Episode 157: Empowering HR and People Analytics Leaders in Managing Microstress (Interview with Karen Dillon & Rob Cross)
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, David is joined by co-authors of the very timely book: "The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems — and What to Do about It.”, Karen Dillon and Rob Cross.
As experts in their field, they shed light on the significance of understanding microstress in today's burnout-prone world and share valuable insights on how we can enhance our wellbeing.
Here are some key points covered in the conversation:
Differentiating microstress from conventional stress and understanding its unique implications
Exploring the brain's response to microstress and the long-term effects on neurological and physical well-being
Unveiling the main sources of microstress
Strategies for combating microstress and fostering wellbeing on an individual level
Understanding the impact of microstress on team dynamics and organizational culture
Practical steps for HR and people leaders to implement practices that alleviate microstress in the workplace
Support from this podcast comes from Worklytics. You can learn more by visiting:
www.worklytics.co/DigitalHRLeaders
[00:00:04] David Green: Today, we're diving into an intriguing aspect of our daily lives that often goes unnoticed: microstress. We all experience countless microstressors throughout our day; think about it, spilling your morning coffee, getting caught in traffic, or receiving an influx of emails. These microstressors, though seemingly minor, can create a ripple effect influencing our mood, focus, and ability to handle additional challenges as the day progresses. It's remarkable how these daily microstressors can silently influence our lives without us fully realising their impact.
Today, I have the pleasure of discussing this topic with Rob Cross and Karen Dillon, authors of a compelling new book, The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems - and What to Do about It. In their book, Rob and Karen dive deep into the world of microstress, uncovering its hidden consequences, and providing practical strategies to address and mitigate its effects. And today, I will be picking their brains on how we, as individuals and HR leaders, can all become more mindful of microstressors in our daily lives, and create healthier, more productive work environments. So without further ado, let's uncover the world of microstress.
Today, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Rob Cross and Karen Dillon, the co-authors of an important new book, The Microstress Effect, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Rob, Karen, welcome. It's an absolute pleasure to have you both on the show; Rob for the second time, first time for a couple of years; and Karen for the first. And I'm really looking forward to discussing your very timely book, The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems - and What to Do about It, which Dan Pink has described as a revelation and I must admit I was reading through it going, "Yeah, uh-huh". But before we get started, can you please both give a brief introduction to yourselves? So Karen, we'll start with you.
[0:02:19] Karen Dillon: Sure, thank you, David, we're so glad to be here today. I'll just briefly say I'm a former Editor of Harvard Business Review Magazine and co-author on a number of books with Clayton Christensen, and in this case, I'm really delighted to be co-authoring this book, which I think is really important, with Rob Cross.
[0:02:35] David Green: Thanks, Karen. It's great to have you on the show. And Rob?
[0:02:38] Rob Cross: All right. So I'm Rob Cross, I teach at Babson College. I'm working with i4cp now as a research director in some of the work. But my focus has generally been on analytically looking at collaborations and relationships in a range of different ways. And so, this work has been a huge privilege. It took me quite a while to convince Karen to work with me on it, but to really look at some of the ways the connections have an impact on our wellbeing is super-timely, relevant, exciting to be able to get the ideas out and share with people.
[0:03:06] David Green: Well, it's great to have you both on. And, Rob, I think I may have described you last time you were on the podcast as the Godfather of organisational network analytics. I won't say anything quite so embarrassing again!
[0:03:16] Rob Cross: Which means I'm very old, right? He must be ancient now!
[0:03:22] David Green: But it is great, because before we get into it, obviously you've been working in the network analytics field for a number of years. I think one of the challenges organisations have with using network analytics, particularly with passive network analytics, is the whole so-called creepy factor. But your book, this book, particularly shows the positive impact of understanding networks and understanding how that can have an impact on wellbeing and culture within an organisation. I'm sure we'll touch on that in the conversation as well, but I just wanted to put that out there right at the start so you didn't have to say it; I thought I would say it as well!
But Rob, starting with you, given the current abundance of research, which is bringing to light what is widely acknowledged as the "burnout epidemic", obviously the World Economic Forum talked about that back in 2019, and what Kathleen Hogan, for example, the Microsoft Chief People Officer has termed as a "human energy crisis", your book is very timely, is definitely very timely, but this wasn't the reason why you started researching microstress, was it?
[0:04:31] Rob Cross: Yeah, no, not at all. And maybe you've had this experience with your companies as well, but I didn't want to do this idea. This actually started about five or six years ago. I was in one of my big meetings and we were presenting results on understanding how high performers leveraged connections and networks around them. And a couple of people slowly put their hands up and said, "Well, performance is great, but we'd also like to know about people that are happier and kind of thriving in their work and sustainable". And I remember at the time, I just kind of cringed because the only thing people cared about back then was innovation. This was pre-COVID and that was it, and I thought, "That's the direction I want to take this group in".
But they got my attention with it and I started pursuing it, and it really got into my soul, right? When you start to use these analytics to understand the way that connections have an impact on our wellbeing, it really helps in very concrete ways make things pragmatic and actionable like you were seeing in the read that you did through the book. And in tandem, what I started to really focus on with the book and the work with Karen, was looking at how connections have an impact on wellbeing in general.
