In that book, Steele introduced the concept of stereotype threat—the idea that people can underperform when they fear confirming a negative stereotype about their group. The research helped explain disparities in academic testing, workplace performance, and many other settings.

Steele is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University (and a former executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley). Over the past three decades, his work has influenced fields ranging from education to organizational leadership.

His new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, serves as a kind of sequel to Whistling Vivaldi. While stereotype threat focuses on how stereotypes affect individual performance, Churn explores the broader tension that can arise when people from different backgrounds interact in situations that matter.

When the Commonwealth Club World Affairs, in San Francisco, invited me to interview Steele about the book, I jumped at the opportunity. Our conversation explored how identity, anxiety, and trust shape interactions in classrooms, workplaces, and everyday life. What follows is an edited version of that on-stage discussion.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Before we talk about your new book, I want to start with Whistling Vivaldi, which came out back in 2010.

Claude Steele: That book described the research journey that led me and my colleagues—Steve Spencer, Josh Aronson, and others—to the concept of stereotype threat.

That’s when someone faces a negative stereotype about one of their identities—such as race, age, or religion—in a situation that matters to them, like a job interview or a test. In those moments, the possibility of being judged through the lens of that stereotype can be distracting and upsetting. It interferes with your ability to perform in the moment. And if you expect to encounter that pressure repeatedly in a particular environment—say, a profession or a field of study—you might decide not to participate at all.

The research became widely known because it showed that stereotype threat could affect something as important as standardized test performance. For example, a highly motivated African American student taking a difficult exam might experience normal frustration and start wondering, Am I confirming that stereotype about my group? Will others see my performance that way? That extra pressure can undermine performance.

Over the years, researchers have seen this dynamic in many contexts—athletic performance, negotiations, academic settings, and more.

Eventually, I began to think people were missing the broader significance of the idea. The same kind of tension often appears in interactions between people of different identities. In diverse settings, people may worry about being seen through negative stereotypes. That concern can make them hyper-aware of how they’re behaving, what they’re saying, and how they’re being interpreted.

JAS: You’ve compared that experience to multitasking. A person under stereotype threat is juggling extra mental tasks while everyone else can focus on the main activity.

CS: Exactly. If I’m in a group composed entirely of people like me—say, a group of older men—I don’t feel much anxiety about ageist stereotypes. But if younger people join the group, I might start wondering: Do they think I have outdated ideas? Do they assume I’m not technologically savvy? I know what the stereotypes of older men are…and that I could be judged in terms of them.

Diversity brings us together with people of different identities. When that happens, we lose the security that we won’t be judged by outgroup stereotypes. That worry is experienced as tension. 

JAS: Your new book introduces the concept of “churn.” What does that mean?

CS: “Churn” is my term for exactly the tension I just described. To illustrate, let’s begin by imagining a seventh-grade parent-teacher conference. The parents and student are African American; the teacher is white.

The parents know the stereotypes about African Americans, about their intellectual abilities, about their aggressiveness, etc. So on the way to the meeting, they may worry: Will the teacher see our child’s real potential? Will ordinary mistakes be interpreted as signs of aggression or lack of ability?

As they walk into the meeting then, they’re in a state of churn—a kind of vigilant anxiety about how their and their son’s identity will shape their experience in the meeting and their son’s experience in the school.

Meanwhile, the teacher has her own form of stereotype threat. She knows the stereotypes about her racial identity. She may be deeply committed to fairness but nonetheless worried that anything she says—even constructive criticism—could be interpreted as racism.

Both parties enter this conversation in that state of tension I am calling churn—an agitated concern about how their identities will affect how they are judged and treated (and for the African American parents, how their son’s identity will affect his experience in the school). Both parties wonder: Will I be judged and treated fairly in this meeting? Is there some way I should behave, or not behave, to ensure this? Will I be given the benefit of the doubt? Etc.

Most approaches to diversity stress the need to reduce intergroup prejudices—something I heartedly endorse. But churn is different. It affects the prejudiced and non-prejudiced alike—arising as it does not from prejudice per se, but from the identity threat that all parties in a diverse setting can feel.

Churn is a form of social anxiety tied to identity.

JAS: And you argue that churn shows up especially in important situations.

CS: Yes. In low-stakes settings—riding the subway, sitting in a crowd—it usually isn’t a factor.

But when the stakes are high, the threat of being negatively stereotyped increases. That’s when churn becomes more powerful.

Churn isn’t inherently bad. It is simply the effort to cope with identity threat in a situation. It reflects the existence of that threat—and that the person can’t yet trust the situation enough to feel safe from it.

JAS: Another way of putting it might be that churn prevents people from entering a state of flow, where they’re fully immersed in the task.

CS: Exactly. Let me describe an experiment that illustrates this.

My colleagues and I asked white and Black Stanford students to write an essay about their favorite teacher. We told them that strong essays might be published in a campus magazine. Two days later, they returned to receive feedback from a white evaluator.

When feedback was delivered in a straightforward way—or preceded by generic praise—white students trusted it. But Black students trusted it much less.

Why? Because they couldn’t be sure whether the criticism reflected the essay itself or stereotypes about their group’s abilities.

But when the evaluator said, “I’m applying high standards to these essays, and I believe you can meet those standards,” Black students’ trust changed dramatically. They trusted that feedback more than anyone else and were far more likely to revise their essays using it.

Why did that work? Because it signaled clearly: I’m not judging you through those stereotypes of your group. I believe in your ability.

That kind of communication builds trust—and trust is the antidote to churn.

JAS: So how do individuals build that trust?

CS: At the individual level, it often comes down to conveying that you see someone’s full humanity.

There’s a term in the research literature—“wise.” It originally came from an ethnography of gay communities in the 1950s. A “wise” person was someone outside the group who understood their humanity and didn’t reduce them to stereotypes.

When people feel that recognition, they begin to trust you. Often the simplest way to show that is through genuine curiosity—listening, asking questions, taking an interest in someone’s experience.

JAS: So curiosity helps create trust.

CS: Yes. When you feel churn, it can be a signal to adopt a learning mindset. Instead of defending oneself, or retreating, ask questions. Be polite. But be curious. People can sense genuine interest, and that can transform the interaction.

JAS: Some people might say that sounds like a lot of work.

CS: Remember, I’m talking about important settings in our lives—classrooms, workplaces, boardrooms, athletic teams, and so on. In those places, showing respect and interest in others can be far less work than dealing with the consequences of not doing these things.

Moreover, in these settings, I think many people really want to have ways of reducing churn and feeling more comfortable with and connected to others across identity divides. The chief mission of this book is to give people concrete ways of doing that, of feeling more comfortable in diverse settings, and better able to enjoy their great benefits.

JAS: Let’s talk about how power differences might affect churn and trust.

CS: Sure. I think it’s a lot to expect the groups that have historically been the most disempowered to be the first to trust. That’s a big ask.

And in the current divisive era—when we have leaders who don’t even bother with dog whistles in preference for openly racist messaging—it becomes even harder. For African Americans, for example, but for other groups, too, this kind of behavior and rhetoric makes it difficult to trust that their full humanity is appreciated or even recognized.

I don’t want to diminish that troubling reality in any way. But I don’t want to lose hope either. I still have to get up every day and go to work, and so does everyone else. So the question becomes: What do we do in our everyday lives?

That’s really what this book is about. It’s not about somehow directly fixing the political climate, for example. It’s about what we can do within the diverse settings and relationships in which we actually live our lives, to feel more comfortable and able to engage the riches that our differences can offer us. That’s what motivated me to write the book.

JAS: Do you experience churn? When?

CS: Of course. I’m older, and I work in a world full of young people. Sometimes the question is, “Does he even know how to use a computer?” There are moments like that.

JAS: One of the things I appreciated about the book is that it really made me reflect on my own experiences with churn. As I read it, I found myself developing a sort of taxonomy of churn in my own life. Some of it was trivial, some of it more significant—but I realized I hadn’t thought about it very consciously before. It feels like you’ve put your finger on something we all live with.

CS: I’m glad to hear that. In many ways, this is the American experiment. We’re trying to build a democracy that integrates people from many different backgrounds. That’s inherently challenging.

JAS: There’s something a little neurotic about it. From the outside, people sometimes look at the United States and think, “You people are obsessed with diversity”—and they have a point. Many Americans want a very diverse society, but at the same time we’re afraid of what that diversity means, and we must fight against feeling threatened by people who are different from us. Those two impulses are constantly in tension within the American mind. And the truth is, as a people, we seem to want two contradictory things at once. We want the comfort of sameness and we want the vitality offered by living with many different kinds of people. I think that’s part of what’s going on right now in the United States.

CS: Exactly. And that’s why I keep emphasizing the importance of focusing on the worlds we actually inhabit—the classrooms we teach in, the workplaces we’re part of, the systems of hiring and promotion we help shape.

When you talk only about the larger society, the conversation can start to feel abstract or utopian. But when you focus on concrete settings, that’s where real progress can happen. That’s where the strategies I talk about—practical forms of wisdom about trust—can actually make a difference.

The United States made a legal commitment to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy in the 1960s when we dismantled the laws that upheld segregation. When I was a child, the system was so rigid it could fairly be called apartheid. Legally, we changed that—one of our society’s greatest achievements. Now the challenge is making equality of opportunity real in everyday life.

And that happens in relationships—through the small things people do that make it easier to trust each other and work together. Some of the examples I describe in the book involve university programs that created conditions where students could genuinely trust their institutions. In those environments, diversity became a treasured feature of their experience, not a problem.

One reason I’m hopeful is that building trust may actually be more manageable than trying to directly eliminate prejudice. Changing someone’s beliefs is incredibly hard. As a social psychologist, I know how difficult that is.

But trust is different. Many of us have done that in our lives. We have fairly good intuitions about how to do it and what’s required. And then, as the trust between us builds, our attitudes and beliefs begin to change naturally. Prejudices start to loosen their grip when there’s a genuine human connection.

JAS: It also seems like there’s an ask here—especially for white people—to try to be trustworthy.

CS: Right. And to understand that the issue isn’t all personal—it’s largely historical. The question is: Can I trust you? Do I carry the memory of the past into this interaction, or can I begin to set it aside with you?

When trust starts to form, the door opens to a very different kind of relationship.

JAS: Whistling Vivaldi spurred years of research about stereotype threat. What would you like to see researchers study about churn?

CS: I’d love to see research testing whether a focus on building trust is an effective way of reducing prejudice. I’ve suspected this for a long time now. It could be the focus of a whole research program.

My intuition is that trust-building has been an under-appreciated factor in bridging identity differences. I heard colleagues say, “I explained everything clearly to my students—why don’t they listen?” But if the students are wary about trusting you, information alone won’t help. If we really talk to them and listen, we may see, as in the experiment I mentioned above, that they are in a situation that makes trust difficult. Before they can fully absorb the information we’re trying to pass on, they need some evidence or signal that their full humanity is appreciated—that they’re not being reduced to those stereotypes that they know exist, and that they know you know.

Once a foundation of trust is there, the road to learning becomes easier. My hope is that this book encourages researchers, and the rest of us as well, to explore that road more seriously in the settings where we live our lives.

A new survey from the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM)–which represents over 300,000 people working in the human resources field worldwide–finds that incivility in the workplace continues to be a major challenge, particularly as generational and political differences come to the forefront for employees.

The top contributor to workplace incivility in the SHRM index? The answer might surprise you: political differences. In fact, 41 percent of workers said they experienced or witnessed incivility related to politics.

“The workplace is kind of a hub for what’s happening out in civil society,” says Sara Rahim, who serves as a social impact strategist and program manager at SHRM. “So if we’re seeing greater polarization just in the state of America right now, naturally that’s going to translate into the workplace. She also cites generational differences as a point of tension.

Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University, who has spent years working on how organizations can improve employee culture, argues that promoting civility is often overlooked as an organizational goal.

“We pay a lot of attention to productivity,” she says, “but we often overlook accountability for creating a workplace where people can thrive.”

Could America’s colleges and universities train the next generation of workers to be a little more civil with each other? With such a large number of Americans now pursuing higher education, these institutions can play a major role in preparing students to navigate differences in the workplace.

Indeed, that’s the goal of the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, released last year by the Greater Good Science Center. The playbook features science-backed strategies that administrators, academics, and students can use to build their skills for bridging differences.

One way to navigate personal differences is to explain how you came to a belief or worldview and explore how others did the same–rather than simply debating them. By questioning your assumptions about other people, you can help create a less threatening environment. Here’s an overview of key practices that can be cultivated in school and imported to the workplace.

Focus on personal stories

Mark Urista is a communications professor at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon. The campus sits between two politically polarized counties. The famously liberal Portland, Oregon, is around 70 miles away. Benton County has voted for the Democratic candidate for president every year going back to 1988. On the other side is Linn County, which Urista describes as “very blue collar, very conservative,” adding that the last time it voted for a Democrat for president was in 1976.

“So if you think about some of the major tensions right now in this country I kind of feel privileged to be at a college that serves as a laboratory for how to bridge them,” Urista says.

He teaches speech communications classes at the college, largely focused on public speaking and argumentation. In order to help students broach thorny topics, he encourages them from the beginning of the course to humanize themselves.

“The very first day, I get students to start engaging in self-disclosure so they can reveal a little bit about themselves, make themselves vulnerable, understand who their classmates are,” he explains.

The students are then assigned to give a speech advocating for the class to take action on an issue they care personally about. The rest of the class is expected to offer constructive feedback and let the speaker know whether they were persuaded or not.

As one example of how this program worked in action, Urista says that in the spring a female student decided to deliver a speech about how men are struggling in society.

“I love my friends. Back in high school, I had a close group I laughed with, vented to, made the kind of memories that last forever,” she said in that speech. “But when we all moved to college, something shifted. The girls in the group stayed in touch, but the guys, slowly, just… disappeared. Not out of malice or drama. They just stopped reaching out, stopped responding, and stopped showing up.”

She went on to call attention to the epidemic of loneliness among men. She asked her classmates to “be vulnerable,” to “check in on their friends, plan a hangout, start an awkward conversation,” do any small thing they can to help reduce the loneliness among American men.

“I’m sure you can imagine, this created quite the controversy,” Urista says. “You get a lot of students saying, ‘Well, males, they’re part of the historically privileged group, you know? Why should we be making an effort to support them when we see all these other groups that are struggling, right?’”

As the class civilly debated the issue, eventually some men in the class spoke up and said they appreciated the student for giving her speech.

“Sharing that comment openly in the classroom helped shape a climate that allowed us to have a more productive discourse,” Urista says.

Urista’s work is backed by social psychology research around the world that has found benefits to opening up to one another.

For instance, in Europe, the Roma people have long been marginalized, with many Europeans holding contemptuous attitudes toward them. But using an exercise called 36 Questions–where you ask a conversation partner a series of questions to get to know more about them as individuals–Hungarian students who held negative attitudes towards Roma people became more positive towards them after just an hour of conversation with a Roma student.

Similar exercises elsewhere have produced similar outcomes.

One 2015 study found that when college students were assigned to strike up friendships with gay and lesbian people, they grew closer to those people, showing greater closeness and improved attitudes towards gay and lesbian people more broadly.

A separate study from 2008 found that cross-group friendships helped reduce cortisol levels–that’s the hormone tied to stress–between whites and Latinos.

Understand values

Another way to promote civility in the workplace is to encourage employees and employers alike to understand the values of others. After all, cultural and social differences mean that we don’t all even necessarily agree on what constitutes incivility–one person’s habit may be another’s faux pax.

When we discuss our differences, we often focus on positions or beliefs without thinking about the underlying values we ourselves and other people hold. This makes it more difficult to understand where other people are coming from and relating to their experiences and beliefs.

This is a practice that Justin Turpan honed as a student at Tulane University. Working with the bridging-differences organization BridgeUSA, he helped organize events where students discussed contentious social and political topics. Focusing on understanding the other person’s values helped make these conversations more meaningful and less combative.

During one discussion on gun control, for instance, a supporter of gun rights and a backer of gun control were able to both acknowledge that they valued the same thing: safe and secure communities. Acknowledging these values helped them have more constructive conversations.

To make this practice work, it’s important to avoid our conversations devolving simply into debates.

“Debate was not designed to create a group that works well together,” explains Heidi Brooks. “It was designed to help us be more rigorous with thought and to be able to have the issues on the table.”

She imagines her classrooms as miniature societies.

“They’re micro-socities designed for learning,” she says. “And so these micro societies need some practices…listening and curiosity. And that’s not the same thing as judgement, and as critique and analysis.”

But understanding someone else’s values can also help you be more persuasive when you are making an argument. One study published in 2015 found that when arguments were framed in ways that appealed to someone else’s values, they were more convincing. For instance, framing an argument for gay marriage in terms of values that conservatives hold dear–like loyalty or patriotism–was more persuasive than making those arguments rooted in liberal-leaning values like fairness.

Find shared identities

We often find ourselves at loggerheads with our colleagues on campus or in the workplace because we view ourselves as coming from distinct groups. We think to ourselves, that other person is nothing like me.

