We live in the age of speed.

Of instantaneity.

Of not being able to stand the delay of a screen when we click.

Of needing solutions here and now.

We live in the age of globalization and being connected. The age of finding out what’s happening on the other side of the world as soon as we get out of bed and having shopping, car insurance, your record, or CV just a click away.

When something hurts, we take paracetamol. If we want to lose weight, we search on Google for the fastest diets in the galaxy to lose weight. If I write to the person I would like to meet, I need to know if we will see each other and read a response immediately. Well, or check the blue tick just in case we’ve been ignored.

We live so fast, with such haste, and the need to have everything here, now, and easy that we don’t hesitate to buy in the most voracious way from large chains, instead of going to the local lady’s shop.

Who would want to spend two hours in the whole process of buying and cooking a hamburger when you can have it for a simple euro, in a paper bag, and with a napkin included at some fast-food chain?

What’s happening with psychology

The pandemic and the changes our society has experienced in recent years are leaving scars. The adoption of new technologies in our routine, along with all the problems derived from Covid-19 (among other factors), have opened Pandora’s box: our mental health is in great danger lately.

And obviously, we have to do something.

Mental Health begins to be a topic of conversation (and thankfully so). We are concerned about normalizing mental health problems, Twitter and Instagram have been filled with hashtags reminding us that there is no health without mental health. It’s even mentioned from the government that there might be a specific plan to help the population take care of their psychological well-being.

In short, the current context is the ideal breeding ground for the need that has been talked about in recent months: to have accessible mental health solutions for the population.

And these solutions, obviously, will go hand in hand with all the changes and advances that characterize the last decade.

Order of priorities

“Shopping at the nearby store is expensive, I always go to the supermarket”

“All my clothes are from large chains, I don’t have anything artisan or from small businesses”

“Changing my way of understanding food and the way I relate to it is too long a process. I’m going to try the diet a friend told me about that she lost 5 kg in a week.”

“I don’t have time to go to the gym, I’m too busy with my job (even though I spend on average two hours every day passively on my social networks)”

“The psychologist is expensive (but the latest generation smartphone is not)”

Nobody finds it strange to pay an average of 100 euros when they go to a specialist consultation. Really, we already know what we are getting into when we go to a professional that public health does not cover. Undoubtedly, mental health should be a right, and in a fairer scenario than the one we live in, we would all have access to a psychologist without waiting between 6 and 8 months for a 20-minute appointment in public health.

But the reality right now is different. In the field of clinical psychology, if we focus on the average price of a therapy session, it usually ranges around 50-60 euros per session.

In that session, we pay for the training, experience, knowledge, means and tools, the time, and the characteristics of a professional in this field.

What happens when the price to pay, behind the mask of making it accessible, is much lower?

And when the one receiving that money is not directly the person (who only perceives a percentage), but an intermediary?

Cheap, sometimes is expensive

In the field of psychology, costs can only be cut in two ways to lower the price of the product.

The first is to cut back on resources of time, quality, or means (for example, offering shorter sessions, without the need for face-to-face meetings and therefore without rental expenses for an office, with people of low training and/or experience, or without offering a previous assessment through official evaluation tools.

The second, if you do not work independently, is by paying little to the professionals who work for you.

In both cases, the result is the same: the quality of care dangerously drops.

Whether it’s because the professional is not well paid, or because we’ve cut back on means and lowered our hiring standard, the patient will always be the most harmed.

And this is very dangerous. Because mental health is not something to be taken lightly or trivialized. Because a bad experience with a psychologist can condition a person’s life, not only the course of a problem but also the likelihood of that individual seeking psychological help again.

That’s why psychology should not be turned into a fast food product. Because a 1 euro hamburger will never have the quality of a butcher’s hamburger.

Because a service that is normally charged at an average price, cannot be sold for half without cutting back on something.

