The Executive Realm
Often, business and psychology are viewed as different and distinct ideas, but we believe business is driven almost exclusively by the psychology of people. Breaking the barrier into a new realm where the strategic business lens is focused on the behavior of your team, your customers, and your competitors can open a world of possibilities for growth. Join two Business Psychologists, from very different backgrounds, explore the complex intersection of business strategy and clinical psychology in today's rapidly-changing business world. Welcome to the Executive Realm with Dr. D and Dr. K.
The Executive Realm
Information Overload at Work: Anxiety, Communication, and Coordination
We discuss information and data overload, when people over or under rely on data, and how information behavior affects decision making.
Hello, and welcome to the realm. I'm Dr. D, I bring the strategy.
Dr. K:And I'm Dr. K, I bring the psychology, we are business psychologists and your guides to the executive realm where we bring strategy and psychology together
Dr. D.:so you can bring your best to your C suite, your teams and your customers. Today, we're talking about information and data overload when people over or under rely on data and information behavior and decision making. So let's get to work. Dr. K, I bet most people have been overwhelmed with information I know I have, whether it's email or reports, or even, you know, large changes in an organization or when people have to make a big decision, they weren't quite sure where to start, it can feel very overwhelming. What is the common response for people facing information overload? How do people usually react?
Dr. K:In my experience in this last year, working with people that were lucky enough to be able to keep their jobs during the pandemic, it has been anxiety driven, as well as a little bit of anger, annoyance, frustration, and, you know, people, you know, someone might think, well, they're just getting all the information that they need. And that is absolutely true. However, now that we are sitting at home, and the commute has been taken down, and you have the ability to have your computer, your laptop, your cell phone, all of these instruments that can bring you technology in a split second, people within the organization are inundating people with information. And a lot of times it's information that is not really necessary, it's information that could have been combined with the other three emails that someone received in the last five minutes, is too much information that we feel that people need to have, without giving them the chance to see if they already
Dr. D.:have it. I think in business, people can be accused of not sharing information that they should have. And in our environment where we've become so reliant on instant communication, whether that's texting or instant messaging at work or email, there, there is this almost compulsion to share every little bit as it becomes available, it's really easy to fire off a quick text and say, Hey, I just learned this, or I just learned that but the reality is, you could be creating an information overload wake around, you have the people who are receiving that information. And conversely, people are responding to you, or could be pushing that information to you in a way that's just piecemeal, where it probably makes some more sense to stop, take a pause, make sure that you're understanding the whole picture. Rather than firing it off in an email, if it's important, have a conversation, you can communicate a lot more in a five minute conversation, then you can add 30 email back and forth in the same amount of time that it takes to construct that that number of email, it can, it can create a lot of stress and anxiety.
Dr. K:With that stress and anxiety, the potential of disengagement can be there because you know, it was a rapid fire of emails being sent out. And you might have missed one because you quickly got this new one and information can be lost in there. So there and then there might just be too much information. So in addition to the disengagement, productivity can also go down if you're trying to work on this project, and you turn around, you've got 170 emails, which one becomes more important, this projects due in five hours, but all these emails that are popping up urgent, urgent, you know, immediate response, and it's becoming overwhelming. It is taking the mindset of employees in a direction that takes away from the company's goals.
Dr. D.:Yeah, the challenge is, if I have a bit of information that I need to share, or if I have a question that I need answered, I need to be as thoughtful about making that request of somebody else. Because it's really easy to shoot somebody a instant message, or shoot them an email. If they're in a flow state, and they're working and they're being super productive. You can interrupt their flow state and it takes seven to 10 minutes to get back into a flow state again, if you can, and then there's fatigue when you change tasks too quickly. So there are a lot of psychological elements that can influence and degrade productivity. And it's important for leaders in particular to be as thoughtful about the way that they communicate and sending communication via electronic means as they do when they're preparing to stand up and deliver a town hall or post a meeting. And often with electronic communication, particularly email. The intention is I'll put it in emails so that the person can respond when they're available. What some senior leaders fail to remember and we talked about this a bit in our ivory tower episode. There is a power dynamic that when a senior leader sends in Email, there's a perception, it needs to stop and be looked at right away, it doesn't matter if they're working on something more important or more productive, there is a sense of obligation to look at it and respond and probably act on it right away. It's important to think about when you're sending your email. So one thing as a leader that I would do, I would write the email that I needed, I would put a timer on it to be delivered at four o'clock in the afternoon. And then if I learned more about a topic, I could either edit or not send that email because I may, it may have come up in a meeting, or I may have had a water cooler conversation with somebody, it really cut down on the number of email that I was sending. And if it really was truly important, I wouldn't put it in electronic communication, I would pick up the phone, I would call, I would say I this is really important. I'm so sorry to interrupt you, I could have that personal conversation with somebody I know you're really busy. I'm so sorry, I'm working on this thing. And I've got a really tight deadline. I'm trying to figure out x, y, and z. Can you help me with that? If you're working on something with a higher priority, I'm happy to go to somebody else has set the stage to say, I'm not asking because I'm more important than you. Here is my priority. What are your priorities, let's reconcile those two things and be thoughtful about how I'm using your time.
