How We Work

Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind

Leah Weiss, PhD

• Publisher: Harper Wave
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780062565082
• eBook ISBN: 9780062565075
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Leadership

“I have long thought that what the Buddha taught can be seen as a highly developed science of mind which, if made more accessible to a lay audience, could benefit many people. I believe that Dr. Weiss’s book, in combining such insights with science and good business practice, offers an effective mindfulness based program that many will find helpful.” --His Holiness, the Dalai Lama

A practical guide to bringing our whole selves to our professional work, based on the author’s overwhelmingly popular course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In today’s workplace, the traditional boundaries between "work" and "personal" are neither realistic nor relevant. From millennials seeking employment in the sharing economy to Gen Xers telecommuting to Baby Boomers creating a meaningful second act, the line that separates who we are from the work we do is blurrier than ever.

The truth is, we don’t show up for our jobs as a portion of ourselves—by necessity, we bring both our hearts and our minds to everything we do. In How We Work, mindfulness expert and creator of the perennially-waitlisted Stanford Business School course "Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion" Dr. Leah Weiss explains why this false dichotomy can be destructive to both our mental health and our professional success.

The bad news, says Weiss, is that nothing provides more opportunities for negative emotions—anxiety, anger, envy, fear, and paranoia, to name a few—than the dynamics of the workplace. But the good news is that these feelings matter. How we feel at and about work matters—to ourselves, to the quality of our work, and ultimately to the success of the organizations for which we work.

The path to productivity and success, says Weiss, is not to change jobs, to compartmentalize our feelings, or to create a false "professional" identity—but rather to listen to the wisdom our feelings offer. Using mindfulness techniques, we can learn how to attend to difficult feelings without becoming subsumed by them; we can develop an awareness of our bigger picture goals that orients us and allows us to see purpose in even the most menial tasks. In How We Work, Weiss offers a set of practical, evidence-based strategies for practicing mindfulness in the real world, showing readers not just how to survive another day, but how to use ancient wisdom traditions to sharpen their abilities, enhance their leadership and interpersonal skills, and improve their satisfaction.

Part I

Having Purpose at Work

It’s Possible

1

Healing the Toxic Workplace

In the 1980s, architects began to design buildings with energy efficiency in mind. One of the ways they did this was to create structures with a “tighter envelope,” or less ventilation. Around the same time, the first reports of “sick building syndrome” surfaced.¹

Sick building syndrome was the term used to describe a cluster of symptoms experienced by people who spent their days in environments heavy in pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, VOCs (volatile organic compounds), and allergens. Employers grew concerned about this mystery illness, as it was increasingly linked to diminished productivity and lost profits.² There was also widespread apprehension over the implications for the long-term health of people who worked in environments constructed with materials made of toxic chemicals. It was out of this concern that the “green” building movement grew.

In 2015, a team of researchers led by Joseph Allen at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health set out to collect data on the impact of sick building environments on the cognitive functioning of their occupants and to test the impact of various green building standards.³ To do this, they set up a double-blind study—even the researchers didn’t know which people were in which group—involving twenty-four Syracuse-area professionals. These architects, programmers, and creative marketing professionals went to work in simulated building conditions at the Total Indoor Environmental Quality Laboratory at the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems. They spent six full workdays (nine to five, with a forty-five-minute lunch break spent in a room adjacent to their work space) in offices that simulated conditions of green, green+ (better ventilated than the regular green condition), or conventional offices. At the end of each day, the study participants were administered tests designed to assess their cognitive functioning.

The researchers determined that cognitive scores were 61 percent higher in the simulated green building and 101 percent higher in the green+ environment than in the conventional buildings. All nine cognitive domains that were tested scored higher in the green or green+ buildings, with the biggest increases in functioning demonstrated in crisis response (97 percent higher in green and 131 percent higher in green+), strategy (183 percent higher and 288 percent higher), and information usage (172 percent higher and 299 percent higher).⁴

This study is regarded as a game changer for people in the construction industry as well as most forward-thinking, productivity-minded businesses that invest in healthy buildings for their employees. It offers evidence that the materials used to construct a building have a measurable impact on the people who work in that building. Indoor environmental quality is now a massive priority for businesses. Genentech, Kaiser, Google, Salesforce, Facebook—all are investing significant resources, to the tune of billions of dollars, in creating green work spaces. And in top-tier leadership training programs, such as those at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Kennedy School, students are learning to include these considerations in their planning and decision-making processes.