So the initial focal point was to say, okay, let's build a framework of the ways that relationships are likely to impact wellbeing and then go after that, understand that, the positive side of it. So, we're looking at how connections impact physical health, how they create a sense of growth for us in and out of our professions, how they create purpose in our lives, and then how they generate resilience for us. And so as one example, we're used to thinking about resilience as something we own, right? It's grid, it's fortitude, it's leaning in. But if you ask hundreds and hundreds of people about how they make it through a difficult stretch in their lives, it can be a career setback, it can be surviving cancer, I mean all sorts of things. You know, we heard about it in the interviews.
Actually, here there are eight ways that people help us create resilience for us, with perspective, with empathy, with humour and different devices. And the people that had those connections do much better, and that's what we were gearing off of. And to tell you a quick story to give you the genesis of this. On the very first interview, a life science executive in London, your part of the world, and brilliant woman, you could tell, and she started the interview off. And we said, "Well, tell us about a time in your life you were becoming more physically healthy, whatever that means to you?" and she just kind of laughed for a second. And she said, "Well, Rob, I was the person in high school that dodged gym or PE every chance I could. I wanted nothing to do with it and that worked for me up until about mid-30s, where the profession had gotten too stressful, family life was taking over and my doctor said, 'You have to do something about it'". We actually see that statistically, it's about that point that people are falling out of groups and having impact.
So, her solution was she started walking around a park in London and she was doing it the same time each day, and she started walking and bumping into the same people and so they started walking together, and then it led to a longer walk and a charity walk and then a short charity run. And then you flash forward ten years to when we were talking to her, and she was somebody that would plan her vacations where she would do a marathon first with her husband and a small set of this group, and this was the person that dodged gym in high school for most of her life. So, it was this fantastic view of how embedding the physical activities you're trying to lean into in a group has major benefits. Because New Year's Eve resolutions are done by 23n January, right? It's not like we don't know what we need to do. It's the way we build connections around it.
But then the whole genesis of this microstress happened at about 45 minutes into that interview. So, you've got to imagine this interview going 100 miles a minute, super-excited, everybody's laughing, we're thinking we get hundreds of these, we have a New York Times bestseller. And then we just asked on a whim, we said, "Well, what got you in trouble?" And this interview that was going 100 miles a minute went down to nothing, pure silence for like 45, 60 seconds. And she couldn't tell us, right? And basically what caught her and caught the hundreds of people that we spoke with after this was not one big thing; it wasn't one toxic boss or major health scare. Now, those happened to people, but that wasn't the thing that was crushing them.
What was crushing them was the slow accumulation of the small moments of stress that was coming at them because we're so hyperconnected today, and it was happening both professionally and personally. And it was really that moment, that pivot moment that said, wow, there's something different happening here that we kept leaning into to understand better, you know, what is this kind of stress; how do we think about it; how do we see it; how do we deal with it? Because it literally is killing people.
[0:08:59] David Green: And it's fascinating, Rob, because that one pause, 45 minutes into the interview, that one thing that you weren't expecting, it's interesting how that one observation can change the whole scope of your research. So, tell us more about the research that you then subsequently did, or consequently did into that, and what you found.
[0:09:19] Rob Cross: Right, so we kept teasing that apart, you know, and we'd say, "Just tell me about your day", and where were these interactions coming at us? And they could be things like sensing misalignment with a colleague on a call, and you're just in the back of your mind wondering, "Okay, how am I going to solve this? We've got to do this before it gets too far down the road". And that's in the back of your mind, right? And then the very next call, you see a teammate that needs to be coached for the third time on how they're handling something. And again, it's not fight or flight, you're not panicked, but it's in the back of your mind, wondering how you're going to do that and maintain their engagement. And then you get a text from a child, right out of the blue, and they're grumping about something that you can't tell if it's a big deal or they're over it in two minutes, and you worry about it for three hours in the back of your mind.
That's what was happening to people, right? It was this slow addition, accumulation of stress that none of it really registered in terms of creating this fight-or-flight response, the mechanism we're used to using to handle stress, but it would pile up and exhaust people. And it's the reason most of us in the day are heads at the pillow, and we can't put a finger on what just happened. And there's a whole series of things. We found 14 of these microstressors that fall into three categories, very specific tactics for dealing with them in isolation and in aggregate that we found in our work. But one of the most troubling things I found, these were highly successful people. We didn't talk to anybody unless they were successful and in a good organisation, and yet all of them described stretches of three, five, eight years of their lives where they would just fall into a system of behaviour and wake up one day and go, "I'm nowhere near where I meant to be", if they had the luxury of waking up and it was all the small moments that matter. And the small moments actually turned out to be a lot of the solution too, so that was the good news of it all as we went.
[0:11:05] David Green: We'll certainly dig in later to, I think, the three categories which cover the 14 sources of microstress but firstly, Karen, turning to you, I'd love it if you can explain what the difference is between microstress and the stress that maybe we can all more commonly relate to?
[0:11:23] Karen Dillon: Sure so even the term, "microstress" may be new to people because Rob and I created it in response to what we were seeing in this research, and we created it for a reason because we didn't think we had the language to describe something we're all feeling, microstress, but we only know how to talk about stress in bigger, more recognisable ways, so I'll compare macrostress to what I mean by microstress.
So, macrostress are large things that happen in your life, that sometimes there's a bad person or major health issue, you lose a job, you have a really toxic boss, you're really worried about your child's behaviour. Those are stressors that we know, recognise and can have empathy and sympathy for, receive empathy and have sympathy and empathy for other people. And as a society, we recognise that they take a toll on us, and there are things that we coach people to do when they have those kinds of stresses in their life.
