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Science of hiring

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What's News
2/28/2017 5:15PM
Feeling stressed, anxious and overwhelmed are some of the factors that characterize employee burnout. Studies show the problem is getting worse, according to Rachel Feintzeig of the Wall Street Journal.

Show Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

it's a group that more stressed out workers are joining the burnout clump ... award winning work or as a regional in science ... this is what's news I'm the last ten ... time Charlie Turner in New York ... more employees are suffering from burnout at their jobs ... those who study the problem say companies are not prepared to cope ... experts believe the burnout problem is getting worse ... resulting in steep turnover and health costs ... what is burn out what characterizes it and how much has the problem grow network ... Rachel find single The Wall Street Journal joins us to talk about burnout first Rachel what is burning up ... it is actually kind of like an extreme stress reaction ... and so a bikini prompted by a lot of different things but ... that the idea is that you become overwhelmed for sixteen period of time ... after that I am and cynical about working had doubts about why even going to begin with ... and ultimately you just become kind of know ... I ... writes ... give some examples of workers who might be suffering from burnout ... rate bears on ... one of the things would be if your performance starts kind of lagging in its often people who were top performers to begin with ... I'm people who use to critique the Leon projects an hour just kind of quiet work ... people might be cut if Snapcash current their co-workers ... coming and leave leaving early calling a snack ... I aam dozer confirmed that the warning signs ... hope that is the problem getting according to various surveys ... I aam Kerrigan surveys from Kerala on ... some more also done in Europe or Burnie has been a big problem ... aam ... it seems that a lot of people are burnt out ... all or stressed or tired a Gallup ... poll for all of those things ... we also took a look at data from employee assistance programs where I'm ... workers will Colleen and he was the area's problems that they're having ... he and use on those folks are seeing an increase in costs related to stress and anxiety so ... I think that that was whereas a couple years ago ... on this one company EEP provider workplace options ... that fifty percent of their call for related to stress anxiety ... now it's up to seventy percent ... Rachel didn't the problem get worse during the financial crisis when companies ... cut back and ask fewer workers to take on more responsibilities ... did they think the interesting thing is the kind of ... it hasn't gone away in fact ... people and told me that part of the problem is that that happened and many ... companies has continued to kind and do more with Last ... any feelings of job insecurity have persisted and sundown people are beginning to realize ... all this is just the way it's going to be going forward and I think that's kind of prompted a sell out ... of a bigger home of existential crisis among workers ... and there's been a problem of this always on ... culture where workers have felt increasing pressure to be tied to their jobs right yes it did on that is is pretty staggering to mean ... so many people feel like they have to check in on Turner's there is over I'm research showing that ... even if you're not getting emails and characters that anticipatory anxiety when you know you ... can each team can have a big impact ... on ... one consulting I'd talk to ... me the point that it use to be ... like there are certain jobs like a medical resident or a litigator review here are signing up for it was going to be ... really really intense and Tuesday's it feels like everyone's God is in extreme I'm I'm speaking with the Rachel find SIG of the Wall Street Journal in your listening to what's news ... thanks for listening everyone ... Rachel which professions appear to be especially vulnerable to burn out you mentioned at least a couple ... I like this in their booties professions that kind of have long had ... he no longer hours painted in intense war and I think I mentioned ... resident were litigator ... but today it's everyone's feeling at all kinds of jobs and I'd talk to people for the story ... that did did all kinds of things from working in a restaurant ... to being a consultant ... on and he did all were struggling with this kind of seamstress experience ... a couple of ... big pictures sort of questions hasn't burnout caused a big rise in health care costs ... yes so ... and there it there there are studies showing the connection between workplace stress ... and health care costs and ... there's there's one study from researchers at Stanford and Harvard that examined ... ten different ... stressors and anything broadening some of them were related and I believe to like work hours and and that's her thing ... among them or even just ... lack of health insurance or unemployment I'm going back to that Stephen were talkin and job insecurity ... Addie and it did study found that ... those those things are contributing to billions and billions aching goes up the Hunter nineteen billion ... in health care costs overall so it's it's impacting people's hope they mean they're ... they're tired and it can lead to all sorts of problems ... and companies just don't seem ready to deal with the problem ... a lot of ... new companies ... people told me in and I'd deftly gonna my reporting you know that they're not even ready to talk about it they don't want to admit that there's a problem ... on Beastie or ... that he would be really expensive ... and difficult to facts ... and ... do it the kindest don't mind go there I ... think there's been some in peace ... he ... kind of awareness aam ... people having a tougher time pretending it isn't happening by it it there still wrapped Radisson for sure ... Rachel finds age of the Wall Street Journal thank you very much for joining us thanks for having me and thanks for listening nine Charlie Turner at the news desk in New York ... make as part of your daily commute ... WSJ's podcast

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2/28/2017 5:15PM Feeling stressed, anxious and overwhelmed are some of the factors that characterize employee burnout. Studies show the problem is getting worse, according to Rachel Feintzeig of the Wall Street Journal. Show Transcript This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

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One of the greatest threats to workplace safety may be from an unexpected source: stress. Just a few years after launching the Huffington Post media empire, company president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington was so exhausted from running her new business that she collapsed.

"I hit my head on my desk, broke my cheek bone, got four stitches on my right eye," Huffington disclosed during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. "I was very lucky I didn't lose my eye."

Global surveys on the state of the working world show that a large proportion of people share the experience that Huffington described. Indeed, burnout arguably is reaching epic proportions in many industrialized countries. Recent Gallup research, for example, showed that 2.7 million workers in Germany report feeling the effects of burnout. A 2013 survey of human resource directors in the United Kingdom found that nearly 30% reported that burnout was widespread within their organization.

