Working as a college professor for the first dozen years of my post-graduate school life, I was always around people. Teaching a full load of courses to college students every semester, I used to say, "I talk for a living." Then I would come home to my husband and children and more talking. Life was full of what I now call "Face-to-Face" or F2F communication.

Back in those days, I remember one fine afternoon, sitting on the quad with a circle of honors students. We were discussing Csikszentmihalyi's Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. The author made the point that people generally dislike or fear being alone and that this condition stemmed from a time when being alone meant greater vulnerability to harm. An animal that strays from the pack puts herself at greater risk of attack. I remember being aghast at the notion that nobody likes being alone. "I love being alone," I assured my students. "What I fear is that I will NOT be left alone...at least for a little while."

University-From-Home

As a media psychologist, it seemed very fitting when I changed jobs to join a program where technology was used in instruction and communication. Fielding Graduate University's media psychology doctoral program uses what's called a blended educational model. This means we combine face-to-face elements with distance education elements such as class meetings that use audio and video chat, document and program sharing. Students and faculty, in pairs or small groups, can view the same documents, data, Internet site or computer program and can work on projects simultaneously, from locations across the country. The blended model has me traveling roughly every other month to meet for anywhere from a long weekend to two weeks with graduate students and other colleagues.

When I first came to work for Fielding, my colleague Kjell Rudestam¹ described the ebb and flow of life at Fielding as "intense bursts of togetherness" interspersed with periods when faculty returned to their home offices around the country. Kjell was right. My rhythm of life changed from daily stints in the F2F classrooms to working from home using multiple forms of media to connect with people. This was indeed punctuated by these "intense bursts of togetherness" which involve everything from all-day meetings to seminars to parties and group dinners in Santa Barbara and elsewhere around the country. Interestingly, I find that regular F2F sessions, interspersed with video chats and phone calls results in a strong feeling of connection.

Working from Home Is More Common than You Might Think When it comes to working from home part time, I'm certainly not alone (Word play is irresistible, isn't it?). In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "On the days that they worked, 24 percent of employed persons did some or all of their work at home²."

Much has been made of the shift towards working from home, coupled with an increased reliance on a variety of media technologies for communication. In 2009, Time Magazine announced, "The last years of cubicle life³," as part of its cover story on the Future of Work⁴. "...the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away. It's too expensive, and it's too slow. (Godin, 2009, ¶4)

The Grooming Optional Club

As a social psychologist who studies media, you might guess I'd be pretty intensely interested in what the effects of working from home are and will be in the future. I've noticed a number of changes in my own work life. A rather funny change one notices right away is a rather drastic shift in self presentation, also known as personal grooming. While in the past I have had a love-hate relationship with "dressing for success," (I could easily write a blog on the evils of pantyhose or high heels) working from home certainly involves experimentation with new lows in self care. For instance, I've wondered whether it's entirely advisable to live life in yoga pants or pajamas. On the other hand, isn't it sort of a dream come true?

My cousin Janis, founder of the social networking site for women SocialJane.com, also works from home. In a column, she recently confessed, "I hold conference calls, prepare power points, and analyze the monthly budget all in the comfort of my pajamas ... with un-brushed teeth⁵." Another work-from-home colleague (I won't "out" her, but she also writes a blog for Psych Today) said that she feels bad if she spends the whole day in exercise pants and doesn't actually exercise.

Of course, there are a lot of other ways life is different for those working from home other than fashion and grooming. For instance, bosses have been concerned about productivity, though reports suggest workers may actually be more productive when working from home⁶.

Does Working From Home Ruin Your Social Life?

Perhaps the greatest concerns for those who work at home are the social concerns. Will my colleagues who work out of the office be jealous and will our relationships suffer? Actually, research tends towards "yes" on those questions⁶. But there appear to be social benefits from working at home as well. These include generally feeling happier, being less stressed, feeling more autonomous and even a lessened sense of work-family conflict⁶.