But microstressors are such tiny, brief moments of stress, that come specifically from interactions with other people, that are so brief that our brains literally barely register them. Our frontal lobe, which is the sort of mental scratch pad of our brain, barely registers it because we're under this constant form of stress that we almost don't have language to talk about, but our bodies do. So, the body doesn't distinguish between different forms of stress. Microstress may happen in smaller increments, but it layers up, as Rob talked about.
So, what happens with microstress is, you don't remember the interaction with someone that was, again, brief, so fleeting, that started to make you feel exhausted in the day, and then you had five others or seven others or ten others. By the end of the day, your body knows it's been stressed, but it doesn't trigger the normal fight-or-flight mechanisms that stress normally does. So, the toll of microstress on us is significant and cumulative. There's some interesting research that shows that if we are exposed to social stress within two hours of a meal, so just social stress, not a horrible macrostress thing that happened to us, the body will metabolise that food as if we ate 104 extra calories. Now, that doesn't sound like very much, 104 extra calories, a couple more bites of something, but if that happened every day, which it probably does for many of us, that could add up to 11 pounds a year, that we gain 11 pounds a year.
So the effect, the physiological effect of microstress, is significant and it takes a toll, but we literally don't remember the things that happen because they're so brief, our mind doesn't process it in the same way.
[0:13:45] David Green: And, I mean I don't know if in the research -- it's really interesting because there's been a blurring between work and personal life I think since the pandemic, obviously lots of research about remote work and hybrid work and what the future might be around that. But there's definitely that blurring of personal and work, maybe because we're predominantly working where we live. I mean, again, I don't know if your research, do you see it as something that's been exacerbated by the pandemic and the whole shift to hybrid since then?
[0:14:21] Rob Cross: Absolutely. What we've seen is the volume of opportunities for stress to come at us through these connections has gone up. So, just as one simple example, pre-pandemic, most people organised their lives by eight one-hour meetings, right? They'd complain about being overwhelmed, but it was typically our meetings that they were talking about. Through the pandemic, somebody came up with a great idea that, "Let's go to 30 minute meetings or maybe even shorter". And so now we've got 16 of these things, and we're more stressed in the moment we're moving across them. We end the day with longer to-do lists, we're working five to eight hours more, and that's just one example of all the opportunities for small moments of stress to come at us through how we're connected.
That's a really big deal because it's not disassociated stress, that's out there. There are social justice issues, the war in the Ukraine, all that stuff, that's not great. This is stuff that's coming at us through people we know. So, if I'm irritated with you, then it spikes me even more; if I love somebody, my daughters, one of my biggest source of microstressors, biggest love of my life, but that biggest microstress at the same time, it spikes you even more. And so, there's a legitimate rise in the opportunity to feel that kind of stress over time because of those touch points. And so, that's one thing we see in adult care, and if you want to comment on what --
[0:15:36] Karen Dillon: Sure, I would just say that the companion to that is that, while the pandemic created all those extra exponential, I would say, opportunities for microstress to happen in our day because of the way we needed to work differently, it also took away one of the most powerful antidotes to microstress, which is some of the social contact and/or groups and organisations and opportunities to be with people outside of work and home. For most of us, our worlds got smaller during the pandemic and we stopped because of social distancing. Many of the routine things that we did that were just sort of part of our everyday life, coffee chats with people, book groups, religious attendance, being part of civic groups, that just narrowed down. And I think for many of us, we haven't got it back fully.
But what we've learned from our research is that kind of what we call a multidimensional life outside of the narrowness of work at home, which are everybody's anchors, is really important to being able to mitigate the microstress in your life, to put it in perspective, to make sure you sort of have opportunities to see the world differently. So, we lost a powerful antidote to it, and we gained more microstress in the pandemic, and we haven't really kicked away some of those things that happened in the past few years, and we're still trying to get back to new normal, I guess.
[0:16:47] David Green: And a continuation of that, I mean I see days, and I'm sure you both have them as well, and I'm sure many of our listeners do, where you start the day thinking, I'm going to get these three or four things done, and then events overtake you. And sometimes it can be because something major has happened. But at the end of the day, that kind of resonates. Okay, something major happened with a client, with a member of a family, with a colleague, and I had to drop everything and deal with that. But it seems with the microstressors, it's a culmination of a number of different things that happen. You get to the end of the day and think, "Why did I not achieve the three or four things that I wanted to do?" Is that where the microstress effect comes in a little bit?
[0:17:29] Rob Cross: I definitely think it can, right, with all the things that are hitting us and interactions. And I do think to your audience, it's very much an analytic challenge, that we have the ability to apply analytics to all sorts of things. We have not caught up. We've tried to design network-centric organisations, we've created agile talent marketplaces. You go down the list of things that's intended to create one-firm cultures, but we haven't really factored in that there's a cost to all that, and using some kind of analytics to either help groups understand how they're working, or just individuals to see, "Well, yeah, that's what just happened to me. I had eight small disruptions".
The problem with the microstressors is that they're all small, right? They're all things that reasonable human beings, successful human beings should just get over. So we bypass it rather than deal with it and say, "Okay, this is systemic enough that I need to do something about it", and that certainly one driver for how these things kind of creep in on us in different ways.
[0:18:25] David Green: Yeah, that makes sense. And Karen, turning back to you, you talked a little bit about some of the detrimental effects on our neurological and physical makeup. Maybe going to that a little bit more, how does our brain respond to microstress compared to conventional stress; and what can be some of the long-term effects of experiencing a high volume of microstressors on the brain?