It's a mistake to assume that burnout is merely an emotional response to long hours or a challenging job. Rather, mounting scientific evidence shows that burnout takes a profound physical toll that cascades well beyond our professional lives. Using cutting-edge techniques, integrative research teams are demonstrating that burnout is not just a state of mind, but a condition that leaves its mark on the brain as well as the body.

Just as the impact of burnout stifles healthy professional growth, emerging research shows that the chronic psychosocial stress that characterizes burnout not only impairs people's personal and social functioning, it also can overwhelm their cognitive skills and neuroendocrine systems - eventually leading to distinctive changes in the anatomy and functioning of the brain.

Burnout Begins

The psychologist Herbert Freudenberger is credited with bringing the term "burnout" into the research lexicon in 1974, defining it as the loss of motivation, growing sense of emotional depletion, and cynicism he observed among volunteers working at a free clinic in New York City. Formerly idealistic mental health workers were finding themselves depleted and weary, resenting patients and the clinic.

Burnout is now recognized as a legitimate medical disorder by much of mainstream medicine and has even been given its own ICD-10 code (Z73.0 - Burn-out state of vital exhaustion). Many of the symptoms of burnout overlap with the hallmarks of depression, including extreme fatigue, loss of passion, and intensifying cynicism and negativity.

APS Fellow Christina Maslach, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the foremost researchers on burnout, began studying this emerging phenomenon in the 1970s through a series of extensive interviews with employees in service organizations. In analyzing the interviews, Maslach and colleagues noticed a trend: Workers often reported feelings of profound emotional exhaustion, negativity directed at clients and patients, and a crisis in feelings of professional competence. Much like symptoms of depression, burnout was asphyxiating people's ambitions, idealism, and sense of worth.

The 1976 publication of Maslach's article "Burned-Out," published in the magazine Human Behavior, generated a huge public response - popularizing the concept of burnout within the popular press. Maslach received an incredible outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who were grateful to find out that they were not alone in their experience of burnout.

"I had not expected at all that kind of reaction," Maslach said. "The impact of that article was just huge." The article led to more research, more books, and more attention from academic journals.

Maslach and APS Fellow Susan E. Jackson (Rutgers University) collaborated on what would become the most influential framework for defining and assessing burnout. Published in 1981, the original paper describing the Maslach Burnout Inventory has been cited well over 6,000 times to date, according to Google Scholar. The scale evaluates burnout based on three key stress responses: an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment, and a sense of professional ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.

At its core, burnout emerges when the demands of a job outstrip a person's ability to cope with the stress. People in careers focused on caregiving - teachers, nurses, social workers, and physicians - report the most prevalent rates of burnout, but the condition ultimately doesn't discriminate among call center representatives, professional athletes, or CEOs. Over time, jobs that require too much of employees will cultivate feelings of negativity and hopelessness as people struggle to meet impossible deadlines, deal with rude customers, or cope with the emotional toll of professional caretaking.

It's a common misconception that the culprit behind burnout is simply working too long or too hard - research indicates that other factors, both individual and organizational, can be just as detrimental. For example, a comprehensive report on psychosocial stress in the workplace published by the World Health Organization identified consistent evidence that "high job demands, low control, and effort-reward imbalance are risk factors for mental and physical health problems." Ultimately, burnout results when the balance of deadlines, demands, working hours, and other stressors outstrips rewards, recognition, and relaxation.

Over the past 20 years, Maslach and her collaborators have developed a comprehensive model identifying six key components of the workplace environment that contribute to burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Burnout emerges when one or more of these six areas is chronically mismatched between an individual and his job. Over time, Maslach explained, passion erodes not only because people have too much to do, but because of these other factors.

Richard Gunderman, a physician who serves as a professor of radiology and philosophy at Indiana University, described the incremental onset of burnout as "the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of tiny disappointments, each one hardly noticeable on its own."

A Vicious Cycle

New research is showing just how devastating this kind of occupational stress can be to the brain.

Research from an integrative team of psychological scientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden provides striking evidence that workplace burnout can alter neural circuits, ultimately causing a vicious cycle of neurological dysfunction.

Lead author Armita Golkar and colleagues recruited a group of 40 subjects with formally diagnosed burnout symptoms from the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University, Sweden. All of the participants attributed their symptoms to stressful working conditions, entailing more than 60 to 70 hours of work per week continuously for several years. The researchers also recruited a socioeconomically matched control group made up of 70 healthy volunteers with no history of chronic stress or other illnesses.

Each group of participants completed two test sessions: a task designed to measure their ability to regulate their negative emotions and an evaluation of their brain's connectivity using resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI).

To assess reactions to stress, researchers showed participants a standardized series of neutral and negative emotional images. After a participant looked at an image for 5 seconds, a set of instructions appeared on the screen, directing each participant to either suppress (down-regulate), intensify (up-regulate), or maintain her emotional response to the picture. Immediately following this instruction cue, the same image was presented again for another 5 seconds.

As the participant focused on the picture, a loud, startling burst of sound played. An electrode taped to the participant's cheek recorded the reflex reactions to this stressful stimulus.

The two groups showed similar startle responses when they were instructed to maintain or intensify their emotional reactions. However, when the groups were asked to down-regulate their emotional responses to negative images, clear differences emerged.

Those diagnosed with burnout reported more difficulty modulating their strong negative emotional responses compared with the healthy controls, which was confirmed by their physical responses: They had dramatically stronger reactions to the startling noise than did the control group.

On a different day, a subset of the participants came into the lab, where they were scanned while lying quietly. The researchers focused on activity among several brain areas involved in processing and regulating emotions.

The two groups showed key differences in the amygdala - a brain structure that is critical in emotional reactions including fear and aggression. Participants in the burnout group had relatively enlarged amygdalae, and also appeared to have significantly weaker connections between the amygdala and brain areas linked to emotional distress, specifically the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The more stressed an individual reported feeling, the weaker the connectivity between these brain regions appeared on the R-fMRI.

