Feeling Uncomfortable with the Reentry? You’re on the Right Track

As Covid-19’s dizzying spin slows down, leaders are steeling themselves for the long road to recovery. An essential early step in that journey is effectively addressing the anxieties of millions of workers worried about the future of their work and their health. But how do you stabilize human behavior at such an emotionally volatile time?

If leaders want to use this moment to do more than call worried, distracted employees back to old jobs they once knew, there is much to be learned from the study of how the brain responds to uncertainty. In particular, scientific evidence shows that it’s often counterintuitive strategies that are most effective. To beat anxiety, therefore, we should pay attention to what we instinctively want to do and then actively consider its opposite.

Consider the case of a combat veteran who develops post-traumatic stress disorder following a devastating nighttime raid. For years, the soldier’s natural coping strategy has been to avoid anything even slightly related to the experience. While it makes intuitive sense to avoid even loose associations to such painful events, the most effective treatments for PTSD demand the opposite: repeated, detailed discussions of the trauma combined with robust engagement in all facets that were previously avoided in order to cope.

Similarly, anxiety often leads us to reflexively make decisions that are not ultimately in our best interest. In my work with companies dealing with change management, I often observe new leaders who become easily distracted by the allure of day-to-day “crises.” Paradoxically, this peremptory action often leads to less success than if leaders had done what feels like the wrong thing to do, but isn’t: sit back, listen, wait.

Many leaders are now tasked with figuring out how to meet the return-to-work challenge in a pandemic-ridden world. Covid-19 is an invisible and insidious enemy, a pathogen that promises to wax and wane for an indeterminate future period. Its unsettlingly long incubation time may render even the most rigorous workplace prevention efforts ineffective. All of this makes us anxious.

To face these anxieties, leaders need a plan. The three paradoxical strategies below – rooted in neuroscience and psychology – can help.

Performance Management: The Reflex Is to Exert Greater Control, but the Solution Is More Flexibility

In a crisis, it’s natural to seek to grab the one thing we lack: control. For example, the leaders of one firm we worked with were panicked about a protracted office absence and lagging productivity. They thought they could create control by asking employees to sign a contract promising to avoid all distractions while working from home. While leadership’s anxious impulse around productivity is understandable, it led employees astray. Not only was the request absurd for those who were dealing with new “coworkers” in school or diapers; it also disrupted team cohesion by implicitly communicating that employees could not be trusted with managing the complexities of their own jobs and lives.

The concern about performance is warranted, but leaders should pay keen attention to any reflex that tightens the grip – and actively consider its opposite. Instead of focusing on process and micromanaging schedules, leaders would be wise to consider a strategy that is far more flexible than feels comfortable for them.

Communication: Overcommunication Is Encouraged, But Less Is More

Many leadership teams determined to assuage the fear of this moment are providing employees with as much information as they can through Covid-19 microsites, updates, e-mails, policy announcements and virtual town halls. But, according to neuroscientific evidence, transparency and complete access to information don’t necessarily create a sense of security. In a recent strategic planning session with one of our clients, a senior leader remarked that she was so fatigued by a deluge of Covid-19 communications she had set her e-mail filters to automatically delete anything mentioning “Covid-19” in the subject line. Weary brains don’t want or need more stuff to think about.

If the goal is to lead employees through a fog of information, the solution is not generous information sharing, but radical clarity. Radical clarity is distinct from transparency because it requires defining what information will be tended to and what information will not; it means delineating what the priorities are and also what they are not. By definition, a crisis is something that exceeds our capabilities to cope. As we return to work, leaders will have the misguided impulse to dedicate our attention to far too many issues. Because impulses are difficult things to control, leadership would be aided by a communications hierarchy that focuses on strategic priorities at the exclusion of all others. While there is no one-size-fits-all communications strategy, a useful heuristic is to define five top priorities.

Effective Leadership: To Be Tough, You Must First Get Soft

Ironically, the precursor to mental toughness is emotional vulnerability. Thoughtful sharing of emotional content in safe spaces indeed leads to profound shifts in group cohesion, innovation and performance. However, offering uncommonly emotional content to our co-workers is a risk the brain does not take lightly. Therefore, improving team cohesion depends on the courage of leadership to go first. The highest-ranking people at the table should begin, offering insight into their own professional struggles and subsequent emotional experiences. In doing so, they will enrich team connection and, subsequently, agility.

Leaders may feel self-conscious in the initial attempts to establish deeper connection through greater self-exposure. That awkwardness is healthy, and should be embraced. At this moment, the day-to-day intricacies of team members’ lives have become tactical issues that affect the very substance of the work we do. It is time to use appropriate methods for communicating about issues previously deemed too messy for work. In what is arguably the most important lesson of anxiety research, we learn it is only in approaching what we have historically avoided that we’re able to find the very resilience we’ve been seeking.

The inevitable discomfort that accompanies change should not be interpreted as a sign we are on the wrong path – just the opposite. This anxiety is a sign of productive growth, telling us we are on the right path to making substantive changes. To squander this moment’s rich opportunity for transformative change is as bad for business as it is for the brain.