Would you buy a car that they tell you is new and quality, but costs 200 euros? No, because you know it’s not possible to offer that price if the car is new, safe, and works. And if not, it could endanger your life

Because even though we live in a globalized world and have adopted a more comfortable way of living, this comfort should never come before our health or put it at risk.

For accessible, but quality mental health.

When we think of the figure of a leader, perhaps the image of a person in a suit, appearing to have everything figured out and a high level of authority comes to mind. Or that of the typical man who has succeeded in business and now his story appears in books on how to succeed in life, like the story of Netflix or Google.

Or conversely, maybe the picture of Nelson Mandela giving a speech to thousands of people comes to mind. Or who knows, perhaps that of Angela Merkel at the head of the government.

There are as many definitions of leadership (almost) as people have tried to define it

There are many definitions of leadership. And of course, many types of leaders. This is because leadership is a phenomenon very conditioned by cultural, political, religious, social, and of course, psychological factors.

Years ago, about 50 years, if we asked someone from the Western context what a leader is to them, they would probably respond or define a figure closer to a boss than to a leader.

A figure probably male, with a lot of authority, a rather aggressive communication style, and very focused on results.

However, if we asked the same question in an Eastern country, let’s imagine India for example, the answer would likely be quite different.

So, what are we talking about when we talk about leadership styles?

Goleman and his six styles

One of the most well-known authors globally in the field of leadership is Goleman.

In his classification, Goleman talks about these 6 leadership styles:

• Coercive or authoritarian: based on hierarchy, authority, and being above employees.
• Visionary: these are the leaders who take motivation to another level, making it the main glue towards employees.
• Affiliative: it’s based on creating bonds among team members since it considers group cohesion and belonging as key concepts of success.
• Democratic: it’s based on taking into account the opinion and needs of others.
• Helmsman: literally, it’s the helm that sets the course. It’s a quite protagonist figure and does not focus on the needs of others, but rather on following a previously designed route.
• Coach: like a coach, this leader enhances the good part and minimizes the flaws. It places a lot of emphasis on training workers and helping them improve personally.

Transformative Leadership

Before, long before Goleman’s classification, there was already talk of a style of leadership that could wield a lot of power in organizations: transformative leadership.

As its name suggests, transformative leadership generates changes, transforms the structure and experience of the organization from the ground up.

This concept began more or less in 1973, by James V. Downton, a sociologist famous for his research on leadership. Years later, this definition expanded towards concepts that emphasize the personal characteristics of the leader, their projection, and both inter and intra-personal skills to generate changes. But, how does it differ from leadership styles such as motivational or helmsman, by Goleman?

The ABC of Transformative Leaders

• One of its bases is making new ideas and possibilities a reality. Basically, materializing and giving shape to projects and concepts related to the organization that do not yet have their parcel in the real world
• It focuses on how things are done and how changes are gestated. For this, it trains and mentors employees. It empowers them to make decisions and work autonomously.
• A transformative leader is very clear about their core values: authenticity, cooperation, and open and assertive communication
• They understand the importance of the organization’s culture and therefore promote interest and cohesion towards the goals and among teams within the organizational culture. This is achieved by not neglecting the values and priorities of the group
• Like a coach leader, it aims to generate motivation and facilitate the development of all the positive aspects of people, also helping to improve difficulties.

We’re talking benefits

As you can imagine, transformative leadership is an ideal tool for working on a lot of things in the organization. In addition, it intrinsically carries a series of positive consequences of its implementation

• It fundamentally affects the culture of the organization, having the capacity to mutate it. Thus, it generates changes in what not only the work carried out in the organization means but also its values and therefore, its identity
• It is closely linked to satisfaction since it not only generates motivation and therefore, engagement, but also improves factors as important as the work climate, the efficacy perceived by employees, or the reinforcement and culture of feedback.
• It’s a trump card for organizations to be prepared for all changes. The digital age, teleworking, globalization… all are new challenges for which we need a figure to guide us, and transformative leadership is all set to be that beacon

The concept of multi-skilling refers to the set of skills, knowledge, experiences, and aptitudes that enable a person to perform different jobs or roles within their company.