But when we look closer, we can often find that we share more in common than we think.

GGSC Senior Fellow Allison Briscoe-Smith put this skill into practice by starting a series of interfaith events at the Wright Institute, where students and other civic leaders across the spectrum of faith and spiritual beliefs convened to discuss their distinct practices and where their traditions overlapped.

The series of events helped people across campus connect across religious differences when they saw themselves not just as followers of different religions but collectively as people of faith.

One 2001 study found that building a common identity can go a long way in healing even racial differences.

Researchers had interviewers post up outside of a college football game to ask participants to answer questions about their food preferences. They found that Black interviewers netted interviews more often when they wore paraphernalia associated with the same university as the interviewee. This helps demonstrate how the shared identity of supporting the same university helped bridge the racial divide.

What we can all do

The SHRM Index isn’t all bad news. In a section where employees were asked about how their managers are addressing workplace incivility, 51% said that their manager “actively helps to guide employees through acts of incivility” and 54% said that their manager “actively encourages employees to address incivility through talking and having conversations,” just as Urista does with his class.

The survey finds that employees who described their work team as civil were much more likely to report positive team cohesion. For instance, 86% of workers who said that they belonged to a civil team said their “team members celebrate one another’s successes,” as opposed to just 47% of those who belong to uncivil teams.

But challenges remain, especially as Generation Z–whose school life and work life was intimately shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning–enters the workplace and encounters the norms that older workers have.

Rahim says that it’s important for people to ask themselves how they can contribute to building a culture of civility: “How am I showing up in the workplace? How am I building psychological safety for my team? How am I creating a space in which feedback is welcome?”

Brooks agrees.

“We all have a responsibility to bring some positive energy… into work spaces,” she says. “It’s part of what it means to be a citizen.”

However, the reality is that there are two facets of a truly resilient workplace. Employee resilience, yes. But organizational resilience is even more important.

When we speak of employee resilience, the focus is on the individual—their personal resources, knowledge, and skills that enable them to adapt and recover from challenges. In contrast, organizational resilience operates at the macro level, reflecting the collective strength of the organization’s planning, systems, and processes.

The two are deeply interdependent: resilient organizations foster resilient employees, and resilient employees, in turn, reinforce organizational resilience. Yet too often, employees are expected to shoulder the full burden of resilience in workplaces where organizational resilience is lacking. In fact an Accenture study of 1600 companies across 18 industries suggests that only an estimated 15% of companies are highly resilient, implying that for many companies organizational resilience is more aspirational than operational.

In this article, I’m going to focus on organizational resilience: what it is and how we can increase it. A definition of resilience that I really appreciate comes from a 2012 Argonne National Laboratory report: “the ability of an entity…to anticipate, resist, absorb, respond to and adapt to and recover from a disturbance.” A disturbance can also be thought of as a stressor or a challenge. Common organizational stressors can include shifts in the industry, loss of revenue or donors, reputational risks, loss of talent, and so much more.

What I like about this definition is it recognizes all facets of resilience: anticipatory, preparatory, response, and recovery. All of which are necessary to build a truly resilient organization.

Anticipatory resilience

Anticipatory resilience involves building in regular opportunities at the leadership level to discuss organizational risks that could affect “business as usual.” This can be done by keeping a pulse on your industry, looking at trends among competitors, and understanding volatility in the levers that allow your business to function, such as government policies, regulations, community shifts, and markets.

Unfortunately, an over-focus on the bottom line keeps leaders with their gaze downward, focused on patterns in spreadsheets and reports, instead of looking up and outwards strategically to see what may be on the horizon. A 2024 PWC pulse survey found that only 11% of Chief Risk Officers and Risk Leaders, whose jobs are to assess organizational risks, spend more time on proactive or anticipatory risks than reactive risks.

Anticipatory resilience activities should be ingrained in the way organizations operate and take place in more formalized settings, like leadership meetings, at a regular cadence. During such meetings leaders can ask the following questions:

• What emerging trends or disruptions could challenge our mission, revenue, or operations in the next 12-36 months?
• If our largest funder or client disappeared tomorrow, what would we do in the next 14, 30, 60, 90+ days?
• What assumptions about our operating environment are we relying on that may no longer hold?

The answers to these questions help to build an action plan for strengthening preparatory resilience. Building anticipatory resilience is not an exercise in doom and gloom, but a disciplined practice of preparing your organization to navigate uncertainty with confidence and clarity.

Preparatory resilience

There are many ways organizations can strengthen preparatory resilience, all linked to the organization’s policies, systems, procedures and management, that strengthen operational functioning and contingency preparedness. Preparatory resilience decreases the likelihood that a challenge occurs or reduces the distress it causes when it does. I’ll use two preparatory aspects of organizational resilience as an illustration: employee well-being and financial resilience.

1. Employee well-being

Organizations often overlook or simply omit employee well-being, which is largely a function of the macro conditions of the organization. At my organization, Yes Well-being Works, we define employee well-being along four aspects: Basic Needs, Psychological Safety, Belonging, and Esteem.

Collectively, fostering employee well-being entails the implementation of operational and management frameworks that intentionally support how employees experience their work which affects their psychological functioning in the workplace.

The reality is that when most organizations enter a crisis many employees are feeling burned out, undervalued, fearful to speak up, and disconnected from the work and their colleagues–they’re in distress, which weakens resilience.

I once gave a keynote to a sub-section of the U.S. Department of Defense on employee well-being. A soldier in the audience raised his hand and said, “But we can’t do this on the field in the middle of warfare.” I responded, “You’re absolutely right! It has to be cultivated before the crisis occurs.”

Organizations interested in building a strong workplace culture rooted in employee well-being can start with assessing the following:

• Are employees empowered with all of the resources they need to do their jobs?
• Do employees speak up when they see a problem, have a question, or need support?
• Are our managers incentivized to use employee-centric strategies, tailoring their approach to each one?
• How do we show employees they are valued in our organization?
• Is work designed in a way that employees constantly have to manage high workloads?

Employee well-being pays dividends during times of stability, by increasing employee productivity. But it’s also key to preparatory resilience in numerous ways.

From our research with clients we have found that when employee well-being is high, employees are more likely to stay, which reduces the likelihood of talent disruptions. When their well-being is high, employees report lower levels of stress during challenging moments, suggesting they are able to be more resilient, staving off signs of distress.

2. Financial resilience

This involves managing cashflow and debt, diversifying revenue, forecasting, and more—processes that can often go overlooked when operating on thin margins. One of the biggest consequences of organizational financial volatility is job loss for employees. Ideally the goal is to avoid such volatility at all, but recall resilience can also involve reducing the impact on employees.

I’ll share an example of the latter from my work with a client. Several years ago a mid-size company reached out to me to support them in designing a minimally traumatic “reduction in force,” which is sometimes called a RIF in the human resources space. They lost a large source of revenue and as a result had no choice but to layoff a sizable portion of their staff.

Together, we designed a process that provided the affected employees with five months’ notice, internal support, outplacement services, severance, and extended benefits. The employees who were not laid off also received support to cope and manage with a common trend in layoffs—survivor’s guilt, which involves feeling guilty because you were able to keep your job. The company was unable to avoid the financial shock, but through financial pipelining and planning efforts they were able to mitigate the impact on employees.

The challenge with the preparatory aspects of resilience—like employee well-being or financial resilience, which ultimately protect employees—is that in an at-will work environment, employers are not incentivized to invest in this form of resilience. Those that do, do so of their own volition and internal values. There are no national laws in the U.S. (as there are in Europe) that says employers have to consider the psychological and financial well-being of employees (although there is momentum gaining for the Workplace Psychological Safety Act). Thus, if preparatory resilience isn’t hard baked into the organization’s values, it often goes overlooked.

Responsive resilience

Responsive resilience describes how organizations respond once a challenge is already underway. When anticipatory and preparatory efforts fall short—as they inevitably sometimes do—the question becomes: What happens next?

In many organizations, the reflex is panic, cascading from the top down. Panic is a form of distress that constrains the very cognitive capacities—discernment, judgment, and clear decision-making—that are most needed during crisis. At the organizational level, panic often shows up in predictable ways:

• Leadership defensiveness: Organizational leaders lashing out at employees or assigning blame without fully understanding the complexity of the issue from an operational perspective.
• Threat-induced effort escalation: Employees encouraged to work harder, faster, or longer, without clarity about what increased effort will actually produce—or whether it meaningfully addresses the crisis.
• Heightened organizational amygdala response: On both organizational and individual levels, experiencing distress over an extended period can increase the excitability of the amygdala—the part of the brain responsible for discerning threats—to the point that everything feels urgent or dangerous.

What’s the alternative to panic? It’s critical for leaders to ask: Are we responding from a place of fear and panic or from strategic discernment? Here are the strategies required for a resilient response:

• Proactive communication: In crisis, many organizations stop or significantly limit communication with employees. This is counterproductive. In the absence of clear information, employees are likely to construct their own narratives about what is happening, often far worse than reality. Regular, transparent communication, even when there is “nothing new to share,” helps to stabilize the crisis and temper widespread panic.
• Emotionally regulated leadership: Organizational crises are frequently exacerbated by leaders who lack the emotional intelligence skills of self-awareness (understanding how they are feeling) and self-management (choosing how to respond to those emotions). Emotionally dysregulated leaders can add fuel to an already volatile situation. Resilient leadership requires the ability to self-regulate or when that is not possible, to be surrounded by trusted others who can speak truth to power.
• Clarity of direction (over volume of effort): When a problem arises, a common fight-or-flight response is to throw more effort at it—more hours, activity, output—without pausing to assess whether that effort will actually resolve or meaningfully reduce the problem. Resilient organizations slow down to clarify direction and align effort with the outcome that will provide impact.

Recovery

The final, and most overlooked, component of resilient organizations is the recovery period.

Does this sound familiar? Your organization responds to a challenge, overcomes it, and immediately rolls into the next one. When the dust settles, the expectation is business as usual.

I work with many clients who recount that their organizations rarely pause to slow down, reflect, or recover. It’s go, go, go—all of the time.

There are two primary contributors to employee burnout. The most commonly understood is excessive workload, without adequate support. A lesser recognized contributor is the expectation that employees endure prolonged periods of organizational stress while continuing to produce as though nothing has happened. From a biological and neurological perspective, this is simply unsustainable.

When an organization moves through a crisis or major challenge, it is imperative to pause and recover—for the well-being of employees and the long-term sustainability of the organization.

Recovery is not a luxury; it is a necessary phase of resilience. Some ways organizations can support recovery include:

• Compensatory time-off: Actively offering and encouraging time off after periods of intensified effort—time that does not draw from limited vacation or sick leave banks.
• Leadership postmortems: Creating space to examine what happened, how the organization responded, and what was learned, without blame.
• Intentional stress reduction: Temporarily reducing demands to allow employees’ nervous systems to recover. What can be deprioritized? What can wait?
• Organizational retreats: Investing in connection, re-energizing, and realignment after sustained periods of strain.

If your organization is only investing in building employee resilience, without focusing on organizational resilience, it is asking people to carry what organizational systems should be designed to hold. Organizational resilience is not measured by endurance. It is reflected in the strength of the structures, decisions, and leadership behaviors that reduce how often crises arise—and how destabilizing they become when they do.

Since then, having a work buddy has always been important to me, which is why I’ve cultivated friendships throughout my work career. Those special friends have helped me maintain my focus and commitment to the job and increase my sense of safety and belonging. When things got rough, I had someone to confide in, get perspective from, and count on in a pinch.

Researchers who study organizational health and friendships agree that having a work buddy is a plus, helping employees and their workplaces function better.

“Everything you do at work will be better when people get along well with each other than when they don’t,” says organizational scholar Stephen Friedman, of York University, Canada. “The things that are difficult become just a little bit easier.”

Why work friends matter

Workplace buddies can function like other friendships, helping us feel emotionally supported when we need it. They can provide instrumental assistance, too, like offering to cover our shift if we’re out sick or taking on some tasks when we’re overwhelmed. And, since we spend so much of our lives at work, having friends on the job can help stave off loneliness, contributing to our health and well-being over time.

Moreover, having a work buddy can also improve workplace culture and organizational health. As Gallup Poll researcher Tom Roth wrote in his book, Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without, people who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to have high worker engagement. That higher engagement, in turn, has been tied to all kinds of benefits to the workplace, including less absenteeism, fewer safety issues, longer retention, productivity, and the ability to manage challenges on the job.

That makes friendships on the job a win-win for companies and their employees.

“There’s some really robust research that friendships at work improve workplace outcomes in ways that friendships outside of work might not, like productivity, performance, likelihood of retention, engagement, cohesion on teams,” says Marisa G. Franco, professor at the University of Maryland and author of the bestselling book Platonic.

Franco points to research by BetterUp showing how much companies save when people are connected and feel like they belong. People want to work with someone who’s competent, but also friendly and warm, she says.

“It definitely benefits a workplace a lot if they can be intentional about helping people form connections,” she says. “Their employees will perform better, their teams will be more cohesive, and they’re more likely to retain people.”

The challenges of friends at work

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to make those connections. In fact, Gallup recently reported that one in five employees worldwide feel lonely at work, and fewer people say they have a close friend on the job, especially among younger adults.

One potential factor making it harder to connect is proximity. More of us work remotely now (in part, a consequence of the COVID pandemic), which can decrease opportunities for casual contact between colleagues. If we aren’t bumping into each other at the water cooler or grabbing a spontaneous lunch, it might be harder to jumpstart a friendship.

Workers tend to change jobs more frequently than they used to, too, which can hurt or end a work friendship. People with temporary employment are lonelier, perhaps because they don’t have as much time to develop meaningful friendships.

But those factors don’t tell the whole story. Our own reluctance to prioritize social connection at work can also take a toll. We may worry that it’s not appropriate to make friends at work. Maybe we’ll be dinged by our employer, or maybe our friendship could cause conflicts or affect our productivity.

These concerns are not trivial. Indeed, they are part of the reason not all researchers say work friendships are beneficial. Sometimes, maintaining close relationships takes time and effort, which could mean less of each for reaching organizational goals.

Conflicts between friends at work might also spill out into the workplace. For example, what if you are promoted over your friend—or vice versa? Could that create bad feelings between you and affect your work and your friendship? Quite possibly, says Franco.

“It’s hard for friendship to happen in a hierarchy, because if we’re on the bottom of that hierarchy, we’re not sharing certain things about ourselves; we’re afraid of being judged,” says Franco. “If we’re at the top of the hierarchy, we may question whether that person can bring as much to our lives as we can bring to theirs; so, hierarchy can be really antithetical to friendship.”

On the other hand, she adds, it doesn’t have to be a deal-breaker.

“Don’t assume because of the title change that there’s going to be a change in your dynamic,” she says. You can always talk things through and decide how to be in relationship to these changes, potentially making it work, she adds.

It may be hard to be our true selves at work all of the time, though, she adds. A “guise of professionalism” may mean being less real or vulnerable, impinging on connection. Plus, self-disclosure can make people uncomfortable, perhaps especially in a competitive work environment.

“People [might be] afraid to share something with a colleague that can be used against them in the workplace and affect their professional success,” says Franco.

Workplace friendships can sometimes become insular, as we tend to form bonds with people who are like us in some way—for example, of the same race, ethnicity, generation, gender, etc. If work groups don’t feel welcome to everyone, it could make people feel like they don’t belong. That could create problems, says Franco.

Do benefits outweigh the problems?

Still, these potential issues shouldn’t stop us from having friends at work, says Franco. There are ways to connect across differences, manage emotional conflicts, and do our jobs well while having friends—to everyone’s benefit.

“There’s a misconception sometimes that when someone’s focused on friendships, they’re not focused on their tasks. But honestly, we’re not made to be completely focused on tasks for eight hours a day,” she says. “It’s kind of impossible, and [social] breaks actually make you perform better.”

Friedman agrees, saying that many reasons people give for forgoing work friendships are misguided.

“There is no relationship with another human, friendly or otherwise, that doesn’t contain risks,” he says. “It’s the same thing with workplaces. Like anything in life, [work] friendships have risks but can bring great benefit when they work out.”

Besides, he adds, when so many of us spend a lot of time at work, it’s important to cultivate positive social connection there in order to thrive.

“The idea that I’m going to go to work and cut myself off from having some friends is unreasonable and not a good idea,” he says. “Especially if you’re a working professional, you’re not going to spend nearly as much time at home as you will with the people you work with. So, it makes sense to have friendships at work.”

How to foster friends on the job

Of course, no one can insist you make a friend at work. But if we want our workplaces to be a caring, compassionate, productive place to be, fostering positive connection on the job may help.

To do that, Friedman suggests taking the initiative and making an effort to put yourself out there. If you can become more approachable and friendly, and “get your face out of your phone and notice the people around you,” it will improve your chances, he says.

Even in cases where companies have a lot of remote workers and less in-person contact, you can still build intimacy online, says Friedman. You just need to get a bit more creative.

“If you and I sat here for an hour and grabbed a coffee and shot the shit about life, I think we’d end up having some fondness and a connection,” he says.

