again. Sounds like a bad cycle, right?

Theres a trick to solve this Ferris wheel of misery from transpiring in your office. The first step I suggest is to equip yourself with emotional intelligence. If you recognize and understand your own emotions and those of your team, then you can take a deep breath and change your outlook before stepping into your office or into your home. Not only will this keep your head on straight, but helps the people you work with and live with manage their own emotions. You can also help yourself by recognizing how different you are from your peers, executives, and subordinates. Your team has a diverse outlook and diverse experiences. Take this into account when interacting with them and judging their emotions. You can’t promote their well-being without understanding how they feel, so don’t write a formula that you think will work for everyone!

In conclusion, the workplace is not just a professional arena; it's an emotional landscape where managers act as conductors of a complex symphony. You should understand the various approaches to emotions, recognize the antecedents, and work on mastering your emotional intelligence to create a harmonious workplace that resonates with positive emotions and optimal productivity.

[cognition-and-the-workplace]

Decoding Rating Bias in Management

In the intricate world of performance management, where assessments shape career trajectories, there's a silent saboteur at play – rating bias. Rooted in cognitive psychology, sources of bias such as heuristics and cognitive errors can distort evaluations, disrupt employee development, produce unnecessary conflict, increase expenditures, and overall decrease organizational function. Let's delve into the nuances of rating bias, understand its cognitive underpinnings, and explore avenues for cultivating more valid performance management systems!

Cognitive Calamity: The Architects of Bias

Cognitive psychology teaches us that our brains, despite their brilliance, are prone to certain ways of processing and interpreting information. Heuristics, or mental shortcuts, help us make decisions efficiently, but they also lay the groundwork for biases. For instance, the halo effect leads us to generalize from one positive trait to an overall positive judgment, while recency bias places undue emphasis on recent events, overshadowing historical performance. Furthermore, anchoring bias anchors our judgment to initial information, confirmation bias gravitates toward data supporting our preconceptions, and affinity bias leans toward favoritism based on perceived similarities. As research has demonstrated, these biases are deeply rooted in our everyday lives, and especially thrive in the workplace.

Management needs Precise Measurement

Biases, like the ones described above, often find their way into performance assessments through the very nature of human cognition. These biases influence our perceptions, leading to imbalanced evaluations and potential distortions in decision-making. To counteract rating bias, organizations can implement strategies grounded in cognitive psychology research. Don’t be afraid of capitalizing on this research; science and practical applications go hands in hand!

Some ways that valid ratings can improve is through calibration sessions where managers gather to discuss and align their evaluations. These sessions help mitigate biases by ensuring a consistent standard across the organization. Additionally, breaking down evaluations into specific competencies rather than relying on an overall rating can help you move towards a more accurate and granular understanding of an individual's performance. Your performance management systems need to be dynamic! You must use multiple sources of data and establish a culture where people value development and fairness in the workplace.

Other Conceptual Approaches: Prototypes and Exemplars

In cognitive psychology, the concepts of prototypes and exemplars shape the way we view and process information. Prototypes represent the generalized, idealized image of a category, while exemplars are specific instances that embody the category. Translating this to the workplace, relying solely on prototypes when evaluating employees may lead to biased perceptions. Embracing exemplars allows for a more nuanced understanding, recognizing individual contributions and achievements.

Advice for Accuracy:

If you can be aware that our cognitive functions are susceptible to biased perceptions and judgments instead of believing that you see things for exactly as they are, then you have taken the first step at improving your performance management system! I recommend regularly self-reflect on potential biases that may influence your judgments. Awareness is the first step toward overcoming cognitive pitfalls.

You do have an incredibly rich point of view, but so do other people! Include diverse perspectives in performance evaluations. A variety of viewpoints helps counteract individual biases, contributing to a more holistic assessment. With this technique, you can collect more data and see a fuller picture of an individual’s performance in your organization!

