Tag: behavioral psychology

Control Freak in the Workplace

Posted on by Rachel Burr

A control freak often has a demanding personality who strains relationships and saps energy in the workplace. Explore ways to manage and redirect controlling behaviors.

We’ve all heard of “control freaks” – people who feel the need to direct, control, and even change the people around them. You may not be a control freak, but you’ve probably run into them. It could be the leader who constantly asks for updates or makes continuous changes throughout a project. Sometimes even changing changes they previously made. Or it could be the colleague who regularly offers unsolicited advice and criticism.  

Being around control freaks can be exhausting and demoralizing. They strain relationships, whether with family, friends, or co-workers. There are better ways to relate to the world!

This article will examine what drives people to become control freaks, and what can be done to loosen their grip.  

What is a control freak?

Managing and directing is a part of leadership.  Leaders are expected to direct, inspire, and organize the efforts of others. Without healthy leadership, chaos can take over. But there comes a point at which the need to control outruns its usefulness. It crosses the line from conscientiousness into coercion.

There are two types of control freak, according to Psychology Today. Both types are rooted in the need to overcome fear, anxiety, and insecurity, but they manifest themselves in different ways.

The first type of control freak, according to the author, are people who have “intense and exact control over themselves.” They are hyper-focused perfectionists who expect themselves – and the people around them – to “perform perfectly and without error.”  

The second type of control freak uses the opposite strategy. Instead of controlling themselves, “they are skilled at controlling other people.” They like to give orders but are “dependent on others to carry out their wishes and demands.”  

Both types use control as a way to manage fear and anxiety. But no one can be another person’s “management agent,” in the author’s words, and trying to be one will just cause damage.

Signs of controlling behavior at work

Here are a few examples of controlling behavior at work, from an article in Forbes:

  • Being a poor team player. To be part of a team, people must give up some control. They can only work on part of the task at hand. For controlling personalities that can be a big challenge. They often prefer to work alone and, when forced to become part of a group, may try to dictate how others work and behave.
  • Failing to delegate tasks. For controlling personalities, delegating is just another way of losing control. That’s particularly true of the perfectionist who believes he or she is solely responsible for the success of any project. When forced to delegate, they tend to micromanage the work.  
  • Strained relationships. Control freaks are prone to making demands and being hyper-critical of the people working around them. To the perfectionist type, any mistake or flaw – whether real or perceived – is intolerable. Working relationships suffer as a result.

Letting go of the need to control others

There are ways out of the “control freak paradigm”, and we’ll discuss two of them here:  Emotional regulation and re-defining control.  

Learning emotional regulation. The source of controlling behavior lies in uncomfortable emotions like fear and anxiety. “Rather than controlling their emotions, [control freaks are] always trying to control the environment,” according to Forbes. Change begins by learning emotional regulation.

The first step toward regulating emotions is to pay attention to them. Identify and name emotions as they arise. It’s an exercise that takes practice, and can benefit from working with a coach or a therapist. 

When negative emotions arise, we can choose how we deal with them. A useful technique is reappraisal, which is a change in perspective. Fear and anxiety can make us feel threatened. Reappraising a threat as a challenge instead, can help us choose a more positive course of action.

Re-defining control. Another useful strategy is to re-define what control means, and what it looks like in practice. It’s a strategy that’s especially useful for leaders.

Most leaders reached their positions by being highly skilled in technical areas. But as leaders take on more responsibilities, they have less capacity to absorb technical details. They need to rely on others.

Re-defining control is a shift from completing every detail personally to having systems in place that allow others to complete them. The systems can include scheduling regular team check-ins and clearly defining project milestones. 

We’ve all run into control freaks. Their overbearing demands can drain energy, productivity, and creativity from the workplace. But practical solutions are available. If you would like to learn more, please contact us.

===================================

Rachel Burr is an executive and leadership coach with over 20 years of experience working with CEOs and the C-suite across all industries, in organizations of from 200 to 10,000 employees. Rachel holds dual master’s degrees in Organization Development and Clinical Psychology, and numerous certifications in the field of executive coaching. Rachel is a “people expert” who works with clients to unleash their leadership potential.  If you would like to learn more about leadership development training, please contact us.

Copyright ©️ 2024 by Rachel Burr. All rights reserved.

Boost Psychological Safety for Healthier, More Creative Teams

Posted on by Rachel Burr

Psychological safety is a feeling shared among team members that it’s okay to admit mistakes, share concerns, and ask questions. Teams that achieve psychological safety are more productive, more creative, and better able to resolve conflict than those that don’t.

