{"id":853,"date":"2016-09-08T13:13:49","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T18:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thepurposeinst.wpengine.com\/?p=853"},"modified":"2019-06-18T15:57:56","modified_gmt":"2019-06-18T20:57:56","slug":"creating-the-conditions-for-people-to-flourish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/creating-the-conditions-for-people-to-flourish\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating the Conditions for People to Flourish"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo get to where we need to go, we need better people<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I hear this lot.\u00a0\u00a0 And sometimes it\u2019s legitimate\u2014certain skillsets or expertise are missing from the bench and need to be brought in.\u00a0\u00a0 But often, those people that were so wonderfully talented when you hired them, are still quite wonderful–they just need the right conditions for their talent and passion to flourish.<\/p>\n

Before embarking on an overhaul of the talent pool in your company, consider the context in which you\u2019re asking people to work.\u00a0 Sumantra Ghoshal, an Indian scholar who served as Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School, contends that companies on a mission to improve the productivity and performance of their employees should first consider\u2014what he calls\u2014\u201cThe Smell of the Place<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 As he puts it:<\/p>\n

Revitalizing people has a lot less to do with changing people and a lot more to do with changing the context that companies, that senior managers create around their people\u2026 context, the \u2018smell of the place\u2019 is a hard thing to describe\u2026 Most companies, particularly large companies, have created downtown Calcutta in the summer inside themselves and then they complain and say \u2018you are lazy and you don\u2019t take initiative and you\u2019re not cooperative\u2019\u2026 but it\u2019s not about changing [the employee]\u2026.The issue is how do we change the context? How do we create Fontainebleau forest inside companies? <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Years ago I heard Sir Ken Robinson share a similar idea when he described the miraculous Spring wildflower display that can occur in Death Valley\u2014a desert that can go barren for years on end seemingly bereft of life. But when the rain falls sufficiently, when the winds are just so and when the warmth of the sun is just right\u2014the wildflower seeds that have been dormant begin\u00a0blooming like crazy, filling the desert with a sea of stunningly beautiful flowers. \u00a0They just need the right conditions to come to life.<\/p>\n

If your organization feels like Death Valley, don\u2019t blame the seeds for not blooming…or start trucking-in new and better seeds into Death Valley. Bring the rains! Do all that you can to create the conditions for your people to come to life, to flourish.<\/p>\n

Consider a study conducted by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer<\/span><\/strong><\/em> <\/a>that literally brought 70 year old men–with an array of aches and pains and ailments–back to life just by creating an environment that made them feel 20 years younger.\u00a0\u00a0 In the counterclockwise study,\u00a0she designed an experience to re-create the 1950s\u2014newspapers from that era were delivered daily, 50s music played throughout, sports events from the day were broadcast on TV, everything was of the era (I picture something akin to the resort from the movie Dirty Dancing<\/em>).\u00a0 Elderly men were invited to spend the better part of a week in this time warp and were instructed to act as if they were 50 years old again.\u00a0 By being in an environment thoughtfully designed to support that belief, incredible things began happening.\u00a0\u00a0 Across the board, there were significant improvements -in their cognitive abilities, -their physical strength and flexibility,-their sense of vibrancy and even their looks!\u00a0 At one point, canes were thrown aside and a spontaneous game of touch football occurred!<\/p>\n

The experimental subjects\u2026 had \u201cput their mind in an earlier time,\u201d and their bodies went along for the ride! (New York Times Article on Langer’s Study<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Context matters.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a force that can either prime people to be their very best \u2013 or prime them to be their very worst.\u00a0 The same person can behave in shockingly different ways depending on the situation they find themselves in.<\/p>\n

Remember Milgram\u2019s Obedience to Authority<\/strong> <\/a>study? Research subjects were told to administer ever-increasing electric shocks to another research participant (who supposedly had a heart condition) ostensibly to study the effect of pain on memory function.\u00a0\u00a0 As the research subject delivered increasingly powerful shocks to the person, the recipient would scream in pain and plea to be let go.\u00a0 If the research subject protested, the authority figure would simply say, \u2018the experiment must go on<\/em>.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0 While the tendency is to think, \u2018I would never do that to someone\u2019<\/em> \u2013 turns out 65% of participants who were put in that situation did.\u00a0 The context caused ordinarily good<\/em> people to engage in very bad<\/em> behavior.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Zimbardo\u2019s Prison Experiment <\/strong><\/a>\u2013wherein Stanford students were randomly divided into prison guards and prisoners and placed in a mock-prison environment\u2014had to be stopped abruptly and prematurely out of concern for the psychological and physical safety of the prisoners who were being horribly abused by the guards within days of being in this situation.<\/p>\n

Now those are extreme examples. Hopefully, you haven\u2019t created conditions that are causing people to abuse and humiliate one another.\u00a0\u00a0 The point I want to make is that the situation, the social context, the conditions under which people are asked to perform matter. <\/em>It matters a lot.<\/p>\n

Put someone in a bad situation (say a corporate environment driven by fear and quarterly earnings pressure wherein people are told to win at all costs); don\u2019t be surprised to see bad, unsettling behavior.<\/p>\n

Put someone in a \u2018blah\u2019 situation (say a corporate environment that looks a lot like the one depicted in \u2018The Office\u2019), and get \u2018blah\u2019 behavior.<\/p>\n

Put someone in a good situation (say a corporate environment driven by love\u2014yes, love!\u2014wherein values are consciously cultivated in the culture) and you\u2019ll see good behavior.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Do you really need to improve the quality of your people? Maybe.\u00a0 But before judging the quality of a person, you may be better served by stopping and taking stock of the smell of the place<\/em>.<\/p>\n

>How would you describe \u201cthe smell of the place\u201d in your organization? \u00a0 How does that \u2018smell\u2019 make people feel?<\/p>\n

>What\u2019s the context or situation that brings out the very best in your people? What can you do to replicate or amplify those conditions?<\/p>\n

>What\u2019s the context or situation that brings out the very worst in your people? \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What can you do to reduce or eliminate those situations?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo get to where we need to go, we need better people.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I hear this lot.\u00a0\u00a0 And sometimes it\u2019s legitimate\u2014certain skillsets or expertise are missing from the bench and need to be brought in.\u00a0\u00a0 But often, those people that were so wonderfully talented when you hired them, are still quite wonderful–they just need the right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":854,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[67,64,65,68,63,62,66],"class_list":["post-853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose","category-values","tag-culture","tag-ellen-langer","tag-milgrams-obedience-to-authority-study","tag-sir-ken-robinson","tag-sumantra-ghoshal","tag-the-smell-of-the-place","tag-zimbardos-prison-experiment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepurposeinstitute.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}