Compared with the control group, the overworked group also showed weaker correlations between activity in the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a structure involved in executive function. Weaker connections between these two brain structures could help explain why participants in the burnout group had more difficulty controlling their negative emotions.

In another study, Ivanka Savic, a neurologist in the Department of Women's and Children's Health at the Karolinska Institutet, confirmed that the brains of individuals suffering from burnout don't just function differently - their very structure may change.

Supporting the functional findings of the collaboration with Golkar, Savic found anatomical evidence that the brains of burnout patients were showing signs of chronic stress. Savic anticipated that chronic stress would be visible in brain areas involved in the modulation of stress responses - the amygdala, the ACC, and the mPFC.

Savic matched a group of 40 subjects reporting symptoms of burnout to a group of 40 healthy controls. She used the Maslach Burnout Inventory to measure participants' degree of burnout and took MRI-based measurements of cortical thickness and amygdala, ACC, and mPFC volumes to gauge the physical toll of stress.

The results suggest that the emotional turmoil of burnout leaves a signature mark in these brain structures. The frontal cortex, a brain area essential to cognitive functioning, begins to thin as part of the normal aging process, but patients suffering from burnout showed more pronounced thinning in the mPFC compared with the controls. The normal effects of aging were also more prominent in the scans of the burnout group.

Other brain structures also showed signs of wear and tear: Burnout patients appeared to have larger amygdalae and shrinking in the caudate, which correlated with their perceptions of workplace stress.

Savic theorizes that overactivation in the amygdala leads to impaired modulation of the mPFC regions, which then triggers further stimulation of the amygdala - leading to even more activation of the mPFC. As this cycle spirals further out of control over time, neural structures begin to show signs of wear and tear, which lead to cortical thinning as well as memory, attentional, and emotional difficulties.

In a collaboration with another team of Karolinska Institutet stress researchers, Savic and colleagues concluded that long-term occupational stress also was linked with significant reductions in gray-matter volumes in the hippocampus, caudate, and putamen - structures known to be susceptible to neurotoxic changes arising from the excessive release of glutamate.

"Data from animal experiments show that stress causes an enhanced release of glutamate, and that a stress-related elevation of extracellular glutamate levels induces retraction in the spines in stress-targeted regions, such as the mPFC, the anterior cingulate, and the basal ganglia," Savic and colleagues explain.

Neuroimaging studies of people who have experienced severe early-life trauma have revealed that their brains show similar patterns to the brains of people suffering from clinical burnout. Regardless of the underlying cause, evidence is accumulating to suggest that the neuronal circuits can be damaged by both situations of extreme trauma and by accumulated everyday stress.

Cognitive Costs

Beyond changes to the brain's anatomy, scientists are beginning to understand how burnout can affect people's cognitive functioning - disrupting creativity, problem solving, and working memory.

To get a better understanding of the cognitive costs of burnout, a team of Greek psychological scientists led by Pavlos Deligkaris (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) conducted a comprehensive review of the burnout literature. Ultimately, 15 studies met the strict inclusion criteria: Articles had to be in English, include measures specific to burnout (regardless of assessment scale used), and assess cognitive functions with a validated psychometric measure.

In 13 of the 15 studies, burnout was associated with cognitive deficits. Deligkaris and colleagues reported that "specifically, executive attentional and memory systems appear to suffer in association with burnout, and cognitive functioning is impaired in burned-out individuals." Of the seven studies assessing sustained or controlled attention, five indicated that individuals with burnout were more prone to attentional lapses. Out of the seven studies that included assessments of memory, six showed an association between burnout and memory impairments.

However, the researchers caution that nearly all of these studies were both small and cross-sectional, making it difficult to pinpoint burnout as the cause of any cognitive impairments. It's also possible that individuals who have low executive functioning to begin with end up being more vulnerable to the negative effects of stress - ultimately resulting in higher rates of burnout.

Biometrics of Burnout

In addition to dysregulation in brain function, emerging evidence suggests that - much like other chronic stress conditions - burnout also leads to turmoil within the regulation of the body's neuroendocrine system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is an important component in the regulation of the stress response, controlling the release of the "stress hormone" cortisol.

Under normal conditions, when we perceive a threat - whether it's a snake in the grass or an upcoming deadline - a rush of cortisol is released into the body.

Once released into the bloodstream, cortisol triggers potent reactions throughout the entire body, ranging from cardiovascular activity to the immune system and memory formation. Once the threat has passed, cortisol levels fall off, and these systems return to baseline levels. However, when stress becomes chronic - as in the case of burnout - the body fails to return to normal, leading to a cascade of potential health problems.

Under conditions of prolonged stress, the HPA axis ceases to produce higher-than-normal levels of cortisol: When cortisol levels remain too high for too long, the body responds by eventually downshifting cortisol production to abnormally low levels, a state called hypocortisolism. These abnormally low levels of cortisol are associated with severe stress and trauma, as though the body's stress response system itself has been burned out.

A team led by Bart Oosterholt (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands) investigated the relationship between HPA-axis functioning and burnout symptoms. They recruited both a group of patients with a formal clinical diagnosis of burnout and a group of nonclinical patients with burnout symptoms but no formal diagnosis. An analysis of saliva samples showed that both burnout groups had significantly lower morning cortisol levels compared with a group of healthy control subjects - a sign that their bodies were responding to long-term stressors.

Additional research suggests that hypocortisolism induces low-grade inflammation throughout the body, which in turn contributes to severe health problems, including buildup of plaque in the coronary arteries. One large study of nearly 9,000 employed adults found that burnout was a significant risk factor for developing coronary heart disease, which can lead to heart attacks.