Why we want it in our company

We are accustomed to a labor market where the trend towards hyper-specialization is the order of the day. A career, a master’s degree or a postgraduate degree, and several courses to perform that small parcel within what would be our job role. This type of knowledge falls within what is called hard skills or specific technical knowledge to carry out such work.

On the other hand, the concept of soft skills is also starting to resonate, which, conversely, refers to a series of competencies and characteristics in relation to personality and both intrapersonal and interpersonal traits of a worker. Intrapersonal traits refer to the relationship with oneself, how much one knows oneself, and how one regulates oneself. Interpersonal, to everything that has to do with the relationship with others.

Within this soft skills/hard skills dichotomy, multi-skilling refers to both technical concepts and those “personality” skills, facilitating the development of different positions and roles within a company. Therefore, it increases what we know as the “human value” of the organization.

Human value in a globalized environment like ours is starting to be a must-have. With increasingly specialized profiles, jobs or roles that did not exist a few years ago but simultaneously a growing trend to focus on the human and its needs, multi-skilling is posed as a very attractive option to foster among employees. Thus, it begins to position itself at the top of the list when attracting new talents.

Two great benefits of attracting people with these characteristics to our organization, or fostering them among employees, are:

Increased productivity and efficiency: since an organization where a person can carry out various tasks, streamlining and energizing the work flow and achieving more goals in less time, will always be more productive. Of course, without this agility affecting the quality of work.

Exponential growth: both for the company and the employee, since it allows for the expansion of work areas, products offered, or the company’s action plans when we do not focus on a single skill or specialization. On a personal level, it is a very good opportunity for the employee to undergo a training and development process within the company, increasing engagement and satisfaction levels towards the entity.

Imagine a brain. Simplifying the issue a lot, a brain is composed of neurons connected to each other. Imagine now that each of those neurons is extremely good at processing only a tiny part of information in great detail. It does not know how to communicate with other neurons nor adapt its nature to process different signals if necessary. Would this brain be functional and useful?

How is multi-skilling achieved?

It’s important to remember that, like all learning, we’ll need to plan the objectives we want to achieve when training our employees in different skills. These objectives must be measurable, referring to operable, evaluable behaviors.

In relation to multi-skills, this translates into teaching everything from knowledge to values and skills that allow the employee to increase their capacity to take on more tasks and roles than strictly related to their job position.

According to Guy le Boterf, an expert in competency management and internationally known, acquiring a new competency depends on these three fundamental components:

Knowing how to act: includes the more technical knowledge related to the competency to be acquired. Theoretical training and more cognitive skills.

Wanting to act: related to the motivational component and is closely linked to the worker’s perception of their competencies and the feedback received.

Being able to act: related to personal characteristics that, together with technical knowledge, are a decisive and differential factor when distinguishing oneself from the rest. Specifically, they would be the last link in multi-skilling.

Once these three factors are clear, the ideal is to develop a list of competencies to be acquired for those worker profiles we believe could comfortably move in multi-skilling. Thus, we will have a kind of “matrix” where we can cross and compare that person’s competencies at each of those levels, and the objectives to achieve new skills and competencies in knowing how to act, wanting to act, and being able to act.

Multi-skilling is a very interesting concept given the current context. It values human capital, functions as a talent attractor in a company, and generates more human organizations where, in addition to a title and knowledge, the personal characteristics of the employee are leveraged.

“I feel overwhelmed by any setback. I’m drowning in a glass of water.”

“Every time I have a problem, I avoid it. In the end, I end up having two problems: the original one and all the guilt for not having done anything sooner.”

“Lately, everything feels like a drag; I’m tired of this situation. I find it hard to control my emotions so they don’t overwhelm me.”

“I can’t stop dwelling on bad things. It’s as if there’s only room for negative thoughts in my head.”

