Stress + Loneliness = Disaster

Like many people today, Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers, slowly slipped into a life where her job was #1, ahead of every relationship in her life. To have sufficient energy to work an exhausting schedule throughout the week, she spent weekends sleeping.  Eventually she reached a point where what she did was who she was.  When she left her job around the time of Lehman’s demise, she was devastated.  As Jason Pankau, my friend and business partner says, “when you are what you do, when you don’t, you aren’t.” Recently Ms. Callan told her story in a very thoughtful essay that appeared in The New York Times.  Be sure to check it out at “Is There Life After Work?

The other night my wife and I watched the DVD extended-cut version of the movie Margaret.  The movie’s story is about stress, relational disconnection and loneliness in the lives of a teenage girl and her mother, an Off-Broadway actress.  Anna Paquin gives a tour-de-force performance as the teen traumatized after she witnesses a bus hit a pedestrian after running a red light and the woman dies in her arms.  She seeks comfort from her divorced parents with little success (her father lives in California, while her mother is pre-occupied with the opening of a new show). Desperate for connection to help soothe her pain, Ms. Paquin’s character begins to look for connection in all the wrong places including alcohol, drugs and having sex with a male acquaintance who already has a girlfriend and one of her high school teachers (played by Matt Damon).   I don’t want to be a spoiler so let me encourage you to rent the DVD.

Today we live in an age where relationships are devalued and tasks that increase wealth and status rule supreme.  The problem with this is that human beings are hardwired to connect.  Insufficient connection leads to feelings of anxiety, emptiness and depression, and an unsustainable life.  We thrive only when our lives include meaningful relationships.  Ms. Callan’s essay and the movie Margaret provide vivid reminders of that, so to is the recent sad news that in America, deaths from suicide now exceed deaths from motor-vehicle accidents (note that the Centers for Disease Control has found that promoting connection in a community reduces the risk of suicide).

Are you investing sufficient time in developing and nurturing the meaningful relationships in your life?

Your Leadership is Killing Me!

Why do people react so strongly when they don’t have a voice in decision-making? Research suggests there is a rational biological basis for this reaction.  It comes down to this: feeling that we have little or no control is detrimental to our health.

The famous Whitehall studies in the U.K. established that there was an inverse relationship between level of hierarchy, power, control, status and cardiorespiratory disease/mortality rates in members of the British Civil Service.  More recently, a group of researchers found that participants in a Harvard Business School program for leaders had lower stress (as measured by cortisol levels and self-reported anxiety levels) versus people in the local community who didn’t manage others.  The researchers also found that leaders with more powerful positions had even lower cortisol and self-reported anxiety.  Here is a link to the published research and to a New York Times article about it entitled “It’s Easy Being King.” 

Leader, Beware of Failing to Give People a Voice

John Sexton, the president of New York University, is been aggressively expanding NYU at home and abroad.  Now the faculty of NYU’s largest school, Arts and Sciences, have scheduled a no-confidence vote on Sexton.  An article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “A Test of Leadership at NYU,” described the no-confidence vote as coming about because dissident faculty felt Sexton was acting like a maverick CEO.  How did this happen?  It appears that Sexton’s mistake was failing to give faculty a voice in major decision-making and failing to address their legitimate concerns such as increased teaching loads that require travel abroad and the impact of the expansion on student-teacher ratios. “Voice” is one of the three elements in a Connection Culture (the others are Vision and Value).  When a leader fails to give people a voice in decisions that affect them, he or she runs the risk that some people will organize and seek to have the leader replaced.  This article describes that scenario.  Note in the article that one astute observer comments: “had more faculty been involved in the process…few if any professors [would be actively opposing Sexton].”