The Impact of Crisis on Work Performance

As we end 2010 and prepare to enter 2011, the national news has continued to worsen regarding economic conditions.  Growing joblessness, persistent long-term unemployment, impact every American family.  Millions either are unemployed or have family members who are.  More millions with jobs worry they may be the next victims of “nothing personal, just business” layoffs and terminations.  Even for those employed, health benefits often are not included, or are pared down to fit the diminishing funds available to pay for them.

Most CEOs grieve inside because they care about every one of their people, and they try to cope emotionally with what they see they must do–if things do not change.

Stress, Anxiety, and Executive Functioning

Today’s CEO has problems at home and at work.  An adult child has graduated from university and graduate school.  That graduate may have earned even an MBA or JD or other professional degree, and searches daily for any job without good news.  An aged parent has Altsheimer’s.  The spouse has a parent with terminal illness.  The home life is filled with stress and anxiety.  Members of the inner circle are in counseling.  Some have medical prescriptions to relieve mental symptoms.  Some turn to self-medication through alcohol.

These conditions the CEO brings to work.  There he or she knows there are scores, hundreds, even thousands, with similar issues.

Many do not have the same benefits package and must endure their stress and anxiety as best they can.  This knowledge adds more to the CEO’s burden.  Where does the CEO turn for relief?  Just like those depending on him or her, the choices are all over the map, from substances to dysfunctional behaviors outside the workplace:  reckless spending, sex, whatever.  If the CEO has a religious faith, it is under pressure under the growing gray and black clouds in the service of industry, government, and nonprofits.

Impacts on Neural and Behavioral Functions

One of the most important areas of research for us here at Leadership Ethics Online is how the human brain functions, for humans in general, and for both labor and management in particular.  Why?  A person’s ethical values, ethical theory (religious or philosophical), and ethical practices are often only as good as their mental health.

Continued, serious, long-term stress and anxiety lead the human brain to produce a self-defensive mechanism.  That mechanism includes changes in brain chemistry produced to cope with fear. If  unrelieved, so the brain does not “get a rest and cool off,” the brain becomes “accustomed” to existing conditions.  Put simply, the brain begins to “dig a biochemical rut” due to daily, weekly, monthly, even yearly forms of fear contained in stress and anxiety.

We all know we are “not our normal selves” when we suffer under severe fact-based, objective pressures beyond our control.  We become over-sensitive.  We may begin to become paranoid, looking for people contributing to these conditions.  We may begin to develop imaginary scenarios of where these fearful, uncontrollable conditions will go.  Compounded emotional traumas lead to various symptoms of mental illness.  Abnormal conditions affect our brains and its “emotional conditioning” over time.  What once was rare and episodic is the norm.  Therefore, our normal brain functions, in relation to fear, become altered so the brain begins to “function normally” in an abnormal state. Abnormal becomes normal, without our ever knowing it happens.

We have a good friend who is a social worker.  She works with homeless Americans.  This professional wrote her master’s thesis on the emotional traumatic impacts on homeless persons.  She concurs with us, in our studies of emotional trauma, that serial bad events without relief alter a person’s capacity to see things otherwise. We often use the phrase in marketing, “perception is reality.”

Impacts on Understanding and Executive Practice

CEOs need to understand this process, in themselves, their families, and most of all, their workforce.  In fact, they need to understand this process also is at work in their customers, clients, suppliers, contractors, and the general public.

Given our national economic conditions today, it is fair to say millions of Americans are becoming, or already are, emotionally unstable due to our common family and workplace situations.  There is a tsunami of emotional destabilization in most, and incipient or advanced mental illness in others, all around us.

What is the CEO to do?  First, we all recognize benefits packages may not exist to provide much-needed psychological services.  Second, many persons do not want to access EAP programs, if they still exist, because of documentation issues.  Everyone wants to say under the radar and be perceived as a productive, happy employee.  And many put on a Happy Face that hides their true feelings.  The CEO is caught between Scylla and Charybdis, the proverbial “rock and hard place.”

The CEO has a real crisis brewing, because such proliferate emotional and mental destabilization affects focus, production, efficiency, teamwork, attitudes, choices of words, and behaviors. Because mangers themselves are suffering, their performance in all these areas, their capacities to do their jobs with labor, are adversely affected.  They become less patient, more critical and judgmental.  Their disciplinary write-ups may begin to escalate, not because laborers deserve them so much, but because their own emotional gear is wrapped so tight they take out the pressure the wrong way.

They also may not tell the CEO what he or she needs to hear because their fear prevents them from sharing essential information of what is happening throughout the organization.

All these conditions exist for today’s CEO.  Inner pressure and outer pressure–at home and at the workplace–lead executives to become unstable, to seek sycophants instead of solid critics, and to begin to lose their innate, normal moral bearings.

Options

Leadership Ethics Online understands these conditions, as the discussion above illustrates.  We are not psychologists.  We are not magicians with a magic wand.  We are well-prepared to help assist CEOs with these personal and organizational challenges.

What we can do is carefully-guided executive team and organizational intervention.  This is not listed in our menu of services for a very good reason.  Most CEOs simply cannot wrap their minds around the magnitude of the problems described in this discussion.  Were we to include this as a main service, it simply would not make sense as something needed.

With the full cooperation of the CEO–who must instruct HR, Training, perhaps even the Legal department (if one is in-house) to cooperate in providing needed information–Leadership Ethics Online can assess what appears to be organizational conditions, then prepare a systematic curriculum of education, recognition, support, and long-term organizational mobilization.

Regardless of whether accessed for this service, we issue this discussion as a real form of preliminary intervention so CEOs can make other arrangements to protect themselves and their people–and all the families involved in this current American crisis.

John D. Willis, PhD, President
Leadership Ethics Online