[0:18:52] Karen Dillon: Sure, so just to be clear, neither one of us are neuroscientists or neurologists, but as we understand it from talking to neuroscientists and neurologists, our body and our brain is constantly trying to predict. It gets better at predicting stress, so it sort of knows how to respond to it, and that's where the fight-or-flight mechanisms come in. It knows how to raise or elevate our adrenaline and our heart rate when we need to respond in some way, it knows how to sort of what's called body budget, is to try to make your systems work constantly to try to keep you at equilibrium; what's called allostasis. So, our body's good at that, our body is less good at predicting microstress because again, it's not registering them in the same way.
So, one of the researchers that we talked to, a woman called Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who's pioneered this concept of body budgeting that your body knows how to anticipate, gives a really good analogy, which is that if you imagine that microstress is the equivalent of children jumping on a bed. So, you can have one child, two children, three children; no big deal, the bed will hold, they'll be having fun, and that's our body responding to the microstressors. You get to the 10th one, the bed's kind of holding; the 11th one, the kid jumps on, the bed breaks, and that's what happens to our body.
So again, our body doesn't distinguish between different forms of stress; it may take a little more time for the microstress to add up, but its cumulative toll does all the things that makes us exhausted. It affects our mood. And by mood, we mean just the kind of, "How am I today?" not happy or sad, but I don't feel great, I don't have energy; that can take a toll. So, your body is not responding to that microstress in the way it knows to respond to regular forms of stress. So it's sort of a puzzle for the body, and that's why it's so challenging.
Although an interesting thing, which I know we'll probably talk about a little bit more later, is Lisa Feldman Barrett also says that while people are a part of the problem, the microstress that comes from other people, they're also part of the solution, that the positive parts of being connected to people can do great benefits on your brain and your body, that it really does add to your ability to counter it. So it's not all bad news. There's bad news and then there's some good news about being connected with and interacting with other people.
[0:20:59] David Green: No, that's really interesting. And don't worry, we know you're not medical physicians, so neuroscientists; but as you said, you interviewed people that are and understood the impact. And I guess, maybe we'll talk about this later as well, it obviously has an impact on wellbeing, but ultimately it has an impact on performance as well, which is something that organisations, hopefully they care about the wellbeing, but hope they care about the performance even more.
[0:21:27] Rob Cross: It's just undeniable that it can in creativity and innovation and execution. And I do think that you mentioned that idea of blurring between professional and personal has got to be done at some level, right, to kind of help create a context where people can flourish today.
[0:21:46] Karen Dillon: And one of the things I'll just add to that is microstress is stuff coming at us all day long, right? We're interacting and we're responding to things. So, what Rob and I talk about is being in a responsive posture all day long. None of us can be at our best when all we're doing is responding to the stuff coming at us, as opposed to proactively shaping our day. So, even in our work and in our careers and in our lives, if all we're doing is figuring out which balls can we get away with dropping because we're overwhelmed with stuff coming at us, that's not a definition of doing our best work and growing and being happy with your performance and being the best person you can possibly be in your life and in your professional life. So, responding all the time, which is what happens when you're inundated with micro stress, is just a recipe for not doing that.
[0:22:29] David Green: Yeah, it's like playing tennis and you've got 14 people serving at you at the same time!
[0:22:33] Karen Dillon: Exactly, that's exactly what it's like. It's like you can't get yourself back on the left, they're coming at you too quickly, it's over there, there's no chance of responding to that shot over there if someone was just serving at you constantly from all sides of the court.
[0:22:47] David Green: You mentioned earlier, Rob, and in the book, you identify 14 sources of microstress, which you group into three categories. I'd love to have the time to go into all 14, but I think what we do have the time for is to go into the three categories and what they are. And I think that will really help bring awareness for listeners to some of the factors that can lead to the microstressors that we're probably all experiencing.
[0:24:17] Rob Cross: Sure, sure. The first one for us were interactions, again as Karen said, in our professional and our personal lives that drained our capacity, our ability to get done what we needed to get done, and it's very similar to what you just said, right? You start off the day thinking, "Now, there's three things I'm going to get done", and suddenly these things start to accumulate around you, and you end the day going, "Well, it didn't happen, and I'm not quite sure why, what just went on there?" But there were five forms of those. Now, again, we went through hundreds and hundreds of interviews to really isolate out where and what does this look like, because it all tends to fly under the radar screens.
But one of them was misalignment, and there's a tremendous amount of work being done through cross-functional, agile teams, things like that, where people will come in and agree in the room and then go off and pull in slightly different directions, either because they care about different aspects of the work, their leaders are pulling them in different paths, whatever it may be, but it would create misalignment that for many people was one of their worst career experiences, when misalignment wasn't handled well.
A second one is small performance misses from people you're counting on. So, what we would find is people are not just on one team, they maybe have one home team, but usually they're on four, five, six collaborative efforts, right? It's just this lack of analytics, again, for leaders to understand the cost of all these teams they throw at places and problems. And what would happen is, if you happen to own one initiative with four other people on your team, and they showed up to your effort 95% done, so they're almost done, exactly what you agreed on, tiny misses, the problem is that four people times 5% means 20% to you, right? And you're stuck with this decision, "Do I work a little bit deeper into the night and upset my family, my friends, I pull myself further out of things that were keeping me healthy and whole; or do I underdeliver? Both of those things create stress.