However, those who work from home may need to be more thoughtful about making and keeping social connections. For instance, in her article "Improve your social life: Work from home⁵," Janis Kupferer suggests scheduling lunches with friends, doing leisure activities that involve social interaction, and even getting out of the home office to work in public social spaces like Internet cafes and coffee houses.

I have personally experienced some of what the experts cited above have said. For instance, I find regularly scheduled lunches (or movies, afternoon coffees, etc.) with friends help fill my need for social interactions. Working from home takes away all those random conversations with colleagues in the hall and forces you to be more deliberate and planned about being social.

Working from home may also change the nature of your interactions, moving you towards choosing the people you really like to spend time with and pursuing those relationships purposefully. In other words, one side effect of working at home may be having fewer relationships, but relationships that are different in texture - perhaps deeper, richer and more deliberate. Consequently, that would also mean fewer of those shallow relationships that revolve around small talk at the copy machine or office meeting.

Home and Family

I have also found that my family life has grown richer simply because I am more physically present and able to switch between work and family needs. For instance, I can pick my kids up from school every afternoon rather than sending them to after-school care. I can easily stay at home with a sick child and care for him or her while working. Now, this flexibility also has its price. For instance, my children popped in with requests at least a dozen times while I was writing this very blog entry. (One of those was a request to make a baking soda and vinegar-powered volcano in the back yard, which was awesome.)

Well, that's all for now. I have a V.I.P. waiting for me in my office. It's my son, Jason. On the agenda for this evening: he wants to choose middle names for the dogs and show me a scene from West Side Story on the computer. I have to say, it's a lot more fun than your typical office agenda.

References and Notes
¹Kjell and Fielding's Judith Shoenholtz-Read are the co-editors of the Handbook of Online Learning (Sage, 2010). Kjell and Fielding's Rae Newton are the co-editors of Surviving your Dissertation (Sage, 2007). Needless to say, I'm not the only one who finds Kjell's perspective helpful.

²Bureau of Labor Statistics (June 22, 2010) American Time Use Survey, available at: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

³Godin, S. (May 14, 2009) The last days of cubicle life, Time, available at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,18980...

⁴Time magazine cover story, "The future of work," (May 14, 2009), available at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,189802...

⁵Kupferer, Janis (September 3, 2010). "Improve your social life: Work from home," available at: http://www.socialjane.com/articles/12-tips-for-connecting/113-wan...

⁶Korener, B. (Sept. 22, 2008). Home sweet office: Telecommute good for business, employees, planet, available at:

Image from workingdivas.com available at: 

What would I say in a talk on leadership to a professional sports team, Kaitlynn Myers, a Yale psychology student, asked me in an email. How to answer her is all I've been thinking about since.

It's usually people from sports that are brought into coach business groups, not the other way around. Lou Holtz, former coach of Notre Dame, is a fixture on the business lecture circuit, but I don't believe the steel industry's turnaround artist Wilbur Ross has ever been brought in to address a struggling football team. We hear often of inspiring speeches in the locker room, but they're a rare occurrence in the conference room.

Nevertheless, I think there is a quite a bit that neuroscience might teach sports teams about leadership, and the first thing is not to pay too much attention to talks. Sure, people like me might offer some provocative ideas, such as that most of what we take for granted about leadership is simply wrong. But it takes more than an entertaining hour to improve performance.

According to neuroscience, performance, even when physical, starts with what goes on in people's heads. But just like physical conditioning, mental conditioning takes repetition. The more neurons fire together, the more they wire together, as neuroscientists like to say.

Perfecting a skill requires attention and focus, and with enough practice, execution becomes unconscious and automatic. Yet every athlete knows that too much thinking hampers performance. When it's time to perform, we've got to shut down the yabbering in our heads and totally immerse ourselves in the play.

In fact, the focus shouldn't be on the individual at all, but on the team. A study I once conducted found that the highest performing managers would opt for team players over individual stars. Recent research has established that members of high performing teams touch each more than those on other teams. One theory is that it keys the release of the hormone oxytocin, which creates strong bonds between the team members.

