Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Martin Luther (2016)

  When it came time to lift the host, he was frozen, unable to do that very thing for which he had prepared nearly two years, and for which everyone in the room had traveled so many miles. There was another priest with Luther during this ceremony, as there always would have been when a priest was performing his first Mass. Luther was in this moment so paralyzed with what he had to do that he whispered to this priest that he wanted to run from the altar. But the elder priest had stood at this precipice once himself, and he now ordered the young monk to continue, and Luther obeyed. No one knows whether Luther’s celebration of the Mass came across as halting to those there as witnesses, nor whether any of them noticed his uncomfortableness and anxiety. But there were in attendance people from every part of his life. Although it is not known whether his mother and sister and a sister-in-law were there, we may assume that they were, because women were allowed into the all-male world of monasteries on important occasions like this. A brother and brother-in-law were there, as was Luther’s elderly great-uncle Konrad Hutter, from Eisenach, and the Eisenach teacher to whom he was close, Wigand Güldenapf. And of course Johannes Braun. Nonetheless somehow Luther got through it. But what would happen next, at the festive dinner with all of the guests, was just as momentous and would be just as memorable for Luther for the rest of his life. Because it was at the dinner celebration that Luther dared to say publicly, “Dear Father, why were you so contrary to my becoming a monk?” We cannot know the tone in which this remark was made, but given the father’s deep antipathy toward his son’s decision it seems a daring, if not a downright cheeky, question. Was Luther teasing his father good-naturedly, or was he somehow challenging him? Even after this bold question, there was more. “And perhaps you are not quite satisfied even now,” he said. “[This monastic] life is so quiet and godly.” His father’s response to this was a shocking one. “You learned scholar,” he said, “have you never read in the Bible that you should honor your father and your mother? And here you have left me and your dear mother to look after ourselves in our old age.” Most biographies present this as a deadly and stinging rebuke, the all-too-public and uncomfortable eruption caused by powerful, subconscious Freudian plate tectonics. Here at the very moment that Luther sought comfort and conciliation and fatherly blessing for the decision he had made during the thunderstorm in Stotternheim, he was instead rudely smote by paternal thunder. But was he?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Greetings. I received both your German and Latin letters, good and learned Scheurl, together with the distinguished Albrecht Dürer’s gift, and my Theses in the original and in the vernacular. As you are surprised that I did not send them to you, I reply that my purpose was not to publish them, but first to consult a few of my neighbors about them, that thus I might either destroy them if condemned or edit them with the approbation of others. But now that they are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation, I feel anxious about what they may bring forth: not that I am unfavorable to spreading known truth abroad—rather this is what I seek—but because this method is not that best adapted to instruct the public. I have certain doubts about them myself, and should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.6 It was as though a hastily written e-mail to a friend were inadvertently forwarded to a major news organization or as though an ill-considered thought were captured on a “hot mic” and thenceforth broadcast to the world. Luther had no choice but to do his best with the events that had run far ahead of his control. In chasing them, he would end up in places he had never dreamed. Tetzel Strikes BackBut what about the quacking preacher Tetzel, who had started all the hubbub in the first place? After making his initial death threats, Tetzel suddenly double-backed on himself and decided that the best way of countering Luther was to be mild and intellectual. He had recently matriculated at the Brandenburg University in Frankfurt and now thought he should fight academic fire with academic fire. So he would write his own countering theses on indulgences, and of course planned to debate them. Tetzel did post theses of his own, although in the end they were written not by him but by the renowned Frankfurt theologian Konrad Koch, whose birth in the city of Wimpfen led him to take the unfortunate Humanist appellation Wimpina.* On January 20, 1518, Tetzel did debate these theses, albeit with no one whom history remembers and to no particular fanfare. His theses rather preposterously put forward the same idea of indulgences that Luther himself would have agreed with. Thus his theses utterly—and whether cannily or idiotically we cannot know—neglected Luther’s genuine concerns on what indulgences had effectively become under the fire-breathing preaching of such as Tetzel himself.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Finally, Luther decided to do what Staupitz and the Saxon counselors had advised. He would make a formal appeal directly to the pope, and this he did. In it he made clear that he had expected a genuine hearing in Augsburg in which he could explain himself thoroughly and then be fairly judged, but this had never taken place. So he asked in this written appeal to the pope that he be given a new hearing and that the final decision on that hearing be made by the pope himself. Luther realized that no matter what happened, this appeal would at least give him further breathing room. But his remaining friends in Augsburg knew that at any moment he might be arrested and taken to Rome, so they urged him to flee their city as soon as possible. Luther agreed. But to cover his tracks, he sent a very humble letter to Cajetan, informing him of his leaving. His excuses for leaving were that the church had not condemned him with the clarity necessary for a recantation, and so of course a recantation was currently out of the question. On a much more practical note, he said that he was fresh out of money and was therefore now taxing the limited resources of the Carmelite brethren who were hosting him. He also told the cardinal the big news: that he had officially appealed to Rome. And having delivered himself of these things, he waited for a response from Cajetan. But two days passed, and none came. The tension for him became unbearable. Was the silence because the cardinal was now secretly fixing to abduct Luther and bundle him south to Rome? Luther wasn’t about to wait to find out. So he decided to make a run for it.