When your team is anxious or stressed, they’re not going to give their best effort. And right now, our research shows that around 70% of people are not giving their best effort at work.
On many levels, this is understandable. There’s a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety in the world right now, and we can imagine that this is going to last for some time. Leaders are facing a big challenge in figuring out how to help people get their mojo back and interestingly enough, the answer can be found in a marshmallow. Well, actually a study that included marshmallows.
The Marshmallow Experiment
In the late 1960s, a psychologist at Stanford University, Walter Mischel, conducted a series of experiments, sometimes known as the “marshmallow experiments” that were geared at testing self-control. Basically, the researchers took a group of about 600 four and five-year old children and put them through a little test. They put in front of the kids a tray with all sorts of wonderful goodies: marshmallows, candy bars, little toys, etc.
Each child was offered a choice of one of these small rewards provided immediately or two small rewards if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the researcher left the room and then returned. And a lot of the kids picked the marshmallow.
The children were also offered a third option where they could ring a bell and the researcher would return and they’d be allowed to eat the first marshmallow, but there would be no second marshmallow
So, basically, the children had to make it 15 minutes without eating a marshmallow if they wanted a second marshmallow. Now, as you might imagine, this wasn’t easy for these young children. Seventy percent of them failed to make it the full 15 minutes (a lot of them didn't even make it to 30 seconds). Others rang the bell and the researcher would come in and they would eat the marshmallow. Only about 30% of the kids actually made it the full 15 minutes.
It’s All About Distraction
Obviously, this tells us that some kids have more self-control than others. But what's really fascinating about this study is that the kids who made it to the 15 minutes didn’t just sit there and stare at the marshmallow, exercising tremendous will power to not eat it.
Rather, they used what an adult might call the technique of distraction; they thought about other things. For example, some of the kids climbed under their chairs or under the desk and played games by themselves. Walter Mischel would ultimately call this “strategic allocation of attention.”
Now, there's more to this, because a follow-up study was conducted on the same study group nearly twenty years later. And it was discovered that the kids who were able to wait the full 15 minutes, and so got the second marshmallow, also ended up with SAT scores that were, on average, 210 points higher than the kids who couldn't wait. This wasn't just simply an issue of some kids can wait longer than others. These kids demonstrated a skill that greatly influenced their ability to succeed in life. They had better jobs, they were more successful, they were more fulfilled, and all because they were able to distract themselves.
How Leaders Can Use Distraction
So what does this mean for a leader who is trying to put the spark back in their organization? Well, what it means is this: The marshmallow is the malaise, it's the funk, it's the anxiety, and it's all the bad stuff that your people are experiencing at the moment. That marshmallow is sucking the spark out of them because they are sitting around ruminating all day, perseverating on how bad it is out there, and how scary it is and how anxious they are. In other words, your people are staring at the marshmallow and trying really hard not to think about it, which is not at all what you want them to do.
Instead, you want them distracted and thinking about other things. As a leader, your job is to strategically allocate their attention onto other issues. You can’t just sit there and say, "Listen, folks, I know it's tough, but suck it up and stop thinking about it." That's wholly insufficient.
You need to give your people something else to think about; to strategically allocate their attention onto something bigger and better.
And one of the easiest things to give them is the opportunity to learn and grow. Our research has discovered that there's a strong positive relationship between how much people learn on the job and how much they love their job.
Employees who score high on survey questions like, "I will have to learn new skills to achieve my assigned goals for this year," have higher scores on questions such as, "I recommend this company to others as a great place for people to work."
So give your team some new learning opportunities, goals, or projects, and get their minds off of those marshmallows.