Most people chose in their stories to do the hero route, and they created stress for themselves, but then they also taught people that maybe 90% is good enough next time. And again, to Karen's point, it's not that people are nefarious, it's that legitimately, most people were making decisions on which balls to drop, not where to excel in different ways. So we see five of them. There's the misalignment, small misses; shifts in expectations from stakeholders that shift the "what" of the work, the performance expectations; emotionally they show up differently, point A to point B; collaborative overload itself, just the sheer volume of collaborations we're having to deal with; and then, surges in either professional or personal work.
Just to give an example on the personal side, many people describe what they call parent homework, where the kids get sent home with a project, end of the day, Friday. There is no reasonable human being in the fifth grade that could accomplish this project without a bunch of parental support. And so it's not just work-related surges, it's all these surges that we pile on ourselves because that's what good parents do, right, they rise to it. All of them in isolation are not big deals, but they chip away at us and they hurt our ability. So that category was really geared around drains to capacity, and there are unique things you can do about each of them that we've talked about in the book, but let me give it to Karen for the next category.
[0:27:28] Karen Dillon: Sure, the next category are microstressors that deplete your emotional reserves, meaning let's just say you start every day with a kind of emotional tank of things that you need to get through during the day. And then little by little, those microstressors are poking holes in your tank of emotional reserves and making it harder to get through your day. And a couple of simple examples are, if you're a manager or just you have people in your life that you're responsible for, the feeling of responsibility for the success and wellbeing of those people is full of possible microstressors.
So, oftentimes you think of managers as just having a headache, which is a microstress. But it's also sometimes because they care so much. They want the people that are working with them to thrive and do well. And you might notice an employee needing to be coached on a point for the second or third time, and you figure you have to have that conversation again, try to be constructive, but be clear. That's a microstress because you want that person to do well and you carry that with you. The same holds true for the people in your personal life as well. So, that's a surprising microstress. It's not that they're driving you crazy, it's that you care about them and you want them to do well. That's one good example.
Another good example of microstress that depletes your emotional reserves are what we call second-hand stress. And I think most of us have worked with people in environments where you may not be stressed about something in particular, but a colleague is. It's the Chicken Little of your office. And suddenly they're sort of whipping up a froth all around them about something that could go wrong, or something they're stressed about, and it permeates everyone else in the office. And this isn't sort of just a metaphorical second-hand stress, there's research that suggests the expression, "I feel your pain" is literally true. There's research on the motor neurons in our brain that if we're in the room with someone we care about and they are feeling pain, our brains will process what we assume to be the pain they're feeling, as if we're feeling it too. So it is literally physical. So being around someone who's stressed out makes us stressed out.
Those things, little by little throughout your day, just completely deplete that emotional reserves tank. So by the time you get home, when you most want to be your best self, it may be your worst self of the day because the tank's already gone and then something triggers you at home, something that depletes your emotional reserves at home; it's the 11th kid jumping on the bed and then you end up not being your best self, and the microstressors of the day have taken a toll on you and the people you love most. So that's the second category. And then, Rob, that probably segues nicely to the third category.
[0:29:51] Rob Cross: Yeah, so I'll grab that one. That category is challenges to identity. It's just small interactions that accumulate and slowly push us into being people we didn't initiate, right, or didn't plan to be in the beginning. And that to me, they're more subtle, right? If you notice, the impact of these increases as we go down the list, the drains are fairly obvious, the emotional ones have a bigger impact. The challenges to identity kind of creep up on you.
But that was one of the more disturbing things that I mentioned earlier, that people would be in these windows of three, five, eight years, where they would wake up one day and just go, "You know what, I've allowed myself to fall into a system, a pattern of behaviour, expectations that's not where I wanted to be". And some people were able to get out, some people didn't, but what they would take the form of is pressure to pursue, for example, efficiencies or revenue in ways that didn't line up with what that person believed in, so overselling on a product or a service that kind of created dynamics that they didn't believe in themselves.
Or another one was shifts, how we shift either because we're looking to take another job or we take a promotion. Those transitions disrupt the connections that we had in our lives that made us who we are to begin with. And a lot of people, what would happen is probably 90% of our population, these are again were all highly successful people, but they would recount to us myriad transitions through their career where they took a promotion or they took a job in another company and they would come home and tell their significant other, "Well, you're not going to see me for six, nine months, right, I've got to be heads down, and then I'll get back to life", and of course they never did. They slowly, at each increment, became smaller versions of themselves and lost the things that were keeping them whole to begin with.
Now, the fascinating thing and kind of a transition from the microstress to the people that really seem to have it nailed, we call them our ten-percenters, because about one in ten, they were just living fundamentally differently in ways that allowed them to hit their performance goals, but just thrived more naturally. And some of it, to be honest, had a lot to do with this integration of work and life, a little bit uniquely through connections. But they would do the transitions differently. They would describe stories of going into it and say, "Well, why at this point should I fall into everybody else's idea of fun, right? This is the ideal point to shape other people's expectations of who I am and what I can bring. And this is actually the ideal point not to shrink, but actually think about who I want to be and expand", and they would put their anchors out in different ways. And it had a huge payback.
What we know from this work, one of the big things is these microstressors, there's so many coming at us. There are things we can do to remove some of them that are very important, and I can talk to that in a minute. But a really important piece too is engaging in life in ways that helps you rise above them, and actually having other things you care about, other dimensions in your life, like Karen mentioned earlier, is a really big deal. And these people did that well, transition after transition versus letting them fall away. So those are a couple of ideas from that category.