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Of course the ideas in “The Twelve Articles” were profoundly buttressed by Luther’s writings and Reformation thinking, so it was clear to Luther that he must have a response to this document. But even if it hadn’t been clear that this article looked to him as its father, the document was sent to him with an accompanying pamphlet in which he, Melanchthon, and Johannes Bugenhagen were asked to be the arbitrators between them—the peasants who had written it—and their noble rulers. But the escalating seriousness of the peasants in seeing their demands through would put Luther in a difficult position. Already in 1522 from the Wartburg, he had written his pamphlet Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion. He wrote it in response to the rabble-rousing and worse that had been going on in Wittenberg at that time, and in it he put forth his conviction that the Gospel must never proceed through force or violence. The Word of God would accomplish its own ends peacefully, if only people would preach it patiently and humbly. This thinking lay behind much of what he said when he returned from the Wartburg and kicked his friend Karlstadt to the curb, holding that even if what Karlstadt was saying were true, he must not forcibly insist on it being implemented but out of concern for “the weaker brethren” should take things slowly and should put up with things he found bothersome rather than demand that they be made right. They would be made right in God’s time. This, it seems, was precisely Luther’s position now when he read “The Twelve Articles.” It wasn’t that what they said was wrong but that using force or even the mere threat of force was not the way to make things right and was therefore itself wrong. And that was the underlying message of the peasants’ document. Everything it said was noble and true, but the threat of force behind it all damaged it fatally. So in mid-April, Luther wrote his Admonition to Peace: Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia. In it he said that if the rebellion were to “get the upper hand,” the results would be tragic. He wrote, “Germany would be laid waste, and if this bloodshed once starts, it will not stop until everything is destroyed. It is easy to start a fight, but we cannot stop the fighting whenever we want to.”22 As in his Sincere Admonition, he cited the suffering of the innocent as a main reason not to proceed with the rebellion. But in this essay, he severely admonished both sides. He took the nobles to task for their unchristian behavior in oppressing the peasants, and he took the peasants to task for wanting to proceed impatiently with violence. Luther always had respect for authority, even when it was in the wrong, and he believed that going to war with the powers that be would be far more destructive than constructive.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In America, workplace anxiety is estimated to cost some $40 billion a year in lost productivity, errors, and health-care costs, while stress is estimated to cost more than $300 billion. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris offers an even more dour assessment of the effects in Europe, estimating the total costs of mental health problems at more than 600 billion euros annually, with anxiety being the most common issue. Though the problem is becoming more serious with older employees, it’s been particularly acute with millennials and Gen Z. According to a 2019 study published in the Harvard Business Review , more than half of millennials and 75 percent of Gen Z reported they had quit a job for mental health reasons. In our consulting work, we’ve found that one of the greatest concerns among managers today is how to motivate younger workers. One leadership workshop Adrian conducted with a group of executives had especially driven home the problem. In the Q&A session, every one of their questions was about their younger workers—specifically about how they were having a hard time handling the pressures of their deadline-oriented business. One leader summed up the general concern for all: “How do we get our young employees to cope better? I mean, we can’t stop delivering.” A big part of the problem is employee anxiety, which can present as an overestimation of workplace threats (from personal issues such as “Will I fit in?” to organizational issues that may affect the stability of the company) and an underestimation of one’s ability to cope. Yet sometimes anxiety is a general state of unease for no apparent reason. As Gen Z is now flooding into the workforce, a tidal wave of anxious young people are on their way to our businesses, says Michael Fenlon, chief people officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the nation’s biggest employers of newly minted college grads. We’ve found most young people want to be able to discuss their anxiety at work. Said one twenty-something employee in an interview, “My generation talks about anxiety all the time to each other.” Rightly so, they believe that it’s impossible to fix something we are scared to talk about. And yet in a 2019 survey of one thousand employed adults with anxiety, 90 percent judged it would be a bad idea to confide their situation to their bosses. Sad. The profound realization from the pandemic is that our world is subject to destabilizing, long-lasting threats, which may arise seemingly out of nowhere and disrupt not only companies but the whole economy. That is affecting anxiety levels like nothing we’ve seen before. According to the U.S.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  How often do we, as leaders, start to micromanage when things get tense? Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist who writes on self-awareness and suffers from anxiety herself, told us that leaders must live in the moment during a crisis. “There’s such uncertainty. During the pandemic, for instance, we worry, when will there be a vaccine, when will I get to go back to the office? We don’t know. What I can control is the day that I have, or the moment that I have, and that lessens my experience of stress. “If you have anxiety, every evening before you go to bed your mind is racing, so I force myself to think about what tomorrow could look like at its best. Realistic expectations: Perhaps I’ll get a call from an old friend or an inquiry to work with a client. You are engineering hope and optimism. You are saying to yourself, ‘Everything is going to be okay.’” Following up on Dr. Eurich’s comment, note that it’s more than appropriate for team leaders to, now and then, let their teams know that they are overwhelmed and might need a little help. This kind of vulnerability as the boss —admitting anxiety—will go a long way to helping your people open up when they need help themselves. Method 3: Ensure Everyone Knows Exactly What’s Expected of Them This may sound basic, but when employees don’t understand what is needed of them day-by-day, it’s like throwing fuel on the anxiety fire. Managers may respond to this suggestion by saying, “Of course my people know what they’re supposed to get done! They’ve got job descriptions, deliverables. They’ve got KPIs and targets to meet.” Each person should have a set of specific goals. Yet time and again, team members we visit with say they suffer from a lack of clarity about what’s really expected of them or how they are doing regarding their goals. From the workers we interviewed for this book, we can attest that much anxiety stems from details about their jobs that managers often assume to be insignificant. A rule: If an employee is asking questions about minutia, they’re unfamiliar with a process. Indeed, several of our young interviewees complained about the on-the-job trainings they’d received, which were more overviews and not tailored to how someone in their position would use the software or follow a procedure or implement a system. Said our millennial Anthony: “With some jobs I’ve had, I got thrown in the deep end and no one explained the details.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  By taking the steps we’ve outlined in this chapter, you’ll make sure your people know that when you say, “We are in this together,” you really mean it, and they will in turn help one another lift their loads. We’ve seen teams working together in that way, and they’re not only the most productive, but the most personally rewarding work groups for managers to lead. SUMMARYHelp with OverloadLeaders often fail to appreciate that constantly demanding more and more work in less and less time will lead to employee frustration, rising anger levels, and eventually anxiety and burnout.Managers may believe it is an individual failure when an employee is overwhelmed, and yet more than 90 percent of employees feel burned out at least some of the time. The problem is often organizational.Most approaches businesses take to helping people cope with crushing workloads are aimed at fixing the person instead of focusing on underlying issues with the amount of work assigned and with the ways in which employees are managed.When employees feel anxiety from overload, managers can start by helping them break work into optimal chunks.Other methods to help team members better cope with workload expectations and reduce anxiety levels include: 1) create clear roadmaps, 2) balance loads, 3) rotate people, 4) closely monitor progress, 5) help people prioritize, 6) avoid distractions, and 7) encourage R&R. 4Clear Paths ForwardHelp Team Members Chart Their WayLeadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence. —Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, Facebook A great deal of study has been done about one domain of online life and the link to anxiety: social media. The research spotlights that as people constantly peer into what others are up to online, they are often led to feel unsettled about their own lives: Are they doing as many fun things, traveling to as many cool places, and doing as well? Few things create more unhappiness in human beings than comparing ourselves to others. When it comes to work, we are seeing similar FOMO worries. Workers, especially younger ones, can become concerned that by staying put in a job, they might miss out on something more interesting, more secure, or more lucrative. We believe the effects of the rising generation growing up as “digital natives” goes some way to explain an issue we hear from managers: Young employees are more anxious about their jobs. In the online world, the formula for success is proven. You post, get likes, add followers, and repeat. And it’s a fast-working formula. In contrast, young people often find the corporate world excruciatingly slow and frustrating. They are eager to be given promotions, be trusted with added responsibility, and receive raises, but they don’t want to pay their dues, boss after boss tells us. Typically, younger workers are more antsy about moving up or moving on. The research bears it out.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Of course, all of us have aspects of our jobs we don’t particularly enjoy. Everyone has to take out the trash, so to speak. But we’ve found managers can help employees become more committed, confident, and satisfied in their careers by helping them understand that while compensation and promotions are important, just as vital is doing something they’re passionate about, with work they find interesting and rewarding. Employees who feel anxious about their career path may actually be on the wrong path. Caring managers can often help them know if that’s the case, which we were hoping would happen in Greg’s situation. Discovering a mismatch between an employee’s work and the kinds of tasks that would be more motivating also provides the opportunity to do some job sculpting with the employee: finding assignments they might transfer to someone else on the team, tasks that may be altered