The team of researchers, led by Sharon Toker, head of the organizational behavior department of Tel Aviv University, Israel, tracked the routine health screenings of 8,838 employees for an average of 3.4 years. They found that employees who scored in the top 20% on the burnout scale at baseline had a 79% increased risk of being diagnosed with coronary heart disease over the course of the study.

Coronary heart disease is the most common type of heart disease, killing more than 370,000 people each year just in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although public health efforts to prevent heart disease most often focus on lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise, the stresses of a grinding workday may be just as detrimental as lighting up a cigarette or eating a double-bacon cheeseburger.

Can Burnout Be Reversed?

APS William James Fellow Bruce McEwen (The Rockefeller University) researches the interplay of stress hormones, the brain, and the body. His research on the neuroendocrinology of stress hormones has shown how chronic stress impacts specific areas of the brain - leading to the changes in mood, learning, and memory that are the hallmarks of burnout.

McEwen, along with APS Fellow BJ Casey and psychiatrist Conor Liston, both of Weill Cornell Medical College, has found promising initial evidence that the negative effects of chronic stress may be reversible.

The research team recruited a group of severely stressed-out medical students. The 20 students were studying to take one of the most important tests of their lives - the US medical licensing exam. Students cannot practice medicine until they pass this exam. The researchers also recruited a group of relatively unstressed medical students as a control group.

Previous research in animal models found that rats subjected to chronic stress showed impairments in attention-shifting tasks, as well as signs of shrinkage and damage to neurons in the mPFC, a brain region involved in attention shifting. But after 4 weeks of relaxation, the changes to the mPFC were reversed. The researchers hypothesized that the pressures of the upcoming high-stakes exam would lead to similar stress-related changes in the brains of the students.

Specifically, the researchers expected to see impairments in the functioning of brain areas involved in attention shifting, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). To test this, they had all of the medical students complete an attention-switching task while undergoing an fMRI scan.

Much like the distressed rats, stressed-out students had more difficulty switching their attention between two visual stimuli compared with the control group. The functional-imaging data confirmed that the network including the PFC was engaged during attention shifts; in stressed students, however, there appeared to be a reduction between the connectivity of the PFC and other components of the brain's attention network.

It appeared as though the stress of preparing for the exam had disrupted connections between neurons in parts of the brain, specifically in regions like the PFC that are associated with modulation of the HPA axis.

Four weeks after completing their exams, the students returned to the lab for another round of scans. This time, the two groups showed no significant differences on either perceived stress or performance on the attention-shifting task. Neuroimaging data revealed that the impairments shown in the formerly stressed-out students' brain activity also had reversed. After 4 weeks of recovery, their patterns of brain activity were similar to those of the control subjects.

Obviously, 4 weeks of exam prep is not equivalent to the years of stress that many people endure at their jobs. However, this study does suggest that interventions and recovery at the neurological level are possible for people suffering from burnout. œ

References

Blix, E., Perski, A., Berglund, H., & Savic, I. (2013). Long-term occupational stress is associated with regional reductions in brain tissue volumes. PLOS ONE 8: e64065. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064065

Deligkaris, P., Panagopoulou, E., Montgomery, A. J., & Masoura, E. (2014). Job burnout and cognitive functioning: A systematic review. Work & Stress, 28, 107-123. doi:10.1080/02678373.2014.909545

Golkar, A., Johansson, E., Kasahara, M., Osika, W., Perski, A., & Savic, I. (2014). The influence of work-related chronic stress on the regulation of emotion and on functional connectivity in the brain. PLOS ONE 9: e104550. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104550

Gunderman, R. (2014, February 21). For the young doctor about to burn out. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/for-th0e-young-doctor-about-to-burn-out/284005/

Liston, C., McEwen, B. S., & Casey, BJ. (2009). Psychosocial stress reversibly disrupts prefrontal processing and attentional control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 912-917. doi:10.1073/pnas.0807041106

Maslach, C. (2003). Job burnout: New directions in research and intervention. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 189-192. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01258

Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Occupational Behavior, 2, 99-113. doi:10.1002/job.4030020205

Maslach, C., & M. P. Leiter, (Eds.). (2015). It's time to take action on burnout. Burnout Research, 2, iv-v. doi:10.1016/j.burn.2015.05.002

Morgan, C. A., Russell, B., McNeil, J., Maxwell, J., Snyder, P. J., Southwick, S. M., & Pietrzak, R. H. (2011). Baseline burnout symptoms predict visuospatial executive function during survival school training in special operations military personnel. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 17, 494-501. doi:10.1017/S1355617711000221

Oosterholt, B. G., Maes, J. H., Van der Linden, D., Verbraak, M. J., & Kompier, M. A. (2015). Burnout and cortisol: Evidence for a lower cortisol awakening response in both clinical and nonclinical burnout. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 78, 445-451. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2014.11.003

Savic, I. (2015). Structural changes of the brain in relation to occupational stress. Cerebral Cortex, 25, 1554-1564. doi:10.1093/cercor/bht348

Schaufeli, W. B., Leiter, M. P., & Maslach, C. (2009). Burnout: 35 years of research and practice. Career Development International, 14, 204-220. doi:10.1108/13620430910966406

Toker, S., Melamed, S., Berliner, S., Zeltser, D., & Shapira, I. (2012). Burnout and risk of coronary heart disease: A prospective study of 8838 employees. Psychosomatic Medicine, 74, 840-847. doi:10.1097/PSY.0b013e31826c3174

World Health Organization. (2010). Health impact of psychosocial hazards at work: An overview. Geneva, Switzerland: Leka, S., & Jain, A.

