by Larry Senn
It is fascinating to see how these principles play out in organizations. One example is L Brands, the parent company of the popular retail chains Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret. The Essential Organizational Values show up at L Brands under the rubric of The L Brand Way—the company’s own definition of the culture it aspires to cultivate.
In an era when many business organizations have come under fire for unethical behaviors, L Brands has made a fundamental commitment to living its values, not just pursuing profit. In the words of company founder and CEO Les Wexner, business is not just about winning: “It matters how you play the game.”2 Fortune magazine named L Brands one of the Most Admired Retailers in the world. The company was also recognized by the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California as one of the most agile in the United States.
When employees of many of the world’s best companies were surveyed, L Brands was ranked highest in several crucial metrics:
“Decisions and actions reflect customer care.”
“I feel valued as an associate.”
“I have the opportunity to develop the skills I need to be successful in the future.”
“It is easy for people of diverse backgrounds to fit in—and be accepted.”
In explaining these achievements, Wexner commented, “It is our thinking driving our behaviors and our results”—the language of riding the Mood Elevator applied to organizational achievement.
Another CEO who has employed the power of the Mood Elevator to enhance his organization’s performance is David Novak of YUM! Brands, which manages 36,000 KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell restaurants and 1.7 million employees around the world. YUM! Brands has effectively used the Mood Elevator as a tool to shape its culture and the employee and customer experience. YUM! Brands is one of a handful of large global companies that hold the distinction of a decade of annual earnings growth exceeding 10 percent, and Novak was named CEO of the Year by Chief Executive magazine for his accomplishments.
Novak’s best-selling book, Taking People with You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen, includes a section on the Mood Elevator. In a CEO Show interview, Novak observed, “The worst thing you can do is go to work every day and not have a positive attitude. You’ve got to at least move yourself up the Mood Elevator and get in the ‘curious and interested’ level to be an effective leader—and you make your best decisions at the top when you are grateful.”3
A third leader who has used the Mood Elevator as a leadership tool is General Josue “Joe” Robles Jr., former CEO of USAA, the military insurance and financial services company. A much-decorated officer, Robles was named Innovator of the Year in 2009 by American Banker magazine, and under his leadership USAA was repeatedly ranked number one among all US companies in surveys on customer service and customer loyalty. Robles uses the Mood Elevator to bring out the best in people and teams. As he says, “The concept has been invaluable in all walks of life for people at USAA. It helps us work better together as business colleagues but has equal benefit in personal relationships.”4
Robles retired from USAA in 2015 and was promptly asked by President Barack Obama to serve as chair of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ newly formed MyVA Advisory Committee, with the mission of making the VA more effective and accessible to the veterans it is intended to serve.
Fewer organizations today are neglecting issues of culture, values, and attitudes. Those that do are driven by thinking that “soft” topics are less meaningful and significant than traditional “hard” factors like strategy and systems. But our experience with organizations in every industry and country has shown that it’s the soft stuff that largely determines success in life and in organizations. That’s why learning to master the Mood Elevator offers such big payoffs for companies that wisely devote some time and energy to self-reflection.
In chapter 4 we delve further into the secrets of riding the Mood Elevator—beginning with the challenge of recognizing and understanding your own moods so that you can take steps to deliberately alter and control them.
4
Escaping Unhealthy Normal
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
—NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
Once we understand that our thinking creates our moods, we still face a problem: we can generally justify our thinking no matter how unreasonable it may be. Recall how John in chapter 1 came up with seemingly logical evidence to support his feelings about his job at Tip-Top Products, even as those feelings veered wildly from positive to negative and back again. The fact is that our thinking does not serve as a very trustworthy guide to how we are doing in life. If you simply listen to your thinking, you’ll likely remain stuck on whatever floor on the Mood Elevator your thoughts delivered you to in the first place.
But there is good news. Fortunately, we human beings are endowed with not only the gift of thought but also the gift of emotion. Each thought provokes a feeling, and every feeling we experience is a signal about how we are relating to the world. In a sense, the Mood Elevator is just a “feelings barometer”—a sensitive instrument that reflects the varying state of our emotions from high to low. So when you want to know how you are doing, look to your feelings as your guide. They can provide meaningful clues to the reliability of your thinking and the impact it is having, not only on you but on those around you, as well.
Learning to Read Your Human Dashboard
The big news in autos today is electronics. The dashboards in new cars feature an amazing array of information, from engine warning signals to tire pressure. The Mood Elevator is your human dashboard. The moods you experience can let you know how things are working inside you, at levels of emotion you may find difficult to understand or analyze.
Just as a red light on your car’s dashboard starts blinking when the engine is overheating, rising anger offers a warning when your emotions start heating up. And just as your car’s gas gauge warns you when you are low on fuel, the feelings of apathy and depression let you know when your emotional energy level is at a low ebb. And just as your GPS navigation system announces “Recalculating!” when you make a wrong turn, feelings like frustration and anxiety can alert you when you are on the wrong path and need to reevaluate your direction.
