I emerged from these experiences skeptical of change. Not always, but certainly when it struck me that change was happening for the sake of change, or that change was making things worse rather than better, or that change was making things murkier rather than clearer. Of course I had learned early on in my career to say with great regularity how excited I was about change and how incredibly comfortable with ambiguity—as many of us had learned to say—but as the years went by, I found myself feeling that the truth was more complicated.
In my two decades working in large organizations, I'd seen change that had unquestionably led to better results and better work and better experiences; at the same time, I'd seen plenty of change that was a disaster for all concerned, and that extracted a heavy toll from individuals, and teams, and ultimately from organizations themselves.
Yet no one seemed to question the notion that change was always and necessarily a Good Thing.#6043•
Looking back, he wonders how anyone was able to put up with the mayhem, the infighting, and the politics. And he questions whether the bank really got what it was after—"They got the people they wanted, but at what cost?" The more senior people were great in front of clients, but they lacked the ability to do much of the unseen work that the old function had done to keep everything running smoothly: "the random things that come up" and that, if left undone, "unravel client relationships or create chaos." Because of the lack of appreciation for this invisible coordination across the networks of teams—the sort of work that, as Peter observes, is never reflected in anyone's job description—the new model had exchanged one set of problems for another.#6033•
This—the uncertainty, the turmoil, the exhaustion, the disempowerment, the disengagement, and the slim and tenuous hope that it will all be okay in the end—is organizational change in action, and it's very hard to come away from conversations about it without questioning the proposition that the way we do change today is by its very nature a good thing, and that change itself is an unalloyed good.
This point holds not just for the people on the receiving end, but also for the companies that instigate these sorts of changes.
If you talk to the people on the front lines, the stories you hear are not of suddenly increased innovation or productivity or efficiency, but rather of desperate efforts to steady the ship and keep it afloat.
It's also hard to overstate the extent to which this is work today, so thoroughly have our ideas about the unimpeachable virtues of change colonized our workplaces and the thinking of those who shape them.#6028•
Chapter 2
Its prophet was the late Clayton Christensen, who in 1997 published The Innovator's Dilemma, in which he argued that the inevitable fate of large, established organizations is to have their lunch eaten by small, upstart organizations. Because small organizations don't have to worry about meeting the needs of an established customer base, he said, and because these same organizations aren't held to the standards of profitability that obtain in a mature industry, they are freer to innovate, to identify new ways to serve new customers, and then to thrash their way upstream until, all of a sudden, they have replaced the incumbents.
This process leads to the dilemma of the book's title: By doing exactly what is expected of them—by paying attention to customers and profitability—the executives of large, established organizations are paving the way for their own demise.#6025•
Aided, as is so often the way, by its catchy distillation into two words, this notion proved enormously seductive. Not only could it claim a long intellectual pedigree—as far back as 1942, the economist Joseph Schumpeter had argued that the essential mechanism of capitalism was the death of the old, tired ways at the hands of the new, a process he called "creative destruction," and before this, Charles Darwin had shown that the essential mechanism of life itself was the extinction of less well-adapted species at the hands of better-adapted ones—but it also offered corporate leaders a way to reimagine something that had hitherto been a threat as something that offered a competitive advantage.
The best self-disruptors, it seemed, would be the last ones standing.
Before long, what had entered the world as a specific observation about new entrants in established markets became transformed into a one-size-fits-all prescription for great swaths of corporate life, and along the way collected a few related ideas—that, for example, fast is always better, or that the first company to get to scale in a new market will win, and profits can come later—that together constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking.
Change is inevitable; we can be either its instigators or its victims; and if we choose to be its instigators, then we are pretty much automatically on the right track.#6027•
Because it's expected, and because it's assumed to be a good thing, change of this sort has become the ultimate easy button for leaders. Rather than the hard graft of creating actual improvement, all a leader has to do is a couple of reorgs or "transformative" acquisitions, spend a few months explaining how very visionary this all is, and make sure that by the time the dust has settled, he or she has moved on to the next thing.
And if, while explaining, they manage to say the word "disrupt" a lot, they get extra-bonus-biz-dude points.
A few years back, it was cool, in certain circles, to describe yourself as a Change Agent; now all the change agents are looking sad and slow, and all the cool kids are Disruptors.#6044•
And then there is a distinct whiff of heroism about the whole thing. Take a big bet and fail, and people will tell you how brave you were and ask you how much you learned, but no one has ever made a name for themselves by saying, "Let's stay as we were and see where it takes us." Meanwhile, the idea that in order to survive, you have to deliberately undercut your own business is next-level radical: Surely only those with the rarest intelligence and the deepest courage will be able to pull off the ninja move of saving their organizations by imperiling their most important products.