I encourage managers to adopt external memory aids, such as note-taking and documentation. This serves as a reliable reference point and minimizes the risk of memory-related errors.

Finally, I recommend embracing continuous communication with your team. Regular check-ins allow for real-time feedback, promoting a more nuanced and accurate understanding of performance. This is really the foundation of creating a detailed and impactful performance management system where you can actively review what people are doing and update your logs on how they are doing.

[cognition-and-the-workplace]

How to Turn From the Burn of Burnout

Where There’s Smoke, There’s a Fire!

Like a candle left unattended for too long, burnout is a hazard that can create extensive exhaustion and detachment if not attended to. If you're a manager smelling the smoke, fear not! This guide is your secret weapon to not only extinguish burnout and combat depersonalization, but to send them packing like disgraced party crashers.

Picture this: your team is a well-oiled machine, but suddenly, there's a creak in the gears. That's burnout – a chronic state of stress-induced exhaustion, often accompanied by depersonalization, where colleagues start looking like cardboard cutouts rather than fellow humans.

Research has well-documented data to support why you should be concerned about stress-induced exhaustion and depersonalization in your workforce. If you’ve experienced burnout, you would know how impactful it can be to the work-related domain and your personal life. It depletes your energy, diminishes work performance, and can ruin the quality of your relationships with others. That is NOT something you want to deal with.

Shedding Light on the Shadows: Operationalizing Burnout

Now, let's get practical. How do you manufacture a workplace without burnout and depersonalization? With the proper tools, of course! The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is your trusty temperature gauge that can check the wellness of your organization. It breaks down burnout into three parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. This gauge helps identify where the heat is coming from.

To understand why your team is feeling the burn, the Conservation of Resources (COR) model can serve as your guide. It's like the GPS that tells you when your resources – like time, skills, and emotional support – are running on empty. Stress happens when there's a threat of resource loss or when your employees don’t have the mental, physical, and emotional resources needed to perform in the first place. Another way that burnout and depersonalization can occur is through the multidimensional appraisal of stressors and their subsequent responses to them. In this view, individuals go through an appraisal of their situation, and then go through an appraisal of their options in responding and coping with their stressors. At work, you can imagine how it may feel if you were to ask your subordinates to stay a couple of extra hours to finish up some work. Do they hesitate to agree? Are their kids waiting at home? Does this overtime help them pay for that new couch they bought? Do they feel a strong commitment to the project? These factors all contribute to how your workers appraise their situation. If they are feeling the burn in burnout because of the stress that this may induce, then these workers may not have the necessary resources or adaptive skills to handle what is being asked of them. Be mindful of this, and always ask questions! Once the symptoms of stress infect your crew, it can be troublesome to ameliorate these effects and get your plans back on track. So, what can you do about this?

Keep it a Fad: Burnout is out

Here are some mighty suggestions:

Walk the talk and lead by example. If you're on the brink of burnout, chances are your team isn't far behind. Show them it's okay to take breaks, set boundaries, and prioritize well-being. I promise this is a game-changer!

A pat on the back works wonders. Recognize efforts and celebrate wins – big or small. It's not just a morale boost; it's a resource refill.

Bottling up stress is so last season. Create an environment where your team feels comfy expressing concerns. It's like a pressure valve – release the steam before the pot boils over. You can spot the warning signs. I would keep an eye on changes in behavior, energy levels, and interpersonal dynamics. Addressing issues in their infancy is like catching a cold before it turns into the flu.

Life outside work is not just a rumor. Embrace flexible schedules and offer stress management programs. A balanced life is the antidote to burnout.

Finally, adopt a resilience mindset. I firmly believe that resilience doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, but the benefits of adapting to stress can be enormous. You can encourage a growth mindset, emphasizing that setbacks are opportunities to learn and bounce back stronger.

[cognition-and-the-workplace]

Intelligence Assessment in Selection

Can We Show What We Know?