You may recognize these phrases or even have felt identified with them. Often, we go through bad emotional periods due to factors such as grief, job instability, economic crises… And what happens in the world, affects us—and how!

The pandemic and other fatigues:

It’s no wonder terms like “pandemic fatigue” have emerged to refer to that feeling of tiredness and discouragement, stemming from a situation of chronic stress, with measures that limit the positive reinforcements we usually have. With positive reinforcement, I mean meeting with friends, having a coffee break at work, being able to see our family, or going on that much-desired vacation trip we’ve been saving for.

Modulating our reactions to life

I’m not telling you anything new if I say that we can’t change the events that happen to us or reality itself, right?

What we can change is how we face that reality. No, don’t worry, I won’t force you to have a smile glued to your face or to think that if it rains, it’s because confetti is falling from the sky. I’ll just talk to you about a term: emotional regulation.

“Emotional regulation is defined as the ability to consciously regulate the emotions we experience, when they happen, and how we express them.”

Does this mean we can control our emotions?

No, emotions are not controlled. They are identified, recognized, managed, or mitigated.

But then… can I decide which emotion to feel?

No. Emotions have biological, social, and learning significance. They arise from our interaction with the environment (we generate them), serve to communicate, and help us learn which behaviors are valuable and which are not.

In short, they help us survive.

That skill

Therefore, emotional regulation is that skill that we can work on to better understand ourselves, our emotions, and the way we express them at any given moment.

It’s responsible for ensuring we don’t drown in a glass of water, that we have reactions adapted to the context, and that, despite everything bad happening, we can continue with our day-to-day life with some “normality”.

Of course, negative things will continue to happen, and we will continue to feel sad or anxious, but if our emotional regulation strategies are good, we’ll mitigate all those negative processes without denying them, but without letting them harm us excessively. Basically, we learn to live with them without our mental health suffering along the way.

Event, thought, emotion

When an event occurs, it generates a thought or belief. This belief, in turn, will lead to an emotion and some behavior.

For example, if my supervisor asks me to redo a report because there were errors, I might think I am useless, that it always happens to me. I will feel discouraged and probably make another poor report due to lack of motivation or anger for having made a mistake.

If I continue dwelling on how bad I feel, I’ll magnify that sensation. On the other hand, if I look for an alternative solution, I’ll probably improve my emotional state.

Great, but what are the strategies?

There are many strategies that help us regulate our emotions. The most well-known are the following:

• Active coping: actively facing the problem instead of avoiding it or procrastinating.
• Seeking social support: there are emotions like sadness that are not negative (surprise, no emotion is!) but direct us toward certain actions. In the case of sadness, it indicates that we seek help or take some time to rest. Therefore, paying attention to this positive intention is to regulate our emotions.
• Changing the focus of attention: have you seen the classic video of a group of people passing a ball, while a man dressed as a bear dances in the middle of the group? Excuse the spoiler, but this video deals precisely with the importance of the focus of attention. It’s so important that if we don’t pay attention… WE DON’T SEE IT! The same happens with those unpleasant sensations; if we focus our attention on them, they become bigger and bigger. Ideally, we should shift our focus to a task that is interesting or demanding enough to engage us, keeping us entertained so we don’t think about the negative (for example, doing a sudoku, writing or drawing, talking to someone…)
• Positive reinterpretation: let’s go back to what we explained a few paragraphs ago. Instead of having catastrophic thoughts, let’s look for another interpretation. One that helps us make the emotion that follows more bearable or easier to manage.

It’s important to remember that when we have a certain level of discomfort or believe there’s something about ourselves we’d like to change, it’s ideal to seek a mental health professional.

These are some examples of emotional regulation strategies. There are more useful strategies, but I invite you to try some of these for a week and tell us how the experience went.

Are you up for it?

About 600 days have passed since the state of emergency was declared (for the first time) in Spain.