The rest of us can only look on and marvel.#6023•
Chapter 3
We will explore these costs across five categories. We begin with what happens to humans when the future is uncertain, as, for example, when it's not clear what the impact of the new initiative is going to be, or when it's not clear who's in charge or how long that person will be around for. Next, we'll look at the effects of a lack of control over our environment, such as when we are told something is changing but have no say in how or when or how much.
After that, we'll consider the importance of our social ties and what happens to us when they're disrupted, such as when teams are split up and organizations restructured.
We'll then learn about our attachment to particular places and rhythms of life, and the effect on us when those places and rhythms are no longer part of our lives, such as when we move from one office to another, or when the office floor plan is changed.
And we'll conclude this survey by looking at meaning, and what it emerges from, and how important it is to us—and how change tramples on that, too.#6047•
We might guess that good news is the best, and that bad news is the worst, and that no news is somewhere in the middle—certainly, our tendency to avoid sharing bad news with people and instead hedging on what's likely to happen reflects this ordering. But the implication of this finding is that no news, for us humans, is actually worse than bad news, particularly when it's not clear which way events are going to go#6042•
To understand why all this is so hard on us, particularly at work, it helps to understand the important difference between fear and anxiety. The psychologist Martin Seligman puts it like this: "Fear is a noxious emotional state that has an object, such as fear of rabid dogs; anxiety is a less specific state, more chronic, and not bound to an object."#6039•
What Seligman took from these experiments was an insight about safety. In order to curtail chronic fear, we need some evidence that the threat has passed—the dog has moved on; the shock signal is no longer sounding. This he termed the safety-signal hypothesis: "In the wake of traumatic events," he wrote, "people and animals will be afraid all the time, except in the presence of a stimulus that reliably predicts safety.
In the absence of a safety signal, organisms remain in anxiety or chronic fear."#6031•
What had made the difference, the psychologists realized, was the initial conditioning in the hammock. As well as teaching the dog that shock followed tone, they had also, inadvertently, taught the dog that shocks were inescapable, because unlike the shocks in the shuttle box, those in the hammock could not be shut off by the dog in any way.
And so the dog, experiencing more tones and shocks in the shuttle box, presumed that those shocks were inescapable, too—even though that was now untrue.
The dog had learned that it was helpless—hence the name for the effect: learned helplessness—and having learned it, didn't seem to be able to easily unlearn it.#6036•
Martin Seligman, one of the original researchers (and the same Martin Seligman we met a few pages ago), summarized learned helplessness thus:
When an organism has experienced trauma it cannot control, its motivation to respond in the face of later trauma wanes. Moreover, even if it does respond, and the response succeeds in producing relief, it has trouble learning, perceiving, and believing that the response worked. Finally, its emotional balance is disturbed: depression and anxiety, measured in various ways, predominate.#6034•
Decisions are announced from on high—the new org chart or strategy is rolled out as a finished product—and rarely are people told that something is being deliberated before they are told the results of those deliberations and how they will be affected. When leaders hold all-hands sessions or go on listening tours, the focus is for the most part how to make people comfortable with the change—the problem to be solved is not the course of action to be taken, but rather how to help people move beyond their questions and objections.
It is unheard-of for the roadshows and feedback sessions and ask-me-anything calls to result in a leader deciding that, now that you mention it, this whole change initiative was not a very good idea and so let's go back to the way we were and think no more of it.
The input from employees is deployed as a tool to move the change forward, not to reflect the agency of employees in shaping it in anything more than a perfunctory way.#6040•
Baumeister and Leary show that the need to belong has two components: First, we need frequent and enjoyable interactions with others; and second, we need stable and ongoing interactions with others, or as they put it, "people need to perceive that there is an interpersonal bond or relationship marked by stability, affective concern, and continuation into the foreseeable future."#6038•
Again, this is not frivolous, but essential to who we are and the societies we form. Dunbar writes that "gossip, in the broad sense of conversation about social and personal topics, is a fundamental prerequisite of the human condition. Were we not able to engage in discussions of these issues, we would not be able to sustain the kinds of societies that we do." And beyond its primary role in social bonding and its contribution, thereby to our sense of belonging, gossip has other functions.