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One of the greatest threats to workplace safety may be from an unexpected source: stress. Just a few years after launching the Huffington Post media empire, company president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington was so exhausted from running her new business that she collapsed.

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A mentor is someone who agrees to share their skills, knowledge, expertise, and professional contacts with you. Mentors can help you set career goals, resolve difficult problems, and make sound career decisions. People with mentors earn higher salaries, are promoted more frequently, and report higher job satisfaction than those without mentors. Sounds pretty good, right? You may already have one, since many mentoring relationships arise organically at work or in school. But if you've found yourself without a mentor, and you want one, here's how to go about finding one:
1. What do you need from a mentor?
First and foremost, you're looking for someone who's interested in mentoring. Other than that prerequisite, it's up to you to identify what kind of person you're looking for. Here are some questions to consider:

Are you looking for someone local? Is it important to you to meet in person?

Are you looking for someone with a particular skillset? Or who works in a particular field?

What kind of time commitment are you looking for?

What's important to you in terms of personality? For example, would you like to be mentored by someone who is outgoing and boisterous, or calm and soft-spoken?

What do you want to gain from the relationship? For example, do you need guidance on a specific project or could you use ongoing support making a career transition?

2. Where should you look for a mentor?
Once you narrow down what you need from a mentor, searching for one becomes a bit easier. Here are a few places to look:

Within your network: Former supervisors, professors, volunteer managers, or contacts you know through your friends and family are great places to start. And don't forget your weak ties.

Strangers: Perhaps no one in your immediate network quite fits what you're looking for. There is no harm in considering a stranger to be your mentor and there are a few places to look:

Search for potential mentors online using LinkedIn.

Look through the members of associations related to your field or the field you're interested.

Check the alumni directory of your alma mater for potential connections.

Programs: There are a growing number of programs that facilitate mentoring relationships. Many fellowship programs - such as the Fellowship for Emerging Leaders in Public Service - connect participants to mentors. Net Impact has a Career Connections program that allows business professionals to reach each other online. Start by exploring membership associations in your field and community such as the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, and Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Also, it may seem intuitive that you'll want a mentor from your professional field, but don't discount the value of a mentor from a very different profession or background. Mentoring relationships can span many years, so your mentor might follow you through several job changes.
3. What does your relationship look like?
In your initial contact, send an email asking to meet up for coffee, in their office, or a phone call. Conduct this initial meeting like an informational interview: ask some specific questions about their career path and experiences. Also, get a sense of the chemistry. This is an exploratory conversation to get a sense of whether or not you'll be a great pair.

Note: If the person is slow to respond, or gives vague answers, perhaps it's not a good time for them to be a mentor. Don't take it personally!

Once you've established contact with the person, continue to cultivate the relationship. You can send occasional updates or interesting articles-remember, networking is a two-way street, so if you can provide valuable information to your potential mentor, do it! At this point, you're also testing the waters yourself-is this person who you want to be your mentor? Are you clicking? Are you finding their advice useful?

If the answer is yes, you may want to formalize the relationship. One strategy might be to ask if you can set up a regular monthly meeting to check in. Ultimately, the structure of the relationship is up to you and your mentor.

Additional resources

If you want to learn more about finding a mentor, check out the resources below:
Go back to our resources.
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A mentor is someone who agrees to share their skills, knowledge, expertise, and professional contacts with you. Mentors can help you set career goals, resolve difficult problems, and make sound career decisions. People with mentors earn higher salaries, are promoted more frequently, and report higher job satisfaction than those without mentors.

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Taking Responsibility for Your Performance

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be the person who knows how to ask. - Peter Drucker, author and consultant

It's time for Scott's performance review - he walks in confidently, and he's expecting praise for the hard work that he's been putting in.

However, he's devastated when his boss starts criticizing the quality of his work. Not only is she unhappy with Scott's performance, but she's also considering taking away some of his responsibilities.

Although this might sound like a drastic scenario, situations like this are more common than you might think. After all, if your boss or your clients were unhappy with your work, they'd tell you, right? Well, not all of the time. This is why it's so important to be proactive about soliciting feedback. In this article, we'll look at how to ask for feedback, and how you can learn from it....

Learn More and Join Today

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Getting Feedback: Taking Responsibility for Your Performance

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Taking Responsibility for Your Performance The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be the person who knows how to ask. - Peter Drucker, author and consultant It's time for Scott's performance review - he walks in confidently, and he's expecting praise for the hard work that he's been putting in.

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https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_98.htm

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Check Your Motives

Before giving feedback, remind yourself why you are doing it. The purpose of giving feedback is to improve the situation or the person's performance. You won't accomplish that by being harsh, critical or offensive.

You'll likely get much more from people when your approach is positive and focused on improvement. That's not to say feedback always has to be good, but it should be fair and balanced. Use tools like the Feedback Matrix and the Losada Ratio to help you get the exact balance right. (Note that the statistics behind the Losada Ratio are in doubt but the principle is not.)

Be Timely

The closer to the event you address the issue, the better. Feedback isn't about surprising someone, so the sooner you do it, the more the person will be expecting it. Think of it this way: it's much easier to provide feedback about a single, one-hour job that hasn't been done properly than it is to do so about a whole year of failed, one-hour jobs.

Take a look at our article How to Deliver On-the-Spot Feedback to help you judge the right time.

Make It Regular

Feedback is a process that requires constant attention. When something needs to be said, say it. People then know where they stand all the time and there will be few surprises. Also, problems don't get out of hand. It's not a once-a-year or a once-every-three-month event. Though this may be the timing of formal feedback; informal, simple feedback should be given much more often than this - perhaps every week or even every day, depending on the situation.

With frequent, informal feedback like this, nothing said during formal feedback sessions should be unexpected, surprising or particularly difficult.