Nor should professional athletes focus on the rich rewards they enjoy. The pleasure chemical dopamine, whose effect is much like cocaine, is released in the brain not when we receive a reward, but when we are fully engaged in the activity leading to the reward. It's not the reward that's motivational, but the work itself.

Even more distracting is the all too common practice of coaches yelling at players. We are all internally driven by our need to achieve. All being yelled at motivates is a desire to yell back, or to punish the person yelling by doing exactly the opposite of what they want. In the workplace, such negative feedback has been found to drive down performance.

So my message to leaders in sports would be to leverage the way the mind works. Coach players to consciously work on every aspect of their game in practice, but when on the field, encourage them to become totally immersed in the play of the team and forget everything else, including the multimillion-dollar salaries. Stop yelling and start asking questions, so that players are prompted to critique their own performance and take ownership of the effort required to improve.

Great leaders create a vision of success for people to strive for, but they stress the transcendent feeling that comes from full engagement in the work of the team, in the here and now.

It's pretty much the same advice I give to leaders in business, but then minds are minds, no matter what activity they're engaged in.

Since I recently wrote about the great places to work, friends and colleagues have been sharing examples of workplace situations that lead to poor working environments. I've assembled these (and some others) into the 5 signs that a workplace is deteriorating in quality, and thoughts on how to make things better.

1. "All Sticks and No Carrots." When management begins to focus solely on what employees are doing wrong (i.e., correcting "problems"), and never or rarely rewarding them for what they are doing right (rewards, recognition), it is simply bad psychology and bad leadership in action. A friend told me that if he or members of his department hear from the boss, they know it means they have done something wrong. "It didn't used to be that way around here," he said. "We used to get a balance of good and bad from our former boss."

Good leadership practices involve encouraging and rewarding employees for the things they have done right. This increases worker motivation and morale. A punitive work environment stifles initiative and has everyone walking on eggshells wondering when and where the hammer will fall next.

2. "The Creeping Bureaucracy." A while back, an academic colleague submitted her research proposal to her university's Institutional Review Board to get permission to conduct her research using students. It took over 8 months to get approval! When she asked about the delay, she was told, "we have complicated procedures that must be followed and a backlog of work."

While following standard policies and procedures is important, too much bureaucratic "red tape" is never a good thing. All too often, as in the example above, employees will use the bureaucracy as an excuse for not getting work done. And, if bureaucratic procedures are bringing operations to a halt, then it is time to find a faster, better way of doing things.

3. "The Gigantic Bottom Line." In our current poor economic environment, examples of this abound. Organizations that have a singular focus on money - profits, cost-cutting, etc., without considering the other "bottom lines" (the shorthand for the triple bottom line is "profits, people, planet") is on a downward slide.

Even under the worst economic times, it is important for leadership to pay attention to its workers and the work environment. If the company is going to turn around, it is going to take the motivation, dedication, and talent of the workforce to do it.

4. "When Bullies Rule the Roost." I've written extensively about workplace bullies, so there are many examples of bullying in earlier posts and discussion from readers. Nothing can make a workplace more toxic than the presence of bullies - and leaders, who are either bullies themselves, or allow the bullies to thrive and attack victims unchecked.

High levels of dysfunctional workplace politics -- and the terrible trio of bullying, cronyism, and nepotism - is always a sign of a deteriorated work environment. Leaders: Put a stop to this! There needs to be a zero tolerance policy to stop bullying and bad politicking.

5. "Losing the Human Touch." "It doesn't feel the same around here." "They treat us as if we were interchangeable parts." "When I went to HR to complain about mistreatment, they told me that maybe I'd be happier at another company." These are all comments that I've heard about deteriorating workplaces.

The very best companies are those that genuinely care about their workers and their welfare. The emphasis needs to be on the "human" in the terms "human capital" and "human resources." Leaders need to continually ask the question of how policies and practices impact workers. There needs to be genuine concern and caring for people to make an organization a great place to work.