somewhat to become more motivating, and—best of all for the manager and employee—those things that they’ll love doing may be added to a person’s plate. Rather than just giving employees promotions or raises (which can’t be done very often), we’ve found this process of sitting down and sculpting their jobs can be powerful in increasing worker engagement and sense of direction. This is why we created the Motivators Assessment in the first place, to help leaders pinpoint what most engages their employees in their work. The assessment is now used by hundreds of organizations around the world to help managers better align their employees’ jobs with core drivers, with well-documented results in performance and retention. Coming back to the director and her employee Greg: We’d given this team the Motivators Assessment, and Greg’s results showed that “Developing Others” and “Teamwork” were near the bottom of his list of twenty-three core drivers. That could be problematic. After all, if promoted, his new job would be about helping a department of a dozen people grow and “develop,” all while building a cohesive group with a strong sense of “teamwork.” We sat down and asked Greg to describe his worst days on the job, and he mentioned becoming frustrated when mentoring younger employees and/or helping one of his project teams work through sticky personnel issues and conflicts. When we asked Greg about his best days, he brightened up. He was usually off-site working with clients, solving their issues, and looking like a hero. About people management, he confided, “My team members have conflicts. There are folks here who don’t take feedback well. I have all these peers playing politics.” Then he paused and asked, “You’ve done this awhile. Is that what management is always like?”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s general sense of his own unworthiness before God was not necessarily theologically out of line, but it would nonetheless lead to a significant problem at the event to which he was inviting Braun and so many others. This is because on that day Luther would do something he had never done before: he would bring himself face-to-face with God. Every priest knew that to handle the host and pour the wine was not something to take lightly, as though one were merely handling bread and pouring the fermented juice of grapes. In the transformation that the priest would himself oversee, the bread would in his sinful but sanctified hands miraculously become the very body of God incarnate, the body of the King who had been cruelly broken for mankind. And at the sound of his human words, the wine would be transformed into the very blood of the one who in his sacrifice of extreme agony had bled for us, and died. Luther would take this responsibility as seriously as any priest ever had. Luther well knew that in the ceremony he would, for the first time in his life, be talking directly to the ineffable Almighty. Luther was thunderstruck at the tremendous prospect of it all. To see the vast distance between himself and the God on high whom he dared approach was to reel with dizziness. Who was he to do such a thing? He was more sensitive than most priests to the number and depth of his sins, and he was never sure he had genuinely confessed all of them, although he certainly tried. But Luther knew that if he had any unconfessed sin in him as he performed the holy rite of Mass, he might well be struck dead in that moment. Because many monks would not have understood this as Luther did, those in authority over them would have made the awesomeness of it all terribly clear. But Luther was the last person to need this clarified and underscored, and as the day approached, the prospect of what he faced tore him apart. How dare he, the sinful Martin Luther, approach an infinitely holy and all-powerful God?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Translating the Old TestamentDespite all else he was doing, Luther’s greater and far more ambitious project of translating the entire Bible into German would not lie fallow, even in 1522. Not long after handing his New Testament manuscript to Melanchthon, Luther sprang into this years-long project. His plan was to attack it from the beginning books first and publish it in stages. The Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) would naturally be the first part. Luther and his team, consisting of Melanchthon, Amsdorf, and others, got through these five long books with such speed they were able to nearly finish the first volume of the Old Testament in late December of that year and actually publish it in February 1523. But translating from the Hebrew presented fresh and sometimes extraordinary difficulties. For one thing, the Latin Vulgate was riddled with errors, which Luther was thrilled to discover and correct, although knowing they had been promulgated by the church for centuries must have caused him pain too. In a letter to Spalatin, Luther rather desperately asked for help in solving the riddle of many obscure animal names found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. By the time of his letter, the manuscript was essentially finished, but before it could go to the printer, there remained a handful of sticky taxonomic wickets to be negotiated. One can only imagine what Spalatin thought in reading this letter and in being urgently tasked with these overwhelming details: Please make your help available to us, and describe for us the following animals, classifying them by their species: Birds of prey: kite, culture, hawk, sparrow hawk, the male sparrow hawk. Game animals: gazelle, chamois, ibex, wild goat, or forest goat. Reptiles: Is stellio correctly translated as “salamander,” and lacerta limacio as “orange-speckled toad”? . . . Among the Hebrews, Latins, and Greeks, [the names of] these animals are terribly confused, so that we have to guess at what they are on the basis of the genus and species of the animals. If possible, therefore, I want to know the names, species, and nature of all birds of prey, game animals, and venomous reptiles in German. . . . There are so many names of night birds: owl, night heron, great horned owl, wood owl, screech owl. These birds I know: vulture, kite, hawk, sparrow hawk—although I cannot identify them too well. These game animals I know: stag, roe deer, chamois (which [the Vulgate] renders as bubalus). I do not know what [the Vulgate] is thinking when [it] mentions among the kosher animals the goat, stag, antelope, and giraffe. I wish that you would undertake this part of the work. Take a Hebrew Bible and try to find out all about these animals through careful research, so that we can be sure about these things. I do not have so much time. Farewell, and pray for me.23

