Stop Yelling At Your Employees--It’s Making Them Stupid
by ilene - September 10th, 2009 3:29 pm
Studies in neuroscience explain what many of us may know intuitively--criticism is a true relationship wrecker. This article is subtly brilliant, apply it to life.
And welcome to Nick Saint! – Ilene
Stop Yelling At Your Employees--It’s Making Them Stupid
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Courtesy of Nick Saint at Clusterstock
Recent neuroscience studies contain useful lessons for managers:
Don’t make your employees feel dumb or incompetent--this will make them worse at their jobs.
How you praise or criticize your staff can affect their ability to work--and not in the way you might think.
The "fight-or-flight" response to threats has been studied by psychologists for decades. When animals – including humans – are in pain or physical danger, their neural activity changes radically in ways that help them focus on the threat and confront or escape it effectively. But this focus comes at a cost to other brain functions. A person in danger is better at fighting, but worse at thinking.
More recently, neuroscientists have found that the brain responds to social threats in almost exactly the same way. Brain scans show that people made to feel excluded from group activities respond as if they were in physical pain. Similarly, criticism that makes an employee feel his job is in danger or that his work isn’t as good as that of his co-workers will make his brain respond as if he were in danger.
This is good news if you want your employees to fight or run away, but not so good for office productivity. David Rock at Strategy+Business (free registration required) explains:
The threat response is both mentally taxing and deadly to the productivity of a person — or of an organization. Because this response uses up oxygen and glucose from the blood, they are diverted from other parts of the brain, including the working memory function, which processes new information and ideas. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving; in other words, just when people most need their sophisticated mental capabilities, the brain’s internal resources are taken away from them.
The impact of this neural dynamic is often visible in organizations. For example, when leaders trigger a threat response, employees’ brains become much less efficient. But when leaders make people feel good about themselves, clearly communicate their expectations, give employees…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.