More than ever, businesses find it challenging to ‘get stuff done,’ but organizations and leaders can no longer do whatever it takes – they face increasing obligations to drive results without burning people out. Not only do they have a moral and legal obligation to create psychosocially safe workplaces but doing so results in a huge commercial payoff. Like a well-oiled machine, businesses need to function at an optimal level – if you have too much ‘sand in the gears’ then the machine runs inefficiently and breaks down often.
There are mountains of research and articles about team and business dysfunction. Patrick Lencioni’s ‘Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ highlights the lack of healthy conflict, poor commitment, low accountability, and inattention to results, all cemented by a lack of trust. However, what is less talked about is the root causes of these dysfunctions. Workplace psychosocial risk legislation and management frameworks tend to list effects - ‘events’ rather than causes of psychosocial hazards, meaning the damage is already done. This is like going to the site of a plane crash and trying to work out what caused it without the black box flight recorder.
While few debate the negative impact of these dysfunctions and events, there is less clarity on the factors contributing to them and the specific role leaders play in amplifying or mitigating them. Four main psychosocial risk factors compromise a team’s ability to function – anxiety, stimulation, conformity, and ambiguity - collectively known as ASCA. They each work in different ways to negatively impact the level of thinking, confidence, discussion, and debate across teams. If a business is a problem-solving machine, then these forces are the proverbial ‘sand in the gears’ that grinds people down and causes breakdowns. ASCA must be identified with an effective ‘black box recorder’ to understand what’s causing psychosocial risk events so businesses and leaders can take proactive action to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Having the right data and definitions is critical, so breaking down the ASCA elements is important, starting with ‘anxiety’, which is feeling fear about an imagined unlikely event - what has been recently relabelled as ‘excessive worry’. Next comes ‘stimulation’, which is the energy level a person feels they have. If someone is stimulated, they are awake and focused, but if people are under-simulated, they drift into boredom, distraction, and stimulus-seeking behaviors. Conversely, when they are overly stimulated, people go into a cognitive shutdown, decreasing what they can think about, how they think about it, and how much they focus on essential tasks. Then comes ‘conformity’ which occurs when someone decides to give in or give up on arguing the point or decides that near enough is good enough, leading them to say one thing while believing and doing another. Finally, there is ‘ambiguity’, which has similarities to anxiety but significant differences. Ambiguity comes from external communications and subsequent interpretations – when two sets of information should match but don’t.
First and foremost, businesses must identify and mitigate two of these psychosocial risk factors - anxiety and stimulation - so people can apply their knowledge and skills to business problems. People can’t spend too much time in their heads being distracted, uncertain, fearful, or excessively worrying, or they will focus too much on imagined problems rather than real business problems. If they are overly stimulated, they are likely to be distracted and bouncing off the walls, and if they are under-stimulated, they are likely to be bored, fall asleep, and struggle to focus.
Businesses must also realize when high levels of conformity exist and take action to reduce it. While agreement might feel nice, it is counter-productive to alignment and innovation. Discussion and debate are critical to leverage diverse knowledge and experiences. Centuries after Descartes wrote, “I think therefore I am,” and logically proved the only way we know for sure our existence is not a dream is that other people can think and do things we cannot, business hierarchies are still designed to reduce or prevent the dialogue of different ideas. While many businesses say they want diverse views, they are often structured for conformity – ideas come from the top, and challengers are seen as cynics. Conformity kills ideas and innovation, which leads to stagnation, obsolescence, and eventually financial catastrophe for a business.
Finally, businesses must also identify and minimize ambiguity, so people have accurate information and clear context, giving them maximum confidence to apply their knowledge and skills. Self-efficacy is someone’s perception of their own skill, and over-confidence or a lack of confidence can lead to ineffective and inefficient outcomes. Being overly focused on the font used in a report or the paper it’s written on doesn’t get the report written. If a person fails to grasp the reality of the situation because things are communicated in contradictory terms or shrouded in ambiguity, then people will spend unnecessary time and energy trying to work things out or take no action or ineffective action due to uncertainty.
It is important to note that these ASCA factors are often created by external factors such as competitive pressures, market volatility, and industry uncertainty. However, businesses underestimate the vital role leaders play in moderating how these four factors impact the function of individuals and teams. If the leader does their job well, they decrease the impact of ASCA on the team. If the leader is ineffective, they neither increase nor decrease it. However, toxic leaders amplify ASCA and create more problems than they solve, thinking they are driving people and business performance while impairing it.
Effective leadership isn’t about being smart, right, or nice. High-performing leaders not only deal with their own anxiety, ambiguity, stimulation, and conformity but also manage them effectively for other people. This is the price and the privilege of leadership. If a leader’s fundamental job is to mobilize people to deliver business results, then they must stop the toxic cycle created by ASCA’s psychosocial risk factors.
The GreyScale is the only leadership assessment on the market that specifically measures a leader’s impact on the ASCA psychosocial risk factors. It provides insight into a leader’s performance personality, their innate strengths and limitations, and how they impact people and business performance. To find out more about how The GreyScale can help your business and your leaders keep the sand out of the gears and unlock the black box of business dysfunction, visit us at http://tgsleadership.com