[0:32:54] David Green: No, really interesting. So basically, three categories: capacity-draining, emotion-depleting, identity-challenging; pretty significant things. And I think you said in the first category on the capacity, Rob, we're collaborating more and more, more and more than we ever have done at work. And so, I suppose the opportunity for some of those examples that you both gave to happen are more abundant than maybe they were five, six, seven, ten years ago. And actually, I think what we could now, Rob, is to explore a little bit further how being aware of what these sources are is the first thing, education I guess, but now knowing what some of the strategies are to help fight and prevent them is obviously the next step.
So, you kind of hinted a little bit there, but how can we as individuals combat these microstressors in both our professional and personal lives, because they are blurring, but we can't just deal with it in one side, we need to deal with it in both sides really, don't we?
[0:33:51] Rob Cross: Yeah, so one thing we have put out there for everybody, it's free on the App Store, is something called the Microstress Effect app, and people can download it and they can whip through these 14 that we're talking about and isolate where two or three, four of these are impacting our lives and actually generate a report for themselves. So, what we would do then is our analytic strategy was to say, "What are five to six ways that people typically deal with this?" if we go across hundreds and hundreds of interviews, and then be able to come back to people with suggestions around each microstress, because they're different, right? How you would handle misalignment problems is different than how you would handle second-hand stress, that Karen is talking about.
But our pivot point in the book, Chapter 5, really lays out this table where we have the 14 microstressors down the one column, then across the top, we have the typical sources of these microstressors. It can be a boss, teammates, colleagues at work, loved ones, and thinking about where these things come at us inside and outside of work. And one of the most powerful things we've seen is you get people to take three passes through this thing, right? And we'll say, "The first pass through, I just want you to isolate out two, three, or four cells where there's a microstress that's systemic enough in your life that you should be doing something about it". You've just kind of been persisting through it, but you should change the nature of the interaction, increase the time duration from those interactions, whatever it is, right, there's a lot of small strategies. And that turns out to be a big deal.
We know from social psychology that the negative interactions typically have three to five times the impact of the positive ones in our lives. So, if we're just doing things around wellbeing that help us persist in the system that we've let build around us, then we're actually leaving the high-value stuff on the table, the high-leverage stuff, to actually say if you can shift that. So first pass is, what are you absorbing that you could actually do something about?
Second pass then, and it always catches people off guard, is to say, "Well, what are you causing; what are you unnecessarily creating?" And everybody goes, "Oh, I hadn't thought about that, I've been focused on just me". And the same idea is what we found, you don't want to be somebody that creates it unnecessarily; but what we also found is that the stress we create inevitably boomerangs back on us in different forms. And so the less we're unnecessarily generating because we're under pressure, the less we tend to experience. So it might be leaning on a star employee one step too much, right? And suddenly they back away and you're working harder leaning on a child on something that doesn't really matter, but you're down in the weeds. And so the less we create, the less we absorb.
Then the third is, "Where have you just gotten down in the minutiae?" We have people go through a third pass and say, "Where have I just -- somebody's gotten in under my skin, and I'm allowing this thing to be a big deal, and in the scope of life it isn't", and isolating out three, four of those. That becomes very actionable. Suddenly you're not coming in and saying, "David's driving me nuts, I'm going to dump him out of my network". We just have this one issue around shifting expectations, right? You get down to the interaction versus the relationship and it opens up a sea of possibilities on this level.
The trick a lot of times is to keep people from identifying too many of them, right? You're trying to get them down to just three or four that they'll take action on and persist. So that's one overall strategy for what we see people being able to sink their teeth into and get things done.
[0:37:15] Karen Dillon: I just want to add one thing to that, because the reason it's so powerful to try to identify two or three things that you can take action on, is that years of social science research tell us that a negative interaction can have three to five times the impact of a positive one. So if we are only trying to steel ourselves to deal with more stress, lots of conventional methods, which are good things, yoga, meditation, mindfulness, that's trying to make us stronger to deal with the microstress compared to the opportunity, the higher-leverage opportunity, of removing a negative, removing a couple of microstressors. You can have a much more significant impact quickly if you can find two or three things reasonable to remove or change or shift in some way that it's worth doing, it's worth trying to remove a couple of negatives. The impact will be material.
[0:38:02] David Green: Yeah, so good advice there. I've done that in my past, but I won't go into it now, and I'm sure you both have as well. Karen, staying with you, obviously we've talked about how one microstress may not have a huge impact, but it's the ripple effect that impacts the rest of our day; but it's also how you respond and treat others as well. And, Rob's just given us some great guidance on maybe trying to tackle this from an individual level. But if we think most of the people listening to this podcast will be working in the HR field, trying to support their organisations, so if we look at it through that lens of organisational culture, how does microstress affect team dynamics?
[0:38:45] Karen Dillon: Well, it's enormous because a culture of microstress can be created, even through the technology we use, the fact that we all have cultures of "and", right? We add things, we add teams, we add responsibilities, we add cross-company collaborations, we add technologies, and we're always adding, all of which create exponential potential for microstress. So, looking at it as a culture of microstress and trying to, again, even identify the two or three or four significant ways that they are systemic and becoming systemic, can completely change the cultural impact of that.