Dunbar suggests that it helps us address free riders in society—those who don't do their part to contribute to the group—while others have suggested that it plays a central role in learning about behavioral expectations and norms.
Interestingly, we don't just gossip about the bad stuff—around a third of our gossiping offers positive examples of behavior, and these examples are used in turn to create an understanding of How Things Work Around Here.#6024•
Sometimes, we're upset or stressed—as is the case when our autonomy or our sense of place is taken from us. Other times, however, our response is to try to compensate for the loss, to get back to where we started. So, for example, when an important social relationship is lost, we will try to compensate by forming a new one.
This act of making up for the loss of something with something else that serves the same purpose is known as substitution, and it's one of the characteristics that define a fundamental human need: If we can't get it in one place, we must find it in another.
And this pattern—this substitution behavior—is what we see when we look at our need for things to make sense.#6081•
So often our discussions of meaning skip right past the question of whether things make sense and ask instead whether whatever sense they do make is sufficiently inspirational to us—we are typically less concerned with coherence than with significance. But you cannot have the latter without the former: Events and actions cannot point in a particular direction when they do not, because of their incoherence, manage to point in any direction at all; purpose cannot emerge from chaos.#6079•
And it should be evident that when it comes to meaning, the first casualty of disruption is not whether the mission has changed, but more fundamentally whether the new configuration of the world continues to make sense.#6076•
"We are predisposed," writes the psychologist Thomas Gilovich, "to see order, pattern, and meaning in the world, and we find randomness, chaos, and meaninglessness unsatisfying." We find it easier to memorize a list of items or words or numbers when we can make up a story connecting them all—so people who set records for feats of memory are actually setting records for feats of story-creation.
We use stories as vehicles for knowledge, carrying it from one person to another and one generation to the next.
We use stories to organize events: The notion of "career," for example, is at root a work-story, organizing a series of qualifications and jobs into a sequential narrative.
Our stories shape how we decide: An experiment with jurors showed that when all the witness testimony from a trial, both prosecution and defense, was rearranged from the order in which it happened to be presented in the courtroom to an order matching the sequence of events in the alleged crime—story order, that is—nearly three-quarters of the jurors found it more persuasive.#6070•
This sense of connection to something larger is what Viktor Frankl wrote about in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who was held in four different concentration camps during the Second World War, and who witnessed the deaths of his father, mother, brother, and wife in those camps, wrote that having a reason for being—a clear sense of some task that only we can accomplish—has actual survival value, and can keep people going through unimaginable adversity.#6091•
When we think of meaning in terms of these two facets, coherence and significance—whether something hangs together, and then what it points toward—we can see that they are additive: We cannot have the second without the first; we cannot find meaning in things before we can make sense of them. The loss of meaning that results from change is, first, a loss of coherence, and second, a resultant undermining of significance.
This means that companies and their leaders cannot compensate for the erosion of coherence, in times of change, by pointing to ideas and projects that are intended to be inspirational—and it's part of the reason why, when leaders are cheerfully flipping the blender buttons on and off, their assertions that they are "excited" (lifted up, we must imagine, by the significance of the whole thing) are so grating.
When nothing makes sense, it's annoying to be told how much it all means.#6087•
Chapter 4
These things matter not just because they are a cause of psychological health, when we have them, or distress, when we don't, but also because they are a reflection of our ability to do our work. We can think of predictability, control, belonging, place, and meaning, together, as the feeling that it's worth putting in an effort, because actions lead to results and because my actions will make a difference; that I know my way around this place, and how to work with my colleagues; and that I feel my efforts are a useful contribution to the world.
These are surely not only what we want all our people at work to feel, but, moreover, a minimum standard of what we want people to feel.
To disrupt them is to put the basics of human effort and productivity on the line.
Yet this is exactly what we do, time and time again. There is a disconnect between how we see people at work, and how people actually work—there is a problem, in other words, with our model of a human at work, and what a poor representation of flesh-and-blood humanity it is.#6075•
Heath looked at what he termed "lay" theories of motivation—in other words, exactly the sorts of ideas we're talking about here—and found a very revealing pattern. When asked about our own motivations (with which, presumably, we have a high degree of familiarity), most of us will place more emphasis on the type referred to as intrinsic—feeling good about oneself, for example, or gaining skill—and report that these have higher priority than so-called extrinsic motivators, such as compensation or promotion.
But when asked about the motivations of others, we invert this relationship: We guess that other people are motivated more by money and fame, and less by doing useful work.