What is psychological safety?  

Psychological safety refers to an environment where it’s okay to take risks, make mistakes, and where it’s accepted that people will voice differing opinions and ask difficult questions.  It’s an important part of a healthy workplace, with benefits for organizations as well as employees.  

The term psychological safety was coined by Amy Edmondson, a professor at the Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. She developed the concept while studying teams of medical professionals for her Ph.D.  

At first, Edmondson thought that the highest performing teams would be the ones reporting the fewest mistakes during their shifts, but she found the opposite. The teams that achieved the best outcomes reported a higher number of mistakes per shift than their lower performing peers.  

She later realized that the high performing teams were more willing to admit mistakes – and learn from them – than the other teams.  From that insight came a concept she called “team psychological safety,” which can help anyone who works with a team.

This article will discuss the basics of psychological safety and how to improve that quality in any team.

Make it safe for people to speak up in the workplace

Psychological safety has been called “the belief that one can express themselves freely without fear of negative consequences” in a Penn State University article. Amy Edmondson calls it “felt permission for candor.” However described, the level of psychological safety in any team has major impacts on productivity, innovation, conflict resolution, and more.  

For example, Google’s Project Aristotle, a large, multi-year study of team dynamics and team building, found psychological safety to be the single most important factor in creating high performing teams.

The Google researchers began with the idea that the best teams would emerge naturally by putting the brightest high achievers together and turning them loose. But that wasn’t the case. They concluded that who is on a team matters much less than how the team members interact. According to the authors:

Our researchers found that the best teams created a climate of openness where team members admit to their errors and discuss them more often. In other words, they exhibited high levels of psychological safety[.]  

Psychologically safe teams accelerate learning and innovation by acknowledging mistakes and exploring new ideas. And not only are they more adaptable, they can also impact the bottom line.

The study found that teams with high levels of psychological safety exceeded their sales targets by 17%, while teams with low levels of psychological safety missed their sales targets by 19%. According to Google, psychological safety was a much better predictor of team success than the number of top performers or the general intelligence of team members.

Developing psychological safety

Psychological safety is a team characteristic.  It emerges from interactions among team members over time.  Edmondson states, “This is a group level phenomenon – it shapes the learning of the group and in turn affects team performance and therefore organizational performance.” Team members who collaborate closely feel similar levels of psychological safety, according to the Harvard Business Review.  

Building psychological safety is “more magic than science,” according to Edmondson, but there are simple steps any organization can take to improve teamwork.

Ensure good management.  The first step to increasing psychological safety is the most basic: Establish good management practices, which include setting clear expectations and norms of behavior, ensuring fairness and equal treatment, encouraging open communication, and making sure people feel valued and supported.  

Admit mistakes. Psychological safety begins when people are willing to admit their mistakes and learn from them. Leaders must be in the forefront of the effort by admitting their own mistakes, struggles, and challenges.  In short, leaders need to become willing to appear vulnerable and less than perfect in the eyes of the people they lead. If they are not, the foundation for psychological safety will be missing.  

Actively solicit input. Leaders need to do more than encourage team members to speak out, they should set the expectation that everyone on the team will share their ideas, opinions, and concerns. Some will naturally be more vocal than others, but creating a safe space to share ideas without being judged or criticized is key to developing psychological safety. It may feel awkward at first, but it will become easier with practice. As a bonus, regularly asking team members to express their concerns can help defuse workplace tensions and promote healthy conflict resolution.

In the words of Stanford professor and psychologist Robert Sutton, “When people talk about their own mistakes, rather than pointing out others’ missteps, that suggests your workplace is psychologically safe.” Rather than wasting time and energy blaming and shaming, psychological safety lets teams focus on learning and problem solving in a healthy learning environment, which is the key to unlocking resilience, creativity, and innovation.  

===================================

Rachel Burr is an executive and leadership coach with over 20 years of experience working with CEOs and the C-suite across all industries, in organizations of from 200 to 10,000 employees. Rachel holds dual master’s degrees in Organization Development and Clinical Psychology, and numerous certifications in the field of executive coaching. Rachel is a “people expert” who works with clients to unleash their leadership potential.  If you would like to learn more about psychological safety and how it can improve teamwork, please contact us.

Using Behavioral Psychology to Improve the Customer Experience 

Posted on by Rachel Burr

When interacting with clients and customers, perception is reality!  By using principles from behavioral psychology, leaders can emphasize the positive to improve customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction can be greatly improved with behavioral psychology by segmenting experience, giving customers a sense of control, or even becoming part of their routines, in order to highlight the positive.

Perception is reality

In every customer encounter, perception is reality.  In fact, perception can be even more important than reality. We sometimes ignore reality, but we rarely ignore our perceptions. Whether your organization sells goods or provides professional services, the customer’s perceptions of your product or service matter.  A lot.  With a master’s degree in both psychology and in organizational development, I’d like to shed some light on the behavioral psychology aspect of customer perceptions.

In leadership coaching, I know many leaders invest time and effort to improve the quality, timeliness, and relevance of their offerings.  But unless you focus on how customers perceive their experiences, your offerings may not generate the hoped for customer satisfaction.  Of course, organizations should always pay attention to the quality of their products and services.  But to drive better customer impressions and higher customer satisfaction, leaders need to consider how the customer journey appears from the customer’s point of view, applying principles of behavioral psychology to achieve the best results.

This article will focus on using behavioral psychology to improve customer journeys and experiences.  Paying attention to the high and low points, or “pain points” of a customer’s journey, and how those experiences unfold in time, are keys to improving both perception and reality.

Pay attention to the sequence of events

People don’t remember all portions of an experience equally.  Research in behavioral psychology shows that they tend to remember a few high and low points and gloss over the rest.  The result is that just a fraction of the complete customer experience can have an outsized impact on perception.  

People are also sensitive to trends – whether an experience is moving from negative to positive, or the reverse.  Not surprisingly, people prefer that their experiences improve over time – and the ending is most important of all.  Even if an experience has been positive until the last interaction, a bad ending tends to overwhelm the customer’s memory.  

Knowing these quirks of behavioral psychology can help organizations maximize positive customer impressions.  Avoiding a “last bad experience” is one reason some hotels have eliminated the need to check out.  It’s also why cruise ships schedule the “captain’s dinner” at the end of the trip. Leaders should look at the customer journeys their organizations offer.  How can they emphasize positive experiences?  How can “pain points” be minimized or managed?  

Segmenting experiences to emphasize the positive

Another useful tool from the behavioral psychology toolkit is managing the sequence of experiences to minimize the impact of negative experiences while highlighting positive ones.  We’ve already seen that customers are sensitive to trends, such as whether the experience is improving or getting worse.  When the customer journey involves several different interactions, it’s useful to get the “bad stuff” out of the way at the beginning and to spread the “good stuff.”

If you’re a hotel or cruise line, that can mean getting all the payment and personal information in a single transaction.  Now the service provider is free to sprinkle perks and freebies into the rest of the journey.  Memory of the “pain point” will fade in comparison to the perks and freebies.  

If you offer professional services instead of hotel stays or cruises, think how segmenting might work for you.  

For example, you probably need to gather background information about the client and the project – that’s a “pain point” and will count against the customer‘s experience unless managed.  Try to gather all the information needed at one time and minimize having to ask follow up questions.  The “perks” in this case will be rolling out with deliverables smoothly and predictably.  

Giving customers control

A third way to improve customer satisfaction is to give customers control over their experience.  People want to feel that they have agency, or the ability to change events and outcomes in their lives. There are many ways to make customers feel empowered, engaged, and informed.  

For instance, offering a choice of service packages, B2B or B2C like airplane seats, or hotel rooms is a good way to start. Customers who have these feelings are less likely to blame the service provider when things go wrong.  

Proactively updating clients also gives them a sense of control.  Providing ways to engage with the organization and offering timely updates are good ways to boost engagement and information.  

Another way to promote feelings of control is to avoid making changes that could frustrate your customers.  If you have to change what customers or clients originally bought, you must apologize and explain.

Consistency in your offerings such as brand promises, messaging, even “look and feel”  reassures customers of a predictable experience and a sense of control. People become comfortable with routines and if your organization is lucky enough to become part of someone’s routine, that’s a bonus!  Take advantage of it!

Behavioral psychology can help organizations enhance the customer journey to maximize customer satisfaction. Strategic use of sequencing and segmenting will help accentuate the positive and ensure customers leave with a positive impression of their experience.  And don’t underestimate the power of giving customers control or agency.  Helping customers feel empowered, engaged, and informed is a pathway to success.  

===================================

Rachel Burr is an executive and leadership coach with over 20 years of experience working with CEOs and the C-suite across all industries, in organizations of from 200 to 10,000 employees. Rachel holds dual master’s degrees in Organization Development and Clinical Psychology, and numerous certifications in the field of executive coaching. Rachel is a “people expert” who works with clients to unleash their leadership potential.  If you would like to learn more, please contact us.