That’s one important purpose of the Mood Elevator: it acts like a human dashboard to let you know how you are doing. If you can learn to notice your feelings as they change—particularly when you find yourself slipping toward the lower floors—you can allow those warnings to trigger corrective actions, following the pointers in this book. This will help you spend more time living up the Mood Elevator—and at your best.
Over time you’ll become sensitively attuned to the blinking lights and warning signs that alert you when you are drifting down to the lower levels—especially when the floor is a familiar one that you’ve visited many times.
My most common lower floor is impatience. I experience it in a variety of ways, some of which may be familiar to you as well:
Why is this darned traffic moving so poorly?
Of course, the checkout line I chose turns out to be the slowest—and now the customer in front of me is arguing about a 50-cent coupon!
Why is it taking so long for my computer to boot up?
Come on, people—we’ve talked about this business issue for 30 minutes. Let’s just make a decision!
I’ve learned to recognize the emotions that accompany impatience. I feel tense, a little irritated, even a bit “bottled up.” If the feeling lasts for more than a few minutes, it can easily morph into anger. And it often leads to foolish choices: I make an irritable remark to the cashier, who is doing her best to handle the line of customers, or I rush to conclude a business discussion before all the facts have been fully evaluated.
Worry is another familiar lower floor to me. It comes with its own set of feelings—usually not as intense as anger but sometimes even more unsettling. I most often recognize worry by noticing that the stories I am cre
ating in my thoughts are going around and around in circles—and with each revolution the imaginary outcome gets worse and worse. If I don’t take steps to stop the worry cycle, a small source of concern can become a major drama.
One recurring cycle for me has to do with my passion for physical fitness. I’m driven to keep in shape because of my deep-seated belief that fitness improves mood and mental well-being. For me there is nothing like a morning jog to clear my mind and start the day up the Mood Elevator. It is also when I get my most creative original thoughts and solve problems. I’ve been blessed to be able to jog decades longer than most people, whose knees go by their sixties. For many years now, every time I feel even minor knee pain while running, I have to be on guard or my thinking can weave a disaster scenario: Maybe my knees are finally going. Then I can’t run anymore and I won’t be as creative. I won’t be able to stay in shape by training for triathlons. Without cardio exercise, my longevity could be affected.
Awareness is the key to reading your human dashboard. Carrying a Mood Elevator pocket card as a handy reminder helps keep that awareness front of mind. Learning to read the signals your feelings evoke is important because the first step in managing mood states is knowing which one you are in.
You can download and print your own Mood Elevator pocket card by visiting this link: bkconnection.com/moodelevatorpocketcard
Lulled into Unconsciousness: The Problem of Unhealthy Normal
Unfortunately, there is a phenomenon that makes it more difficult to recognize and manage our mood states. I call it unhealthy normal. It occurs when any lower-floor mood state and its related feelings become so familiar that we don’t notice them anymore. The negative state becomes our “new normal,” escaping our conscious awareness and therefore becoming very difficult to alter.
The old story of the boiled frog offers a handy example of how unhealthy normal can happen. As the story goes, if you put a frog in a pan of water and increase the heat very slowly, the frog won’t notice the temperature change; therefore it never leaps out of the pan—and it ends up a boiled frog.
I understand that some biologists believe the boiled-frog phenomenon is not actually scientifically accurate; in fact, they tell us that a healthy frog will recognize the change in water temperature and jump to safety. But the metaphor is nevertheless useful because, ironically, it captures a familiar aspect of human psychology.
People often adjust to unhealthy environmental conditions in a way that resembles the frog. For example, for a few weeks after Senn Delaney moved its headquarters into a new office building adjacent to the I-405 freeway in Huntington Beach, California, I was bothered by the constant sound of traffic. Today when guests ask how I manage to work with the noise, my response is, “What noise?”
I’ve adjusted in a similar way to the often hazy skies in the Los Angeles area. Our oldest son, Kevin, is a famous kiteboarder known as Top Hat; he owns Hawaii Surf and Sail, an apparel store in Haleiwa, Hawaii, on the legendary north shore of Oahu. We love to visit Kevin and his wife whenever we can. The constant trade winds in the islands ensure that the sky is a magnificent shade of blue, with air that is extremely pure. Later, when we fly back into Los Angeles, I am always shocked to see the haze in which I’ve grown accustomed to living. Within a few days, of course, I’m no longer aware of it.
Unfortunately, we all run the risk of becoming boiled frogs when it comes to habitual emotional states. Think about a time when you found yourself routinely bothered or irritated by people and events—perhaps when you were working in an organization suffering from some dysfunctional behavior patterns. Hopefully, you remedied the problem by changing either your circumstances or the thoughts you embraced in response to those circumstances. But if you didn’t, you may have found yourself gradually becoming more and more bothered until the state of irritation was so familiar you no longer even noticed it.