Furthermore, the less well we know someone, the more this assumption applies: In effect, we assume that people we know somewhat well are a little less intrinsically motivated than us, but that people we hardly know or don't know at all are a lot less intrinsically motivated than us.
To exaggerate only slightly: We ourselves are honorable and of worthy intent; our friends and families are not quite up to our level, but are certainly trying; and those folks over there, on the other hand, are clearly just in it for the cash.
Heath names this effect the Extrinsic Incentives Bias, and it underlies a huge amount of rather mechanistic carrot-and-stick thinking in the management ranks.i#6088•
The idea that leaders know best what the people on their teams need is another manifestation of the same pattern—we allow our familiarity with our own abilities and way of thinking, and our lesser familiarity with others' abilities and mental processes, to lead us to assume that what we can't see doesn't exist.
We can't see the intrinsic motivations of others, but we can see their extrinsic rewards, so we assume they are driven by what is visible to us.
We can't see how someone else thinks about a particular task, but we know how we think about it, so we give them "constructive" feedback or micromanage them, saying, in effect, "You'd be much better if only you were more like me!" all the while justifying this with the thought that we mean well.
Who else, we ask ourselves, would be brave enough to provide the tough love that these misguided souls so desperately seem to need?#6089•
We are, to borrow a phrase from Rutger Bregman, "ultra-social learning machines. We're born to learn, to bond and to play."
We grow fond of places, and our daily place-ballets that animate them and tie us to them.
We resist simplification, and when we feel others are trying to simplify us, we become annoyed.
We yearn for certainty.
We cherish our social groups.
We enjoy helping one another, and we are able to help one another more if the future seems more predictable to us.
And most important of all, we are deeply motivated to leave things a little better at the end of the day than we found them at the beginning of the day.#6073•
Chapter 5
What creates the clarity of ensemble is not the downbeat—the beat that happens at the instant of the sound—but the upbeat before it, the beat that prepares for the sound, and that defines the space in which it can happen. What is happening, in essence, is this: The conductor is saying to the orchestra, through his or her gestures, okay, here we go, now over to you, and the musicians are coordinating with one another.
And this is massively easier when the conductor gets out of the way.#6072•
Some of the more obvious ways to make space for others involve the realization that if you are filling all the space yourself, there is little left for anyone else. So listening (not talking) makes space for others' words; sharing information (not instructions) makes space for others' decisions.#6069•
In a similar vein, describing ends (not means) makes space. One of the fundamental tensions that team leaders must navigate is between each team member's need to be seen for who they are, and their need to feel connected to something larger—between, in other words, the individual and the universal. By locating the universal (ends) in the near future ("Here's where we're all heading; this is the main objective") and resisting any urge to tell people what to do (means) to get there, a team leader can make space for the individual, and allow them to work out how to bring their particular way of doing things to the task at hand.#6083•
There's an old saying: if you want a snake to know its shape, put it in a box.iii The paradox with space-making is that infinite space amounts to no space at all—just as, absent a box, the shape of the snake is any shape, or no shape at all. This is why entirely self-managed teams (certainly, self-managed teams with more than three or four people) can struggle—because there is no ready source of structure.
This is why holacracy, the fad from a few years back that envisaged a manager-free organization, didn't catch on beyond a small number of companies and has quietly faded away.
And this is why anarchy (literally, the absence of a chief) is hard on people—not because there is no freedom, but because there are no limits.
It's vastly easier for us to feel space—and agency within that space—when the boundaries of that space are well-defined.
Walls (not anarchy) make space.#6078•
Ratings, because of our human idiosyncrasies and unreliability when judging others, are that most dangerous animal—noise masquerading as data.#6068•
Here's what one looks like. Each week, a team member answers four simple questions: what they loved about last week; what they loathed about last week; what their priorities are for this week; and what help they need from their team leader#6071•
When the Cisco researchers were looking at the relationship between frequency and effect, they found that a biweekly conversation had a clear, positive effect, and that a weekly conversation had a really very big indeed positive effect. This explains the accountability that Cisco established (and tracked) for team leaders, and which became one of the "walls" of a check-in: Team leaders were not held accountable for check-in frequency, because the invitation to a check-in was at the behest of the team member; instead, they were held accountable for responding to every single request, either digitally or in person, or both.#6084•
But the job of the leader is, at root, to support the team, and so the job of the leader is to surrender some small part of his or her own agency in return for a much greater measure of space given to the team member—to make time, and within that time to make space. This letting go is the hardest thing about being a team leader.