Even just a simple example, a leader who routinely sends email to his team at 9.00 at night, 10.00 at night, because that's when his mind is on and he wants to get it off; he's creating the impression on his team that, "I need you to be on 24/7. When you get the email from me at 10.00pm, I'm expecting a response before the morning", and that creates just the microstress immediately, eats into people's evening, it's blurring the line between work and life, do they have to panic and get some response? Even though he doesn't say that, that's a culture of just adding, that's for the leader's benefit.
So thinking about, one, the microstressors we create for others and asking managers and leaders to think about that, maybe actively assess, "Where are the points where I am unintentionally", microstressors are usually unintentionally created, "creating stress for the people that I'm working with, collaborating with, responsible for?" That's one pass. And, second, just recognising that the impact of microstress is significant. It's not just, we're all busy, we all have to juggle, get over it; it's that we're actually affecting the performance of individuals and the team, by every time there's a microstress in your misalignment, or differing expectations, or role misalignment, or second-hand stress, that has ripple effects on the organisation too.
So, recognising where you're causing it, changing the culture or trying to address the unintentional culture of microstress, and three, recognising that the impact is real, it's not just people griping about having too much to do. You're really damaging the organisation by not beginning to try to address some of these things.
[0:40:50] David Green: Yes, it's just simple things, isn't it? If you are a leader and maybe 9:00pm is the only time you can send email, which isn't great, let's be honest about it, just (a) telling your team, "Look, just because I'm sending at 9.00pm, you don't need to do anything with it. Please don't do anything outside your working day", or I've even seen some people in their email signature just saying, "Just because I'm responding to this email at X time doesn't mean that you…", which is something, I suppose.
[0:41:15] Rob Cross: Send it on a delay, like you're saying. I mean, that's one of the things that we see tremendous impact with, with these ideas, is we'll just have team leaders. There's a tool we've built too on it, but you can do it with a blank piece of paper. Just draw two lines down a blank piece of paper and say what are all the ways we're collaborating in the first column, right, and it's email meetings, team collaborative space, instant messaging applications. Usually it's six to nine things across companies that people are using. And then in the next column, pick one and say, "Okay, what are the three positive ways we want to use this tool versus it using us?" and kind of build out those norms.
So, if it's email, maybe it's, "We're just going to use it to confirm agreement, we're going to write bullet points versus ten-paragraph texts where people hide what they want in the night". I mean, just kind of standard hygiene that we see. And in the last column, say, "Well, what are the three things we want to stop in this thing?" And maybe it is that 9:00pm email; send it on a delay, whatever it may be, the unnecessary cc'ing behaviour, you know. And what I hear constantly is that a leader will fill that grid out, takes maybe an hour to say what are the things, the ways we should be using it versus it using us, bringing it into a team meeting, and people are laughing at the absurdity of what we do to each other.
But they've just never really thought about it, you know what I mean, and so there's a tremendous opportunity to really look at the norms of collaboration, just as one example to your point, and in very specific ways, take down these stressors without even really affecting the work, right, and it's helping the work. It's not a matter of, "Oh, you need to be shielded from these microstressors, go home", whatever; this is actually just shifting how it's hitting people in different ways, so tons of opportunities to do things like that.
[0:42:51] David Green: Yeah, technology, I mean, there was some research published by Microsoft recently, and I think it was external research rather than looking at data in their own organisation, and I think the average person, I think it was 31,000 people they surveyed for this, was spending two days a week just answering email or being in meetings. And actually, if anything, that seems like an underestimate to me.
[0:43:14] Rob Cross: I think it is from everything, yeah. And if you add that up, right, so that's just email and meetings, and let's throw in instant messaging, let's throw in the team collaborative space and how we're using that, it's a lot for sure.
[0:43:29] David Green: Obviously as I mentioned, most people that listen to this are HR leaders, HR professionals, people analytics professionals. What can HR leaders or people leaders do to put some of the practices in place that you've both talked about, to help combat or alleviate microstress within their organisation?
[0:44:41] Rob Cross: Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the big things we're always focused on, when we profile and we're talking to large groups, thousands of people, for example, on a web link, and we'll have them poll and say, "What stresses are you experiencing?" and you see the profile come up, and then, "What stresses are you causing?" and they're almost identical polls, the results at the end of it, you know, the stress we experience and the stress we cause. And so, part of it is looking for ways to stop that propagation, and from a cultural standpoint. There's a lot of neat things analytically you can do, if you've done network analysis, to see who those key leaders are and how to shape what's going on that way.
I think purely tactically, some of the things that we're just starting to experiment with are organisations that are taking these ideas through all their team leaders and saying, "Once a week for six weeks, Monday morning, you're going to get a nudge, and it's one of these practices, short video-based feed tool that you're given, you put that into play in your teams through the course of the week, and then you end the day on Friday and you just talk to four other leaders about what you did and what the results were, and kind of do a cadence like that for six weeks, something like that, where there's an accountability and people are sharing things that are working or not". I believe that those kinds of small efforts, first of all, it's possible for everybody. You don't have to have a massive budget to go do an ONA or whatever, but you can do that.
Second, I think that to me is actually where we're going to get real change, it's not really through the policies and procedures; there's so many times that those things don't work, but to get it into the voice of the teams, right, and to get the teams to be talking about making trade-offs in ways that I believe will lead to the cultural shift over time. So that's one example of things that we're seeing places take on.
[0:46:28] David Green: You talked a little bit about people analytics specifically. Some of the analysis and maybe some of the projects that they do could be to actually maybe start to understand and identify this within organisations perhaps?
