Management gemsFind here some gems from our monitoring of the best publications on leadership and management

Today, every manager needs to show empathy towards their team members. In a complex and uncertain world, attentive listening and solicitude are indispensable for reducing the stress of teams and facilitating their commitment. But at what cost?

A 2022 study by the Future Forum shows a significantly higher rate of burn-out among middle managers than among all other categories of workers. Another study shows that teenagers whose parents are empathetic are less prone to depression than others, but that these same parents suffer from greater cellular aging! An excess of empathy can thus be detrimental to one's health.

Should we harden ourselves and return to a more distant management style? The challenge is rather to set limits in order to cope over the long term:

– Have as much empathy for yourself as for others: you will only be able to help them if you yourself are hanging in there!

– Nuance your empathy: concern yourself with others, but do not take on their feelings to avoid an overload of negative emotions.

– View empathy as a skill, rather than as a trait of your personality: you will more easily be able to choose whether to activate it or not according to the situation.

Source: How to Sustain Your Empathy in Difficult Times, Jamil Zaki, Harvard Business Review, January-February 2024.

Has it ever happened to you to have a word at the tip of your tongue, or to not remember what someone said to you a few minutes earlier? These small glitches in our memory are very common and are nothing to worry about—even if they can be the cause of some frustrations. They are linked to the manner in which our brain stores and retrieves memorized information:

- To properly store information, the key consists in concentrating our attention. Most of the time, when we forget a piece of information, it is because we have processed it automatically, without paying attention to it, or because our attention was solicited elsewhere. All it takes, for example, is to think about what we have to do for the day or to receive a notification for our attention to be diverted. Our brain then assumes that the information to which we are not truly attentive is not sufficiently important to be memorized.

- As for the “word at the tip of your tongue”, it is due to the fact that the brain mistakenly activates the wrong neural network to retrieve the information. The more you attempt to find this missing word, the more you activate this wrong network. When this occurs, the solution is therefore to accept bringing your search to a momentary halt. This gives the appropriate neural network a chance to activate when you restart your search a few instants later.

Source: How your memory works — and why forgetting is totally OK, Lisa Genova, TED Membership, March 2021.

Stress seems to be the ill of the century. And, especially since the Covid-19 crisis, burn-out is inviting itself onto every level of the corporate world, in an increasingly visible way.

In one of his posts on LinkedIn, physician and neuropsychologist Bernard Anselem mentions a study published in the journal Health Psychology that highlights the link between stress and mortality, carried out on 30,000 American adults over the course of eight years. According to this study, when they are subjected to high stress levels, people who believe that stress has a negative impact on their health do indeed suffer excess mortality, whereas the people who have a more neutral perception of the matter can withstand it without any significant impact on their health.

This is in line with other studies devoted to this phenomenon. For one thing, our interpretation of a situation influences our physiological reactions; thus, people who are sensitized to the utility of stress have less pronounced cardiovascular and mental reactions. For another, at the neurological level, the encoding of emotional and memory networks varies according to whether we perceive a situation as good or bad; if we relive the same experience, we will therefore be conditioned to once again perceive it as good or bad.

A scientific explanation of the virtues of a Stoic approach to stress.

Source: Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality, Abiola Keller, Kristin Litzelman, Lauren E. Wisk, Torsheika Maddox, Erika Rose Cheng, Paul D. Creswell, Whitney P. Witt, Health Psychology, September 2012.

Legendary basketball coach John Wooden is quoted as having once said: “Never mistake activity for achievement.” And yet, within our companies, a kind of cult of hyperactivity often exists. It is considered good form to show that you are always busy, even overwhelmed. Is this not a sign of being indispensable, at the heart of critical projects? Of course, your effective workload has an incompressible impact on your schedule. But it is also common to measure a person’s level of commitment and contribution by how busy they appear to be.

This over-valuation of hyperactivity has high individual and collective costs. Professional burnout syndrome, bureaucratic overload, diminished creativity…: the consequences of this frenzy are numerous. So, what if you rehabilitated the value of downtime or less directly productive moments? Here are some actions you can initiate to get the ball rolling:

– Create slots of time within the team’s agenda during which meetings are forbidden.

– As a manager, dare to take breaks conspicuously.

– Encourage your team members to do the same and to take advantage of breaks to truly disconnect—for instance by stepping outside for some fresh air.

Source: Beware a Culture of Busyness, Adam Waytz, Harvard Business Review, March-April 2023.

The voice is one of a leader’s essential tools. Far more than we think, it shapes perceptions and contributes to the quality of interactions. An American study conducted on presidential candidates showed that the simple fact of altering their voice through a computer program had an impact on voting intentions. In the corporate world, executives testify that it is far more difficult to rise through the ranks and assert yourself to your teams with a thin voice.

Fortunately, it is possible to learn to play with the timbre and tone of your voice, to modulate its rhythm and volume according to situations, for instance to restore calm during a turbulent meeting or to refocus a tense press conference. You must also be sure to periodically rest your voice, in order to avoid vocal breakdown. A classic problem according to executives, who state they spend their time talking—sometimes to the point of voicelessness!

Consequently, more and more companies are calling on the services of speech therapists to help their managers learn to tame their voices. Singing or acting lessons are also offered. This enables in-depth work to be conducted on people’s vocal capacities and helps to collect ideas for exercises or micro-routines to sustain them over time.

Source: Un bon dirigeant doit assurer vocalement [Good leaders must be vocally assertive], Christophe Haag, Harvard Business Review France, October 2014.