In the high-stakes world of organizational selection, figuring out who's got the cognitive skills to navigate the corporate labyrinth is no easy feat. That's where intelligence assessments can help managers like you shine a spotlight on the cognitive prowess of job candidates! But how do we turn the abstract idea of one’s general mental ability into something we can measure and actually use? Buckle up, because we're about to embark on a journey through the cerebral wonderland of organizational intelligence assessments.

First things first – we're not mind-readers (not yet, at least), so we rely on standardized intelligence tests to paint a picture of our cognitive capabilities. These tests, curated and validated by dedicated psychologists, capture the mosaic essence of cognitive functions. These tests capture important verbal, numerical, and spatial reasoning skills that relate to how one performs on a variety of tasks. Better yet, intelligence tests in assessments can help predict how a prospective employee is going to do in a given role. They can test what you know, how well you know it, and even if you’re someone who can easily learn what you don’t know. It's like a backstage pass to the most complex puzzle – the human brain!

We have to measure something when assessing candidates’ cognitive competencies, so what is that something exactly? Comprehensive models of intelligence serve as the foundation of these assessments. Let’s focus on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll Model for instance. It can be a pain to walk through what is really needed for a job, but scientific wizzes can help us break it down into narrow abilities! Do you need to assess mathematical skills? Is listening and communication a make or break for a role? Maybe you need a person who can handle the task of visualizing an innovative product to launch the most revolutionary campaign you haven’t even dreamt of yet. Well, you’ve got it! The Cattell-Horn-Carrol model can be used as a tool in crafting cognitive assessments as it separates discrete abilities that contribute to our general intelligence. In the search for that one candidate who can change it all, you need to figure out how to use a toolkit to figure out how to measure it all. Like using a hammer to screw or a pencil to paint, the wrong assessment will get you into trouble. I will leave you to find what is going to work for you, but there is a lot more where that came from. Given the innumerable number of skills and talents you could be capitalizing on by assessing the cognitive abilities of your candidates, it is imperative to give your company a fighting chance and research what cognitive capabilities will build you a company that lasts. Leveraging the science is key to creating that perfect potion that will break the spell of inadequate performance. 

Wisdom in the Winner!

As managers lean into the challenges of organizational selection, here are three nuggets of wisdom:

The Role is Key: Customize assessments like a bespoke suit for each role. Using an assessment tool off of the proverbial (or literal) shelf will not get you what you want. Consulting your staff on the needs of the role you are looking to fill can help you craft an assessment that fits like a glove and make your company feel like your riding in a custom Cadillac (if people still drive them anymore, not sure because I live in the city). The more in-depth you look into these needs, the better you can make an assessment that will prepare you to capture that perfect candidate. It's not a one-test-fits-all world, so be scientific and be creative!

We Create Culture: Recognize that intelligence doesn't perform alone; an individual’s job performance is an orchestral ensemble that is influenced by organization culture, values, and development. Look for assessments that seek harmony across cultural lines and celebrate diverse forms of brainpower. Just because you find one good fit for a role doesn’t mean that the next person needs to act (or look) exactly alike. A room full of violins playing a tune wont sound nearly as good as an extravagant accompaniment of piano and bass that add some richness to your organizational culture. 

Future-Proof Intelligence: Don't just assess for today; predict for tomorrow. The crystal ball of the Cattell-Horn-Carroll Model lets you peek into the future of learning and adaptation. Your hires aren't just solving today's puzzles; they're gearing up for the challenges of tomorrow. Spend some time looking for what is going to happen tomorrow instead of being centered on yesterday. This change in reference will make you build cognitive assessments that will grow your horizons.

So, there you have it – the dazzling world of intelligence assessments, where standardized tests and cognitive theories waltz hand in hand. As managers, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to embrace the dynamism of the orchestral ranges of your talent and pick the right acts for your organizational extravaganza. Break a leg, not a neuron!