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well there's certainly been quite a lot of conversation lately about how anxiety
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is playing an increasing role in our lives the pandemic and now a softer economy with high inflation certainly
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ramping things up but now how do leaders deal with these issues in the workplace
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a new collaboration called Nano tools for leaders looks at fast and effective leadership tools that can be learned
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quickly and help the productivity of you and your team Marie Schweitzer is a professor of operations information and
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decisions here at the Wharton School who is part of this and he joins us right now Maurice great to see you again ah
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thanks for having me good to be back first let's start with the collaboration
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itself and and you think it's importance in terms of the workplace where we are
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now and and where we're headed well we're constantly collaborating across organizations and within
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organizations where we're reconstituting teams and we have high mobility in the
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workforce and so the challenge of affecting cooperation is extremely high and we've
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got to do that with often new new people so this one around anxiety it's obviously a much discussed topic right
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now how much is it do you think being discussed by employers uh by c-suite Executives by management level in the
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workplace right now I think it's under discussed that is people feel anxiety themselves but
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rarely vocalize it and I think if you were to ask your friends or co-workers how often do you feel anxiety I think
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what you'd find is that people are feeling anxiety almost all the time almost every day almost every hour there
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are times that create anxiety for us there are acute times we might face a presentation or a tight deadline
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where we feel intense anxiety but there are moments of anxiety that hit us almost all of us pretty frequently and I
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think you're right I mean kovid was an anxious time for so many people but their lingering effect some people
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worry about the economy they worry about their job security they were about paying rent there's so many things we
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worry about and then also our performance at work is a constant source of anxiety and so in this case it's
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important for both managers and employees to understand how to be able to handle anxiety better
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yeah I think that's exactly right that is we need as managers to anticipate that our employees are often feeling
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anxious and as co-workers we need to feel you know feel the sense that not just us who feels anxiety but the people
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around us are also feeling anxiety and that's going to impact how we collaborate and how we work with other
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people so you have a couple of action steps here uh that people should think about one being reframing anxiety as
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excitement explain this to us yeah so so if you think about emotions anxiety is what's characterized as a
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higher arousal High activation emotion it's like a heart is beating fast and so
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we think about our heart beating fast that's high arousal High activation it's generally negative so when we're
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feeling anxiety we're worried about things going wrong so think about going into a presentation I'm going to make
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this presentation and I'm thinking about all of the ways that things could go
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wrong and what I'm suggesting here is that we can instead think about the ways in
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which things might go right so imagine this presentation went great what would happen imagine this negotiation ended up
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better than I expected what would happen where it's high arousal High activation
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that is with excitement our heart can still beat fast we're now just focused
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on opportunities versus threats so it's easier than telling somebody you know I
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could say Dan hey why don't you just calm down right but now what I'm asking
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you do is take that High activation your heart rate's racing and I'm telling you
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well just calm it all down slow all the way all it all the way down and that turns out to be extremely hard for
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people so telling people take a deep breath and calm down that doesn't work nearly as well as saying hey get excited
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focus on opportunities and that's interesting because you know you remember the old line of counting to
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ten when you're stressed or you get into you get into a tough situation and while
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that's great in theory I don't know really how much it works in in actual
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you know in actual practicality so thinking about it in a different perspective it's probably new for a lot of people
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I think that's exactly right that is we are so ingrained to say hey just calm
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down or I say look I know you're anxious about this test or this deadline but
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it's no big deal it's fine um just you know take a deep breath calm down count to ten and yet when people
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have taken their deep breath count to ten that anxiety is likely to come rushing back and what I'm suggesting
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instead is let's focus on opportunities imagine this goes great imagine the presentation or the test imagine you you
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meet this deadline imagine this important meeting goes really well imagine that and get excited for it
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so kind of also a byproduct uh are are the health impacts that probably people uh will be able to deal with on a better
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fashion as well well I think that's an important point that is anxiety is not a great place for