Dr. K:And it's important for leaders to understand with us being on our computers, you know, whatever device that we are using, in addition to just the information that is being provided to us a little you know, all our tabs that are open, it becomes additional stimuli, our brains are trying to process we may not realize that our brains are trying to process so as you and I are doing this right now, I can see that the background on my computer changes. And sometimes I'll be like, Oh, did I miss something when I'm in the middle of doing something, and that's a stimulus that is not necessary, but yet my brain takes it into, into play with everything. When this became a research focus. It used to be called information overload. And as time has gone on, and we started using the web, and our brains refocused and new neuro pathways came about neurologists actually termed it as a cognitive overload. Because we are taking on all the extra stimuli. And our brain is trying to process everything.
Dr. D.:Absolutely it is it is literally wired into our brains. And there are people who believe they're exceptional multitaskers. But study after study after study has demonstrated people are really poor in multitasking. And that is why you can be on a phone conversation with somebody and you can hear literally hear somebody zone out and start to look at the signs are so evident to another person that oh, this person's not paying attention to me and the natural responses, I must not be important to them, I must not be a priority to them. And that can be really devastating to an employee who maybe is talking to a senior leader multitasking does not work, it's wired into our brain, being focused and prioritizing the way and how and when you communicate can alleviate a lot of the tension that you could create in the team and the people around you.
Dr. K:And I feel it's important for the leaders to understand this because you know, they're the ones that tend to pump out all this information. And we need this and we need this. If there is too much information or cognitive overload, it can lead to moments of in decisiveness bad decisions, as we said earlier, stress and anxiety that in decisiveness, it has potential to put anyone into a brain pause. And then we have that moment where like, Oh, my gosh, I have to make a decision and we just go with, okay, that's the decision I'm going to make, and that can be an impulsive decision. And then that's where even more stress comes about.
Dr. D.:You touched on people using intuition to make decisions. People are on a spectrum of how intuitive their decision making style is, versus how fact based how data oriented their decision making style is. There's so much so many overwhelming choices of information to choose from, who do you listen to? Where do you get it, it can feel exceptionally overwhelming. I call it the data chasm where you seem to fall into this realm where Everywhere you look, there is an option for where you could get information and you're you'd never really fully trust yourself in which direction you go. But eventually you start to consume that information. You become more educated and you claw your way out of that chasm, you figure out which information is relevant, which direction you want to go, you prioritize, and you work your way through it in a systematic step by step bite by bite basis, that sense of overwhelming. I'm not quite sure where to go. For some people that's very energizing. For me, that's very energizing. I like dipping my brain into a pool of information that I've never seen before and that sense of look at possibilities here. But there are people where that is crippling, where you throw too much information at them too quickly, or you set them loose on a priority and say, research it and figure it out. And they become exceptionally overwhelmed.