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Creating more steps on the career path can help.Some 90 percent of younger workers “highly value” career growth and development opportunities, and organizations that effectively nurture their people’s desire to learn are 30 percent more likely to be market leaders.Some 87 percent of millennials ranked job security as a top priority when looking for a job. That is more than likely going to be even higher in the post-pandemic world.Following a set of methods can reduce employees’ anxiety about where they’re heading in their careers. They include: 1) create more steps to grow, 2) coach employees about how to get ahead, 3) help employees assess their skills and motivations, 4) use a skill development flow, 5) make learning real-time, 6) tailor development to the individual, 7) carefully calibrate growth opportunities, and 8) encourage peer-to-peer support. 5How “It’s Not Perfect” Can Become “It’s Good, I’ll Move On”Help Team Members Manage PerfectionismA beautiful thing is never perfect. — Egyptian proverb While the term “perfectionism” implies an extreme pursuit of the flawless—and is generally understood as an affliction—our culture has fostered it in many ways. Schools have become breeding grounds for perfectionism, offices as well. Perfectionism is too often mistaken for admirable stick-to-it-iveness, having excellence in standards, and a healthy ambition. In fact, once upon a time, we were told “I’m a perfectionist” was the recommended answer to the hackneyed interview question: “What’s your biggest flaw?”— mocked by cultural satirists The Simpsons. When asked in a job interview at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant for their worst quality, those applying answered: Applicant 1: Well, I am a workaholic. Applicant 2: Well, I push myself too hard. Only clueless Homer Simpson answered honestly. Homer: Well, it takes me a long time to learn anything. I’m kind of a goof-off. Little stuff starts disappearing from the workplace. Why shouldn’t we strive for perfection in our work? The fact is, some people should. We rightfully want a technician processing our blood sample to do everything by the book. Airline pilots have little to no room for error, which is why they have copilots and plenty of electronic help. In lots of professions, and with certain aspects of each job, flawless execution is vital. We have worked for many years with groups at Intel, for instance, and there are few companies that value perfection more in their manufacturing process. As with many industrial organizations, Intel seeks zero variations once a process is optimized. Thus, there are times when people are absolutely right to hold themselves to extremely exacting standards.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Some workers become prone to coping mechanisms when things go bad—such as defensiveness and aversion to advice; withdrawal from participation; and, in extreme cases, ghosting. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to assume that an anxious employee may jump there very quickly. Anthony offers a great bit of advice for leaders: “When you say you want to meet with someone, no matter what it’s about, don’t leave them wondering if they are out the door. Because many will. People aren’t ignorant to unstable economic climates or the practice of silent layoffs. Specifically explaining that you want to meet tomorrow to go over revisions to a report, or whatever, is going to save your people a day of worry that could be spent productively.” In all of this, we are not suggesting leaders should try to become therapists. Can you imagine? It’s vital that we turn to specialists to provide counseling; and for employees feeling anxiety symptoms at any level, referral to a company employee assistance program (EAP) or a licensed counselor can be extremely helpful. Managers can play an active role in finding the help their people need, and formal programs can have huge payoffs. PricewaterhouseCoopers has found, for example, that for every $1 invested in mental health programs, organizations receive an average return on investment of $2.30, seen through improved productivity, fewer compensation claims, reduced absenteeism, and reduced presenteeism (showing up for work even when sick, overly fatigued, or otherwise not operating at normal levels of productivity). Forbes reports the total cost of overall poor employee health at more than $530 billion in the US alone, with much of that attributed to impaired performance. Harvard Medical School research adds that the mental health aspect of wellness has usually been overlooked in that analysis. The mindset that mental wellness is the responsibility solely of the employee and does not need to be considered by an employer is not a financially sound decision, the Harvard researchers explain. “In the long term, costs spent on mental health care may represent an investment that will pay off not only in healthier employees, but also for the company’s financial health.” So, to be perfectly clear, we’re big fans of offering mental health assistance. But EAP referrals and formal internal programs aren’t the only answer. Managers have an important role to play as well. After all, a team is a tight social network with its own dynamic. As leaders working in an unpredictable time, we have to be particularly sensitive to the fact that our team might be more vulnerable to anxiety. Encouraging people to be open about their struggles and lending an ear as a boss can do much good. As one young worker confided to us, “Nine times out of ten when we complain we just want to be heard, and it doesn’t involve advice or problem-solving. Just, ‘That sounds really hard. I can’t imagine going through that. I’m here for you.’