What we know as the new normal has stealthily slipped into our daily routines, leaving behind a phrase that increasingly echoes in our ears: “pandemic fatigue.”

What they mean when they talk about pandemic fatigue

The term pandemic fatigue refers to our reaction to the measures derived from the pandemic, characterized by a state of mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion resulting from the health crisis caused by the appearance of COVID-19 (WHO, 2020)

There are a series of factors that converge to cause so-called pandemic fatigue

• Continuous exposure to a stressful situation such as the presence of the virus
• Fear and uncertainty: the predominant emotions in recent months that generate that feeling of tiredness
• Rules and restrictions that limit the amount of positive reinforcements: being away from family, not allowing meetings of cohabitants, nonexistence of cultural activities or social events

We all react differently

Each person has their own way of coping with stressful situations, such as avoidance, denial of what generates stress, or social isolation.

Although each person reacts in a different way, when a stressful situation occurs, we go through three phases in which the organism tries to adapt to the situation:

Alarm phase: when we perceive a danger, the first phase always generates similar reactions such as muscle tension, anxiety, negative thoughts, or restlessness

Resistance phase: it is the phase in which our organism assumes that “there is no other option but to adapt.” Therefore, anxiety levels usually decrease, and a series of processes aimed at accepting the situation appear

Exhaustion phase: occurs when the stressor does not disappear or when our attempt to resist the stressor fails. This is where psychopathology emerges. Without going any further, this is the phase in which we would place the current moment since we have already gone through the initial state of alarm, there has been, in most cases, an attempt at resistance by our organism, and finally, exhaustion arrives.

The result of this whole process, according to the WHO, is that demotivation to follow the recommended protective behaviors that appears gradually and is affected by various perceptions, emotions, experiences, and cultural influences

What can we do to mitigate pandemic fatigue?

One of the keys, as we mentioned before, is the feelings of uncertainty derived from the situation we are living. One thing we can do is not focus on things we cannot control. It’s like trying to predict the future and getting frustrated every time something happens that we couldn’t have predicted.

Another suggestion is to maintain a healthy lifestyle that helps us have restorative sleep, eat well, and try to stay healthy both physically and mentally.

An interesting piece of advice is to limit the number of hours we spend exposed to pandemic news. Just like with celebrity gossip or horror stories, the news related to COVID-19 generates that need to be constantly informed and to know more given the novelty of the topic and its impact at all levels of society. This means we can watch TV or stay updated on the situation in our city, but we should limit the amount of information we receive about it since it magnifies negative emotions and obsessive thoughts.

Finally, although it may seem obvious, it’s very important to maintain social relationships, whether with the classic coffee among friends or through any platform that allows you to talk to your family and friends. Maintaining these types of bonds provides a positive reinforcement that will significantly improve your mood, and also allows you to express emotions and mental states with people close to you.

“We wrote Humanocracy because we believe, as societies and as individuals, we can no longer afford organizations that waste more human capacity than they use.”

Gary Hamel and Zanini

HumanoWHAT?

You may recognize the name Gary Hamel, a reputed management “guru,” named by the Wall Street Journal as the most influential business thinker in the world. He is an economist and professor at the London Business School and Harvard University Business School. Moreover, he owns his consulting firm and publishes several articles annually in the Harvard Business Review.

But, why has this term made him famous?

Humanocracy is the title of a book he has published with Michelle Zanini, also a writer, consultant, and international speaker.

Humanocracy refers to stopping the waste of talent in organizations governed by bureaucracy. It’s about leveraging the treasure that employees’ skills represent. Focusing on a model centered on maximizing the employees’ contributions to the company.

Bureaucracy is based on control, the slowness of processes, and the existence of a form for everything. Humanocracy, on the other hand, values creativity, agility, interpersonal skills, flexibility, and how people can drive each and every organization forward.

