I went in for a root canal… And came out with a solution to my problem.

Today, I anxiously sat reclined in the tan, leather dental chair waiting for the doctor to make her appearance. My dentist referred me to an Endodontist after feeling severe pain in my second molar following a small filling. After a second look, my dentist suspected that I needed a root canal.

I get that root canals are standard procedures performed on more than 15 million people each year. Today alone, 41,000 brave souls have reclined in their Endodontists’ leather chairs, and let their docs go in for a dig. But at nearly 45 years old, I did not even have my first cavity until this year. I’m somewhat of a newbie to dental procedures, and dental pain, for that matter. So yes, I was anxiously waiting for the Endodontist to arrive and tell me the bad news.

Once she reviewed my x-rays, did tooth tap and cold tests, and made me bite down on some tasty cardboard, she swiveled my chair so that I could see the enlarged image of my second molar. She said, “I think we have a number of issues at play here. But I don’t think we have a problem with the root.” She then proceeded to teach me much more about my teeth than I’d ever hoped to know. My brain connected the dots. I had a systems issue at play.

Systems-thinking can get a little complicated. Donella Meadows was my hero when I was writing my dissertation on how systems interactions impact communities working to solve community problems. She is quite possibly the most brilliant systems scientist of my lifetime.  Dr. Meadows broke it down with a simple definition that helps us to apply systems concepts to everyday situations. In her book, Thinking in Systems, she explained it as an interconnected set of elements coherently organized in a way that achieves something. Systems-thinking focuses on the relationships among the system parts, versus the parts themselves. In the case of my second molar, the interconnection of a number of compounding issues had made my situation more convoluted and was causing intense pain. So, my doctor asked me how long and how much pain did I think I could endure in order to give her time to take a step-by-step approach to fix my problem. I told her, “If it means I can keep my root, I am all in!”

At Crescent Leadership, we call this untangling the system. Elements of any organization, or system, reciprocally influence each other creating a reinforcing context. The reciprocal influence and reinforcing context breed conditions for enduring growth, or decline. This means that the decisions, actions, and behaviors of Leaders have an intense interaction effect. The good news is systems effects go both ways. When Leaders reinforce healthy culture states—Trust, Vitality, Belonging, and Purpose—through their decisions, actions, and behaviors, it produces the right conditions to build enduring organizations. The bad news is when managers reinforce toxic culture states—fear, fatigue, isolation, and apathy—through their decisions, actions, and behaviors, it produces convoluted, complex organizational problems immune to simple interventions.

To better explain how this works, let’s go from bad to good, shall we?

In Courage Goes to Work, Bill Treasurer explores the concept of fear in order to enhance our understanding of courage. He’s clear that fear has the ability to drive performance but only to a certain point. Essentially, you can scare your people into performing by threatening their jobs, limiting their growth opportunities, and making errors a death sentence instead of a chance to learn from the experience. But Bill reminds us that the “impact of fear on performance has diminishing returns.” At a certain point, the negative side of fear rears its ugly head. Fear reinforces the culture states of isolation, fatigue, and apathy, and can lead to avoidance, paralysis of action, or even aggression. https://www.stress.org/ reported that workplace stress comes at a significant cost to the organization and the economy:

·       Depression and anxiety cost the global economy approximately $1 trillion in lost productivity.

·       An estimated 1 million workers are absent every day because of stress.

·       Job stress is estimated to cost the US industry more than $300 billion in losses due to absenteeism, diminished productivity, and accidents.

·       Over five hours of office work hours are lost weekly to employees thinking about their stressors.

·       Work-related stress costs $190 billion in annual healthcare costs in the US.

Wharton management professor Andrew Carton says, “when fear becomes an entrenched marker of an organization’s culture, it can have toxic effects over the long run. In addition to stifling creativity, it can inhibit collaboration and lead to burnout.” The term “burnout” has been around since the 1970s but has been diluted over time making the fear-mongering of managers easier to swallow. The true cost of fear and work-related stress on an individual’s health is rarely acknowledged. In the same study, https://www.stress.org/ reported that:

·       83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress, with 25% saying their job is the number one stressor in their lives.

·       About one million Americans miss work each day because of stress.

·       76% of US workers report that workplace stress affects their personal relationships.

I started this example with a single concept—fear. The impact of fear is exponentially multiplied by its relationship to the other culture states. Now for the good news. Last week I posted a quote from my research on the impact of trust. “A single act of trust by a Leader has a profound and immediate neurological effect on a team member’s confidence.”  When Leaders give team members discretion in how they do their work it results in performance and innovation. Allowing people to utilize the expertise you paid for when you hired them is a no-brainer way to reinforce the trust culture and untangle the culture of fear. The surest way to extinguish the passion of a motivated and competent employee is to signal to them that their expertise and knowledge have no value to you as a Leader. In his study of 1,095 working adults, on the neuroscience of trust, Paul Zak found that respondents from companies in the top trust quartile reported having 106% more energy and 40% less burnout than respondents from companies in the bottom trust quartile. They also reported 76% more engagement and 50% more productivity. 50% more intend to stay with their current company which signals significant cost savings for high-trust companies. 88% would recommend their workplace to a family member or friend.

The examples of two opposing culture states demonstrate why culture—healthy or toxic—is so complex. Culture is a system where every interaction effect must be considered. A leader’s role in untangling, or further tangling these issues within an organization is inevitable. How people lead and the type of culture they perpetuate have the most profound impact on how effectively they can untangle the system. A Leader must be willing to play the long game. And unfortunately, we’ve grown lazy. In the dizzying, face-paced digital age, anything that can’t be quickly and easily implemented, measured within an inch of its life, and proven gets tossed out with the morning garbage.

John Kotter, who has studied organizational change and culture for decades, found that major culture change efforts can take as much as four to 10 years. But he also gave us one of the most significant research-backed demonstrations of the bottom-line impact of culture. His study of 200 companies found that strong culture increased net income by 756% over 11 years. I’ll take 756% in 11 years over huge gains in a single year, only to watch them plummet the next, any day of the week.

Today, my Endodontist offered to untangle the system… to provide a solution that would address the core problem, and fix my issue for the long-term. But she was clear—it would take time, patience, methodical action on my part, and more pain than I might typically be willing to endure. Untangling any system is not easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. In the same way, culture-building isn’t a quick-win growth strategy.

But… it’s the only sustainable one.