Franco, who often works with companies to help build a sense of belonging, suggests making friends across differences by assuming people like you (more than you might think) and keeping an open mind. She says:

There’s this term in the research called “habitual open-mindedness” where you remind yourself that, just from looking at someone, you don’t know anything about them, and you can still give them space to unfold in their identity in front of you. That allows you to approach people that might not look like the typical friends that you have.

Organizations have a role to play in fostering workplace friendships and belonging, too, says Franco. She points to research suggesting that leaving it up to individuals alone is not enough to stave off loneliness, and that leaders can foster positive connection at work in several ways. For example, they can start work meetings with chit-chat, where people can check in about what’s going on in their lives. Or they can divide meetings into one part business, one part communal lunch, to encourage socializing.

“When managers make an effort to create opportunities for connection, there’s a 31% difference in how connected people feel in that place,” she says. “So, it does really make a difference if management takes it upon themselves.”

Buddy programs, kindness campaigns, or happy hours can also foster more sense of connection at work, she adds. Similarly, making sure people are recognized for who they are, not just what they do—by celebrating birthdays or offering to help when employees go through hardship, for example—can build a culture of care and inclusivity. Being intentional is key.

“If you want to create connections across difference, you often have to make [activities] more structured,” she says. “Let’s say, we do board game night, and then people are on a team with people that are of a different group than them. That’s really important for connecting.”

While Friedman is less sure about companies taking the lead in encouraging work friendships, he does think it’s important at least not to thwart people’s natural inclinations to affiliate with one another.

“We ought to build community . . . [to] have a group of people who are going to support us or advocate for us in our department, or stand by our side when we need support and encourage psychological safety in our meetings,” he says.

Both Friedman and Franco say people don’t necessarily need to be best friends at work, though. Just having a nice, friendly connection may be good enough.

“If you’re someone that’s really afraid of the risk of getting too close, then I would suggest not being black or white about it. Perhaps we can be friends, but just at a certain level of closeness,” says Franco.

Friedman warns that being too close to a coworker might cloud our judgment, just as being too distant from them can. It’s best to find a happy medium, he says—someone you’re friendly with and maybe hang out with a little after work, rather than someone who’s your bosom buddy. In that way, you can reap the benefits of having a work friend and, hopefully, avoid any pitfalls.

“When we’re friendly with people at work, we collaborate better, we solve problems better, we’re more forgiving of each other, we’re kinder to each other,” he says. “I think we need lots more of that everywhere.”

They seem rushed. A few questions, a quick exam, a glance at the clock and then a rapid-fire plan with little time for discussion – and you leave feeling unheard, hurried and frustrated.

And what if you’re hospitalized? You may face a similar experience.

More than half of U.S. adults say their doctors have ignored or dismissed their concerns, or not taken their symptoms seriously, according to a December 2022 national poll.

It’s easy to blame the doctor. But the reality is, most doctors would like to sit down and have an in-depth conversation with patients and their families. Instead, your unpleasant visit may be the result of productivity pressures and administrative burdens, often shaped by health care systems, payment models and policy decisions that influence how care is delivered.

Patients are increasingly experiencing what’s known as administrative harm – those unintended but very real consequences arising from administrative decisions, made far upstream, that directly influence how doctors practice. Ultimately, these types of interactions affect the care patients receive and their outcomes.

As a doctor and researcher who specializes in business and health care delivery, I’ve studied how organizational decisions have ripple effects, shaping patients’ relationships with their doctor and the quality of care they receive. Patients may be unaware of these upstream administrative decisions, but they affect everything from time allotted for an appointment to the number of patients the doctor has to see and whether a visit is covered by insurance.

A look behind the scenes

Increasingly, health care organizations and physician groups face intense financial pressures. Many doctors can no longer sustain their private practice due to declining reimbursements, rising costs and increasing administrative burdens; instead, they’ve become employees of larger health care systems. In some cases, their practices have been acquired by private equity groups.

With this shift, doctors have less control over their workloads and the time they get with their patients. More and more, payment models fail to cover the true cost of care. The default solution is often for doctors to see more patients with less time for each, and to squeeze in additional work after hours.

But that approach comes with costs, among them the time needed to build meaningful connections with patients. That negative, impolite tone you may have experienced might be because the doctor has many patients waiting and a full evening ahead just to catch up on writing visit notes, reviewing medical records and completing other required documentation. During the work day, they’re often fielding over 100 messages and alerts daily, including referrals and coordinating care, all while trying to focus on the patient in front of them.

But the consequences go beyond their bedside manner. Research makes clear that doctors’ performance and the quality of care patients receive are affected by their workload. A similar pattern is true with nurses: Their higher workloads are associated with higher death rates among hospitalized patients.

Suppose you’re hospitalized for pneumonia, but because your doctor is caring for too many patients, your hospital stay is longer, which increases your risks of infection, muscle loss and other adverse outcomes. In the doctor’s office, a rushed visit can mean delayed or missed diagnoses and even prescription errors. 

About half of U.S. doctors report feelings of burnout, and about one-third are considering leaving their current job, with 60% of those likely to leave clinical practice entirely. 

Long work hours also brings higher risks of heart disease, stroke and other health problems for health care professionals. In the U.S., 40% of doctors work 55 hours per week or more, compared with less than 10% of workers in other fields.

A better way

The administrative harms stemming from upstream decisions are not inevitable. In large part, they are preventable. Overhauling the health care system may seem daunting, but patients and doctors are not powerless.

Patients and their families must advocate for themselves. Ask questions and be direct. This phrase: “I am still really worried about … ” will quickly get your doctor’s attention. If your visit seems rushed, share it with patient representatives or through patient surveys. These insights help administrative leaders recognize when systems are falling short.

Doctors and care teams should not normalize unsustainable work conditions. Health systems need structured, transparent mechanisms that make it easy and safe for doctors and care team members to report when workloads, staffing or administrative decisions may be harming patients.

Even more powerful is when patients and their doctors speak up together. Collective voices can drive meaningful change – such as lobbying for adequate time, staffing or policies to support high-quality, patient-centered care. It is also important for administrative leaders and policymakers to take responsibility for how decisions affect both patients and the care team.

More research is needed to define what safe, realistic work standards look like and how care teams should be structured. For example, when does it make sense for a doctor to provide care, or a physician assistant or nurse practitioner? At the same time, health systems have the opportunity to think creatively about new care models that address clinician shortages.

But research shows that the medical profession can’t afford to wait for perfect data to act on what’s already clear. Overworked and understaffed teams hurt both patients and their doctors.

Yet when doctors do have enough time, the interactions feel different – warmer, more patient and more attentive. And as research shows, patient outcomes improve as well.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

But even when things seem inescapable or hard, it can be helpful to remember that we have personal agency in how we respond. Whether it’s managing our emotions better, improving our relationships, stretching ourselves in new directions, or envisioning a better future for all, we fare better when we don’t give into despair and take constructive, positive action. The science suggests taking care of ourselves can allow us to better face our collective challenges.

We hope this year’s selection of books will inspire you as they have us to become the change you want to see in the world.

Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want, by Marc Brackett

What is your relationship with your emotions on a daily basis?

Some of us might deny that we’re influenced by our feelings at all. Others might try to leave our emotions behind when we move into certain environments, like work or school. We may believe that particular emotions are “bad” or “negative”—and so aim to avoid them as much as possible.

But emotions are around whether we like them to be or not, explains Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in his new book, Dealing with Feeling. Our skill in dealing with them will influence how much success and well-being we can attain.

His book explains how we can work with our emotions so they don’t get in the way of us achieving our goals or living the life we want. This involves working with our beliefs about emotions, the emotions themselves, how they show up in our bodies, and the thoughts that come with them—and reaching out to others for support. 

Emotion regulation is a skill that we should start learning in childhood, Brackett argues, but many of us must revisit it as adults because no one really showed or taught us how to practice it. 

How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty by Elizabeth Weingarten

At the start of her new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions, behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Weingarten rejects the now-conventional wisdom that everyone should “embrace uncertainty.” While that approach might help some people in many circumstances, Weingarten suggests that humans “are programmed to try to dispel doubt and uncertainty”—and so telling people to do the opposite can actually lead to more anxiety, rumination, and paralysis.

Her alternative? To embrace not the uncertainty but rather the questions we confront throughout our lives. Her inspiration is the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in his 1929 book Letters to a Young Poet urges his interlocutor Franz Kappus “to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, liked locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language.”

Some questions can be answered easily, but some take a longer time—and some must be continually asked. The key is to construct the right questions and understand their place in your life.

For example, Weingarten describes starting out by wrestling with the question of whether she should stay in her relationship. And at a certain point, she realized that “Should I get a divorce?” was simply too binary. A good question needs to break out of binaries, and so she pivots to “What would have to change in order for us to stay together?” This question allowed her to have the right conversations with her husband, and so they were able to answer it together.

Weingarten calls this way of life “a method of truth-seeking” that is “characterized by patience and openness to new ideas.” Through a combination of scientific research and journalistic profiles of people who exemplify these qualities, Weingarten walks her readers through the many ways we can construct good questions and then carry them as we navigate ourselves and the world around us.

Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life, by Shigehiro Oishi

Many of us think happiness or meaning are the keys to a good life. But, in Shigehiro Oishi’s book Life in Three Dimensions, we learn about a third path: “psychological richness”—something that comes with seeking novel, complex, challenging experiences that alter your perspective.

“Psychological richness is really capturing change rather than stability, newness rather than familiarity,” says Oishi. “In that sense . . . it’s quite distinct from happiness and meaning.”

His research finds that people seeking psychologically rich experiences are more curious, knowledgeable, and wise. They’re also more apt to connect across differences, willing to move out of their comfort zone to explore and innovate.

His book tells stories of people like Oliver Sacks and Steve Jobs who famously lived psychologically rich lives. He also features everyday people who’ve pursued novelty and personal challenge, showing how they benefitted from stretching themselves in new ways.

Anyone can seek psychological richness, says Oishi, whether that’s trying out a new cuisine, deepening conversations, or learning a new language. Even those with happy, meaningful lives could experiment with adding more richness to help fill whatever may be missing from their lives.

Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change, by Olga Khazan

Our personalities may seem fixed and unchanging. But, as Olga Khazan writes in Me but Better, research and personal experience suggest otherwise. Your personality can change and often does, through aging, experience, or deliberate effort (like therapy). That means you can become a different version of yourself.

Why change one’s personality? For Khazan, it was about being happier and healthier, while taking on new challenges in life. A self-proclaimed introvert and neurotic, she was sobered by research suggesting introversion makes you less happy, while neuroticism (a tendency toward worrying and emotional instability) puts you at greater risk for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and dementia. Her desire to change led her to experiment with a “fake it ‘til you make it” approach, leaning into experiences aimed at increasing extraversion and decreasing neuroticism.

While we may not share Khazan’s goals, her book still offers a provocative, entertaining primer on the research behind personality change, as well as a wealth of tools for nudging yourself in different ways. Following her lead might not bring you a whole new personality, but even small changes could make a difference.

“A new and slightly improved personality, I learned, can make you happier, more successful, and more fulfilled,” writes Khazan. “It can help you enjoy your life, rather than just endure it.”

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, by Kurt Gray

Many of us are outraged today. We dig in our heels on abortion, vaccines, immigration, or gender—convinced we are morally right and the other side is dangerously wrong. We talk past each other, certain we’re protecting what matters most. And the other side feels exactly the same.

In Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, psychologist Kurt Gray argues that our outrage doesn’t stem from fundamentally opposing values, but from a shared moral instinct: the drive to prevent harm.

Drawing on two decades of research and his work leading the Deepest Beliefs Lab at UNC Chapel Hill, Gray [now a professor at Ohio State University] shows that beneath every heated debate lies the same question: Who is being harmed? We aren’t divided because we disagree about morality’s essence; we’re divided because we disagree about who the victim is.

Gray challenges the idea that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. Instead, he argues that our “harm-based” moral minds—shaped over millennia of threat detection—interpret modern dangers differently. These competing perceptions fuel today’s polarized outrage.

Still, Outraged is ultimately hopeful. Gray offers tools like sharing personal harm stories and his C-I-V method (connect, invite, validate) to bridge divides.

Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, by Beverly Daniel Tatum

American colleges are in crisis. Campus protests, financial worries, and White House demands are pressuring higher education leaders like never before. 

Peril and Promise speaks to these pressures. A psychologist by training, Beverly Daniel Tatum has worn many hats in higher education, from professor to trustee to interim president of Mount Holyoke College and president emeritus at Spelman College—a broad perspective that makes her uniquely poised to tackle the issues colleges are facing.

In 2012, for example, Spelman faced a dilemma—its NCAA program was draining resources, and the facilities were floundering. In response, Tatum launched a wellness initiative, replacing costly NCAA athletics with a campus-wide health and fitness program, boosting fitness class participation from 278 to over 1,300 students.  

It’s this out-of-the-box thinking that reveals Tatum’s original thinking and care for the students under her wing. Her vision for higher education—prioritizing holistic health, equity, and belonging—is what our leaders need, moving forward.

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, by Nicholas Carr

Many psychologists have sounded the alarm over social media and its damaging effects on our relationships and mental health. As Nicholas Carr chronicles in Superbloom, this is not some new phenomenon, but part of a historic trend. Many past improvements in communications technologies, like social media, have not lived up to their hype of creating a more connected world.

That’s because increased ease of communication is not necessarily better, he writes. For example, the personal information dumps we get from social media posts tend to make us like people less, not more. People tend to be less filtered when chatting online than in person, too, so that conversations can quickly become toxic and divisive.

Why do we engage anyway? We’re wired to seek out new information and confirm our place in the social hierarchy, says Carr, and these instincts are easily exploited by media companies.

“The algorithms read what triggers our attention, what grabs our attention, and, by proxy, seems to be what we desire, and then give us a lot of it,” says Carr.

By explaining how we’re being duped to tune in, Carr hopes to inspire people to use social media more wisely, prioritize in-person interactions, and exert more agency over how technology is regulated.

Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, by Alison Wood Brooks

As humans, we’re talking to each other constantly. With all that practice, we must be pretty good at it—right? 

Not exactly. As a professor at Harvard Business School, Alison Wood Brooks teaches people how to have better conversations. In Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, she debunks many of the widespread myths and assumptions that cause us to have less-than-stellar interactions. It turns out that many of our intuitions about how to talk to each other are off the mark, creating awkwardness, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities for connection. 

For example, it helps to prepare conversation topics in advance, even if we resist doing so, and people are more open to talking about deep or “negative” topics than we think. Switching topics frequently tends to make conversations better, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever ask too many questions. Almost no conversation will end when you or the other person wants it to—and that’s OK. 

As Brooks explains, conversation is a skill, and research findings can help us become better at it so our conversations are more enjoyable, more productive, and better at bringing us closer together. 

The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life, by Arthur C. Brooks

In his popular Atlantic magazine column, “How to Build a Life,” Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks has explored the habits that help us cultivate greater meaning, contentment, and well-being.

His new book gathers 33 of those short essays, each one with a simple message. In one on  “treating your life like a startup,” for example, Brooks shares how the great entrepreneurs develop clarity, create intentional design, and have the courage to pivot, all of which are important skills to apply to your own life.  

In another, Brooks encourages us to consider starting with “no” as the default, reflecting on how saying “yes” might affect your own happiness (and your need for rest, focus, and meaning), and then making a conscious decision about the request. 

A major theme in the book is that we think happiness will come from status or achievements when, in reality, more lasting happiness comes from paying attention to relational matters like love, friendships, and community. The important thing is to take small steps.

As Brooks relates, “Humans get satisfaction not from arriving at a destination but rather from making tangible progress toward it…no matter what we call it, the key skill is to understand that the returns on life come from the strength of your intimate ties.”

What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, by Diane Button

Most of us probably don’t want to think about the inevitability of dying. But there are important lessons to learn from facing our mortality, argues end-of-life doula Diane Button in What Matters Most.

The book is full of moving stories in which Button helps people manage the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of dying. By shepherding them through the process, she’s witnessed firsthand what people facing death care about most and what brings them peace and joy.

“When people are facing the end of life, everything that is superficial just gets stripped away,” she says. “You’re really focusing on love, relationship, healing, and, oftentimes, spirituality.”

She’s also seen many people needing to attend to unfinished business, like reconnecting with estranged loved ones, forgiving others, or preparing a legacy to leave behind. By revealing what people need when facing death, Button provides life lessons for us all.

“Talking about death is talking about life,” she says. “If you start to understand what, for you, is most important and what might be most meaningful for you at the end of life, then you can live differently now.”

Who Pays for Diversity: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do About It, by Oneya Fennell Okuwobi 

To prepare for the writing of Who Pays for Diversity?, University of Cincinnati sociologist Oneya Fennell Okuwobi interviewed employees of color in churches, universities, and corporations. 

She found something troubling. These employees were bearing hidden psychological and professional costs from becoming tokens and commodities in organizations that were pursuing diversity, as many organizations do, for image, legitimacy, or financial gain. Time and again, she found, these employees are asked to serve on extra committees, run diversity programs, and represent the organization in other ways. One Black wealth manager was pulled into so many client meetings that were unrelated to his job, just so the company could “look diverse.” As a result, his performance metrics suffered greatly.