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Alice Boyes, former clinical psychologist and author of The Anxiety Toolkit, advises that they might seek excessive guidance, seem loath to take any sort of risk, and treat every decision as if it were a matter of life and death. It’s a good assumption to make that those displaying perfectionist tendencies have anxiety. Harvard University research adds that perfectionists tend to become overly defensive when criticized. Healthy strivers, by contrast, tend to take criticism in stride as they push for superior results. And while strivers tend to bounce back from failures, perfectionists often become preoccupied with their missteps or the mistakes of others. Okay, so what’s to be done to help these employees? What follows are a series of methods we’ve found are helping in leading those with perfectionist tendencies. Method 1: Clarify What Good Enough Is First, take a little time to consider whether you, or the organizational culture, might be stoking perfectionism in those with a tendency toward it. In our coaching of leaders, we often find that they push themselves and their team members to not only high standards, but unrealistic ones. In this way, leaders can become overly harsh in criticizing employee work, and their focus on addressing problems and putting fires out takes up so much of their time that it leads many to overlook offering praise to their people—ramping up anxiety considerably. Well-calibrated and well-timed recognition of good work can help everyone feel more confident that they’re doing all they can to help the team. It can also help people learn the boundaries of what counts as acceptable work—when good enough is good enough. If left entirely on their own to determine whether their work is up to snuff, perfectionists are more than likely to overthink and rework, make tweaks, second-guess, or even do too much—such as doing inventory for everyone instead of only on the products they were asked to count, or handing in War and Peace when their boss really wanted an executive summary. We know that most managers have no desire to handhold their people, and they rightfully worry about micromanaging, but with employees who tend toward perfectionism it’s important to guide them clearly through the standards you’re looking for. Anthony recounts how helpful this was when he transitioned from working in chemistry labs to biotechnology labs. “In chem labs, we were accurate in weighing and measuring re-agents to several decimal places,” he said. “It was time-consuming and several hours were allotted to make measurements accurate. The scales were surrounded by windshields to keep our breath off, and the reading on the scale could change if we leaned against the counter.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And so Luther left, along with Staupitz and the others, and then Luther and Staupitz had lunch. Meanwhile, Cajetan was fumbling with this frustrating puzzle before him. How could he get this monk to give him what he wanted? Having failed to get the German estates to agree to pay the Turkish tax, he might at least have this smaller victory in hand when he slunk back to Rome. But how to get it? After lunch, Cajetan summoned Linck and Staupitz to meet with him. Surely they would be more reasonable than this smart aleck Luther. Serralonga was there too, and both Cajetan and Serralonga labored for many hours to persuade Staupitz and Linck to persuade Luther to recant. They even together helpfully drafted a possible recantation that he might sign. Cajetan was mostly focused on the issue of papal authority—on the issue of the keys—and he said that he would not insist on the other theological points. But Staupitz and Linck could not bring themselves to trust Cajetan, so in the end nothing came of this meeting. During this time, a rumor arose that the leaders of the Augustinian order would step in. After all, they were under the authority of Rome and could not have this lone wolf sullying their name across Christendom. Some even said the Augustinian leaders from Rome were on their way to Augsburg to seize both Linck and Staupitz. And presumably Luther too. It was at this point that Staupitz did something extraordinary: He summoned Luther and absolved him of his vow of obedience to him. This way they could now operate independently of each other. Luther therefore could no longer be guilty of disobeying Staupitz, and Staupitz could no longer be held responsible for Luther’s actions. It was a brilliant and genuinely dramatic solution. After he did this, Staupitz—and Linck with him—departed Augsburg with almost comical haste. It was odd that they did so, for Luther was now alone, unsure of what exactly was to follow. Days passed with Luther cooling his heels in the Carmelite monastery, wondering what would come next.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Cardinal Cajetan found himself buffaloed by Luther’s confidence. But Luther’s confidence was no act. He had little doubt there really was a God who should be feared and to whose authority he and everyone should submit. To that God—and to truth and plain reason—Luther would listen. But unless Cajetan and the rest of them pointed to that God through his Scriptures and plainly showed Luther his error, he was quite immovable. Along these lines between Luther’s position and the church’s lay the great fault in the tectonic plates beneath history, and every day the pressure between them increased, which would soon enough lead to the seismic cataclysm ahead. Luther understood why he could not give an inch, but why could the papal powers not see things as he did so that they could solve the situation? What had he missed in all of this? But they could not or would not, and so now, over and over, with an obstinacy that cannot be fathomed, they single-mindedly continued to insist on nothing from this well-meaning monk beyond a single Latin word. One little word from him would end all the trouble. One little word would quell them. And the word was revoco! The pressure on Frederick to turn over Luther was now increased, but for some reason he did not do so; rather he chose to protect him. Precisely why this is, we can never fully know. And of course we know that Frederick had himself invested much of his life and treasure in the idea of indulgences. But probably because of the advice of many Wittenberg theologians—and principally because of Spalatin, whom he trusted utterly—he chose to protect Luther from Rome. Still, Luther knew that by staying in Wittenberg, he was doing harm to Frederick’s reputation. The situation had become yet more political. Rome understood that it had a full-blown public relations disaster on its hands and it must do everything possible to stem this rising tide of questions and scandal, which was reducing the power and authority of the church by the day and would have dramatic consequences in every direction. Perhaps most disturbingly, it would affect the upcoming election of the new emperor. As we have said it was vital to Rome that the young Charles I of Spain—who was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain—not be elected. His power if elected would be so considerable that Rome worried it would be overwhelmed. This was so important that Rome clearly put the politics of this situation above “truth” and theological clarity. There was an imperial election coming up, and that now must take precedence over all else, and did.