INsight/ Impact of Exclusion

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Manila, 26 January 2022 — What is the impact of exclusion in your workplace?

Story 

It happened in the past 15 years.  What I’m talking about is the story of coaches and managers using valuable insights from neuroscience to facilitate the development of people in the workplace. This story, which is unfolding, resonates strongly with what I have been discovering over the same period in my work with leaders in businesses and organizations around the world. What resonates is that learning from neuroscience helps us to improve the way people think about work and discover new strategies to influence positive change. On the other side, it also helps people to work through negative experiences in the workplace, such as their suffering from exclusion. 

Let’s start on the positive side. In other posts, I have shared about the executive coaching insights that I gained from studying with one of my mentors, Judith Glaser, author of Conversational Intelligence – How Great Leaders Build Trust & Get Extraordinary Results. Glaser developed a body of knowledge, and a worldwide community of practitioners, on how to use conversational intelligence (C-IQ) at work, drawing heavily on neuroscience. Invariably, the leaders I work with love to use some of the C-IQ tools, especially how the Trust Needle helps them to engage more deeply with colleagues in their workplace. At the same time, it makes them acutely aware of the trust deficit regularly encountered among colleagues.

Today, I’d like to highlight the work of researchers at the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), who have helped many international corporations in analyzing how to best facilitate the way people can think and work in pursuit of excellence. And in finding solutions for the many challenges that businesses face in getting there. Those of you who have already taken our Work In All Colors leadership course will recognize that the Orange worldview, which focuses on success and results, shows up prominently in NLI’s outreach. For now, there is one aspect of their research that I’d like to draw your attention to specifically, and that is their work on the impact of exclusion.

Challenge

Neuroscientists tell us that various parts of our brain are working hard to help us operate, keep us safe, and let us learn and make better decisions. At any moment, however, your brain can guide one of these functions to take the lead over others. This selection depends on several factors, and important among these factors is how you perceive your environment at that time. Does it make you feel good or do you feel a threat?

We also learned from neuroscience that some of the decisions in the brain can happen very fast, like in the case of the fight-or-flight response. These ultra-quick changes are triggered by ancient parts of our brain, such as the amygdala, that was already protecting human beings from wild animals in our very distant history. Today, such quick reactions are still hard-wired in how our brain operates. By rapidly generating an abundance of cortisol and adrenalin, the brain can switch our focus to defense and self-reliance, shutting down the positive-thinking brain in the pre-frontal cortex.

Moreover, some of the brain processes are not only quick but also difficult to reverse. That doesn’t only apply to the amygdala shutting down your pre-frontal context over an actual or perceived threat. Take, for example, the well-known saying that first impressions last. This refers to the brain quickly forming an impression about a person you meet for the first time. All of us will recognize from our own experiences how important and impactful such an impression can be. If something in the other person’s behavior triggered caution in your brain, that can be deeply impactful for trust, and difficult to change later on. As a coach, I have heard numerous stories about this.

Question

Taking this forward, my question to you today is about one of the most stressful threat responses that humans can experience, which happens when we feel a sense of being excluded by others in the workplace. As humans, we are social beings and deep down in our brains, collaboration is important for our wellbeing. Exclusion, therefore, constitutes a primal threat, triggering emotional distress that can, according to the researchers at NLI, be compared to acute pain we suffer pain when we get physically injured. Furthermore, since exclusion is more likely to occur as a pattern rather than a single event, the distress can be compared with injuries that take a long time to heal as the threat may still continue. if there is a long recovery time from events that triggered distress over exclusion, the brain will keep allocating more resources to help us cope and get better. That allocation of resources, of course, has consequences.

In the case of people who experience a form of exclusion in the workplace over a longer time, researchers point to the serious impact on individual and team performance and well-being. According to NLI, employees suffering from exclusion tend to retreat — as a way of self-protection — into a diminished version of themselves, causing them and their teams to suffer from a lower ‘IQ’ as a result. This impact of exclusionary behaviors on employees is more widespread than we think, the researchers say, and can go on for a long time, spanning many years. Imagine how much distress and loss of productivity that amounts to! My question to you, therefore, is what you think the impact of exclusion is in your workplace, drawing on your experiences and on stories shared by colleagues and friends?

In the meantime, we have seen in recent years that one of the hotter topics in industry and government has been about diversity and equality and how to promote these, often with quite a narrow focus on certain kinds of diversity such as gender, ethnicity, and more. Sadly, less attention has been given to questions of exclusion, although this is now changing. It matters a great deal what you focus on, with researchers pointing out that efforts to promote diversity can, inadvertently, also cause more exclusion. It’s high time, therefore, to take a closer look at the deleterious effects of exclusion in the workplace, and how we can counter, and hopefully prevent, these behaviors by practicing inclusive leadership behaviors. That’s why I am looking forward to hearing your response to my question for this week.