Today, there is no dearth of critiques on the subject of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and that’s probably a good thing. It turns out that it’s really hard to undo centuries of oppression, especially when Americans don’t see eye to eye on these issues. Okuwobi argues for replacing performative diversity with structural change and shared responsibility for equity—and helps all of us consider what a better workplace could look like.

Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection, by Ben Rein

Having warm, close relationships is key to our physical and mental health. Why?

According to Ben Rein’s Why Brains Need Friends, our brains releases neurochemicals like oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine whenever we’re with people we love. The release of oxytocin alone has been tied to reducing stress, anxiety, and inflammation, and healing from wounds, making the health connections clear. But all three chemicals work in tandem to make sure we feel rewarded for and seek out warm relationships.

Other biological systems come into play, too. For example, we unconsciously mimic the expressions of other people we’re with, helping us to understand their feelings and have empathy. This doesn’t happen as easily online, which explains why it’s easier to make a close connection in person.

Our brains can also hinder our desire to reach out to strangers by underestimating how enjoyable it might be or overestimating the possibility of rejection. By understanding our strengths and limitations, we can learn to nurture the warm relationships we all need.

“The human brain has been shaped through evolution to reward us for connection and punish us for isolation,” he writes. “As such, we have so much to gain from socializing, and arguably even more to lose without it.”

Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “It’s called work for a reason,” right? It suggests work is supposed to be hard and torturous, so don’t expect more.

In Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, economists Jan-Emmanuel de Neve and George Ward show why that view is so wrongheaded. By using rigorous research findings to make their case, they argue that investing in policies that support workforce well-being also creates competitive advantages for companies, such as talent acquisition, employee engagement, retention, innovation, and business cost savings and profitability—that is, key performance indicators or KPIs.

For their research, de Neve and Ward partnered with companies to systematically increase well-being among some employees and not others, and then examine the impact on KPIs. Consistently and across multiple studies, more well-being led to better outcomes. The authors even computed a stock market index that included the top 100 well-being scorers and documented their superior long-term performance over well-known S&P 500 and Nasdaq composites. 

Employee well-being improves the bottom line, write the authors, because it heightens productivity, strengthens relationships, fosters creativity, supports health, makes recruitment easier, and improves retention. By sharing methods and strategies for increasing well-being at work, their book provides both justification for and actionable approaches to companies seeking healthier, more profitable workplaces.

BONUS: Though we didn’t include it on our favorite books list, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our own book that came out this year, The Science of Happiness Workbook: 10 Practices for a Meaningful Life, which offers evidence-based practices for improving your personal and relational well-being. Read an excerpt.

But there are ways to find more connection, meaning, and happiness in our work. In September, we hosted a conversation with Brooks to discuss these topics alongside the release of his new book, The Happiness Files. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation, where we narrow in on how happiness and success are related, helpful morning rituals, AI, and more. 

Kia Afcari: Could you talk a little bit about what readers can expect to find in your book and why you wrote it?

Arthur Brooks: I write a column in The Atlantic—I’ve been doing it for five years—called How to Build A Life. It’s based on the idea that you can get happier and the happiness will be sticky if you do three things: if you understand the science, if you change your habits, and if you become the teacher.

By the way, that’s the three-part formula for making golf skills sticky or making mathematics sticky. You have to understand, you have to change your habits, and you have to teach others. In medical schools, if you’re becoming a surgeon, they’ll say, “Watch one, do one, teach one.” It works for happiness just like anything else. That’s the formula for my column every Thursday morning: Here’s the science, here’s how you change your habits, here’s how you explain it to other people, so that you can become the teacher.

With the editors, I looked at the 33 columns that people found most impactful over the past five years about life and work, and we put them together in one volume, 33 essays. And so it’s the kind of book that you can read each night for a month. Read one before you go to bed. Read one to your beloved before you hit the sack. You’re putting your phone away, and you open the book and read it, and then discuss a little bit about what your resolutions are tomorrow to live out some of these ideas that are based in science. And I wrote it as an offering to people to do something like that. It’s gratifying to see that people are doing just that.

KA: In your book, you say if you want success, pursue happiness. But a lot of people go about it in the opposite way. Why do you think it’s much more effective to start with happiness?

AB: Mother Nature lies constantly about happiness. One of the key ways that Mother Nature lies to us is by saying that if you follow your impulses toward worldly success, then you’ll get happiness.

There are four worldly success impulses. This comes from Aristotle, and it was brought to more modern audiences by Thomas Aquinas. He said that people follow idols; we would think of them as these impulses. The four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame. And there’s nothing wrong with these things. The problem is that when these things become an end in and of themselves, they lead to unhappiness.

If you’re pursuing money for the sake of money, if you’re pursuing power—which is just to say, influence over other people—if you’re pursuing pleasure, feeling good all the time, you know it’s going to end in tears. If you’re pursuing fame, the admiration of strangers, you’re going to make these incredible sacrifices with your own life that lead to deep dissatisfaction, loneliness, and misery. Or, as Lady Gaga famously put it, fame is prison.

The reason that we do that is because Mother Nature is saying, Do it. Do it. Here. You know you want it—and then you’ll be happy. But that’s wrong. What the data show is that if you pursue the sources of deep satisfaction, which are faith or philosophy, contemplation, family, friendship, and work that serves others, then you’ll be successful enough.

Now, I tell my MBA students at Harvard University to pursue happiness and you’ll be successful enough. There’s one word in that sentence that freaks them out. What do you think it is?

KA: Enough.

AB: You got it, baby. And that’s because we’re success addicts. We’re not wired to have enough. Enough is for losers, man. It’s for slackers. We’re strivers. But that’s the wrong way to think. Because the truth of the matter is that there will be lots of worldly success when worldly success, per se, is an intermediate goal to get what you really want—which is love and happiness, lifting other people up and bringing them together with your talents. Then life is really, really fulfilling and truly you will have enough.

KA: How do we foster connection in an online working community? We’re constantly on these screens. We come into the office and we’re still on the screens, even though we’re right next to each other.

AB: The pandemic was the mother of invention. But this is not a substitute for human contact. There’s a lot of research on the neuropeptide oxytocin, which functions as a hormone—also known as the love molecule of human bonding—which you need if you’re going to feel human to be connected to other people. It’s largely transmitted through eye contact and touch.

During the coronavirus pandemic, one of the reasons that people spent so much time bingeing social media is because they were starving for oxytocin and they weren’t getting it. You get very little of it over Zoom, because you don’t have actual eye contact. You need in-real-life touch and eye contact to get sufficient amounts of oxytocin.

The result of it is that people are like, Why am I sleeping so crummy? Why am craving so much highly glycemic carbohydrate? And the answer has to do with the fact that oxytocin levels are in the cellar and you’re not feeling human and that loneliness that actually creeps in.

If you’re working remotely, you have to make sure you’re getting proper amounts of oxytocin. If you live with somebody, you need to have lots and lots of eye contact. That means you have to have strict protocols with your devices. No devices in the first hour of the day. No devices in the last two hours before sleep. No devices during dinner. If you live with a romantic partner, every time you’re talking, staring into each other’s eyes. Every time you’re together, you better be touching, because you’re just not going to get enough oxytocin otherwise as a result of this. In other words, like everything else, when the modern world changes the circumstances, we have to take our lives into our own hands and manage it appropriately.

KA: What one morning ritual would you suggest that would have the biggest impact on people?

AB: I actually think that it’s worship or contemplation—to dedicate your day to love and service every single day. To have something that you do that says, I’m truly grateful for the beautiful things that are going to happen this day, the lovely things, the fun things, the enjoyable things. And I’m also grateful for the hard things, for the things that bother me, for the challenges I’m going to have to overcome. Bring on this day. I am truly grateful for this day. And to set that resolution and to set it in the presence of the divine or to set this in the presence of yourself in a way that’s really meaningful and contemplative. Doing that every day, I think that’s a really important thing to do so that the day doesn’t manage you, but that you manage the day at its onset.

KA: AI is a topic du jour. What do you think are its implications for happiness?

AB: The answer is almost certainly that it will help some people a little, it’ll hurt other people a little, and for most people, it won’t really affect their happiness very much. That’s how technology usually works out at the end of the day.

Here’s the way to understand all technology and happiness: If any technology is complementing your relationships with other people, it’s helpful. If it’s substituting for your relationships with other people, it’s a problem for your happiness. Happiness is love. That’s just the way it is. And if any technology is getting in the way of real-life, in-person relationships that involve eye contact and touch, you’re in trouble. If it connects you to other people more effectively, then it can be a complement and it can be life-enhancing.

Now, it’s not going to solve human problems the way that it’s promising. Lots of technical problems, yes, of course. Already I use it in my work every single day. Everybody uses AI constantly. I use it constantly when I’m doing literature searches, etc. But here’s the thing: The problems that it solves are what we call complicated problems, which are very difficult problems but once you solve them, they’re solved once and forever. These are problems that we’re thinking about using the left hemisphere of our brain. That’s the task side of our brains.

The things we really care about are called complex problems. Complex problems are easy to understand and impossible to solve, like love and meaning and happiness and a football game and your cat. Those are all complex problems. I mean, they’re easy to comprehend and impossible to solve, which is why you can’t solve them. You live them. And that’s the beauty of it.

I’ve been married 34 years. My wife and I know each other deeply. This morning, before I left, my wife said, “I love you.” And she does. And when I get home tonight, she might be super mad at me. I don’t know! And that’s the point. That’s why I love my marriage, because it’s a complex problem. If you think a complicated solution like AI is going to solve complex problems in your life like love, you’re sadly mistaken and you’re going to wind up becoming frustrated and wasting your time.

KA: The quote from your book that really stuck with me is that “your life is the most important management task you will ever undertake.” What does that mean to you?

AB: That means that you don’t have to leave your life up to chance. There are lots and lots of uncertainties in life, to be sure. There is lots of risk in your life. There’s a lot of unknowns in your life. There’s a lot of fun adventures that you’re not expecting in your life, not just bad things. But fundamentally, you don’t have to leave the big things up to chance. Your life doesn’t have to manage you. You can manage your life, but you have to know how it works, and that’s the task at hand.

I came to this because I was retiring as the CEO of a big think tank in Washington, DC, and I was 55 and I was really at wits’ end. Not knowing what I was going to do next, I walked the Camino de Santiago, which is a very long walking pilgrimage across northern Spain. People have been doing it for years. And the ancient idea is that you will be granted what you seek on the last day. And sure enough, as I entered the medieval city of Santiago de Compostela, I was filled with this idea I was going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And all this work is the fruit of that.

This course includes articles, videos, interactive surveys, and activities and exercises that learners can do to strengthen skills that enhance and sustain their happiness at work. Featured as “Learning by Doing” sections of the courses, these activities include things like engaging in a variety of self-reflection and mindfulness practices.

After completing each mindfulness activity, learners are asked to rate their own experience during the exercise in three ways: Did they feel distracted or focused? Tense or calm? Critical or friendly? Learner ratings give us insight into the potential impact of different exercises, activities, and practices on happiness and well-being at work.

As someone who hopes to become a therapist, I’m especially drawn to mindfulness practices that help people pause, notice what they’re feeling, and reconnect with what is most important to them. So, I took a look at how learners felt while doing four brief audio-guided mindfulness practices in the Mindfulness and Resilience to Stress course. According to this data, even five-minute mindfulness practices can help people feel more focused, calm, and kind.

Four brief mindfulness practices

The first practice that learners are encouraged to try is called Interoceptive Mindfulness, a five-minute audio-guided exercise that resembles a body scan meditation. Led by Eve Ekman, a senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, the practice encourages listeners to gently focus on noticing sensations in the body in a nuanced and granular way. This kind of attention to sensation, what scientists call interoception, includes awareness of everything from changes in heartbeat and visceral tension to how emotions like anger, sadness, or joy feel in our muscles and tissues.

As Ekman explains, becoming more aware of these signals is like developing an “early warning system” for our emotions. Without awareness, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to regulate what we feel. By tuning into physical sensations, people can often find a measure of relief from spiraling thoughts and show up more present in stressful situations. For example, the practice encourages listeners to “inhale, paying close attention . . . to the sensations of breath as our belly rises through the inhale.”

In practice, this means that learners are invited to attend to sensations throughout their body as they are occurring in real time, focus on their breath, and let incidental thoughts arise and recede without judgment.

The second five-and-a-half-minute practice in the course is called Mindfulness of Thoughts. This practice shifts the focus from bodily sensations to the activity of the mind itself. In Ekman’s words, “our minds can sometimes be sharp and clear, and other times restless, jumping from one thought to the next like we’re just along for the ride.” Mindfulness of Thoughts is intended to help learners notice these patterns and gently build intention around their attention. For example, learners are prompted to “shift attention . . . opening up to notice the thoughts, memories, and images that pass by.”

As clarification, Ekman explains that mindfulness is not about “clearing the mind,” a common misconception, but about learning to return, over and over, to a chosen point of focus. That act of returning, the practice suggests, is what strengthens attention. By practicing this gentle noticing and redirection, learners begin developing what Ekman describes as “balanced attention,” a way of concentrating that isn’t rigid or self-critical, but refreshing and sustainable. Research finds that training attention in this way improves focus, helps people let go of distractions and distressing thoughts more quickly, and boosts both resilience to stress and performance at work.

The third nearly six-minute practice offered in the course is called Handshake with Stress. Unlike the previous ones that focus on inner sensations or the flow of thoughts, this practice invites participants to turn toward their emotions directly, particularly the difficult ones. As Ekman describes, this kind of awareness involves noticing what triggers unpleasant feelings, how they arise in the body, and how we typically respond. Developing this awareness allows us to bring more choice and clarity into our reactions.

In the audio, Ekman reminds learners that people feel the full range of emotions at work: joy, frustration, excitement, and overwhelm. Emotional awareness doesn’t mean trying to eliminate stress or suppress or avoid negative feelings; it’s about recognizing feelings and thoughts as they happen and learning to respond in ways that are more aligned with our values. The practice encourages listeners to “continue simply shaking hands with the felt sensations of stress in the body, noticing the sensations but not engaging with the memory or story.”

The fourth and final practice in the course, also just under six minutes long, is Loving-Kindness Meditation. This practice shifts from focusing on stress toward cultivating positive, prosocial feelings; it is designed to generate warmth and goodwill, both for ourselves and for others, using memory and imagination. For example, the audio invites learners to “shift into this practice of joy, by bringing to mind someone who we really believe has our best interests at heart . . . imagine them truly wishing for you to be happy.” Unlike concentration practices that train attention, Loving-Kindness Meditation strengthens our capacity for compassion, care, and shared joy—even in the face of challenges at work.

In the audio, Ekman highlights the broader scientific foundation for these methods. Compassion and loving-kindness are not new ideas, but contemporary science finds that they can enhance resilience, emotional flexibility, and collaboration. By visualizing a colleague or family member, and sending a genuine wish for enhancing their happiness and well-being, we train our minds to respond to difficulties with kindness rather than stress or self-criticism.

The Loving-Kindness Meditation practice often unfolds in two steps: first, envisioning a loved one, colleague, or client and wishing that they flourish; second, extending the same sentiment toward ourselves. This shift in perspective naturally evokes positive emotions, reinforcing a sense of connection and common humanity. Research finds that loving-kindness meditation increases access to positive states, broadens outlook, and makes us more open to opportunities in work and life.

The power of short practices

Immediately after completing each type of mindfulness practice offered in the course, approximately 4,000 learners posted ratings of their experience across three dimensions: how distracted vs. focused, tense vs. calm, and critical vs. friendly they felt while they were doing the practice.

Self-rating scale used in the course. After each practice, learners rated themselves on three dimensions: 1 = distracted to 5 = focused, 1 = tense to 5 = calm, and 1 = critical to 5 = friendly.

When I analyzed these responses, I found clear, consistent patterns:

• Distracted vs. focused: Learners’ ratings shifted toward greater focus over time, from an average of 3.38 after the first one, Interoceptive Mindfulness, to 3.71 after the fourth, Loving-Kindness Meditation. This suggests that even very brief mindfulness practices can cumulatively build attentional stability.

• Tense vs. calm: Average ratings also veered toward calm over time, from 3.27 at the beginning (after Interoceptive Mindfulness) to 3.63 by the end (after Loving-Kindness). There was, however, a dip in this pattern when learners did the Handshake with Stress practice. Importantly, this isn’t a “failure” of the practice; it actually reflects its purpose. Learners were invited to sit with something stressful, which would make anyone feel less calm. This finding indicates that the pattern in our data is not random; it reflects what we would expect given the nature of the practice.

• Critical vs. friendly: Ratings of friendliness increased the most from the first to the fourth mindfulness practice in the course, from 3.34 to 3.92. Again, this pattern flattened after the Handshake with Stress practice, followed by the largest increase for Loving-Kindness. The flattening of friendliness after Handshake with Stress is consistent with existing evidence suggesting stress can make us less kind. Nevertheless, the final Loving-Kindness practice in the course seemed to leave people feeling especially warm and open.