Dr. K:Totally agree. And with the people that become exceptionally overwhelmed, it's understandable. You know, sometimes, you know, working with clients, people, they get mad at themselves, they get frustrated with themselves. And what I try to work with them is these are things that you can always help that there's all this information out there, and you get lost, you know, it's the, it's the multiple rabbit holes that people tend to fall in my advices. If you have the start of something that's kind of like your it could be your base, or it could be you know, the top of your mountain. And what's everything underneath that you need to add to that, what's the important information so that you can stay on topic, stay focused on that, make a choice, make a list and stick to that those rabbit holes can get very dark, very deep, and you can slide down and quickly when you're in the rabbit hole. It seems like it's never ending,
Dr. D.:it can be very discouraging. Absolutely. Because Yeah, it does. It makes a person feel inadequate, out of control out of control. And it is not a comfortable place for for many people and senior leaders often forget how finely tuned, their ability to navigate new information and decision making is the more senior you become an organization, the more consequential the decisions, and the more people you have to support that information search. When you want to understand a new topic, you can bring in consultants, you have other experienced leaders with expertise, you have networking relationships, all of those things that senior leaders can do are a support mechanism, it took time to develop all of those support mechanisms. There's also a concept called heuristics, which is shortcuts in decision making. It's a common term in behavioral economics and decision theory where over time people develop shortcuts in their mind. And those can be very helpful because they they get tuned over time where they become a danger is when you over rely on those heuristics and don't challenge yourself on the underlying assumption. Because those heuristics end up leading to bias, whether that's in interpersonal relationships or points of view, or bias in decision making, those heuristics can be very damaging to your decision making. But they're necessary to decision making. It's very important as part of the wiring in that brain that but as a senior leader, you have had experience in making decisions and choosing which avenues of information you're going to select. And you've made a lot of mistakes along the way that you've learned from asking a junior person to evaluate some new bit of information might be very overwhelming for them, because they don't have the history and experience that that you do. They don't have the support network or structure, they might not even know what questions to ask. I have often thrown myself into a new topic, part of the challenge is you don't have the intuition of what the right questions to ask are. And that's usually the key. So helping a person navigate decision making or passing a challenging project to a junior staff member and asking them to figure it out can feel very overwhelming to them, perhaps because they don't have the same level, even if it's an easy decision for you. Or it might be an exit project or a way to approach it for you, it can feel very overwhelming because they don't have that learn history of how to approach situations like the ones that you might be asking them to do. So as a senior leader, it's really important to be thoughtful of how you're asking your teams to approach problems and challenges that intuition that you have might not come naturally to the person that you're assigning the project to.
Dr. K:Absolutely, totally agree. I do want to shift the topic just or not the topic itself, but to a different part of it. And something that people don't always understand is water cooler talk overload that can come into play as well. So here, you know, especially now that we are you know, we've been away from our coworkers for a year, yes, maybe you've talked to a few on the phone, maybe you've however, as we get back into into the offices and get back into the workplace, something that that is important to understand is not only the information that we're getting about with the organization and all the data that comes in with that we also can be overloaded with the workplace drama, or information that comes in if I'm working on a project or if an employee's working on a project and then someone pops their head into the office and says, Oh my god, did you hear that so and so might be getting fired, our brain is going to take that in and go could I be fired what's going on within the company. So water cooler talk is also something that is important to understand. There is no way that that will ever be taken out of an environment. There's always going to be people talking gossiping, but it is just a part of who we are. We talk about things, we want to get people's information. And we want to be careful that you want to be careful of not internalizing. But all of that chitter chatter coming at you can become a part of this information overload. And it's important to kind of step aside from that, when it's not necessary to be a part of it.
Dr. D.:It's a great point because even senior leaders need to be aware of what's running around in the rumor mill, led a number of m&a engagements in the various companies that I've consulted for and worked for managing the rumor mill is a very important part of the responsibility of any communication plan. It's really important to understand what the perceptions and the rumors are that are floating around out there. And that can feel very overwhelming. How do you tap into that information stream to understand what people are thinking about and what people are worried about, just like any other information and data, having a plan and a strategy, psychological safety in an organization is important because as a leadership team, and as a senior leader, or even as a middle manager, or an aspiring leader, having a connection with the team, and having a level of trust built up with the team, where they feel like they can reach out and share their concerns and their worries or share the rumors, Hey, I heard there's gonna be a merger and then then believe your response. It's important to be transparent, it is brave to be transparent. And people are resilient and creative and will work with senior leadership to do the right thing for an organization. It's important to build that level of trust so that you can understand what collectively your teams and what individuals are thinking and hearing so that you can craft your communication effectively, the most skilled senior leaders demonstrate exceptional ability to deliver information in the way that the receiver needs to hear it.
Dr. K:Be concise. And you also want to be precise, on what you're saying. So condense it, take the fluff out.
Dr. D.:And if you are over a very large organization, set the expectation of how you want the leaders who are leading the teams that you support on how to communicate and be very precise in what your expectations are. You expect people to communicate with prioritization with clarity with purpose, communicating in the way that the receiver would understand. Well, I really appreciate the conversation, Dr. K. And to all of you joining us on this journey to the realm Thank you so much. I'm Dr. D.
Dr. K:And I'm Dr. K and we are looking forward to your next visit to the Executive Realm.