Prepare Your Comments

You don't want to read a script, but you do need to be clear about you are going to say. This will help you to stay on track and stick to the issues.

Be Specific

Tell the person exactly what he needs to improve. This ensures that you stick to facts and there is less room for ambiguity.

If you tell someone that she acted unprofessionally, what does that mean exactly? Was she too loud, too friendly, too casual, too flippant or too poorly dressed?

Remember to stick to what you know first hand: you'll quickly find yourself on shaky ground if you start giving feedback based on other people's views.

Criticize in Private

While public recognition is appreciated, public scrutiny is not.

Establish a safe place to talk where you won't be interrupted or overheard.

Use "I" Statements

Give feedback from your perspective . This way you avoid labeling the person.

Say, "I was angry and hurt when you criticized my report in front of my boss" rather than "You were insensitive yesterday."

Limit Your Focus

A feedback session should discuss no more than two issues. Any more than that and you risk the person feeling attacked and demoralized.

You should also stick to behaviors he can actually change or influence.

Talk About Positives Too

A good rule is to start off with something positive. This helps put the person at ease. It will also allow her to "see" what success looks like and what steps she needs to take next time to get it right.

Try to end on a high note, too. Otherwise, she may be left feeling despondent and worthless.

Provide Specific Suggestions

Make sure you both know what needs to be done to improve the situation. The main message should be that you care and want to help the person grow and develop. Set goals and make plans to monitor and evaluate his progress. Use the SMART acronym and define specific steps and milestones, or the GROW model to motivate him to deliver the change that you want.

Follow Up

The whole purpose of feedback is to improve performance. You need to measure whether or not that is happening and then make adjustments as you go. Be sure to document your conversations and discuss what is working and what needs to be modified.

Infographic

See our infographic of a popular feedback tool, the CEDAR™ Feedback Model.

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Giving Feedback - Boosting Your People's Confidence and Ability

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Before giving feedback, remind yourself why you are doing it. The purpose of giving feedback is to improve the situation or the person's performance. You won't accomplish that by being harsh, critical or offensive. You'll likely get much more from people when your approach is positive and focused on improvement.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/201801/identifying-depression-based-social-media-posts

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We think we choose what we share about ourselves on social media, but according to new research, we may be sharing more than we think, including insights into our mental health.

Using algorithms, a research team recently analyzed the data of Twitter users to see if it could be used to predict depression and PTSD in users-and found that roughly 9 times out of 10, the predictions their algorithms made were correct.

The team of researchers analyzed Twitter data from 204 individuals-105 with known clinical depression and 99 without-to see if differences in language could help them detect depression. They found that depressed people used fewer words that were independently rated as positive, such as "happy," "beach," and "photo," and more negative ones such as "death," "no," and "never."

To obtain the results, the researchers used two different kinds of models. One, called a classifier, learned to separate the tweets of healthy and depressed Twitter users (or, alternately, those of healthy users and users suffering from PTSD). The second kind learned to identify indicators of these mental health conditions as they emerged over time.

Using the latter type of model, researchers were able to draw timelines of depression onset, course, and recovery based only on the language people used in their tweets, says Andrew Reece, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University who co-authored the study. When the team tested the model on a separate group of 174 individuals-63 with PTSD and 111 control participants-it detected a change in Twitter behavior among those with PTSD immediately following the traumatic event.

Notably, the algorithmic approach was often able to detect signs of PTSD and depression many months prior to clinical diagnosis. Although there is still much research to be done, Reece says that some day, computational approaches to mental health screening could be used to assist physicians in making diagnoses. The researchers chose only tweets posted prior to the date of subjects' first diagnosis to rule out the possible influence that a clinical diagnosis could have on how some individuals portray themselves on social media. The use of pre-diagnosis tweets also supports the idea that Twitter data could be used to detect mental health conditions early.

When looking at the findings, Reece says, it's important to not only consider precision (the proportion of predictions that were correct), but also recall (the amount of evidence of mental illness that the models identified). While the algorithms' predictions of depression and PTSD diagnoses were accurate more than 85 percent of the time, they only flagged about half of all posts made by depressed individuals as such, and about two-thirds of those written by PTSD-afflicted people. "While our models clearly have a lot of room to improve, they're working to improve on a task that is clearly very difficult for humans," Reece says.

Another limitation of the study is that researchers were only able to study individuals who used Twitter and were willing to share both their mental health history and their social media data, meaning the findings may not be generalizable to those who are less open about their personal information. Reece says that many people dropped out of the study when they were asked to share their social media information, leading him to wonder whether the models are only good at picking out depression in extroverts or in very trusting people.

"Future iterations of our work will have to determine whether this algorithmic approach can reliably screen for mental health issues in the general population," he says. "We're not there yet, but we think this is a good start."

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Identifying Depression Based on Social Media Posts

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We think we choose what we share about ourselves on social media, but according to new research, we may be sharing more than we think, including insights into our mental health.

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"Corporate Silence has a Vocal Opponent."

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"Corporate Silence has a Vocal Opponent."

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LESLIE A. PERLOW was going, well, nuts. She was writing a book, the publisher's deadlines were looming, and her research assistant kept tripping her up. She'd wind up frantically retyping pages -- work he was paid to do -- because somehow he never got around to it in time. But when it came to critiquing her work -- a task that was not part of his job -- he was oh-so-efficient, often implying that he could write a far better book.

Every Friday she'd go home boiling, vowing to confront him on Monday. Every Monday she found an excuse not to have the conversation. She became ever more frustrated and acted ever more irritable.

Finally, she fired him, ''but not until after I'd let him make me crazy and insecure,'' she recalled with half a laugh, half a wince.