My favorite track on Tom Petty's 2006 album Highway Companion is a song called "Saving Grace." About halfway through, he closes off a verse by singing: "You're confident but not really sure." That's a state of mind that sounds paradoxical, but at times it really is true. In fact, it's the essence of what developmental psychologist John Meacham called the "attitude of wisdom." And it's a good description of some bosses I know, who strike a healthy balance between knowing and doubting.

Meacham's insight, which was developed much further by one of my intellectual heroes, organizational psychologist Karl Weick, was that the people we consider wise have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.

When I first became enamored with wisdom after reading Weick's writings (perhaps eight years ago) I heard a great conversation about it at a conference put on by Harvard Business School Publishing in Silicon Valley. There, I heard innovation guru Clay Christensen interview long-time Intel CEO Andy Grove, who had recently relinquished that title and become Chairman. I took careful notes and then a few weeks later went back to the organizers to request a transcript, which they were kind enough to send me. Grove gave his own testimony to this notion of "Confident but not really sure." I've edited this for length (see the whole thing and more of my thoughts on it here), but here's what he advised:

None of us have a real understanding of where we are heading. I don't. I have senses about it. But decisions don't wait, investment decisions or personal decisions and prioritization don't wait, for that picture to be clarified. You have to make them when you have to make them. So you take your shots and clean up the bad ones later. I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

This balancing act between confidence and doubt is a hallmark of great bosses. The confidence inspires people to follow them and believe in them, but the doubt helps ensure they get things right. They are always listening and watching for evidence that they might be wrong, and inviting others to challenge their conclusions (albeit usually in private and in "backstage" conversations).

One of my favorite books on the nitty-gritty of what wise bosses do is Notes on Directing, where late renowned stage director Frank Hauser (with help from co-author Russell Reich) provided 130 leadership lessons. It is chock-full of great advice that any boss can learn from. Hauser argues that "A clear, confident presence and strong direction are highly reassuring for everyone," but later makes clear that a good director changes his or her mind when a better idea comes along:

As the director, you have three weapons: "Yes," "No," and "I don't know." Use them. Don't dither; you can always change your mind later. Nobody minds that. What they do mind is the two-minute agonizing when all the actor has asked is "Do I get up now."

Many of the bosses I admire most ? from P&G's AG Lafley, to IDEO's David Kelley, to Pepsi's Indra Nooyi, to venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur Randy Komisar, to Xerox's Anne Mulcahy, to less well-known bosses like JetBlue Director Bonny Simi ? seem to have this ability to act confidently on what they know, while doubting their knowledge.

Take Bonny, for example, who is a three-time Olympian in the luge and still an active commercial pilot (both excellent metaphors for the need to maintain forward motion while making judicious course corrections!). She recently led JetBlue's successful effort (after a pair of failed ones) to develop procedures for delaying with flight delays and airport shutdowns caused by bad weather. Dealing with such "irregular operations" is crucial to JetBlue's reputation, even its survival. Remember its infamous failure to deal with a winter storm delay, when it kept thousands of passengers packed in planes sitting on socked-in runways for hours and hours? That was February 14th 2007, and the incident not only made for horrible press, it ultimately cost CEO David Neeleman his job. Bonny and her team tackled the challenge through a process of prototyping, identifying all the steps involved in a model shut down and re-opening of airport operations, and then putting their refined system through its paces again and again under different scenarios, looking for the ways it could fail them.

Iterative prototyping like this is so powerful because the attitude of wisdom is at its heart. Each iteration represented a decisive act: Bonny's team had arrived at a new approach they felt confident about implementing. But even while believing it would work, they knew their job was to stay atuned to new information coming in, look for signs of problems and imperfections, and find ways to improve upon it further. They were confident, but not really sure.

Early signs suggest that the "irregular operations" systems and procedures are a huge improvement; they worked perfectly earlier this year when JetBlue was forced to suspend operations at Kennedy Airport for a day as a result of a bad storm: There were no stranded passengers on planes, operations resumed to nearly normal levels the next day, and it was all so routine that the press didn't write a thing about it. The company, Chip and Dan Heath tell us, now recovers from major delays and setbacks 40% faster than just a year or so ago. That saves it millions of dollars, and buys incalculable amounts of customer goodwill.