Average self-ratings across four mindfulness practices (Interoceptive Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Thoughts, Handshake with Stress, Loving-Kindness) on three dimensions: focus, calmness, and friendliness.

Why it matters for work and well-being

These results suggest that brief, varied mindfulness practices can gradually help people feel more focused, calm, and friendly, even in the midst of a busy workday. They also highlight the value of variety: While some practices (like Handshake with Stress) feel less soothing in the moment, they may serve an important role in resilience by encouraging people to face difficulty rather than avoid it.

However, this analysis can’t clearly distinguish differences in people’s experiences across the four mindfulness practices. For example, while ratings for friendliness were highest for Loving-Kindness, this was also the last practice, so the increase could reflect cumulative effects over time rather than being specific to that practice. Interestingly, ratings for focus did not decrease during the Handshake with Stress practice, suggesting that even challenging exercises don’t necessarily undermine attention.

For me, this analysis underscored how much room there is for incremental improvement in workplace well-being. It also reinforced the importance of making practices approachable; just five minutes can be enough to make a difference. If you’re curious, you can try these practices yourself in the Mindfulness and Resilience to Stress at Work course on edX. Even a few minutes a day may help you feel a little more focused, calm, and friendly, at work and beyond.

Before you think about your answer, let me clarify: I’m specifically asking what self-care is—not how do you take care of yourself? It’s amazing that an entire industry has built up around self-care—but from what I have seen, few ever try to define self-care.

So what’s your answer?

Did your response sound anything like: exercise, being in nature, or boundary setting? If so, you have just named ways we practice self-care—and what they all have in common is that they support us in reactively and proactively managing stress in healthy ways. At its foundation, self-care is about stress management.

It’s understandable if you’ve never thought of self-care in this way, as the term currently is largely divorced from its roots. Self-care has clinical origins, initially anchored in the belief that individuals can participate in the management of their recovery from illness through health-oriented practices and behaviors. In the 1960s and 1970s, self-care evolved into a term used by social justice activists as a tool for caring for themselves amid their activism. Around the 1980s, we started to see the term used in the context of workplaces, as an antidote for employee burnout; I have some really strong feelings about this; see my article, “Self-Care Can’t Fix Employee Burnout.” As I argue in that piece, poor workplace structures are stressors that no amount of self-care can address. But effective self-care can help us respond to illness and sustain ourselves when fighting injustice, other types of stressors. 

Unfortunately, today the term self-care has been coopted and commodified, referring to everything from luxury handbags to Netflix bingeing. When self-care becomes anything and everything, it interferes with our capacity to effectively utilize it as a well-being tool, causing a lot of us to get it wrong, engaging in activities under the banner of self-care that only offer a momentary distraction from our stress.

I’d like to argue that effective self-care should provide both a physiological and a psychological benefit. Physiological benefits correspond with the body’s biological and physical functions, while psychological benefits are related to the mind, thoughts, and emotions. So how do we differentiate the most effective self-care tactics from activities that, at best, are mere distractions?

The mind-body stress connection

First, let’s unpack the science behind the criteria of a mind/body benefit for effective self-care. Have you ever wondered why when you’re anxious about an upcoming presentation, your stomach feels queasy? Or why your neck, shoulders, or back feel tense when you’re managing a stressful period in your life? How about when you’re experiencing gastrointestinal issues and your mood is low or you lack focus?

When we perceive something as stressful, that kicks off a response that floods our bodies with hormones (epinephrine or adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol), which affects our body in physical ways (like increased heart rate and muscle contraction).

There’s also the role of the vagus nerve, which originates at the base of the brain and extends into the heart, lungs, and intestinal areas of the body; this is the embodiment of the mind-body connection. The communication pathway between the vagus nerve and the brain works in both directions, from the brain to the lower body (that’s why when you perceive the speech as a threat, you get butterflies) as well as from the lower body to the brain (if you’re having gastrointestinal issues, your mood may dip). 

Communication happens through something called vagal tone, which is a measure of the activity level of the vagus nerve. The more active your vagus nerve, the more your health and well-being benefits. For example, more vagal activity promotes greater cardiovascular health, while less activity is linked with depression.

Thus, it’s not surprising that the vagus nerve is the primary component of our parasympathetic nervous system, the one responsible for putting the brakes on our stress response. The vagus nerve is the highway that directs our self-care efforts. For these reasons and more, effective self-care involves both physiological and psychological components.

Now that we have a better picture of what self-care is and what effective self-care entails, let’s explore some “self-care” tactics to see if they pass the litmus test. First, I’ll define the activity, and then I want you to ask yourself if it’s an example of a distraction or effective self-care. Afterward, I’ll share a science-based analysis of each.

Exercise: Self-care or distraction?

Definition: Planned, structured, or repetitive physical activity, with the focus of improving physical fitness. Is this a distraction or self-care? Walking, hiking, running, working out, kayaking—these can indeed be effective forms of self-care, because exercise packs both physiological and psychological benefits.

Physiological: Exercise is its own stressor from a hormonal perspective. At a minimal effort of 50-60% of VO2 Max, equivalent to light walking, as our exercise intensity or duration increases, the release of the key stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine—and cortisol—increases, too. After we finish exercising, our hormonal levels return to pre-exercise levels, sometimes lower. Over time, the more we engage in exercise, our hormonal stress response attenuates. This is where the magic happens, because this attenuated hormonal stress response carries over to stressors other than exercise, helping us to better cope with them.

Psychological: Exercise can positively impact our mood, countering the low mood often associated with stress. There’s a wide range of reasons why exercise positively impacts our mood: the feeling of accomplishment, social desirability, and neurological effects. The prevailing hormones of interest in the neurological explanation of exercise-induced mood enhancement are endorphins.

But they don’t affect our mood the way you might think. When we exercise, our body produces beta-endorphins in our bloodstream, but beta-endorphins are too big to permeate the blood-brain barrier. Instead, it supports our mood by reducing pain and triggering the release of dopamine in the brain.

More recent science is now focused on endocannabinoids released during exercise, that easily cross the brain-blood-barrier, as a contributor to the positive mood impact of exercise. Endocannabinoids are structurally and functionally similar to cannabinoids found in cannabis and believed to be a key driver in the post-exercise “high.”

Exercise helps us through acute stress through mood enhancement and reducing the presence of stress hormones in our body. It supports us more proactively by increasing our resiliency, reducing our baseline levels of stress hormones, and training our body to manage and quickly recover from stress.

Binge watching TV: Self-care or distraction?

Definition: Consuming multiple hours of television (including TV or movies) in one sitting. Is this a distraction—or is it effective self-care?

This is an example of a distraction and quite a popular one: 83% of U.S. adults watch streaming services and, according to a recent study, 57% of U.S. adults stream TV and movies for one to three hours, with 38% streaming for longer periods.

Physiological: The bad news is that from a physiological standpoint, bingeing is bad. It encourages a sedentary lifestyle and can dull cognitive function. Besides a potential moderate boost in cognitive function through the consumption of high-quality educational content on TV, there are minimal physiological benefits.

Psychological: Many of us might feel a psychological benefit. Binge watching activates our brain’s reward system, triggering the release of dopamine, one of the feel-good hormones. This reward can work to counter the negative emotions of stress. In fact, there’s a correlation between binge watching TV and stress, with higher stress increasing the likelihood to binge watch TV. Binge watching also serves as a form of escapism, allowing us to temporarily avoid or stop thinking about the source of our stress. But with anything that activates our reward system, there’s the likelihood for excess, making it challenging for us to stop.

Bingeing TV distracts us from our stress and offers a small emotional boost, but can have adverse physiological effects and cause more stress related to neglected responsibilities while bingeing.

Spending time with loved ones: Self-care or distraction?

Definition: Spending time with friends, family, and pets that you care about. This one is definitely self-care. Spending leisure time with loved ones supports our capacity to manage stress in a variety of ways.

Physiological: Oxytocin is widely known as the love hormone; it’s associated with activities involving connection with loved ones like hanging out with friends, sex, breastfeeding, and so on. Interestingly, our bodies also naturally produce oxytocin when we encounter stress as a protective measure. That’s when the presence of oxytocin can cause us to seek social support or pull those we love closer in the presence of stressors.

This behavior is called the tend-and-befriend response. It’s an evolutionary response to stress or a threat: strength in numbers. Increased oxytocin due to social connection during stressful moments packs powerful physiological benefits, helping to attenuate the stress response by lowering cortisol levels, inflammation, and blood pressure, for example. The higher our oxytocin levels, the greater benefit to us by lowering our responsiveness to stress and encouraging resilience when we encounter stressors. (However, stress-induced oxytocin in the presence of unsupportive people can actually exacerbate the stress response.)

Psychological: Oxytocin also has a calming effect, reducing psychological distress associated with stressors. But beyond the wonder of oxytocin, a main strength of spending time with loved ones is the social support component. Social support is a known moderator of stress, with the potential to minimize the likelihood that the stressors lead to distress. Social support can actually help us to resolve or re-contextualize the stressor, reducing feelings of worry, fear, or anxiety. 

Drinking: Self-care or distraction?

Definition: The consumption of alcohol, from one to multiple glasses. Distraction or effective self-care?

OK, I have to be transparent here and state that this has been one of my go-to strategies at the end of a long and stressful day for years. In fact, it was the frequency of my “just-one-glass-of-red-wine” strategy that got me thinking about the topic of effective self-care. But this, my friends, is not effective self-care. It’s hands-down a distraction.

Physiological: There are no documented physiological benefits to alcohol consumption, sorry. In fact, the long-vaunted health benefits of red wine have been debunked. Instead, alcohol hurts our brain function, causing adverse effects on things like memory and coordination. It can also disturb our endocrine system, disrupting our hormones. Additionally, alcohol can disrupt our gastrointestinal system by causing inflammation in the stomach lining, inducing nausea, vomiting, and longer-term illnesses, especially if consumed in excess.

Psychological: So if all of the above is true, what draws people to alcohol when stressed? Alcohol can penetrate the blood-brain barrier in five minutes, and you start to feel the effects within 10 minutes. It acts as a central nervous system depressant, increasing GABA neurotransmitter levels (which produce a calming effect), dopamine, and serotonin, associated with feeling good. Alcohol also decreases the neurotransmitter glutamate, decreasing alertness. These all combine to produce a relaxed, euphoric, and less excited state—almost immediately.

But in exchange for this relatively calm state, alcohol, even when consumed in small amounts, impairs our brain function: decision making, focus, memory. With respect to memory, alcohol seems to most strongly affect our capacity to form new long-term memories, like remembering fact-based details, when we are under the influence.

In short, alcohol offers a chemically induced calming effect that allows us to minimize or escape from our stressor, but in exchange we “pay” in other physiological and psychological ways.

Breathwork: Self-care or distraction?

Definition: The use of structured breathing strategies that manipulate the breath for therapeutic purposes. Is breathwork an example of a distraction or effective self-care?

Did you guess self-care? Right again! Breathwork is an effective tool to manage stress, especially reactively, when we find ourselves in a full-on stress response.

Physiological: We can manipulate vagal nerve activity through respiration. Vagal nerve activity decreases during inhalation and increases during exhalation (remember more vagal nerve activity has greater well-being outcomes). Consequently, the heart rate accelerates during inhalation and decelerates during exhalation. Breathwork helps to counteract increased heart rate, a common symptom of the stress response. Breathing techniques focused on extended exhalation, slowing down the breathing (ideally to 10 breaths per minute or less), holding the breath briefly, and then exhaling have all been shown to slow down the heart rate. The magic is in the exhale.

Psychological: Common feelings after breathwork include feeling more positive and alert, and less aroused by stressors. When our heart rate slows down, we have more cognitive control, our amygdala becomes less excited, and our prefrontal cortex functioning is enhanced. Research has shown that slower breathing increases alpha activity (brain wave activity associated with a relaxed and focused state) in the parietal and the cortex regions of the brain, which can result in focused attention, increased creativity, and inhibiting irrelevant stimuli. Those are all great resources when trying to resolve a life stressor.

The main takeaway is that we should not confuse coping mechanisms with self-care. Self-care strives to offer us recovery and restoration on the other side, which goes back to the original definition of self-care. Distractions serve to only temporarily pause the distress. Effective self-care abides by the “do no harm” rule, while distractions like bingeing TV and drinking do not. 

I’m not suggesting that you throw all of your distractions out the window, because sometimes a temporary release, even with the associated adverse impacts, is what we need. But let’s make a concerted effort to not let the coping mechanisms overtake effective self-care—and let’s be honest and call each what it actually is.

Three hundred miles north, on a bend of the Klamath River, members of the Yurok Tribe were lighting a very different fire. Carrying drip torches and cedar boughs, they walked slowly through a hazel thicket. Their flame stayed knee-high—quiet, steady, almost meditative. It cleared brush, opened space for huckleberries, and left behind a mosaic of black soil and emerald moss.

Cultural burns like that one, banned by federal edict for most of the 20th century, are returning because Tribal leaders kept insisting on an older truth: Fire is not a menace to be eradicated; it is a relationship to be managed. “We coexist with fire; we need fire and fire needs us. It’s a different way of looking at the forest,” said Amy Cardinal Christianson, an Indigenous fire expert in Canada.

Watching those two infernos—one apocalyptic, one restorative—feels to me like reading twin case studies on leadership. The first shows what happens when a system treats every spark as an emergency to stamp out. The second shows what becomes possible when stewards learn to invite small, purposeful heat. Swap “flame” for “disagreement,” and you have a parable for modern organizations and the societies they inhabit.

When the office smolders

It is estimated that American employers now lose more than $2.7 billion every day to distraction, absenteeism, and turnover triggered by uncivil or unresolved conflict. Because the costs accumulate in missed deadlines and silent resentment, executives rarely perceive the danger until their smoldering issues burst into flames on social media platforms like X—and they discover their brand in ashes. The impulse in that moment is always suppression: tighten nondisclosure agreements, send cease-and-desist letters, launch a “values” campaign.

Decades of research in conflict resolution—and a growing body of wildfire science—suggest that the reflex is backward.

Conflict, like fire, is inevitable and can be invaluable. The question is whether leaders are willing to stage it on their own terms or endure it on nature’s. That conviction led my team at Columbia University to develop a protocol for addressing significant conflict-related crises we call RESCUE, built on three unlikely intellectual parents: Indigenous fire stewardship; the LCES safety system invented by legendary smokejumper Paul Gleason; and our own research on Conflict-Intelligent Leadership.

Grounded wisdom

The Yurok Tribe’s approach to controlled burns challenges conventional firefighting wisdom by deliberately welcoming fire as an ally rather than treating it strictly as a threat. In contrast to standard firefighting practices—which prioritize suppression and avoidance—the Yurok actively invite periodic, small-scale fires onto the landscape. They view fire as a necessary and beneficial force, capable of renewing ecosystems, preserving cultural traditions, and reducing the catastrophic buildup of flammable material.

Even more surprising is the profound cultural humility embedded in their method: Instead of attempting to control fire absolutely, the Yurok partner with it, respecting its agency and unpredictability. Their strategy hinges on deep, generational knowledge of landscapes and weather conditions, coupled with patience and restraint—qualities notably absent in conventional approaches that often rely on forceful intervention and technological dominance.

Applied metaphorically to managing highly destructive social conflicts, the Yurok philosophy underscores the value of proactively addressing tensions before they escalate into uncontrollable crises. Just as controlled burns prevent catastrophic wildfires, intentional and skillful confrontation of conflict can reduce harmful buildup of grievances, clarify misunderstandings, and strengthen relational resilience.

That demands deep understanding of the underlying dynamics, thoughtful preparation, and a willingness to engage constructively and courageously with potentially volatile issues. Doing so fosters healthier, more adaptive organizations and communities, capable of sustaining vitality through periods of stress and renewal.

Getting conflict-smart

Drawing on 30 years of research on conflict from psychology, peace and conflict studies, and complexity science, Conflict-Intelligent Leadership (CIQ-L) offers a comprehensive framework for managing disputes of all kinds that can be broken down into five nested layers of competencies:

• self-awareness and self-regulation,
• the social dynamics of conflict,
• situational adaptivity,
• the capacity to employ structural leverage, and
• ultimately the ability to read and work with the broader systems that breed conflict.

It’s a far cry from standard conflict-resolution playbooks. This model doesn’t just seek to manage disputes—it encourages leaders to prepare for them and transform them into generative forces, much like firefighters learn to read and control wildfires rather than merely suppress them. By mastering this layered approach, leaders can learn to navigate even the most fractious divides—whether they’re facing racially charged campus protests, internal workplace rebellions, or ideological rifts in communities.

Laying groundwork

This vision of conflict as dynamic, fluid, and potentially constructive is a radical departure from business-as-usual. It suggests that true leadership in this era of permacrisis doesn’t mean avoiding conflict at all costs—it means becoming more adept at employing a set of basic conflict-intelligent principles that allow leaders to work with the energy and power inherent to conflict.