It's not a particularly unusual story, until you realize what Ms. Perlow was writing about. Her book, which came out in May, has the enticing title ''When You Say Yes But Mean No'' (Crown Business), but that's not what it's really about. The lengthier but much more accurate subtitle says it all: ''How Silencing Conflict Wrecks Relationships and Companies . . . and What You Can Do About It.''

As Ms. Perlow sees it, saying nothing is a lot worse than saying yes or no. Sure, she knows that conflict and confrontation can be unpleasant, hence the tale of her own reluctance to criticize.

But she insists that the adage, ''If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all,'' is dead wrong.

Conflict, she says, is not just healthy, but vital.

Her premise is simple: When people raise concerns, voice criticisms and express differences, be it in bedrooms or boardrooms, spats don't escalate to wars, defective products are not released and bosses do not fire employees for problems they might have corrected. But when people stifle themselves, marriages can head to divorce, products to the clearance shelves and companies to bankruptcy court.

''People silence themselves because they want to be seen as accommodating and hard-working,'' Ms. Perlow said. ''They think that by staying silent they can speed things up or preserve relationships, but they usually make everything worse.''

Ms. Perlow, 36, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, knows of what she speaks. She is a corporate ethnographer (translation: ''I do in corporations what anthropologists do in exotic lands'') who has made a career analyzing how people behave at work.

Her original fascination -- how people navigate the competing demands of work and life -- rapidly evolved into a study of conflict, and its suppression.

Those sound like very different topics. They are not. During a recent lunch that started over soup and salads at the Harvard Club Balcony -- the non-posh part of the sumptuous Manhattan club to which guests with notepads are summarily dispatched -- and ended nearly five hours later over dessert and tea in the equally non-posh but notepad-friendly New York Times cafeteria, Ms. Perlow connected the dots.

For a few years in the early 90's, Ms. Perlow, freshly armed with an economics degree from Princeton, was a worker bee herself, doing entry-level tasks (she bridles at the expression grunt work) at a couple of consulting firms.

Both firms had family-friendly policies on the books, yet the hours were daunting -- late nights, early mornings, lots of weekends. Why? People were constantly frittering away the days with kibitzing and questioning, yet no one would say, ''Leave me be, I've got to get home early.'' The result: ''Nothing got done between 9 and 5,'' Ms. Perlow said.

Ms. Perlow set out to find out why. And since then, she has seen the ''vicious spiral of silence'' do its dirty work at countless companies. There was the big office equipment company whose software engineers spent hours every week putting together elaborate presentations for their weekly meeting with the boss. They told her it was a waste of time, but their boss expected it. ''The company's culture was one of accommodating management's requests,'' Ms. Perlow said.

Fine -- except that the boss also thought the meetings were a waste of time, but wouldn't call them off, fearing his underlings might think he was not interested in their work.

''We all know how hard it is to talk back to superiors, but often we forget how hard it is for bosses to speak up to us,'' Ms. Perlow said.

So, despite the universal distaste for them, the meetings and busywork continued. So did horrific hours. Like the consultants from Ms. Perlow's first jobs, the engineers constantly interrupted each other with questions, advice or friendly chat.

Ms. Perlow was certain that they wanted to tell colleagues to go away but were afraid to offend. She persuaded them to enforce a daily block of quiet time, during which it was considered acceptable to ask to be left alone. They tried it, and productivity went up significantly. ''The unwillingness to speak up had trapped them all in dysfunctional behavior,'' Ms. Perlow said.

What finally cemented her attachment to the subject of silencing was when she saw it help bring down a dot-com.

In December 1998, two of Ms. Perlow's students founded Versity.com, a company to make college class notes available on the Internet. She sat in on many of their meetings. ''I saw silencing destroy this company,'' she said.

It all started promisingly enough. Everyone -- the young founders, who were more interested in writing code than devising budgets, and the older executives they hired to lend management discipline -- worked excruciating hours, yet no one minded. ''The enthusiasm was incredible,'' Ms. Perlow said.

Then, a curveball was thrown. A newspaper article tied online notes to laziness, and many colleges and professors attacked the concept. Versity management called an emergency strategy session at which everyone who attended, Ms. Perlow is certain, knew the plug should be pulled, but no one wanted to slow the meeting with quibbles or alienate colleagues with unwelcome truths.

''They knew they should speak up, but they just couldn't,'' Ms. Perlow said. ''Everyone was just too proud of what they had created that no one wanted to kill it.''

Versity bought another small company, called Izio, which made software that helped professors use the Internet to interact with students, but Versity refused to kill the note-sharing concept. ''They were draining resources, and everyone knew it, yet neither the C.E.O. nor anyone else said, 'We should play down the note-taking part and play up new products,' '' Ms. Perlow said.

Morale at the company, meanwhile, was sinking. Occasionally, people would work up the courage to say something, only to drop back into silence right afterward. For example, when the chief executive imposed a formal vacation policy and other aspects of a classic corporate structure, the founders told him he was ruining the culture.

''His response was to say, 'O.K., you want this to be a fraternity, we'll make you fraternity officers,' '' Ms. Perlow said. She said the chief executive literally named one founder the rush chairman and another the social chairman and figured he had the morale problem solved. ''It was ridiculous, but they didn't push back,'' Ms. Perlow said. ''Everyone just said amongst themselves that it wasn't much fun to work here anymore.''

VERSITY wound up selling out to another small company with a Web site for students, CollegeClub.com, which filed for bankruptcy in August 2000 and has since become part of another college-oriented Internet company, Student Advantage.

Since then, Ms. Perlow has gathered any number of anecdotes about the pitfalls of silence. There was the family of four that drove hours to eat at a diner -- none of them wanted to go, but each feared being called a spoilsport. More recently, there was the woman who discovered that her deputy earned more than she did and stayed silent when her boss brushed off her objection with an offhand remark about the man's higher salary when he started at the company. The woman is now seeking another job. ''If she'd said that salary history wasn't a good enough explanation, they could have worked things out,'' Ms. Perlow said.

