Brain-based leadership in a time of heightened uncertainty
Heightened uncertainty can have a devastating impact on the performance and mental health of employees, triggering a threat response in the brain that interferes with rational thinking, collaborating and solving problems. By understanding the core psychological needs of employees, leaders can focus their efforts on the strategies that will have the greatest impact on engagement…
When the coronavirus pandemic first struck earlier this year, people everywhere were suddenly confronted with more uncertainty than most had experienced in their lifetimes. Unanswered questions swirled in all our minds: What does this mean for me? Is my family safe? How will I work now? Is my job secure? How long will the pandemic last?
Heightened uncertainty on this scale isn’t just unpleasant; it also can have a devastating impact on the performance and mental health of employees, triggering a threat response in the brain that interferes with rational thinking, collaborating and solving problems, potentially undermining an organization’s overall productivity.
But as unfathomable as it would have seemed when the pandemic first struck, life has somehow grown even more chaotic since then. What initially seemed like a transitory setback — one that would end after a few months of lockdown — has now swelled to encompass rising social unrest and concern about the economy, the election and democracy itself.
Research confirms that 2020 has been a time of unprecedented disruption for employees, both professionally and personally. In the early stages of the crisis, 64 percent of employees reported that organizational productivity had been affected, another 60 percent felt stressed and worried, and only about 49 percent felt that organizations cared about their well-being.
While the initial drop in productivity is being restored, the overall well-being of employees is declining. As the months passed and levels of uncertainty remained high, pandemic fatigue began to set in. With many priorities to manage at once, we’ve become cognitively overwhelmed — a state that impairs perception, cognition and behavior. As a result, many people have started to behave somewhat irrationally and irresponsibly, from boycotting masks to throwing big parties in the face of all precautions — all products of frustration, fear and defiance in an effort to reassert control over the upended circumstances.
Why stress-induced fatigue leads to irrationality
The restrictions imposed to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, though absolutely necessary, have had the unintended consequence of making people feel that their basic needs are being threatened. As human beings, we’re driven primarily by emotions — not reason, as we might hope. In particular, we have a few core psychological needs that must be fulfilled in order for us to feel safe and secure: relatedness (the need for social belonging), certainty (the need to understand what’s going on around us) and autonomy (the need to feel a sense of control over our own lives and decisions).
The pandemic has shaken our sense of certainty in an unprecedented manner, triggering a destabilizing global domino effect of threats to our core needs.
As human beings, we rely on information to make sense of the world around us. This is because the human brain is a meaning-making machine: It evaluates and reevaluates input, detects patterns, and creates meaning in order to adjust and calibrate our behavior, emotions and actions. As a result, having access to information is vital to our sense of security.
Unfortunately, a lack of sufficient data disrupts this process. It requires tremendous cognitive energy to reconcile uncertainty, weigh risks and probabilities, and predict outcomes. When there are gaps in our information, the brain fills those gaps by making up a story.
If the story we create feels straightforward and easy — regardless of whether it’s accurate — we feel a sense of ease because the internal conflict has been reconciled. When incomplete patterns are completed, we experience a feeling of reward, triggering a dopaminergic response in the brain that we will then crave again the next time we’re in the same situation. This positive experience motivates us to carry out the same exploratory process the next time we face uncertainty, seeking to turn negative feelings into a positive outcome, to turn uncertain into certain — or, to be more precise, to turn the uncertain into the familiar.
Because of course, the future is never truly certain. We forget that uncertainty is not unique to a crisis, but a permanent fixture of life. What we tend to think of as certainty is often just familiarity, which aids predictability. But that’s OK — familiarity and predictability are comforting enough.
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