To underscore the point once more, I will steal a phrase from Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo, who has long argued that the best leaders and the best organizations have strong opinions that are weakly held. Strong opinions reflect and instill confidence, and also provide clear guidance about the direction that people should try to go right now. But, since those opinions are weakly held, they don't stand as barriers to change when better information comes along. This ability to feel, express, and act on strong beliefs without clinging to them irrationally ? the state of mind that Tom Petty captured in a well-sung line ? is the common refrain in Bonny Simi's problem-solving, Andy Grove's decision-making, and Frank Hauser's sound advice to every kind of director: "Don't dither; you can always change your mind later."

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Note: This post originally appeared at Harvard Business Review as one of the list 12 Things Good Bosses Believe that I am discussing there this summer.

It probably won't surprise you if I tell you that thinking about your past successes and failures can influence your performance in the here and now. There's nothing like a winning season to give a player confidence going into that last game, and nothing like a string of awkward dates to make you nervous about how the next one is going to turn out. But thanks to new research, it's become clear that the relationship between our past and present isn't as obvious as you might think.

Imagine you are about to take a difficult test, or undergo a grueling interview. Before you begin, you take a few moments to reflect on some of your past successes - moments where you really shined. This turns out to be a really good idea, because when you think about the many times in the past when you reached your goals, you start feeling like you've really got something that makes you a successful person.

In other words, reflecting on past successes (plural) leads your brain to unconsciously, and quite naturally, assume that since you are the common denominator in all of those successes, your traits (e.g., your intelligence, creativity, charm) are the reason for your success.

Believing that you've got it, whatever it is, makes you more confident, and provides a very real boost to your performance.

Of course the same kind of process occurs when you reflect on many past failures before embarking on a new task - you unconsciously assume that something about you is to blame for your bad track record, and as a consequence your performance in the here and now suffers.

No real surprises there, right? But what if instead of reflecting on your past successes and failures plural, you just thought about a single success or failure? What does your brain do with just one particular memory? The answer: it unconsciously draws the opposite conclusion! That's right - remembering a single episode of success can make you doubt yourself, just as the memory of a single instance of failure can leave you feeling more confident. But why?

General memories, or memories about a group of similar behaviors (like many games won, or many dates gone wrong) lead you to make unconscious inferences about your own traits, because they seem to reflect what you typically do.

Specific memories, on the other hand, are about a single event (e.g., that one win against Central High, that one bad date with Brad). When you focus on a single event, you are less likely to see yourself as responsible for whatever happened, and more likely to unconsciously conclude that it was all due to the situation you were in. (You beat Central High because their team isn't that strong. Your date with Brad was awkward because Brad isn't really your type.)

In other words, memories of a single occurrence in our lives can easily feel like the exception, rather than the rule.

This was nicely illustrated in a set of recent studies. Some of the participants were asked to reflect on a number of their past successes or failures by completing the sentence: "In general, I'm successful (I fail) when...."

The other participants were focused instead on a single episode of success or failure, by completing the sentence: "I succeeded (failed) once when I had to...."

The results were remarkable. People who were asked to reflect on their many past successes or a specific failure scored roughly 10% better on tests of mathematical ability, as well as verbal, spatial, and abstract reasoning, than those who reflected on either many past failures or a single specific success.

Let that sink in for a second. You get the same boost of confidence from thinking about a single time you screwed up that you do from reflecting on the many times you really shined. And you fall victim to the same nagging self-doubt from thinking about that one time you did something right, that you do from dwelling on all the times you did everything wrong.

So if you're looking to bolster your confidence and really motivate yourself before your next test, or your next blind date, or maybe the next meeting you have to run, remember that it's a good idea to draw on your memories of success, so long as you have a string of successes in mind. That way, your unconscious mind (which is so often the maker or breaker of a great performance) will clearly understand that your awesomeness is not the exception - it's the rule.