It is hard to watch someone go about a task in a different way from the one you would have chosen, especially when you feel accountable for the ultimate success or failure of whatever is on the docket.
It is hard to ask someone to do something when you know you will want to tweak the outcome, and indeed might wind up doing so.
It is hard to let people find their own way.#6082•
I asked Alsop how she goes about helping someone who is finding their way in the profession, and what she explained to me was a process of intensifying the characteristics that are already there. "If you try to impose things onto a young conductor," she told me, it's not really authentic, "only derivative and imitative.
So I think it's important to help them mine the depth of who they are." To do this, she searches for the signal.
"What I try to do with my students is to find that kernel of greatness, and focus, focus, focus on it and build it out.
'You do this, so how can you amplify that? How can you add to that?'" She is not, in other words, trying to build young conductors in her own image, but instead trying to build them in their own image, more clearly.
And this, in turn, by enabling their uniqueness to be seen more clearly—by, if you like, making their word clusters fewer and tighter and better seen from afar.
This approach, of intensifying the impression a conductor creates, is, she said, the best way she knows to create longevity and greatness.#6085•
So most organization announcements begin with some version of "I am excited to share that…" or "I am thrilled to announce that…"—when the meaning behind the words is often closer to something like I hope by sharing how great I think this is I can make other people feel it's great, too. The point of the communication has shifted from telling people what's going on to telling them how to feel about it.
And the reader, sensing that a leader somewhere is once again claiming to be excited by something as implausibly exciting as an org structure, realizes that he or she is being nudged to think one way or the other, and resists as a result.#6096•
Interestingly, when the report is not so good, often the formulation changes slightly. Now, instead of "I am sad to announce…" we get "I have some tough news"—and what is described is not the feeling of the leader, but the nature of the message. It seems that it is nigh on impossible for many leaders to share any sort of negative emotion, so important do they feel their continual cheer-speaking is to morale.#6093•
Others of the unreal words are used to describe abstract concepts. Here is the consultancy Bain rotating some nouns in space:
Whatever your ambition may be—from embracing new digital capabilities to reimagining how your business operates to launching entirely new digital ventures—we can help you set a new standard of excellence and achieve unprecedented levels of value.
Our approach combines a proven end-to-end transformation framework with Vector, an integrated platform of digital capabilities supported by an expansive ecosystem of best-of-breed partners specializing in digital transformation.#6095•
There are some rules to this sort of writing. No noun shall lack an adjective. New is necessarily better (and using it three times in a sentence, as Bain does here, is better still). If something is done at all, then it must be done end-to-end. All platforms must be integrated, and if anything else can be integrated, then it must be, too.
Nothing shall be anything less than unprecedented or best-of-breed (this latter always calling to mind some sort of surreal kennel show).#6094•
Or there is the rampant overuse of the adjective strategic, the drywall compound of business-speak, which is applied liberally to any sentences that seem to be in need of a little repair, and is a sure signal that we are meant to think more highly of the now-strategic thing. So strategic thinking is the good sort, and strategic assets are the cool ones, and strategic investments are the ones everyone should be making, except that none of that really means anything at all.#6100•
While the adjectives are grating, it's the nouns that are the real problem, because "strategies" and "capabilities" and "value" and "ecosystems" and "platforms" and "operating models" and their ilk all float one step away from concrete meaning. We're used to seeing them, but when you ask yourself what they really mean, you realize quickly that they boil down to either some sort of obviously and blandly positive business-y thing (value, capabilities) or else the word "stuff" in more expensive clothing (ecosystems, platforms, operating models).
They are placeholders for meaning, not meaning itself.#6101•
Much of the unspeakable is more sinister than this, however. Sometimes, the mode is straight Orwellian doublespeak. So an "opportunity" at work is something that is most often taken on unwillingly, rather than with open arms ("Ashley is leaving to pursue a new opportunity"; "I've decided it's time to explore my next opportunity"), and a "growth opportunity" is an area in which a company or a person is doing poorly (which presumably means that we should think of an illness as a "health opportunity").#6099•
Winston Churchill quote:
Short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all#6102•
The short bit first: It is very hard indeed to confuse someone or something in single syllable words. (This is why, when we get angry and start shouting, we also use shorter words, profane or not. The kid in danger is told, "Stop. That. Now!"#6103•
"Blockchain," for example, is an invented word for a particular encrypted ledger of transactions, but because it connects to nothing very much in the history of words or of meaning, it's easy to turn it into a sort of magic amulet of unquestionable coolness and thereby use it as cover for all sorts of rubbish.