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  After twenty years of helping define and refine corporate culture, we can offer up one warning: Most businesses took their corporate cultures for granted when all employees worked in the same building. When considering the world of remote work, we are entering the Wild West. Helping people—perhaps spread out over various time zones—feel like a part of a collective whole is an entirely different matter. To build culture in a remote world, and reduce anxiety in the process, managers must communicate more, not less, to help their people feel included and not be afraid to try to break out of the status quo. Kraft Heinz Company has done just that. Shirley Weinstein, head of Global Rewards, shared that her executive team has participated in live cooking showdowns in their home kitchens for employees to watch—incorporating their products from Philadelphia Cream Cheese to Oscar Mayer to Classico Pasta Sauce. The half-hour shows pit two executives against each other, cooking in their kitchens in front of their families. “Our global head of communications, Michael Mullen, is the engaging moderator, with a member of our culinary team to judge the creativity and use of our products,” she said. “The taste testers are their families, which is a great way to bring their children, their spouses, and even their dogs into the show.” She added that busy employees working remotely at first thought, “‘I don’t have time for this,’ but they joined in and appreciated the diversity that it brought to their workday. It was a time to reflect, to learn, to laugh, and to appreciate their leaders on a personal level.” As Kraft Heinz is attempting, building culture in a remote world also means clearly defining your mission and values and celebrating those who embody these grand ideals in interactions with customers or fellow team members. It also means using technology platforms and social media to provide ways that employees can connect and get to know each other, replicating the old water-cooler talk or sticking your head over the cubicle wall. Managers with remote teams also should spread leadership around to enhance ownership and engagement—asking certain folks on the team to run meetings about a subject they are passionate about or conduct training sessions on an area of their expertise. Bosses can also bring some fun into the mix by encouraging home workspace decorating contests or background competitions. Even little things can help build connection. For instance, if leaders bring in lunch for people who are in the office, they can make sure to send food to remote people as well. That’s a nice touch.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  But employees interviewed said they wanted to face the hurdles as a cohesive team, even if that meant that some might have to depart the company for it to survive. While Mayer tried to hide layoffs behind the euphemism “remixes,” one employee told the New York Post: “I don’t think people want to be mollified. They want to be respected and trusted with facts so they can plan their lives, and also help.” In just about any company, long before news reports emerge of product failures, layoffs, mergers, or downturns, most employees clue in that the firm is facing challenges. In uncertain times, anxiety (and often apathy) is amped up when managers don’t talk transparently about issues and what the company is doing about them. Take General Electric as another unfortunate case during the tenure of CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Employees began to understand the company was facing serious issues long before the public was aware of them. And yet a “success theater” masked challenges for years at the multinational. Sources on the inside told the Wall Street Journal their topmost leader didn’t want to hear any bad news, and executives continued to project an optimism that didn’t always match the reality of their operations or market. In May 2017, in front of a room of Wall Street analysts, Immelt said, “This is a strong, very strong company,” and then defended GE’s profit goals. “It’s not crap. It’s pretty good really. . . . Today, when I think about where the stock is compared to what the company is, it’s a mismatch.” It was. But not in the direction he was talking about. While GE shares were trading near $28 that day, less than two years later they would drop below $6. We have watched as new CEO Larry Culp has instilled a revitalized culture at GE where internal and external stakeholders clearly understand the strategy, and where employees can raise tough issues and know they will be addressed honestly and directly. Six months into the job, we were heartened to hear Culp explain, “What we’re going to try to do is to share with people, in as transparent a way as we possibly can, what the issues are and the plan that we have. But it will take time. And we don’t want to sugarcoat this.” Like Culp, other leaders around the world are trying to involve employees as partners in this process of working through uncertainty.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Fischer had created ambiguity and was big enough to admit his mistake. He attempted to diffuse a potentially anxiety-charged situation by providing a business focus, gave honest but kind feedback, and helped Lisa see what customers needed instead of making her feel she had failed. He learned that by giving clear guidance about what’s expected up front, employees can start the race in a much more effective gear. Despite the advantages of clear, regular one-on-one communication, many managers still express frustration that their people want that kind of guidance. Instead, they hope their team members will act with more autonomy. It’s true that a degree of autonomy is not only vital for efficacy but for feelings of empowerment, and no one enjoys being micromanaged. But managers typically have a lot of know-how and valuable examples to share about ways they’ve tackled the work their people are doing. When they don’t take the time to share that wisdom, they can raise anxiety levels considerably. With the very specific ways in which firms operate today, and unique platforms for almost every team, getting things right is truly in the details. Providing the minutiae may seem tedious, but leaders should consider how they’d approach tasks as if it were for the first time. Many of the mundane details they might rush through may become the focal point of important conversations with their team members. Six Methods to Meet Uncertainty Head-On From our work coaching leaders, we have developed a set of methods that any manager can use to communicate with employees to help reduce uncertainty. These methods include ways to help team members feel needed and engaged by meeting regularly with them as a group to discuss and debate industry changes and how those might affect their team; incorporating active ways of listening to concerns and suggestions from employees one-on-one; and developing metrics to measure success at helping people feel informed about potential challenges the organization is facing and involved in seeking solutions. Method 1: Make It Okay to Not Have All the Answers When Lutz Ziob was general manager of Microsoft Learning, he led his team of four hundred employees through a significant transformation. For years, his externally focused learning organization had made their money inside client corporations, teaching workers how to use the Microsoft toolkit. The company had a multibillion-dollar operation based around this business model. With an eye to the horizon, the debate became whether to let go of this profitable way of doing things and instead start training people in Microsoft products much earlier, in university or high school. Ziob didn’t have the answers, so he turned to his people and introduced a structured way to debate. He asked team members to come to a series of discussions with evidence and a point of view. They were to defend their opinion vehemently, and then be willing to switch sides.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In his first days there, Luther was desperate to receive letters from his friends and to hear news of what was happening in the wider world. He knew that much concerning him and his cause was going on, and it maddened him to be unable to know everything, much less to do anything about it. So in this first letter, he turned to the subject of something he had heard, perhaps from Berlepsch. It concerned some rioting that had happened in Erfurt just two days before Luther was taken to the Wartburg. The rioting was a result of an incident from a month earlier, after Luther had been grandly received by a number of monks as he passed through Erfurt on his way to the diet. The day after Luther had left, the dean of St. Severin decided to punish those clergy who had taken part in that fulsome reception welcoming this excommunicated heretic. When one of the clergy—a certain Johannes Drach, who was a canon—had refused to comply with the dean’s punishment, the dean humiliated him by physically grabbing him while he was in the chancel, dragging him out of the church, and peremptorily excommunicating him. The Erfurt students and other young people—who had also taken Luther’s side in the wider controversy—protested loudly and rioted against this action. That Erfurt artisans and others took part in this violent protest marks the first time that the Reformation movement had moved beyond its previous academic and ecclesiastical boundaries. This was a trend that would continue from this point on. But the pent-up frustration of the Erfurt citizenry exploded again on May 1 and 2, perhaps because they had word that Luther was then passing nearby on the road home from Worms. Nonetheless, the Erfurters now insisted that Drach be reinstated. Eventually, the dean complied with this demand and nullified the excommunication. Luther was amazed to hear all of this and was desperate for further details, which were slow in coming. Following his reinstatement, Drach nonetheless resigned his post in Erfurt and went to Wittenberg. This sort of thing would happen more and more in the years ahead as what had become the Reformation spread far beyond Luther’s control and unrest spread all across Germany and far beyond too. Wittenberg became the safe place for all who held Luther’s views, and like Drach many of them came there to stay. Luther wondered what effect his disappearance from the world and his present silence—when he had previously been anything but silent—would have on the wider and developing situation:

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  How, I asked Mother, had she come to this? Well, she said, he’ll be telling a story, and he’ll say, “The guy said to me, ‘Bill...’” And I’ll say, “But your name’s not Bill; it’s Ben.” At that time the sheriff in our town was a guy I used to steal watermelons with named Stooge. On the phone, Stooge didn’t sound overexercised. Ben Barker’s truck was registered legal in the name he’d given Mother. Stooge doubted the guy was some lost gangster. Lecia told me the guy seemed too well spoken, too well read, to be outright dangerous. (Which, I now think, fails to take Ted Bundy into account.) Another morning the phone rang early, and Mother whispered that Bill was in the shower, but she’d gotten his license out and his name wasn’t, in fact, Ben Barker. It was Wilbur Fred Bailey, she said. And his ID was from—let’s say—Kentucky. At this point Toby interrupts to comment on the poetic perfection of the guy’s actual name. Wilbur Fred Bailey, Toby repeats. It has a Faulkneresque ring. I notice the rest of the table has gone quiet. The agent has her hand on a glass of water. Toby’s editor is leaning forward. Fred’s the ideal middle name for the guy, Lux says, who’s heard the story before. Fred has that foreshortened, temporary feel to it. A real trailer-park name. So what’d your mother do? Toby asks. I briefly stall like an arid engine, for it’s different telling the story sober—and to these people. But Lux gives my elbow the slightest tap, and, since the current of the story has me in its grip, I start right up. The morning Mother found the license, I told her to run to the library and xerox it, then drop it by Stooge’s office. She did copy it but changed her mind about the sheriff, because—it turned out—Wilbur Fred was paying all her bills. Which pissed me off, since I was paying her gas bill and grocery bill. As was, it turned out, my sister. I made Lecia go down there and call me with Mother on the line, so we could confront this bookkeeping inconsistency. Mother elided it by saying, Oh, Ben doesn’t pay those. He helps me out all kinds of ways. Helps you out how? I wanted to know. How? Lecia said. Well, he cuts the grass, Mother said. I pay Sweet to cut the grass, I said, referring to an old pal of my dead daddy’s. I pay Sweet to cut the grass! Lecia said. The agent said, Hilarious. Triple-dipping. What a woman. Lecia said, Let’s you and me talk after this. Mother said, If Sweet lets the grass get too long, Ben cuts it. Plus he edges the walk real straight. He takes the tops off jars. He hooked up my VCR. He takes me out for Mexican food.... You could be in danger here, Mother, Lecia said. He’s good company, Mother said.