So, is there never a time when holding one's tongue is probably wise?

Ms. Perlow does not rise to the bait. Rather, she tells of a large furniture company where the culture has always encouraged people to express ideas and differences.

''Everyone speaks, everyone listens, and nothing ever gets done,'' she said. ''I'm not saying there has to be consensus before any action; there's a reason we have managers. All I'm saying is, you can agree to disagree, but if everyone knows where the others are coming from, you have a lot better chance for success.''

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AT LUNCH WITH: LESLIE A. PERLOW; Corporate Silence Has a Vocal Opponent

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Interview with Leslie A Perlow, associate professor at Harvard Business School and author of When You Say Yes But Mean No; he tells how corporations, like marriages and other relationships, suffer when people are afraid to voice differences and raise criticisms; photo (M)

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skills for important leaders

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Artwork by Simon Banks

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Simon Banks

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Keynote Speaker | Author | Creativity and Innovation Expert | Conference Emcee | Illustrator and Artist

1. "You are not a leader until you have produced another leader who can produce another leader". Why do you think this statement cause a significant reaction on LinkedIn and the internet?
I was illustrating the content at Leadership program last year. When you work as an illustrator, your job is to listen intently for the stories/a-ha moments/big messages that are in presentations and bring them to life. I was listening intently when I heard Dr Stephen Brown say, "You are not a leader until you have produced another leader who can produce another leader"

As with all of us, I have heard many leadership quotes but had never heard this one. I drew the above picture and shared it on LinkedIn and Twitter. It struck home for lots of people, with comments and feedback from all over the globe and plenty of people even wanting to buy the picture. Given the amount of interest, I thought it would be worth going back to the source and getting some insight on Leadership from Dr Stephen Brown.

For me all leaders need to act with ' selfish intent' and 'generous intent'.

Selfish? Every leader should aspire to be the best leader they can be. The should be prepared to invest in their personal growth through continual learning and self-reflection.

Generous intent? All leaders need to actualise their expertise and leadership capability by developing an organisational culture and a personal commitment to the nurturing of leadership capacity.

Highly effective leaders coach, mentor and support other leaders. The leaders of any organisation is too significant a task to be left to one person. In the ever increasing complex world in which organisations operate it is a fallacious assumption and indeed a matter of considerable risk to assume that a single person has the exclusive capability to lead the organisation.

Leadership should be seen as an inclusive rather than an inclusive activity. I believe that an important aspect of leadership is 'legacy'- what she or he leaves behind. The identification and development of the next generation of leadership should be at the heart of what we as leaders contribute to any enterprise.
2. The picture couldn't have been more simple but received a lot of praise. Is there anything you see that maybe drove that interest?
I believe the world wide resonance with the statement on social media was because there are many amazing leaders in all sectors doing their part but there is much more to be done. However, there needs to be a much greater commitment and collective effort to grow our leadership talent. Some see such an investment as discretionary and has in part led to the concerns expressed by about the urgent requirement to give such a capability focus.

Some organisations are enacting talent identification, succession planning and future or high potential (HiPo) strategies with positive impact in areas such as staff retention and organisation culture. However, despite such promise there is much more to be done. The quote evokes a clarion call or 'call to action' to give leadership development focus and energy.
3. With the world changing so rapidly, do you see a changing role for leaders? What are the essential skills for leaders to thrive over the next 10 years?
I think the picture is very clever-simple but paradoxically captures a number of key themes conveyed by the statement.

Firstly I think the belief and assertion that leadership is not a solo activity. It involves persuading and influencing others. Good leaders work with and through others.

As noted above leadership needs to be considered as inclusive not exclusive. This is particularly important from a diversity point of view. We face wicked and complex problems as leaders that will require divergent and the very best thinking to enable effective responses to be developed.

Secondly, the picture captures nicely that leadership is a both a personal journey and another one we take with others.

Thirdly, it expresses or conveys the theme that leaders need to have resilience to work in operating environments are dynamic, chaotic and discontinuous. Leaders in collaboration with their teams will be required to provide direction and navigate through such difficult terrain.

Fourthly, the setting of high expectations and goals must be in the DNA of all leaders and their teams.

Yes, I believe there are essential skills that leaders will require if they are going to thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

What are these skills?

A report I recently read described these as ' enterprise skills'

The ability to collaborate

Work in various teams

Communicate effectively

Use technology and financial acumen.

From my perspective, these are a must along with the ethical decision making. An ever changing world will require leaders to make decisions about matters that are highly complex and without precedent. Leaders will need to continue to model learning behaviours and ensure they have very well developed specialist expertise in areas of professional practice.
Simon Banks is a Contact details Dr Stephen Brown undertakes a portfolio career. He is an international leadership expert; policy advisor to governments on education; strategist; specialist in change management and organisation design; experienced CEO and senior executive; acclaimed facilitator and program designer. Contact details: , , training facilitator and presenter who is professional and creative,and brings all the vim and vigour your audience expects to ensure brilliant corporate events. He's the Director of creative training company VisualFunk, known for running innovation hubs, conferences and training days to brew fresh thinking and develop market leading ideas. His first book, A Thousand Little Lightbulbs, will be released in September 2017.
The development of leaders is too often left to chance. Each of us an obligation to accept the challenge and responsibility to create the next generation of leaders.

Any thoughts to share? If so, I would love to continue the conversation.

Keynote Speaker | Author | Creativity and Innovation Expert | Conference Emcee | Illustrator and Artist

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You are not a leader until you have produced a leader who who can produce another leader

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I was illustrating the content at Leadership program last year. When you work as an illustrator, your job is to listen intently for the stories/a-ha