[0:46:41] Rob Cross: Yeah. Well I think for me, and obviously we've known each other for quite some time, and you've seen a pivot in my work, moving from purely analytical to this work is hundreds of interviews and I think that's probably, as we've talked about before, one of the most important things from an analytic standpoint is to, as you set the projects up, increase the capacity to do ten interviews behind it, whatever the finding is, and make sure you're getting down to the practices like we have here, because then you're always able to feed these things in in small doses in ways that can have pretty outsized impact, because of what Karen was saying; removal of a negative is three to five times more value than adding a positive.
But we, for whatever reason, are not wired to do that. We'll do these leadership programs and everybody will be, "Oh my gosh, the stress is everywhere, it's killing me, now I've got a handle on it", and then you end the day and say, "What are you going to go do?" They all say, "Well I'm going to go get a new best friend, I'm going to just lean into the positive", and they kind of quickly bypass all the possibility that we have to shape the negative. And so I would urge that, I would urge people to really think about that and what they what they could do there.
[0:47:48] David Green: So, Karen, I can't believe we're already reaching the end of our conversation. So, this is the question that we're asking all the guests in this series. What steps, Karen, can HR leaders take to humanise the work experience?
[0:48:02] Karen Dillon: Well, I think just recognising the whole person, right, because we've talked about throughout this conversation, the blurring effects and the ripple effects between personal and professional microstressors and lives are real. It's impossible to separate the work responsibilities from life responsibilities because the ripple effects are enormous. So recognising, in our case, that microstress at work and at home and in life is real and it's taking a toll on people, and recognising that people need some help and some antidotes to responding to that. I think that's important, seeing the person as a whole and seeing that coming into work, already microstress from home will affect your performance at work; and leaving work at the end of the day, microstress from your day will affect your life at home. It's a pretty vicious cycle. So, seeing the opportunity to reduce microstressors is going to have a catalytic effect on that person's life.
[0:48:51] David Green: And it's a shift really from maybe in the past, we focused very much on performance, but actually we're focusing on performance and wellbeing; and then by focusing on wellbeing, you're likely to have a positive impact on performance as well.
[0:49:05] Rob Cross: Yeah, and I think these are small efforts. It's not wellbeing in the sense of, "Okay, we need a policy where people are going to get sabbaticals", you know what I mean? These are really small moments. So one of the things we learned about our ten-percenters, our top people, that were crushing performance but also happier, they maintained at least two and usually three groups that were an authentic part of outside of their profession, as we've talked about, and that's drifted through COVID. So, we're experiencing stress more because we've fallen out of those groups with social distancing. It can be as simple as leaders modelling that behaviour, or in one-on-ones asking, "Okay, what are you doing outside of work; and are you reconnecting in ways that's healthy for you?"
We had another great team leader at a software development company that he went a step further and he said, "Okay, I was just going through performance reviews with my 60 people", and he had people put it in their plans, "What are the couple of things you're going to do to drive down the negative and to lean into the positive?" And I'm sure you could probably ask him about it, I'm sure he's not going to chase it down to an area that's uncomfortable and blurring the boundaries between profession and person, but it just starts to get a recognition that the whole person is the one coming to work, and that we need to think about this at some level in ways that are, again, very manageable. These are not big investments, these are just thinking about, how do you help people adapt their lives a little bit in ways that can have impact.
[0:50:30] David Green: And that modelling is so important. Just by asking that question, it's probably giving people almost (a) perhaps making them think, "Oh, okay, yeah, that's a good point", or (b) it's almost giving them permission, we want people to have interests outside work that's going to help them as people; that's more important. Obviously, it helps them at work as well.
[0:50:51] Rob Cross: Yeah, and we'll see, as this research always evolves, you identify the principles, the things that can shift, and now we're starting to build things that are bringing these ideas in. And I believe what we'll see is that they'll have a quantifiable impact on retention and time to productivity; I believe they'll have a quantifiable impact on performance, if we can do some paired things that we're focusing on. And if we can get it right and we can start to see, does this somehow stop certain kinds of people from going into clinical categories of care, not only is that morally right, but economically, the benefits are significant.
So, I think there's legitimate ways that we'll be able to see that as we move and evolve this body of work and different avenues.
[0:51:36] David Green: Well, firstly, what a fantastic book. I definitely recommend that if you're listening and you've probably been sparked by what Rob and Karen have been saying, I definitely recommend The Microstress Effect. It's one of the best books I've read in the last five years, it really is, and I think it will resonate with people when they read it as well. Rob, Karen, thank you both for being guests on the podcast. It was great to learn more about your research and the people behind it, and hopefully helping some of our listeners to combat microstress themselves, but maybe within their teams if they're seeing it as well. How can listeners find both of you on social media and follow your work? I'll start with you Rob and let Karen finish.
[0:52:19] Rob Cross: Sure, so my website we have out is robcross.org and we have a site specifically for the book in there that has videos and other things on it that people can access. So that, and just following the work with i4cp and things that we're going to be doing there is probably the next big avenues for me.
[0:52:38] Karen Dillon: So I'll just add, I have a website, karendillon.net and Rob and I both like to connect to people on LinkedIn. So, I welcome invitations on LinkedIn and I welcome continuing the conversation with people if they've been interested in these ideas.
[0:52:50] David Green: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much. We'll put those links in the show notes and also the link to the assessment tool that you mentioned as well, where people can look at the microstressors themselves and generate a report. So, thank you very much again for being on the show and looking forward to hearing some feedback from listeners on how they found it.