Is Covid-19 Exacerbating Learned Helplessness in your organisation?

In much of my leadership and culture work in organisations, one of the most paralysing effects I see is that of learned helplessness.   The term originated in early clinical experiments on animals (see Martin Seligman’s work in the late 60’s/early 70’s) and can be expressed as:

 “When humans or other animals start to understand (or believe) that they have no control over what happens to them, they begin to think, feel, and act as if they are helpless”.

In the clinical domain, it has strong links with depression and there are a range of really good CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and  positive psychology techniques to address it.

Learned Helplessness in Business

In the corporate world, I have seen it manifest in the following ways:

Staff members who say:

• “My workplace is terrible, but what can I do – I have to pay the bills somehow”
• “It doesn’t matter how good a brief/report/plan I write; my boss will always change it to suit her style”
• “It doesn’t matter how often we provide the same feedback; nothing ever changes”

Leaders who say:

• “It is impossible to get our managers to step up and lead”
• “Anything we send up to the executive team gets ‘lost in the black hole’”
• “It doesn’t matter what we give them/do for them, people will always complain”

You may have heard some of this in office chatter or seen it in black and white in your engagement survey results. The common factor is a perceived lack of control and the result is stagnation. Motivation drops and productivity decreases as people “spin their wheels” and go through the motions.  Learned helplessness in organisations creates a vicious cycle. Those who feel that they are unable to succeed are unlikely to put much effort in, which decreases their chances of success, leading to even less motivation and effort.

The impact of Our Explanatory Styles on Learned Helplessness

When something happens, our explanatory style is part of how we process it, attach meaning to it, and assess it as a threat or a challenge in our lives.  It’s part self-talk and part self-perception, and it affects stress levels in multiple ways.  There are three facets of how people can explain a situation to themselves. Each one can lean toward optimism or pessimism:

• Permanence – Do you expect things to get better or worse (temporary), or stay exactly as they are for a long time (permanent)? This can make a difference in how stressful something seems. 
• Pervasiveness –  Do you see the event as universal throughout your life (global)?  Or is it specific to just a part of your life (local)?  A good example of this is the feeling of having good or bad luck.
• Personalization – do you see the cause of an event as within yourself (internal) or outside yourself (external)? For example, if you are having a difficult day and you see it as being “your fault,” you’ll feel more stressed than if you see it as due to factors other than you.

Optimists tend to have more positive explanatory styles—ones that minimize stressful situations as temporary, local, and external and take credit for positive experiences as being more permanent, global, and internal.   Pessimists tend to see things in the opposite way, which can make stress seem like a bigger deal than it needs to be. Over time an overly pessimistic style can contribute to negative mental health conditions such as depression.  We are all on a continuum, rather than at extreme ends (we may be more optimistic about one aspect of our life and less optimistic about another).

Covid-19 and Learned Helplessness

IF Learned Helplessness is about people perceiving they are unable to control or influence their situation, the Covid-19 has just ‘upped the ante’. In a way, it ticks all 3 of the boxes of pessimistic explanatory styles associated with learned helplessness:

1.    Permanent – “this pandemic will never end – life will never return to normal”

2.    Global – “I can’t travel, I can’t go out to eat or shopping safely and I might lose my job”

3.    Internal – “I’m the sort of person who’s likely to get it”

As well as impacting the mental health of your workforce (particularly those already prone to anxiety and depression), it can also make it a lot harder for businesses entering the recovery phase.

So What to do?

As an Organisation:

Research  conducted by YES Psychology & Consulting in Australian businesses during the Covid-19 crisis, indicated that the things organisations and leaders can best do to help people feel more supported, connected and engaged during this time is:

1. Check in – ideally individually with each of your team and go beyond the “how are you going with XYZ tasks” to “how are you and your family coping at the moment; is there anything I can do”. This will also allow you to monitor for learned helplessness statements
2. Communicate – more often than you think you need to with updates, reassurance (where possible) and connection back to the bigger picture/vision/mission/why
3. Role Model – calm and realistic optimism

As an Individual:

Worried that you might be slipping into learned helplessness yourself? Try adopting some ‘learned optimism’ techniques and replacing your explanatory styles.  Explanatory styles and learned helplessness can be altered with attention and practice.  When you experience a negative or stressful situation, note what you tell yourself about it.  Ask yourself if that’s helpful or not.  If it’s unhelpful or pessimistic, try challenging your belief and replacing it with a more helpful, optimistic one.

“Successful people explain the world to themselves in a very specific way. They have learned the skill of optimism. Not a vague ‘glass half full’ sense of the world, but a systematic, deliberate approach to breaking free from negative thought cycles. You can rapidly and permanently acquire this very same form of optimism to maximise your life potential”.  Martin Seligman (“Learned Optimism”, 1991)

Want to assess your own learned optimism?  Chapter 3 of Martin Seligman’s “Learned Optimism” book features a 48-item test that you can do to assess the above three dimensions of your explanatory style.  For each, you’re asked to imagine each situation happening to you and select the response that best describes what you would think.   

Here are some examples from the Learned Optimism assessment (If you want to take the complete test, you can purchase “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman).

1. You run for a community office position, and you win. (Pervasiveness)
   1. I devote a lot of time and energy to campaigning. (Local)
   1. I work very hard at everything I do. (Global)

2. You forget your spouse’s (boyfriend’s/girlfriend’s) birthday. (Personalization)
   1. I’m not good at remembering birthdays. (Internal)
   1. I was preoccupied with other things. (External)

3. You owe the library ten dollars for an overdue book. (Permanence)
   1. When I am really involved in what I am reading, I often forget when it’s due. (Permanent)
   1. I was so involved in writing the report that I forgot to return the book. (Temporary)

Why bother?

Research shows that optimists enjoy greater achievement, greater health (emotional and physical), a sense of persistence toward goals, lower reactivity to stress  and they tend to live longer! 

About the Author:

Greg Dean is a Wellbeing and Leadership thought leader with more than 25 years of experience throughout Australia and the Middle East.  Trained and registered as an Organisational Psychologist, he is driven to create exceptional experiences for people, helping them transform their wellbeing through adopting a more deliberate approach to the way they interact with the world.