Premise:
Last week alone, I’ve had at least 5 conversations with leaders in different functions, all complaining about how they see the engagement among their teams going down significantly due to various reasons, including but not limited to current socio-economic and geo-political situations.
I see this growing feeling of helplessness and loss of agency at every level in our society, not just in the business world.
What is interesting is not the disengagement itself. It was how the leaders described it. Almost all of them attributed it to things outside their control — geopolitical uncertainty, economic anxiety, post-pandemic fatigue.
This perception of things being outside their control is leading to the rise of the phenomenon of Learnt Helplessness.
Learnt Helplessness
There is enough research that talks about the phenomenon that is called – Learned Helplessness.
When someone is repeatedly exposed to situations where their actions have no effect on outcomes, something shifts in them – both psychologically and neurologically.
The regions in our brain associated with motivation, decision-making, and goal-directed behavior goes quiet and the regions associated with rumination and inward withdrawal start lighting up instead.
The result is that they stop trying and become passive and as they have learnt that trying doesn’t work.
And as leaders, it becomes our responsibility to ensure that this risk does not come to pass and become a reality. Specially because, once this takes root, it becomes difficult to get rid of, even if the situation changes.
Learnt Controllability
So, the question we need to ask is this – what can we do to negate this phenomenon?
Neuroscience comes to our rescue here. Just like learned helplessness is a phenomenon, so is learned controllability.
When people experience consistent links between their actions and real outcomes, the brain builds a model that says “effort is worth it. I can affect this“, irrespective of how small linkages are.
People tend to become more persistent, more resilient, more willing to take on new challenges, not because of their personality, but because of what their environment has taught them.
So, we need to create an environment where people can feel real agency about how they address the challenges. Sometimes, we need to frame and / or come up with situations which provide the teams an opportunity to practice this learned controllability by seeing the impact of their actions in real time.
We need to create the conditions where our teams are able to answer the simple question – Does my work matter?
If the answer is consistently yes and they see their effort connect to outcomes, that their choices carry real consequences, they develop something that looks like confidence and initiative, which leads to learned controllability. They continue to engage and show initiative.
If the answer is consistently no, they can not see how their actions impact the results, they disengage, which leads to learned helplessness. They stop taking initiative. They go through the motion of working without actually accomplishing anything substantive.
Here are a couple of things we can do as leaders:
Choice Architecture:
As leaders it is our responsibility to create real choices with real consequences (positive or negative). It doesn’t matter how small or big their impact is. What matters is that the team always has choices to make which gives them the power of agency. The brain registers the presence of genuine agency.
This is specially true, when the environment we are living in seems to be taking these choices away.
Framing:
We also need to find a way to connect the outcomes to our actions, in some form and factor, even if the connection is weak. Even if there are setbacks, how we explain them matters enormously.
When we frame obstacles as permanent and structural — “this is just how things work here” — we are teaching our people to stop trying leading to learnt helplessness.
When we frame them as temporary and addressable, we are doing something more powerful than optimism. We are ensuring that our teams learn controllability.
These don’t require any budgets or re-orgs. All this requires is awareness, intentionality and the skill to frame narratives.
High Performance vs High Performativeness
I have often described leadership, as the art and science of creating the conditions necessary for our teams to do their best work. Sometimes, this could feel abstract.
The neuroscience makes it concrete. The conditions we create are learning environments. And what people are learning, in every interaction, is a simple but consequential thing: does effort here connect to outcomes?
If yes, we are building teams capable of agency, resilience, and initiative – learned controllability; if not our teams become disconnected and disengaged, leading to learned helplessness.
Slowly, invisibly, but effectively. Either of them is very difficult to change once they take root.
So, lets be intentional about what are we training our teams in. Every interaction leads to reinforcing either learned controllability or learned helplessness.
One leads to high performance and the other to high performative-ness.
This choice is ours to make. We have the agency to make this choice, no matter how it feels like.