Take the case of industrial engineer Ray Anderson. In 1973, he founded the company Interface to produce carpet tiles in America for institutional settings. The idea was to create new chemicals and materials following the common practices of the time—practices that paid little attention to the toxic impact these chemicals might have on the environment or the lives of the manufacturers and end users. Everyone was doing business this way. It was the accepted, dominant model.⁵

Twenty years later, while reading Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce, Anderson was struck by what then seemed a crazy suggestion: that business was the cause and also the only possible solution to the environmental catastrophe.⁶ In fact, in The Ecolgy of Commerce, Hawken cites Ray Anderson (and Interface) by name as an example of unmitigated “plunderer[s].” In his 2009 TED Talk, Anderson spoke about the unexpected impact this had on his life. Rather than double down on his position as acting within the agreed-upon norms of his time, he heard this critique as a moment of sanity in an insane system—and as a call to action. He made the pledge to take from the earth only what could be renewed and to do no harm to the biosphere. “If Hawken is right, and business and industry must lead, who will lead business and industry?” he asked. As a self-described “recovering plunderer,” Anderson saw the need to step up and lead his company to a new way of doing business. As a result, he created Networks, a joint effort between the Interface carpet company and the Zoological Society of London that repurposed old fishing nets into nylon carpets. This has created less toxic carpets and therefore less toxic physical work spaces, but it has also created a new paradigm for doing business.

I’m telling you this story because sick building syndrome is really about the toxic environments we work in, both literally and figuratively. Even if the buildings we work in go “green,” what about the rest of the work environment? How do we make it better? Sometimes what is considered “normal” in a given time and place is actually insane. Mindfulness training gives us the wisdom to recognize when we are in a situation like this, and the strength to be the crazy person when needed.

Rehumanizing the Workplace

One of the greatest insights we’ve gained from the past fifty years of social psychology is that our environment matters. And while we are no longer subjected to the extreme working conditions of the kind seen in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, we are dealing with a new set of subtler unsafe working conditions.

Americans work a lot. According to a 2016 survey conducted by National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, “almost two thirds of workers say they often or sometimes work overtime or on the weekend, and about one in five say [sic] they work 50 hours or more hours per week in their main job.”⁷

The United States is one of the only highly developed nations in the world that does not guarantee workers some paid leave each year. And even when our employers do offer vacation days, many of us don’t take them.⁸ According to the same survey, less than half of workers who received paid vacation days used all or most of them in 2015. The survey also found that more than half of adults went to work when they were sick. In addition, 44 percent of respondents said their job negatively affected their overall health, and more than 40 percent said it negatively affected their family, weight, and sleep.

Most of us put in extra hours or skip vacations because we want or need to be more productive. But here’s the thing: studies of both manual and white-collar workers show that once we put in forty-nine hours of work a week, our productivity not only levels off but begins to decrease. At a certain point, working excessive hours actually undermines our productivity. And with diminished time and energy to live our lives, this creates a sense of scarcity in our individual and collective mind-set.

In 2015, my friend and mentor Pat Christen and I presented at that year’s Stanford Social Innovation Review Conference. Pat, who used to run HopeLab, is now the managing director of the Omidyar Group (of which HopeLab is a part), a collection of organizations and initiatives established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his scientist-activist wife, Pam.

The research Pat presented at that conference was all about not having enough—enough time, enough money, enough sleep, enough exercise. She explained how existing in this scarcity mind-set day in and day out impacts our mental, physical, and emotional health and can lead to chronic problems such as addiction, obesity, divorce, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and burnout. She cited statistics showing that people who work more than fifty-five hours a week have a 33 percent greater likelihood of stroke and a 13 percent higher risk of heart disease. In addition, 35 percent of these workers reported that their jobs interfered with family time and were a significant source of stress.⁹

The data back up what many of us know to be true experientially: a lot of us are unhappy and unhealthy and outright overwhelmed by the demands of our jobs, and approaching the question of how to be okay or sane, let alone well and thriving, feels like another overwhelming idea. When the whole culture lives this way, it can be hard to locate where the problem lies or address the question of fixing it. The fact is we wear our busyness like a status symbol, and research shows that such aspiration holds real value—Americans who always say that they’re “busy” are viewed as more important and of higher social status.¹⁰