• For example, CIQ leaders know to lay the groundwork for conflict management by honing the necessary skills and nurturing supportive networks to establish a sturdy foundation for turbulent times.
• When tensions arise, they start smart by drawing on the people, processes, and practices that already foster constructive dialogue.
• As conflicts shift and evolve, they master conflict adaptivity—anchoring their efforts to a clear vision for the future while flexibly pivoting strategies to stay aligned with changing dynamics.
• They also learn to optimize opposing forces, strategically weaving together seemingly contradictory approaches—like blending fierce advocacy with collaborative bridge-building—to generate more creative solutions.
• When conflicts get entrenched, instead of getting mired in the heat of disputes, CIQ leaders know how to leverage the context, zooming out to understand how surrounding forces shape conflicts and then working to shift those conditions.
• Ever-vigilant, they remain opportunistic, seizing on pivotal moments—like a sudden emotional breakthrough or an overlooked ally—to create opportunities that conventional methods might miss.
• Ultimately, they play the long game, patiently nurturing incremental changes in norms, practices, and underlying narratives to unlock new possibilities to learn from and leverage conflict.

Together, these CIQ principles create a holistic approach that transforms conflict from a destructive force into an engine for resilience, learning, and forward movement. Nevertheless, they take time to learn and to implement.

So, what is a leader to do when conflicts spark and burn without notice and then seem to take on a life of their own?

The man who invented don’t-get-killed

On June 26, 1990, Paul Gleason was digging a handline on Arizona’s Dude Fire when the wind shifted and flames exploded 60 feet overhead. He glanced at the treetops, felt the downdraft on his neck, and yelled to his crew: Drop the tools, run to the clearing.

Every firefighter with him lived. Two weeks later, in a hotel bar still smelling of smoke, Gleason sketched four words on a napkin: Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes, Safety zones. LCES became the first universal checklist for wildland crews. Establish it—or refuse the assignment.

Gleason’s insight was not radical complexity; it was radical clarity. Everyone on the line, from rookie to superintendent, had to know the same four things.

When my colleagues and I began mapping organizational blowups, we found an uncanny parallel. Teams that failed explosively were not missing nuance; they were missing common facts. No one was assigned to watch the interpersonal weather. No one trusted the radio traffic. No one knew where to turn when the conversation turned toxic. They lacked their own version of LCES.

A six-phase conflict drill for human systems

RESCUE translates those fire rules from the field for combustible forms of social conflict. It recommends that leaders facing conflict “firestorms” today move through six recurring disciplines—Radical Clarity, Effective Communication, Strategic Adaptivity, Conflict-Safe Environment, Unified Structures, Enduring Resilience. Each is mundane in isolation; together they amount to a rehearsal for the blaze that is coming.

• Radical Clarity begins where Gleason began: Station a lookout. That might be a rotating “meeting anthropologist” whose only job is to name the emotion in the room; or a natural-language algorithm that scans Slack for sarcasm spikes. The purpose is not to punish but to see the smoke early. This phase also requires leaders to be ruthlessly clear about their own biases and blind spots—and those of their team: anything in the way of an accurate take on trouble ahead.
• Effective Communication borrows from Tylenol’s 1982 catastrophe. When cyanide-laced capsules killed seven Chicago residents, Johnson & Johnson’s CEO, James Burke, flooded the nation with unfiltered facts and yanked 31 million bottles from shelves. He obeyed a single principle: Tell the truth faster than rumor can draft its own narrative. The need to have timely, transparent communication both within the organization and with the public is paramount.
• Strategic Adaptivity recalls that fire crews never rely on one escape route. In crises, they must always have Plans B, C, and D. They cultivate flexibility in themselves and their teams, and they aren’t afraid to change course to prevent a conflict from spiraling or to seize an unexpected opportunity that conflict presents. Adaptive leaders keep multiple conflict tactics—control, domination, facilitation, mediation, avoidance—alive at once and switch without ego when conditions demand.
• Conflict-Safe Environment is the meadow before the torch. CIQ leaders create cultures where dissent and debate are welcome, and people can disagree without fear, converting conflict into creativity and energy for change. Google’s Project Aristotle spent two years chasing the secret of effective teams and discovered what Yurok elders already knew: People must believe they can speak up and call out without humiliation. This is the safety valve for releasing pressure before it’s too late.
• Unified Structures embed the lessons. The Yurok have established a Cultural Fire Management Council; smokejumpers have LCES laminated on their helmets. Companies institutionalize conflict intelligence when bonus formulas, performance reviews, and onboarding modules reward conflict-intelligent behavior. Absent that, the wisdom retires with its champion.
• Enduring Resilience is what grows in the ash. CIQ leaders focus on turning crises into breakthroughs and ensuring the resolution of conflict leaves the organization more innovative, cohesive, and resilient than before. Sliced bread, Post-it Notes, the COVID-era transformation of Microsoft into a “learn-it-all” enterprise—each was a seed that grew from the heat of hard times and crises and paid dividends.

How to burn on purpose

In practice, staging conflict feels less like a vision quest and more like infrastructure work. Consider Adobe. In 2012, the company replaced its annual performance appraisal—dreaded, secretive, ratings-driven—with a quarterly “check-in.” Managers were trained to ask three questions: What should you keep doing, stop doing, start doing? Attrition dropped 30% in two years; patent filings rose. The unsung engine was candor with frequency. Tension never piled up long enough to catch Diablo winds.

Or look at a Midwestern children’s hospital that adopted a “speak-up badge”: Any nurse could tap her ID card and freeze a surgery if something looked wrong. Complication rates fell 13%. The badge was a handheld safety zone.

Even small rituals matter. At a Seattle gaming studio, every design sprint closes with a “heat map.” Participants place sticky dots on poster paper: green for energizing disagreements, red for draining ones. Red clusters trigger a 48-hour “spot burn”: a facilitated meeting whose entire agenda is naming what went wrong.

The paradox is that crisis prevention like this feels artificial—until the blowup comes. Then the team with an escape route looks prescient, and the team without one looks negligent.

The politics of good fire

The need for controlled burns extends far beyond the C-suite. Universities wrestling with speech controversies, school boards split over curriculum, democracies confronting disinformation—all face a version of the same dilemma: suppress heat or harvest it.

When students at the University of Chicago demanded trigger warnings on all potentially distressing material, President Robert Zimmer issued a blunt letter defending “discomfort” as a condition of learning. Critics called the stance insensitive; advocates hailed it as a line in the sand for academic freedom. Either way, the letter forced an explicit negotiation of values before resentment smoldered into a conflagration. The university had, in effect, dug its firebreak early.

Compare that with Evergreen State College’s 2017 eruption over a day of absence for white faculty. Conflict bypassed any formal containment line; viral video became policy overnight, enrollment cratered, and the college only recently returned to pre-crisis numbers. The timing differed by weeks; the cost differed by millions.

Political culture is beginning to notice. Maine’s bipartisan attempt to legislate Citizen Assemblies—randomly selected panels that deliberate hot-button issues—echoes Indigenous councils where dissent is institutionalized, not shamed. In a nation stalking toward what some scholars call cold civil war, the practice of micro-burns may be our best fire insurance.

What grows after

Suppression feels compassionate: Why let people suffer the burn?

But the Camp Fire’s lesson is brutal. Every decade that Smokey the Bear kept California “safe” from flame left an acre-deep quilt of tinder. One spark turned that quilt into a crematorium. In human affairs, the accumulation is moral: unresolved abuse claims, buried racial trauma, muttered distrust of institutions. Denying heat is cheaper today but murderous tomorrow.

The alternative—lighting small, intentional fires carefully—demands courage. It also demands foresight and a blueprint. Without those, a “frank conversation” can become a bonfire of grievance. That is why RESCUE, for all its academic lingo, is a checklist first. Appoint the lookout. Test the radio. Mark the meadow. Agree on two exits. Then strike the match.

A year after the Yurok burn, thimbleberries blazed red and hazelnut saplings stood hip-high. A teenage basket maker clipped shoots into a willow-bark pouch.

Leaders who learn to burn well make the same wager: that the next conflict is not a threat to survival but a nutrient cycle to cultivate. In an era of algorithmic outrage and rolling climate disaster, that wager may be the slender difference between civic collapse and civic renewal.

Either way, the forest will burn. Our only choice is whether the story ends like Paradise—or like the ridge where the hazel came back.

However, you may not be aware of over 30 other books he’s published throughout his almost 60-year career, with topics ranging from creativity to cognition to critical thinking. When his latest books came out, The Essential Howard Gardner on Education and The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind—both collections of his writing that tell the story of his personal and intellectual journey—I eagerly jumped at the chance to interview him. As a teacher educator and educational psychologist, I’ve taught, applied, and been inspired by Gardner’s MI theory throughout my career, and I (like many others) consider him to be one of the most influential thinkers in education.

But instead of talking about intelligence, our conversation homed in on another topic that feels particularly compelling today: goodness. Drawing on The Good Project research he’s overseen for years, Gardner reflects on his life and legacy as an educator and developmental psychologist and discusses what it means to be a good worker and good citizen right now.

Amy L. Eva: How do you define “goodness”?

Howard Gardner: I distinguish between two kinds of goodness. One is how it is that we relate to people whom we know, people in the neighborhood, family, relatives, friends, and so on. And the other is our relationship in the workplace to challenges that we face, and where we have to decide the right thing to do—and that’s often very difficult.

What I have focused on with my colleagues for over 30 years is what it means to do “good work.” Initially, working with psychologists Bill Damon and Mike Csikszentmihalyi—both roughly age-mates of mine and people whom I was close to for a long time—we interviewed well over 1,000 professionals in nine different professions. This was in the United States, roughly from 1995 to 2005.

Since then, with my colleagues at a research center called Project Zero, we’ve interviewed many more people. And the nice thing is that after having done this for a decade and read many, many transcripts and talked to many, many people, we have concluded that “good” has three elements.

ALE: What are the three elements of “good work”?

HG: It’s excellent, it’s engaging, and it’s ethical.

Let’s take a worker. Let’s say it’s a doctor or a lawyer or a journalist. First, the person needs to be excellent. The person needs to know the stuff that requires them to do surgery or to argue a case or to cover an event.

Second, it’s really important if you want to be a good worker to be engaged. If you just count the hours each day until it’s over, and you can’t wait until the weekend or whatever the holidays are, then you’re not engaged. The engaged person basically looks forward to work. That doesn’t mean they don’t like holidays. They might. It doesn’t mean that they don’t do things on the weekend. But come Monday morning, their challenges are there, and they want to be able to meet them.

One of the many groups we talked to were K–12 educators. We found that one of the things that kept teachers going when they were in a very tough situation was having some kind of belief system that sustained them (often a religious system). Especially when the environment is very challenging, you need to have something that motivates you to go to work, that engages you.

Then the final thing, which our own research has really focused on the most, is being ethical. You can be very excellent in your field. You can know what you’re doing. You can be very engaged. You can look forward to going to work, whether you’re a doctor or a journalist. But if you’re not ethical, then you’re not doing good work.

If you pick up either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, politically, they are not on the same page. But you read in such well-edited publications about people who know better, but who are cutting corners or doing things that are strictly speaking illegal, or that would be considered illegal by anybody.

So, what we talk about in this is a good mnemonic: the 3 Es intertwined—excellence, engagement, and ethics. If you said, “Howard, what does it mean to be a good worker, a good citizen?,” I would simply say that person knows their stuff, cares about it, and tries to do the right thing.

ALE: How can professionals think more together about ethics in their respective roles?

HG: There are very few ethical dilemmas which are best solved by just sitting by yourself and thinking about the dilemma. Even though people like me, who are professors, often find that internal dialogue easier, you really need to have people whom you trust, an environment that you trust, where you can think about the different options. Even if you’re Moses or Christ, it’s helpful to have somebody else to test it on, rather than to assume that you know better.

First, you have to define the problem; then you have to discuss the problem; then you have to debate and figure out the various sides; then you have to decide. Finally, and very importantly, you have to debrief. Because in any ethical conundrum, you might have made a mistake, you might not have done the right thing. And the question is, how can we learn from that?

Looking at myself, I think some of the mistakes I’ve made were when I didn’t take enough time to test the waters with others and to let them criticize me, and to try to learn from that, rather than assuming, “Well, I’ve done this for a while. I know it. I know the best thing.”

When we look to leaders at work, it’s good to exude confidence. You don’t want to look uncertain, but the confidence should be based on having done your homework and having thought about it and conferred and consulted with people and taken feedback seriously. And if you decide not to follow the feedback, have a good reason for that decision.

ALE: Do you experience virtual spaces and places where educators can come together and do this work? Where they can get emotional support, but also “critical friend” support?

HG: Well, I’m going to give my personal view here, which is not the view of many people I work with. I think it’s really important to be at work—and by that I mean physically at work. If people know each other very well, then Zoom or other kinds of communications can be effective. But especially when someone is relatively new in the job, and when the job is changing quickly, there’s really not a good substitute for being there, for having coffee, for going out to lunch or having a drink together or meeting at the Xerox machine.

I’m not in a majority here. I’m unusual in the academy (that means colleges and universities) because I’m kind of a generalist, and I move from one area to another, and I love environments where people from different disciplines get together. I belong to clubs and organizations where they deliberately have historians and biologists and musicians and so on. Much of the academy now is the opposite. It’s more and more siloed.

Even if you know a lot of people, if they’re too similar to you, it doesn’t advance the notion of dealing productively with complicated issues. Because I’m a generalist, I’m lucky I know people in different fields, and they are willing to tolerate me even if I don’t know much about a topic. I love the curiosity inherent in that, and then the challenging of oneself. I would think that we could have richer discussions of ethical dilemmas with people who think differently and come from different disciplines, right?

ALE: How have you and your colleagues at Harvard made ethics and “good work” more concrete and learnable for both teachers and students?

HG: One of the transformative experiences in my life was being hired in 1967 to be a founding member of an organization called Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate of Education. Over nearly six decades, we’ve had hundreds of different projects.

First, we’ve been working with colleges and universities for almost 15 years now on missions that have something to do with character and ethics. Second, a team has created a curriculum on doing good work and good citizenship, which is basically for secondary schools, but it’s used in some middle schools. It’s also translated and used in other countries.

Third, we’ve launched a project called The Good Starts project. It begins with the realization that in America, in early childhood, so much of life is about “I,” and that’s not good for the world. It may not even be good for the child. So, we’ve been trying to study the emergence of “I,” “we,” and “they” in the United States, and compare this trio of categories with other parts of the world.

We’ve worked a great deal with pre–K schools in Northern Italy where almost everything is group work, and there’s no real belief that “I” precedes “we.” Indeed, it’s the way that the school works as a community that’s important. And there are places in Africa where they don’t have words for “I”; everything is “Ubuntu” (“I am because you are”), which is working with other groups. In Japan, they often have two year olds who walk on errands around the city without any help. On the other hand, when there’s a fight that breaks out for young kids, teachers let them fight.

I’m not trying to do anthropology in five minutes. I’m saying that how one begins to deal with oneself, and other people, starts very early. In this country, we’re quite biased toward my child getting into the right school and getting the right job, but we’re trying to learn from the way societies all over the world relate to personal identity, group identity, and civic identity.

I think that the Good Starts work that we’re doing is important. In every society, people tend to think that the way that they treat young people is the right way, and they’re not aware of the very different approaches that you can take with a young child so that they learn to be part of a community, because you can’t really be a good worker or a good citizen if you’re only promoting yourself.

ALE: Considering current threats to our democracy, what would you advise us as citizens, educators, and good workers?

HG: It may well be that what worked in the United States 100 years ago or 50 years ago isn’t working anymore. And the same might be true about Hungary or England or China or India. You’d have to look at each place and say what’s working and what’s not working. But rather than saying there’s nothing to learn from other places, I think the better question to ask is, “What can we learn from other places, which we haven’t thought about enough and which might allow us to do a much better job?”

I think that we need to understand the different beginning points of education in different parts of the world, and not to assume that the way we’re doing it is necessarily the only way to do it, and to try to learn from the examples elsewhere. It’s not one way. It’s reciprocal.

My own teacher, Jerome Bruner, who was a great psychologist and educator, created a social studies course for fifth and sixth graders. And the course asked three questions: What makes human beings human? How can we get that way, and how can we be made more so?

The Good Project, The Good Play project, The Good Starts project, and, indeed, multiple intelligences are all efforts to make us more human, to bring out the best we can in the species before it’s too late. The clock is ticking loudly. It’s not just ticking in the United States; it’s ticking in many parts of the world. And those of us who still believe that there is such a thing as good work and who want to try to have people become good citizens need not assume we know all the answers, but try to learn as much as we can from other examples, and then try to put them together in ways that make sense for our society today.

Employees who usually get along well are blowing up at each other. Managers are reporting that employees are having emotional outbursts in meetings and they’re not sure how to respond.

That was the start of my call with a chief human resources officer (CHRO) at a reputable nonprofit recently. They reached out looking for resources to support what seemed like a rapidly declining workplace culture. Teams weren’t working together as well as they used to, employees weren’t performing at their usual level, and managers were at a loss about what to do. Something was off.

I reminded the CHRO that they’ve been here before. The culprit? Uncertainty.

When there’s uncertainty, distress tends to follow. Our brains are hardwired for certainty. Evolutionarily speaking, predictability was what kept us alive, and our amygdala can perceive uncertainty as a threat, which kicks off the stress response. That was what the CHRO was describing to me.

This nonprofit’s experience is not unique. In my work as an employee well-being consultant at Yes Wellbeing Works, I field numerous calls, emails, and inquiries like this, especially during times of heightened uncertainty. A few years ago, it was the pandemic. At other times, it’s been related to financial crises within organizations. More recently, it’s been the shifting political climate, resulting in unpredictability, financial uncertainty, job loss, and anti-immigration rhetoric. These forces don’t just affect businesses—they’re potentially felt by employees on professional and personal levels.

If you’re a manager or organizational leader, you may be feeling similar to this CHRO. You might not be really sure what to do or what is within your locus of control. And while, yes, much of what is happening now may not be fully within your control, from our work and research at Yes Wellbeing Works, we know that the relationship employees have with their manager is one of the strongest factors affecting their overall well-being in the workplace.

That’s why I’m pulling from my seven years of consulting and training to offer some guidance on how to respond to employee distress related to uncertainty—both reactively, in the moment, and proactively, over the long run.

What is employee distress?

What do I mean when I say “distress”? I’m talking about responses in our body and mind to experiences of chronic stress. Because the neurological stress response fills our body with hormones, impacting not only our brain but other biological functions, its presence can materialize in both physical and psychological ways.

External signs might include lethargy, lack of focus, withdrawal, irritability, jitteriness, problems remembering, frequent self-criticism, avoidance, impatience, indecisiveness, and more. If you as a manager are seeing these kinds of shifts in normal behavior, that may be an indication of distress.

Yes, employee mental distress can hurt performance. It’s true, there’s no denying it—and it’s not too much different from physical distress (e.g., a cold, broken leg, stomachache, etc.), which can of course also influence performance.

The challenge, especially in high-performance workplace cultures, is that managers tend to only see the performance implications of the distress and attempt to resolve it with traditional performance management tools: disciplinary action, rewards and recognition, and sometimes even separation. Unfortunately, none of that addresses the root cause of the problem in situations of uncertainty.


That’s why, when presented with potential signs of distress, you have to be willing to ask: “Could there be something else going on?” Asking that question invites a pause and allows you to choose a different course of action other than performance management. Instead, you’re employing a mental health perspective. To be clear, the goal of both perspectives is the same: to get the employee back on track. The process is just different, and it’s a question of choosing the right tools.

Tools for reactive responding

What might this look like in practice, in the face of an immediate challenge?

Let’s say you have an employee, Elizabeth, who you’ve worked with for the past three years. Federal funding cuts have hit your organization hard, but so far communication to employees about how that will affect them and their work has been sparse. You also know that Elizabeth’s partner is a federal employee.

Typically, Elizabeth does great work: proactively collaborates with colleagues, takes the lead on key projects, and for the past year has been the chairperson of the organization’s social committee, planning after-work activities for employees.

But over the past week, Elizabeth has been logging on late to meetings, and when she does arrive, she frequently yawns throughout the meeting (lethargy). She’s missing deadlines (trouble focusing, problems remembering), and she didn’t show up to the last social event she planned (lack of motivation, withdrawal). During a meeting, a colleague questioned her about a report that she hadn’t turned in yet, and she snapped at them (irritability).  


Clearly, there’s been a shift in Elizabeth’s behavior. So, what should you do? Here are a few immediate steps to consider taking:

1. Check in with yourself. While the focus of this article is about providing support to employees, I want to recognize the emotional needs of managers, as well. Prior to offering support, check in with yourself, assess if you have the psycho-emotional bandwidth to offer support to your employee. Here’s a one-minute video I did during the pandemic walking you through a brief checking-in exercise:

If you don’t have it in you, it’s OK; identify another resource in the organization who can carry forward the below steps (e.g., HR, a dotted line manager, team lead, etc.).

2. Initiate a conversation of support while reducing reputational risks. Contrary to traditional performance management tools, often rooted in discipline, starting with support is a potentially more helpful alternative, in this case. If you notice signs of distress in employees, you want to initiate a conversation of support while at the same time reducing reputational risks for them.

One of the main reasons employees do not talk about mental health challenges in the workplace is stigma and the erroneous association between mental distress and incompetence. Nobody wants to be perceived as though they can’t do their job, so making sure you address perceptions about reputational risks is important.

You first want to make sure the employee has the bandwidth for the conversation, so I suggest setting up some time on their calendar for a one-on-one; if you’re in the office together, going for coffee can be a nice alternative. Once in the allotted time for the conversation, your opener should have three parts: the objective facts, plus reduction of reputational risks, plus statement of concern. So you might say something like this:

Elizabeth, I noticed a shift in how you’re showing up in the workplace lately, you missed a few deadlines, you seem more tired—and yesterday you snapped at Paul in the meeting. I know this is not like you, and I want to check in.

3. Create space for the employee to respond. Once you finish your conversation opener, now it’s time to pause and listen. When listening, you are doing so for several reasons: to see if the employee is willing to engage with you, to potentially understand the root cause of the observed behavior, and as a form of support.

During times of uncertainty, listening to better understand the root cause of the observed behavior can not only help you to support Elizabeth, but also to aggregate sentiments you’re hearing across your employees, as a potential indicator that a broader sweeping form of support may be necessary (more on that below, under tools for responding proactively). Listening can also serve as a form of support by reducing feelings of isolation and demonstrating care through active listening. 

Please note that it’s not uncommon for employees to refuse to engage, for various reasons. Your goal is not to force them to open up to you, but to express your support of them and give them the opportunity to discuss what’s going on if they choose to do so. If they do refuse to engage this time, you can always try to initiate a conversation in the future if the signs of distress persist.

4. Offer active support. Let’s say Elizabeth is open to engaging with you, and she says something like this: “I’ve been feeling really nervous about the fate of our organization. I can’t stop worrying about my job security. Also my family has been really impacted by all of the uncertainty. It’s been a really stressful time for me lately.”

In this situation, empathic support is great; you can and should say: “I’m sorry to hear that.” However, while you may not be able to solve the uncertainty problem, as a manager you are uniquely positioned to offer real, tangible support that could have a meaningful impact on reducing the employee’s current stress load.

An often-overlooked form of active support that also allows the employee to maintain their agency is to first ask, “How can I best support you during this period?” Oftentimes employees know what might make a difference to help them through a challenging time.

A few other forms of active support include:

• Reprioritizing their workload: removing deliverables that are neither urgent nor important.
• Providing resources: allocating additional human, monetary, or tool-based resources to complete a project.
• Compensatory time off: most full-time–exempt employees work more than 40 hours a week. Some organizational structures have norms that allow for occasionally providing employees with compensatory time off.
• Sharing resources: sharing your organization’s behavioral health resources (e.g., Employee Assistance Program, Headspace mental health app, Calm app, etc.) or other resources you know of that can be helpful.

It’s important to note that if ever during the conversation you become uncomfortable or hear something that goes beyond simple distress toward, for example, suicidal feelings, then you should consider escalating to your Human Resources professional, especially if it’s a matter of safety for the employee or others.

Tools for responding proactively

You don’t have to wait until you see signs of employee distress to offer support. Times of uncertainty are great opportunities for managers to practice proactive management skills that can limit distress. By acknowledging that uncertainty can lead to distress, you can try to manage in a way that reduces uncertainty:

1. Over-communicate. Keep communication with your employees frequent and fact-based. Even if there is nothing new to report, you can share that “I don’t have an update on XYZ.” Why? Because in an absence of information, employees may create their own narratives about what’s going on, and typically their narrative is far more sensational or catastrophizing than the reality. Get in front of that with regular communication and information-sharing. Think: snackable bits of information at regular intervals.

2. Address common shared experiences. This brings us back to listening to Elizabeth above. Hopefully, as a manager, you’re having regular engagement with all of your employees. During times of uncertainty, you want to listen for patterns of shared experiences that paint the truth of the current workplace dynamic and its impact on employees. When you hear that, call an all-hands for your team and acknowledge it. And if you’re willing to be vulnerable, share how the current climate is impacting you. This kind of step helps employees to not feel so isolated, and it communicates, “It’s OK to be honest about our experiences.”

3. Strengthen psychological safety. At Yes Wellbeing Works, we define psychological safety as “the capacity to show up authentically, make mistakes, push back, and seek support without fear of negative consequences.” When psychological safety is high on teams, honesty, help-seeking, and positive group dynamics tend to be higher, too, all of which can buffer employees from distress as they navigate uncertainty.

4. Build self-awareness and self-management. These are foundational emotional intelligence skills. Managers can and do also experience distress. A great way to support your employees during times of uncertainty is to take care of yourself. Specifically by being aware when you may be experiencing distress and then self-managing by seeking support or taking a break, perhaps turning to your own boss. Doing so can model vulnerability and reduce the likelihood that your distress is directed toward employees.

Uncertainty can lead to employee distress, but with the right tools it doesn’t have to. And while managers may not be able to resolve the uncertainty, it will only exacerbate the situation in the absence of support, communication, psychological safety, and self-awareness.


Morally: People should not have to go without income during those times when they need intense care, or have to give intense care to others. Politically: The vast majority of voters support the establishment of a policy. Structurally: Paid leave programs in various cities and states have demonstrated how to make it work. Economically: The data is clear that paid leave is good for individuals and the economy overall.

Yet here we are, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and paid leave is far from universal in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “only 27% of private sector workers in the United States had access to paid family leave through their employer and only 43% had access to short-term disability insurance through their employer.”

And a call for paid leave for all can’t be dismissed as some left-wing, Scandinavian fantasy. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world without a paid leave policy.

I’ve been covering paid leave for over a decade and I still often find myself thinking WHY? HOW? And, most importantly, WHEN?

To answer these questions, I reached out to Orli Cotel, a longtime paid leave advocate who’s worked with PL+US: Paid Leave for the United States, Moms First, and others. We spoke about why women are still going back to work days after delivering a baby, why our friends and families are battling illnesses, or dying alone, because their loved ones have to go to work, and why we avoid seeking care for ourselves out of fear that we will lose a paycheck or our job altogether.

Elissa Strauss: Hi Orli! Thanks for chatting with me about the absence of a paid leave policy in the U.S. Tell me, how did you get into this work?

Orli Cotel: I’ve been in the advocacy space my whole career. I spent the first decade or so working on climate advocacy and then I had my first baby in 2014.

I had this experience that I think a lot of parents have for the first time, feeling like “I didn’t realize it was going to be this hard.” And if it was this hard for me, someone with a lot of privilege, with paid leave and a partner with paid leave, what could this be like for an hourly wage worker without paid leave? How would they get through it?

And so I decided to take some of the skills that I’ve learned in tackling huge problems on the climate side and figure out how we can win paid family leave for everyone in the U.S.

ES: I’m sure by now you’ve encountered many who had to get through a tricky illness or care moment without paid leave. Tell us a story or two of what you have seen.

OC: I have too many, unfortunately. One heartbreaking story that really stayed with me was about a mom who gave birth to a very premature baby on a Thursday, and had to be back at work as a server at Waffle House on Sunday. She went back to work, likely still bleeding, as most people are just a few days after childbirth.

This mom would work long shifts on her feet during the day, and then head to the NICU at night, and just sit by the incubator where her little baby was fighting for its life. She would sit there and cry and cry.

A lot of the conversation about paid leave too has focused on white-collar jobs and executives—part of conversations we have around breaking the glass ceiling. But we don’t talk enough about what it means to raise the floor. That’s why I worked on the campaigns to help win paid leave for hourly workers at Walmart, Starbucks, CVS, and more.

And there are millions and millions of people in America who aren’t even covered for unpaid job-protected leave. I spoke with a dad in New Hampshire who was working as a security guard. He had a shift the day his wife went into labor and he told his boss he had to drive her to the hospital. His boss said if he didn’t show up he would be fired. So he lost his job.

ES: You mentioned how the paid leave conversation often focuses on white-collar workers. It also often focuses on parents, and less on the need for paid leave during illnesses.

OC: I have personal experience with this one. My husband was diagnosed with cancer in June of 2020. It was the height of the pandemic, people were still washing their groceries and not speaking to other humans in person.

It was incredibly isolating and challenging, and we had paid leave. I can’t even understand what that would be like for someone who could not take paid leave to be there at that moment for their loved one. I needed to help him navigate the medical situation, find the best surgeons, help him recover from surgery, and take care of our little kids.

I also think about all the elders in our country who currently have no one around to care for them because their children and grandchildren do not have paid leave. More often than not, they are dying alone. That’s a truly heartbreaking failure of our system.

ES: Can you give us a brief history primer on how we became the only country in the world where these kinds of stories are common?

OC: One piece of the history that I think most people don’t know about is what happened after World War II, and how that impacted the real split between how paid leave emerged in European countries and never happened here.

The European population was decimated in WWII. There weren’t enough people to work in the factories and rebuild the cities. But they also needed to regrow their population—for women to have babies. Basically, women needed to be able to work and have families and so they created policies to support working women, including paid family leave and child care.

Meanwhile, the U.S. had the opposite problem. Our population didn’t significantly decline. We had male soldiers who were coming home and needed jobs. More women joined the workforce during WWII, but now the government felt like it needed to push women out to make room for men. And so, on purpose, they didn’t create policies that would incentivize women to stay in the workforce. In the case of child care, they ended a federal program.

There are other factors as well, things like higher unionization rates in many countries where there are robust policies.

ES: And now let’s fast forward to today when we are the only industrialized nation in the world without a policy…

OC: Yes, we say the only industrial nation, because really the only other nation that doesn’t have it is Papua, New Guinea.

There are now 14 states that have statewide paid leave programs, and that’s great. But that means that there are still 36 states that don’t have anything.

We do have a federal law called FMLA, the Family Medical Leave Act, which was passed in 1993 and is basically just unpaid job projection if you need to take time off to care for a baby, a family member with a medical condition, or yourself if you have a medical condition. But in addition to being unpaid, it is also very restricted—44% of the entire workforce doesn’t even qualify.

ES: How did we get stuck with this half-assed law?

OC: My understanding is that advocates originally wanted it to be a paid law, but did not think that they were going to be able to pass it so instead decided to really push for an unpaid job protection law in the hopes that they would get the foot in the door and then expand it to be paid leave afterwards.

And what’s interesting is that it is not only unpaid, but also has us thinking that 12 weeks of paid leave is the standard, or a reasonable amount, when it is completely arbitrary and also inadequate. All the science shows that you really need at least six months of leave, and the earliest version of this legislation was for 26 weeks of leave. It just got whittled down to 12 weeks in negotiations. Meanwhile over in Canada, they recently expanded their leave from 12 months to 18 months.

ES: And then 30 years later and we still don’t have a paid law…why?

OC: Well, first of all look at the makeup of Congress today. Half of the Senate is over 65. I don’t think they understand the economy in which young people are raising families today.

Many of them had wives stay home when they were raising their children, and so they’ll think things like: People should just save money if they want kids. They don’t get the conflicting economic stressors like housing costs, health insurance costs, and student loan debt.

And then there’s the fact that our society has a fundamental lack of respect for moms, whether they’re in the paid workforce or not. As long as this issue is placed in that cognitive bucket of “women’s issue”…it’s not going to move anywhere. This is why a lot of the work that I do is really around organizing the business community and trying to place this issue into an economic frame to show how much having paid leave can help our economy.

Another reason we haven’t seen progress fast enough is that there’s just not enough support from philanthropy. We need more funding to really be able to swing for the fences.

ES: How do you feel about the incremental progress we have seen city by city and state by state?

OC: A good federal bill would clearly be the best solution. And it would be the simplest solution for big businesses who wouldn’t have to navigate employees living in 50 different states that someday could have 50 different laws.

But in the meantime, the wins at the state level are incredibly inspiring and energizing, and they’re actually bringing paid leave now to people who need it. If we just focus on the long-term vision of a federal bill, it’s going to take a long time.

ES: What do we see happening in those states?

OC: The states are giving us lots of clear data that paid leave is a win-win-win. It helps businesses, it helps families, and it is good for public health.

We are also increasingly seeing people working across the aisle to make paid leave happen. It’s happening in purple states now like Pennsylvania, and I hope red states follow suit.

ES: Yeah, as I mentioned on top, polling suggests it’s a pretty popular issue, across party lines.

OC: Yeah, on the voter side everybody wants it.

But there is a difference in how Republicans and Democrats are approaching the solution. Republicans are offering things like tax credits or allowing people to borrow from their own social security to fund their leave. Or a proposal to give special savings accounts to people in their late 20s and 30s dedicated to paid parental leave, as if young people have tons of extra money to save. These proposals are far from adequate.

Democrats are proposing comprehensive paid leave insurance programs, which has been proven to be the best way to meet the need.

ES: Which paid leave structure is working in the states where it exists?

OC: All 14 states have done things the same way, and it’s working well. They run paid leave through a statewide insurance program. Sometimes employees pay a small premium, and other times employers pay it, and most commonly it is split. For the employee, it can be a few dollars a week, so it isn’t much. That goes into a pool of money that funds leave for everyone when they need it. And it’s important to note that it’s not just parental leave—it also funds leave to care for an aging parent or a family member with a serious illness like cancer.

ES: What can readers do to help make paid leave a reality for everyone?

OC: Vote on these issues, and also let your elected officials know that you are going to vote for them based on this. Email them and tell them that.

Also, we need more young lawmakers, more parents, and more caregivers—and that doesn’t just mean women, but electing more women helps. We need more parents to run for office, and canvas on behalf of other parents.

Also, get loud about this issue. Don’t just complain to your group chat. Get loud in a public way, and if you post on social media, tag your representatives.

We need more folks to get involved with the organizations that are really leading the charge on this, and there are tons of great organizations out there that are fighting for this—including Moms First, Chamber of Mothers, Paid Leave for All—whether it’s at the state level or at the national level. There are opportunities to go and meet with members of Congress and talk with them or with your local state House.

The other way to get involved that can feel more accessible to folks is to advocate for good paid leave policies in your workplace. I have put together a bunch of training materials for anyone who wants to do that. My DMs on LinkedIn are always open if folks want extra support or tools, benchmarking data, or even just a pep talk.

I think at this point we have a lot of research on this, a lot of white papers and reports, and I’m not sure we need more. We need people to make noise.

ES: I want to end by bringing us to a personal place. The absence of universal paid leave doesn’t just impact us during the time we do, or don’t, get leave. It sends this overall vibe that we should be able to handle all care responsibilities without external support, and if…when…we can’t, it is because there is something wrong with us.

As a freelancer, I have never had the help of paid leave, not after the birth of my children, and not while caring for a close family member during an illness. Honestly, I had to hold back tears a few times during this conversation because I’ve realized just how much I have internalized this idea that I should have been able to handle it on my own and the sheer exhaustion or financial worries were all on me.

OC: I 100% agree. Let’s be clear: You can’t solve systemic problems with individual solutions. And yet parents are told that if we can’t figure it out, if we can’t make ends meet, if we feel overwhelmed, that’s our fault. This starts with paid leave and it extends to the child care crisis, to the lack of after-school facilities, to the expensive logistical mess that is summer time for working parents, to the lack of affordable college. There are so many parents I know who feel like if they can just create the perfect Excel spreadsheet, they’ll be able to manage it all, and yet it still doesn’t work. And that’s by design. If we’re overwhelmed, exhausted, and alone, then we’re not in the streets demanding change.

We live in the richest nation on earth and also one of the loneliest. People start their parenting journey feeling alone, and this leads to serious mental health problems. The New York Times just had an article a couple of months ago about a steep drop in mothers’ mental health—and this was from research involving nearly 200,000 mothers. The lack of paid leave clearly plays a part here: 1 in 4 new mothers is forced back to work within two weeks of giving birth, still bleeding from childbirth. This is unconscionable.

We need to fundamentally reimagine what it would look like to support parents and caregivers. This starts with paid family leave, but it could be so much more. In the Netherlands, postpartum care includes home visits from a maternity assistant for the first eight to 10 days after birth, where they provide medical checks, breastfeeding advice, and even do light household chores and cleanup so the mother can focus on healing and bonding with her baby—and this is all paid for by standard health insurance.

Here, we’re telling the mom, “we don’t care if you literally can’t walk and haven’t slept and have stitches in your vagina and are leaking milk out of your breasts, get back to your job.” Is it any wonder that we have a long-term maternal mental health crisis?

This article was originally published on Made with Care. Read the original article.

But is retirement as blissful as it might seem? A paper published this year reviewed 15 other reviews of past retirement research to provide the “most updated and comprehensive summary of the available evidence on the effects of retirement on health,” both mental and physical.

Giacomo Pietro Vigezzi of the University of Pavia in Italy and his colleagues drew from studies across the world, including the U.S., China, Brazil, India, Russia, Nigeria, and many other countries. The big picture appears to be somewhat mixed. While a 2021 study found that people are prone to depressive symptoms in retirement, another 2021 study suggested that retirement actually reduces our risk of depression by about 20%.

But going deeper, they found that the effects of retirement tend to depend on a variety of factors: the nature of the job from which you’re retiring, your own health and responsibilities, and your socioeconomic status, with better-off retirees seeing improvements in different aspects of their health, and worse-off retirees at risk for declines. It’s also the case that different societies have a variety of attitudes toward work and elderhood, which can shape well-being after retirement.

These findings point the way toward better personal choices for ourselves as individuals in retirement—and they suggest that we need policies that will support retirees across the economic spectrum.

Health and well-being in retirement

In reviewing the findings from all the research they surveyed, Vigezzi and his colleagues observed that socioeconomic status seemed to play a role in mental health after retirement. One 2018 study found that mental health improved in retirees with high socioeconomic status, but declined in those who retired on less money.

The job you’re leaving also has an impact on mental health after retirement. People leaving stressful jobs may be the ones who see their mental health improve, according to a 2013 study. This seems to be particularly the case for men.

Do we become more or less active after retirement, another marker of health? Jobs and wealth mattered here, as well. All the reviews found that people with high socioeconomic status became more physically active. Although retirees were doing less physical activity for a job or during a commute, they had more time for recreation, exercise, and leisure. This wasn’t the case for people with low socioeconomic status, who often showed declines in physical activity.

There may be various reasons for this, the researchers explain. Gym memberships and home exercise equipment cost money, and people who are worse off financially may live in areas with less convenient access to parks and other safe spaces to exercise. They may have less time to exercise due to caregiving or other responsibilities, or simply not place that much value on it.

This makes people with low socioeconomic status at risk of rising sedentary behavior in retirement, like reading and watching TV. TV watching tends to increase for everyone after they retire, but even more so those for who are less well off.

And the physical affects the mental. The more older adults engage in active leisure and physical activity, the better their mental health; the more sedentary they are, the less satisfied they tend to be with life.

The researchers also looked at the risk of cognitive decline and death after retirement, but there were no consistent patterns. One complication is that people often retire due to concerns around health and aging, so in effect their health problems cause their retirement, and not the other way around. Diet, smoking, and alcohol use also showed no clear patterns among retirees.

The current study didn’t capture what retirement looks like in low-income countries, and some of the findings dated back as early as 1966, so retirement may be an even more complicated picture in today’s world.

Everyone’s retirement is different

So much of the research on retirement is conflicting, and it makes sense if we consider how different retirement can be for different people, the researchers explain.

First off, we come into retirement from different job situations. For some, retirement means finally leaving a stressful, back-breaking job. For others, “retirement may also entail the loss of daily routines, physical and mental activity, sense of identity and purpose, social interactions and connections, and reduction in income,” the researchers explain.

We can retire because we are forced to, because we’ve reached the “retirement age” in our country, or because we need to care for partners, parents, or grandchildren. Sometimes retirement is planned months or years in advance; other times it happens abruptly.

Culture matters, too. While the practice of retirement may be common in Western countries, this isn’t the case everywhere—so elders who stop work may not receive the same social recognition or status. Depending on government policy in our country, retirement may mean more or less financial support from social programs like pensions.

Needless to say, retirees come with all sorts of living situations and habits. They may have a spouse who still works, or live alone; if they find themselves with free time, they may choose to fill it with healthy or not-so-healthy behaviors.

The researchers suggest that future retirement studies should try to take into account more of these factors to tease out their influence—and that government policy should help promote exercise, mental health, and social activity for elders both before and after retirement.

“Policy interventions should be tailored to address the specific needs of retirees, particularly those from lower socioeconomic groups who are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes after retirement,” write Vigezzi and his colleagues.

Retirement is something we can prepare for both as individuals and as societies—to support ourselves and each other as we adjust financially, mentally, and socially to what can be a monumental life transition.

Many discussions about burnout inevitably turn to ideas like mindfulness and self-compassion: skills that can be taught to workers to improve their mental health and—particularly in health care—enhance patient care.

But that puts the burden on the employee. What about the responsibility of the organization? While we ask people to be compassionate with themselves, we must also encourage organizations to be compassionate toward their people.

This was the starting point for a conversation hosted by the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations between their faculty director, Monica Worline, and Ace Simpson, director of the Center for Compassion Studies in New York and visiting professor of management at Manhattan University. They discussed how to cultivate a culture and practice of organizational compassion—and addressed some of the common concerns leaders may have about it.

Here is an edited and shortened version of their Q&A.


Monica Worline: Could you tell us what you mean by compassion, and why you emphasize that it’s a relational process?

Ace V. Simpson: When we talk about organizational compassion, our emphasis is on the other. We define compassion within organizations as noticing, empathizing with, appraising, and responding to members’ suffering.

Even so, that definition has limitations, as it reflects the giver’s perspective—the one who notices, empathizes, appraises, and responds. But where is the person receiving the compassion in that definition?

In our book Organizational Compassion: A Relational Approach, we have sought to address that by broadening perspectives. We ask questions about the role of the receiver in the compassion process—and give them a voice. We seek to understand how it’s their signaling for support that actually triggers the compassion process. It’s their emoting—their fears and concerns and angst—that needs to be empathized with. It’s their narrating or explaining the context of their struggles that enables appraisal. And it’s the person who struggles, who’s challenged, who’s suffering—by describing what they need to address their concerns—who facilitates adequate responding.

Organizational compassion, then, is a co-created process between receivers and givers—one that unfolds through signaling and noticing, emoting and empathizing, narrating and appraising, describing needs and responding with support to address suffering in the workplace.

MW: What does the research tell us about why we should care about organizational compassion?

AS: Our research shows that when compassion is supported in the workplace—when people are able to express care and support for one another, or receive it from their supervisors or mentors, when they see it demonstrated by their leaders—they feel a greater sense of loyalty, commitment, and trust. When they feel cared for, and when they see that the organization cares, they’re more inspired to give their discretionary time and energy to their colleagues and to the organization.

When organizations pay attention to their people—and support them with compassion, particularly during their times of struggle or distress—that compassion tends to come back to the organization in the form of goodwill, loyalty, and engagement. It also leads to better customer outcomes, because when employees care about the organization, that care spills over into how they treat customers or patients.

That would be a kind of utilitarian argument—a business case—for why compassion matters in organizations. But beyond that, it’s also simply the right thing to do—an expression of virtue and a recognition of human dignity.

MW: You talk a lot about how leaders use their role—and the power they have—to foster greater compassion. What are some specific things you see leaders doing to facilitate compassion across an organization?

AS: Leaders do play a pivotal role in fostering compassion within their organizations—first and foremost, by simply giving permission to others to be compassionate. We say that suffering is always in the room, but we could also say there’s always compassion there, as well. In any social dynamic, there will be micro-acts of kindness, and organizations are no different. Day to day, people cover for each other, they provide slack for one another, they support one another in different ways—emotionally, but also practically, as well. And this facilitates day-to-day organizational functioning, although it’s not necessarily taught in business schools or acknowledged in management and organizational theory. We might even say that organizations couldn’t function without those micro-practices of care and compassion.

Leaders can highlight that. They can acknowledge it, recognize it, encourage it, and facilitate it. They can demonstrate that this is really important and matters within their organization.

A great example of a leader who emphasized compassion within his organization was Jeff Weiner, the former CEO of LinkedIn. He would talk about managing compassionately. He would talk about how he applied this in his own leadership by pausing before reacting, understanding others’ hopes and fears, and trying to foster their well-being and success. So that’s the first thing that a leader can do: They can role-model compassion for other leaders within their organizations.

They can take that further by seeking to foster it within organizational processes. Weiner taught workshops on managing compassionately and organized programs for employees across the organization. They organized compassionate leadership summits and more broadly sought to integrate it into other organizational processes. If compassion doesn’t have the support of leadership, it will be there, but it will be underground, so to speak. When it is supported by leadership, then it can really flourish and thrive.

MW: For people who aren’t in positions of leadership or executive influence, what can they do to create a more compassionate organization without having the support of leadership?

AS: What comes to mind are Peter Frost’s “toxin handlers.” That’s where a compassionate leader or supervisor lower down the organizational hierarchy becomes a defender of their team or people, defending them against unreasonable deadlines and demands that come from headquarters that can undermine their well-being and psychological safety and security. That would be an extreme case, because Frost’s toxin handlers often take a personal hit. It undermines their own physical health and well-being as they shield their people from toxicity that comes from higher up in the organization.

Compassion can involve resistance to oppression and abuse. That would be an example of compassion as strength—and it takes a lot of courage to be that kind of leader, supporting your people in that way. If you are going to take that role—you need to be able to deal with that internally yourself, and to have an outlet: peers that you can speak with, coaches who can support you. It’s a process of self-awareness, not just being the angry compassion warrior. It’s about turning that toxicity—that poison—into nectar.

Aside from that, the manager or team leader lower down in the organization can view their division as a micro-organization within the larger system. Compassionate processes can be integrated within a division just as much as across the whole organization. I’ve certainly seen that in health care organizations and other sectors. When we look at data from our surveys, we often find divisions where employees rate their team very highly in terms of compassion—and others where that’s not the case—all within the same organization. The fact that you find such disparities within the same system indicates that it’s possible for a leader to create a microculture within their team division.

MW: What are some organizational features that get in the way and inhibit compassion across the system, or that enable it?

AS: Culture is really important. Culture can normalize compassion—or not. And when it does, it can create an environment where people feel safer to address mistakes and concerns, to communicate with one another, to be vulnerable, and to reach out and support one another.

Another key factor is leadership. Leadership plays a critical role—not only in role-modeling, but also in ensuring that compassion is integrated across the organization.

Then there are the routines, daily rituals, check-ins, and processes of the organization: Who does it hire? What does it value in terms of performance? Is it purely a metric of productivity? Or is there also a relational dimension to how performance is evaluated? You might have a top sales agent who hits their targets by trampling on colleagues.

Communication is also important—having open communication, empathic channels, and opportunities for people to voice concerns and be heard without fear of reprisal.

And then, related to culture, are mission and values. A lot of the time, organizations profess a certain mission or set of values. But then there’s a disconnect between the espoused values and the actual practices. Being aligned there is also of vital importance.

MW: In a moment like this, where cost-cutting is at the forefront of the organizational agenda, does compassion have a place?

AS: Absolutely. Cost-cutting may be required for an organization’s survival, and a leader has to make those tough choices because they need to think about the organization as a whole. The leader is responsible for all the employees and all those who are stakeholders within that organization.

But cost-cutting can be done in a manner that lacks compassion, or it can be done with a lot of empathy and a lot of care, where the leader speaks to employees and explains why those decisions are made and explains the different choices that were available. It involves being held accountable for the decisions made.

Sometimes leaders try to lead through spreadsheets, and they just say the data said we had to do it. But there are always choices. And there are great examples of organizations—like Costco or Southwest or Hilton—facing the question of whether to lay off employees after a global financial crisis, or after, let’s say, 9/11, when people are too afraid to fly. As an airline, what are you going to do? You have to reduce the number of routes you’re flying, which may mean laying people off. Or the organization could go to employees and say, “We need to reduce the number of routes, for now. We could lay some of you off, but what we’re going to do is ask you all to work fewer hours and take a temporary pay cut. Once things return to normal, we’ll increase your hours and restore your original pay.”

Alternatively, organizations can support employees by helping them find alternative employment, offering counseling and career guidance, or training them for work in other areas, as well.

MW: How can you ensure that a compassionate leader is not manipulated or exploited?

AS: There is that fear—that if I’m kind or compassionate, others might take that for weakness and then manipulate me and take advantage. And, yes, that possibility will always be there.

One option is to decide, “OK, I’m not going to be compassionate. I’ll just present a tough exterior, suppress my compassionate side, and say it has no role or place here.” The other option is to acknowledge that, yes, I might occasionally be taken advantage of—but I’m willing to take that risk as a leader. Sometimes a team member may take sick leave when they’re not really unwell, or someone might exploit the system in another way.

But I would hope—and expect—that as I act compassionately and supportively, we build a certain level of trust between us. And within that context of trust, loyalty, commitment, and engagement—created through a compassionate environment—the likelihood of being taken for granted or manipulated diminishes considerably.

MW: You’ve talked about “presponse” rather than waiting for suffering and responding to it. What do you mean by that?

AS: Often we talk about compassion as a response to suffering, and that framing can be problematic. There’s also suffering that we can anticipate in advance—for example, during mergers and acquisitions, or periods of organizational change. There’s also suffering that can arise within the organization in terms of bullying.

Organizations can and should anticipate this. If we broaden our thinking about compassion—not only as responding to suffering, but also anticipating it—anticipating the pain that will inevitably arise from processes that are unfolding—then being a compassionate leader means responding to that anticipated suffering, as well. That’s when we really begin to broaden our understanding of what compassion entails and involves.

This essay is based on a Q&A that is part of the Positive Links Speaker Series by the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations. The Center is dedicated to building a better world by pioneering the science of thriving organizations.