In a recent interview, the crypto-skepticxv Zach Weinberg asked the crypto-evangelistxvi Packy McCormick to give some examples of what the blockchain might be useful for, so as to illustrate why it is said to be such a breakthrough technology.xvii McCormick volunteered the example of blockchain-based real estate transactions.
They would, he said, allow you to "transact very quickly, you could borrow against them in a global market as opposed to having to go to Bank of America to take out your mortgage—you'd have a more kind of open system that people are able to transact in more creative ways in."#6122•
What follows this light word salad appetizer, for three delightful minutes, is essentially Weinberg asking, over and over again, "So how would that work?" and McCormick giving a series of answers that rather completely fail to explain how this approach would make anything particularly better or cheaper or more effective.
Instead, what McCormick says amounts to little more than, as Weinberg points out, re-creating "the entire mortgage infrastructure that already exists today—" and McCormick jumps in to finish his sentence for him: "… on the blockchain," as though this in some way clinches his point.
I suppose we can, in one sense, admire the evangelical purity of this nonargument: Things are better on the blockchain because they're better on the blockchain.
But back in the real world, the second that McCormick offers his interjection of "on the blockchain"—and reflexively invokes his magic amulet—we realize that this is a fraud hidden beneath a word, made easier to perpetrate because the word has only recently been made up.#6107•
Writing about this and other examples in The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel points out how the interviewers get to the truth: They ask "very simple, rational questions, and the interviewees are unable to answer them without abstract language." What they do, persistently, is to go after the words—to refuse to accept the "hollow abstractions" at face value. Tell us what that means. How does that work?#6126•
First, Donna describes what she's seeing ("you banged your head"). Next, she narrates what will happen next ("we're going to have to go to the hospital"). And then she gives a reason for Oliver to feel better ("you're a good healer"). What she doesn't do is pretend the accident or the injury is anything less than it is, or tell the child how to feel.
There is no overt soothing, yet the words are infinitely more helpful.#6112•
There is also a certain humility here. Donna's goal, it appears, is not to use her words to solve the problem, but rather just to describe what she sees and share what she intends to do—to eliminate uncertainty about what is going on and what will happen next. She doesn't need to have all the answers, and this, paradoxically, makes what she says stronger.#6114•
Unreal words often have the opposite of their intended effect. If you tell someone not to worry, they will worry more. If you tell them you are confident in some outcome, they will be less confident in it unless you also tell them why. If you hide what is going on behind long and wordy abstractions, they will suspect the worst.#6117•
In this way, rituals elude simple definition, and while we can draw lines between some of these ritual components and some of the benefits of rituals—communal rituals, we can sensibly guess, help with community bonding; emergent rituals help with forming an identity; repeated rituals help lessen uncertainty—the features of rituals and their corresponding effects seem to exist in a kind of loose confederation rather than any more precise relationship.#6106•
Michael Norton pointed out to me that we often want to have a specific emotion at a specific point in time: "When we're grieving, we'd like to feel less grief. When we're nervous, we'd like to feel calm. When we're going to go and do sports, we want to get amped up." It would be wonderful if we could just summon these emotions at will, but for some reason or other, we can't.
"We have to do something to regulate ourselves," he said, "and one of the things that seems to work is if we do a ritual."#6127•
Eight questions, in other words, that usefully described the conditions that lifted performance on a team#6140•
The first group of items contains the elements of engagement associated with the company itself:
"I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company."
"I have great confidence in my company's future."#6139•
The second group of items is associated with someone's experience of their team:
"In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values."
"My teammates have my back."#6141•
The third group of items concerns the individual experience of work:
"At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me."
"I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work."
"In my work I am always challenged to grow."
"I know I will be recognized for excellent work."#6143•
Chapter 6
Laura explained that there were plenty of other things that could befall a plant when it was uprooted in order to be moved from one spot to another—a group of symptoms collectively known as transplant shock—and that these could include withering, or leaf discoloration, or what's known as languishing, where a plant neither thrives nor dies but just hovers somewhere in between.
But, she told me, these were all ultimately linked back to the root system, and whether a plant had the ability to support its own needs.
The growth pattern we were observing in the first tree we looked at was directly related to the damage done to its root system in the process of moving the specimen.
Because root systems are so extensive, they are inevitably damaged during transplanting, such that when a tree—or any other plant, for that matter—is dug up in order to be moved, around 80 percent of its roots are severed.#6138•