“Creating organizations as amazing as the people inside them”

Times Change

And so do the needs of organizations, as well as the world in general. Pandemic, telecommuting, jobs with very high specificity, new technologies, multidisciplinary teams, evidence of the need for so-called “soft skills”…

Each and every one of these phrases are changes that have occurred in recent years and call for a need to change the model. Moving from a rigid model to one that empowers the individual, that enhances the worker who knows how to do their job well and possesses that “know-how” (that is, all the knowledge acquired throughout their work experience on how to perform their job). A model that does not pose a barrier between each hierarchical level but functions more like a network that simplifies, facilitates, and humanizes processes.

Gary’s 5 Key Points

Without giving away any spoilers about the book, the 5 main points of Gary and Zanini’s work are as follows:

1. It´s time to kill bureaucracy (it’s time to kill bureaucracy)
2. There are alternatives to the bureaucratic status quo (there are alternatives to the bureaucratic status quo)
3. To bust bureaucracy, start with new principles (to end bureaucracy, start with new principles)
4. Anybody can hack management (anyone can hack management)
5. Every job can be a good job (every job can be a good job)

It seems that changes are here to stay and that it’s time to respond to new needs not only as individuals but also as organizations.

Humanocracy Has Appeared

There are books, movies, and series from more than 20 years ago that are frightening for how well they predict the future.

In this case, we are not talking about The Simpsons and their prophecies, but about a 1984 book that talks about how humanity suffers for not being prepared to use all the technology it has created.

Not because this technology is evil or has rebelled, but because of the lack of personal skills to manage the consequences of its daily use.

“In the book The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution (Brod, 1984), it is defined as an adaptation disease caused by the lack of ability to deal with new computer technologies in a healthy way”

What is Technostress?

According to an article published by the College of Psychologists of Madrid, various authors define technostress as “the negative psychological state, related to the use of technology or its threat of use in the future. This experience would be related to a series of emotions such as anxiety, fatigue, and lack of productivity along with an excessive and sometimes compulsive use.

“Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental”

As in other aspects of stress, technostress implies that there is an inequality between the demands of the environment and our capacities to cope with them. That is, the environment demands more than we can manage. In this sense, its consequences, as can be seen, are similar to those of other types of stress, such as work stress.

The peculiarity of technostress is that it refers to the discomfort derived from the use of any technology device. Not specifically from mobile phones, social networks, or a computer, but from technology in general.

Technostressors

Just like with other types of stress, we have to define what the stressors are that, in this case, exceed our ability to cope. We can divide them into two blocks: environmental demands and lack of resources.

Specifically, the demands refer to the consumption of resources that technologies entail both in terms of time, as well as attention or other cognitive resources, or the excess of information to manage (not always useful when working with it) On the other hand, many times we do not have the necessary resources to face them, thus creating an imbalance.

How can we intervene?

It should be noted that in cases of stress, intervention will always be easier if the stressor is eliminated or mitigated.

If that is not possible, another option could be to apply a series of therapies at an individual, group, or organizational level.

At an individual level: the first thing is to apply techniques that allow lowering the levels of anxiety and activation. It is also recommended to organize habits in relation to technology: reduce the number of hours of use, schedule when they can be used or not, use screens that protect the eyesight, or maintain a prudent distance from it.

At a group level: therapies focused on techniques such as mindfulness can be applied to improve anxiety and strengthen the connection with the present or even adopt a more supportive format in which activities are proposed where no technologies are involved, to promote habits such as sports or social play.

At an organizational level: one of the bases are disconnection policies. Allowing employees not to use technological devices related to work outside their working hours. Another intervention would be directly related to the preventive measures that a company has to minimize the impact of ICT. Another would be the training of employed personnel to avoid that lack of resources we referred to earlier.

“Technology is here to stay and it has many good things. But like any other tool, it requires knowledge, skills, and attitudes to use it positively. We have to prepare ourselves to adapt to all the social, relational, work, and personal changes that it implies. Otherwise, the fantasy of the book The Human Cost of Computer Revolution will become our own story.”