We didn’t plan to be stressed out or bored, anxious or overwhelmed, to feel like meaningless cogs in a very large wheel. Yet somehow too many of us do have this experience too much of the time. Nowhere more than at work do people struggle with the need to feel fulfilled. This need isn’t limited to people who work in the obvious mission-driven fields such as education or in the nonprofit sector. It includes everybody—everybody who ever wanted to be something when they grew up; everybody who has ever felt they didn’t know what they were doing and feared they would be found out; everybody who enjoys complaining about work more than doing it, who experiences the Sunday terrors, or who feels oppressed by information technology’s tether, who doubts that a “work-life balance” is possible; every parent who finds herself between a rock and a hard place, struggling with ambivalence or full-blown guilt both for leaving home to go to work and for being distracted by work when at home; everybody who works too much and everybody who is trying to work more.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. When we start a new job, we’re usually excited about the opportunity and have good intentions to make the most of it: to support ourselves and our families, to learn something valuable, to move toward a goal. But this motivation doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the stuff that makes up our days. We have to find something clean to wear and keep ourselves looking presentable, to be in several places at once and get to all of them on time, to keep track of our kids, to call our parents, to feed ourselves but not too much, to respond to texts and keep up with e-mails, hopefully to get some exercise, pay the bills, bake for the bake sale, get to the parent-teacher conference, and get our teeth cleaned. We have to worry about a lot of things: the health of someone we care about who’s not doing well, a credit card balance that’s not doing well, a child who’s not doing well; what people think of us, how much they value us, whether we’re getting the recognition and pay we deserve. We are, by turns, overwhelmed, ashamed, bored, angry, jealous—and we might simply prefer to be numb. It’s no wonder we lose track of our original intentions.

Not only is all of this subjectively unpleasant, but also it makes us physically sick (that mind-body connection again), emotionally distraught, and mentally compromised. And it spills over into our lives outside work as well as the lives of the people we care about. What can we do, here in the real world—short of acting out our fantasy of screaming, “Take this job and shove it!”? Is enjoying our evenings and weekends and vacation days (if we are lucky enough to get some and not too busy to take them) the best we can do? Should we just suck it up? Is this what it means to be a grown-up?

In a word: no. There is a better way.

We live in a culture that values not only productivity but also profit and promotion at any cost, one that rewards jerks who elbow nice people out of the way, and that creates toxic work environments. Peter Frost, an early and influential thought leader on compassion in the workplace, once said of the office environment, “There is always pain in the room.” This University of British Columbia business school professor who passed away in 2004 diagnosed workplace toxicity as a very real threat to employee performance and company goals. In his groundbreaking piece for the Journal of Management Inquiry, “Why Compassion Counts!,”¹¹ he points out that it is impossible to neatly categorize work as a rational place where emotions don’t belong. In other words, there is no checking your feelings at the door. Yet this is what most of us attempt to do.

The bottom-line currency of the workplace is often used as justification for bad behavior. Stanford Business School scholar and tenured professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches a course called The Paths to Power and is regarded as one of the most influential organizational theorists of our time, wrote an article called “Why the Assholes Are Winning.”¹² In it, he argues that there is a huge gap between the traits of good leadership (modesty, honesty, authenticity, and generosity) and the leadership styles of iconic CEOs such as Roger Ailes, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, whom he characterizes as “ill-tempered and demanding” and exhibiting “abusive behavior with few to no adverse consequences.”¹³ But companies flourished under the leadership of these men, so their bad behavior was excused as a necessary cost of innovation and success.

Make no mistake: it is appropriate to feel sick in a sick environment. And in such an environment, we might well blame ourselves for our suffering, unaware of the role played by a toxic workplace. We are the frog in the pot of water that is slowly being brought to a boil: not seeing the flame or the pot.

The good news is that the curricula at the best business schools in the world are no longer just about learning to win at any cost. In these hallowed halls dedicated to teaching leaders how to make a lot of money, students are now also learning how to create better work environments and be more compassionate leaders. They’re learning how to create new normals for the workplace: treating colleagues and employees with respect, communicating with candor, behaving with integrity.

In 2008, Harvard Business School celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary. That same year, the global financial crisis inspired a group of disillusioned HBS students to work with professors David A. Garvin, Rakesh Khurana, and Nitin Nohria to develop a “Hippocratic Oath for Managers”:¹⁴

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As a business leader, I recognize my role in society.

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My purpose is to lead people and manage resources to create value that no single individual can create alone....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Having Purpose at Work: It’s Possible
• Part II: Bringing Our Whole “Selves” to the Office
• Part III: Failing and Reflecting: The Traits of Successful People and Organizations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher