I find it fascinating when I hear people use very binary language: statements that are absolute in nature.
Words like always and never create an expectation of certainty.
“We always do things a certain way.”
“We never speak to each other like that.”
These statements are fine in isolation, but they rely on our behaviour to carry them through. Human behaviour is dynamic and fluid, and therefore subject to change based on how we’re feeling in ourselves, how we’re feeling in a given setting, and the circumstances that influence our actions and reactions.
In an organisational context we might think we always do things a certain way, but realistically, matters outside our control such as changes in finances or technology can change our approach, and so can the fluctuations of our own emotional and psychological state.
Some of the absolute statements I’ve heard over the years include:
“We don’t do ego here.”
“I’ve never read a book.”
And perhaps the most outlandish:
“I never make mistakes.”
When I hear statements like these, the inquiring part of my thinking kicks into gear and I ask myself why someone would make such a black-and-white statement. What meaning sits behind being so completely 100% about something?
When I hear “we don’t do ego here”, I wonder whether that person has somehow managed to remove the parts of their brain and mind that relate to how we view ourselves and how we’d like to appear to others. Or whether there’s another explanation, crystallised by Shakespeare’s Hamlet: this person “doth protest too much, methinks”.
When I hear “I’ve never read a book”, my immediate thought is: never? Really? Are you sure? Not even at school?
And when I hear, as I have in more than one setting, “I don’t make mistakes”, my mind similarly questions why anyone would say it.
Every one of us makes mistakes, whether in our personal relationships, our finances, technically, professionally, or in predicting what we think will happen. Making mistakes is absolutely normal and a key part of learning. It lets us review what happened and adapt our behaviour to what didn’t work out for us.
I don’t think I’m alone in my ears pricking up whenever I hear absolute statements, am I?
Our brain’s in-built threat detection system, with its watchfulness, picks up on the context of language and raises our level of alertness when such statements are made.
“We don’t do ego here.” Well, let’s wait and see about that.
All of the statements above set alarm bells ringing in the limbic regions of my brain, because my experience and learning connect every one of them with the subject of the first: ego.
When I work with client organisations, I often find that language and examples they’re familiar with help to illustrate a point. So let’s try that here.
We all know the story of the little wooden puppet who becomes a real boy and whose nose grows every time he tells a fib. Think of it like this. The puppet is the absolute statement. The behaviour that runs contrary to the statement is the magic that makes the nose grow. And our own understanding of language in context, of what absolute statements mean, is our ability to see the nose growing and understand what it means.
So absolute statements like the ones above can wake our threat detection system (our limbic lobe, our amygdala) and prime us to be on guard. We perceive the binary nature of the statement and, primed by experience, question why it was made and what lies behind it.
How productive is all of that when we want to build trust and collaboration with others?
My suggestion is that creating an expectation of absolute outcomes, particularly ones as preposterous and contrary to the norms of human behaviour as the examples above, can be enormously counter-productive.
What we’re really talking about here is trust. Trust is the thing that reduces barriers, creates connections and defuses psychological defensiveness. But trust is a fragile commodity, with definite neurochemical and psychological aspects. If we don’t recognise and manage this effectively, the result can be increased defensiveness, diminished trust, silo working and reduced team productivity.
You might be thinking this is all very interesting from a personal perspective, but what has it got to do with the world of work?
The giveaway was the centrality of trust, and what trust means for performance in teams.
This is why understanding what the team and corporate values we espouse actually mean is so vital. If they’re not properly articulated, explored and agreed, it’s easy for the words (the values) and the pictures (the behaviours) not to match. And our brains are as good at spotting that inconsistency as they are at picking up the absolute nature of the statements we hear.
In an organisational setting, values shouldn’t be rigid, absolute, binary statements. They’re principles we attempt to hold ourselves to, accepting, as is normal, that we’ll make mistakes, but having the self-awareness to notice when we have and holding ourselves and each other accountable to those standards. That means managing the internal drivers of behaviour, our survival responses and, unsurprisingly, our ego.
So it’s a really simple, easy task then.
Actually, no. It’s a difficult and challenging skill that we need to deploy on an ongoing basis. And one key step in building it is checking our absolute thoughts, and our ego, at the door.