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us to live and yet that is where most of us reside a lot of the time we feel anxious about all kinds of things and if
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instead we can take some of the most acute moments and get excited not only maybe maybe feel better but in studies
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Studies have shown that we actually perform better so people get excited before a math test the excited before
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they sing they're excited before they go perform something they're more likely to
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do a better job and we have data suggesting that you also talk about the element of thinking about it as a ritual
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yes yeah so I I think one thing that's important to recognize is that we use
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rituals in many occasions to Mark transitions or otherwise stressful events so you can
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think about around death we have rituals around mourning around a burial we think
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about transitions in power we have rituals around those um when we when people get married
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they're sort of Life transitions we tend to have rituals and these rituals help
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us in the big moments and also in the small moments so think about athletes so whenever the place
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stops in a sporting event all eyes turn to one person so you can think about in basketball the free throw shooter that
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dribbles the ball a certain number of times and Spins it before they shoot their free throw shot or the tennis
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player that balances the ball a certain number of times before they serve it these are rituals and these rituals help
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people when they feel anxious they give us a sense of control and they calm us down so rituals can be
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a really important part of our toolkit to help us navigate anxious times and one thing that we
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found in our in our research is that we can create rituals that is it might be nice
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to have a ritual that's been around for hundreds of years that many people do
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with us in synchrony but even if we invent our own rituals those rituals when we do
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them in a certain kind of way we feel a sense of control and Mastery and sort of
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like that tennis player before they serve they move us to a place that's more Serene than that anxiety we might
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be feeling so you tried this out in a case study maybe if you can give us some backstory on on how this played out and
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and what the results were yes so we did this in a few different ways but I'll tell you one of my
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favorite ones we had people singing in uh and we had we used a Wii karaoke machine to score their singing
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performances and uh so we had them in a in a room we told them that we were going to pay
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them based upon their score um on the machine and it's a function of how accurate and sort of loud uh they
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are and uh we had them sing the song Don't Stop Believing um you might you could have a few cars
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Dan oh yeah stop stop believing yeah that's all I got Maurice I'm horrible to be honest
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yeah well so so we gave participants uh uh the words um and then of course the background
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music and uh and then we had them sing and when you ask people to sing um with you know sort of people like you
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as the exception I think you're so used to being on on microphone but most people find that to be an anxious time
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and we gave people we invented a ritual for people to do we told them to draw how they felt to
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sprinkle salt on it um you know to rip it up um we we gave them a ritual and we told
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them this is a ritual uh in other cases we didn't give people a ritual to do we just gave them time to
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sort of you know sit sit quietly another group we told them just to calm down and then we scored their performance
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and and what's interesting is we did this across many different things we gave people math tests and but the
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singing is the most fun and you see that people are singing better and we also we also measured we measured
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their heart rates telling people to calm down doesn't diminish your heart rate
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but going through a ritual does what's the challenge then for a leader a manager in a company who may have to
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deal with his or her own anxiety but then also have to be aware of and maybe act upon the anxiety of employees as
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well yeah so I think the first step is to recognize how prevalent anxiety is and
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to recognize our own anxiety the second thing to recognize is what are the triggers what kinds of things
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are triggering anxiety if we can name those that can be quite helpful hey I'm
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anxious about this deadline I'm anxious about this meeting and then to think about reframing that
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recasting that I think as managers what's really important is for us to recognize our own
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anxiety but also recognize how anxious the people are around us and so it might not be the case that we need to
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make deadlines more Salient to people uh you know it's not that's not what's
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going to motivate them it could be that people are on the other side of this that is they're so anxious that if we
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could diminish their anxiety they might perform better and so sometimes to figure out ways for
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us to take the temperature down and to make people less anxious to help them perform better
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Maurice great to have you with us today thanks for your time all the best with Nano tools thanks again oh thank you
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Marie Schweitzer who's a professor of operations information and decisions here at the Wharton School