Eventually, a mood of impatience, frustration, and pessimism became your unhealthy normal. You may have gone through life unaware of your habitual unhappiness until something external brought it to your attention—perhaps an encounter with an old friend who remarked, “Wow, what’s eating you? You never used to walk around with a scowl like that on your face!”
There are many manifestations of unhealthy normal. At one point in my life, my unhealthy normal was excessive intensity. I was overly concerned about getting everything done, doing everything right, meeting every deadline, never disappointing anyone, and being successful at everything I did. I was continuously wound up. Except for those relatively rare times when I took a real break—such as a long vacation—I didn’t even remember that it was possible to experience a calmer, more peaceful existence.
For others, habitual states of insecurity, judgment, worry, blaming, anger, or depression may become their unhealthy normal. The problem, of course, is that if you don’t notice your state of unhealthy normal, you won’t be prompted to do anything about it. A habitual mood can become a self-destructive way of life.
Thankfully, there is something you can do. The key is to make a continuous, conscious effort to pay attention to your feelings by reading your own dashboard and reacting appropriately.
Sometimes recognizing a state of unhealthy normal requires being sensitive to external cues—like a driver who doesn’t realize he has a burned-out headlight until another driver alerts him to the trouble.
In my case it was promptings from family, colleagues, and friends that made me realize that excessive intensity had become my unhealthy normal. I set to work to recognize when my overly driven nature was giving rise to feelings of impatience, anxiety, and irritation. In time my sensitivity increased until those emotions became like a loud bell that I found impossible to ignore. I developed the habit of taking a deep breath and saying to myself, There you go again! It’s time to escape from that mood of excessive intensity. Be calm. Be present. And take life just a little easier. Over time my periods of excessive intensity greatly diminished.
We are all gifted with a personal dashboard that can save us from the worst mood disorders—but it won’t do you any good unless you read it. Pay attention to the signals you get, internally and externally, and learn to be a sensitive monitor of the emotional gauges on your human dashboard.
Unhealthy Normal and Relationships
When my wife’s parents used to come visit us, she and I would notice how much they bickered. They would disagree about the most inconsequential things and constantly make each other wrong through subtle put-downs or sarcastic shots. They were oblivious to their continuous state of hostility; it had become their unhealthy normal, and they didn’t notice it or see anything wrong with their relationship.
My in-laws aren’t alone in this pattern of behavior; destructive, unhealthy-normal mood states often arise in long-term relationships. Couples start to take each other for granted, stop communicating appreciation for each other, and gradually lose touch with their feelings of love and affection.
There’s no sphere of life in which paying attention to your feelings is more important than in close relationships. The feelings to watch for and cultivate are love, appreciation, forgiveness, nonjudgment, and compassion. When you keep these feelings alive, relationships flourish. When you stop monitoring your emotions, an unhealthy normal may develop, in which judgment, faultfinding, resentment, grudge holding, and bitterness take root.
George Pransky and his wife, Linda, head a counseling practice for individuals and organizations based in the state of Washington. They often work with couples to help them understand the three principles of mind, thought, and consciousness that they consider central to healthy relationships. Sydney Banks, who helped formulate the three principles, defines them as “Mind, which is the source of all intelligence, Consciousness, which allows us to be aware of our existence, and Thought, which guides us through the world we live in as free-thinking agents.” Pransky teaches the concept that “consciousness makes thought appear real to each person in the moment, and therefore indivi
dual reality is created via the medium of personal mindsets and thinking.”5 You might notice that this is a philosophical version of the ideas presented in this book.
George Pransky tells the story of a couple who came for a four-day residential retreat because they felt that love was leaving their marriage. He helped them see that habitual practices of arguing, fighting, and making each other wrong had become their unhealthy normal.
Uplifted by this new insight, the couple left the retreat in a loving and hopeful state, but a week later George got a panicked call from the husband. “We’ve failed,” he announced. “We just had a fight, and we are both so upset that we did.”
George replied, “Congratulations! You noticed this time, and you didn’t like it. That’s the best thing that could have happened.” The couple’s undesirable behaviors and accompanying feelings had become a loud bell that they couldn’t help but notice—the first and most important step toward positive, lasting change.
Unhealthy Normal in Organizations
In Senn Delaney’s work with corporate clients, our goal is to inspire, educate, and partner with them to foster healthy, high-performing organizational cultures. When we run a set of cultural diagnostics, we almost always discover some behaviors and attitudes that are hindering them from achieving the positive, creative, productive state to which they aspire. It takes an outsider to see these dysfunctions clearly because people who have been together for a while develop what could be called familiarity blindness—an organizational form of unhealthy normal.