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When a rear door fell off a Boeing 737 Max aircraft mid-flight last year with 174 passengers onboard, it was likely related to the company’s poor work environment and culture.
Boeing, we believe, was in the Burnout Zone, an environment characterized by high challenge and high threat and leading to wide-ranging negative outcomes. While such cultures may encourage employees to pursue aspirational goals, there’s a lack of support and even a perception that people aren’t safe.
The much-publicized incident resulted in the grounding of many Boeing Max planes, and an 8% drop in Boeing share price, with more losses to come. The subsequent federal investigation documented damaging cultural elements such as poor systems for communicating safety issues and employees’ fear of retaliation when reporting these. Others have noted Boeing’s myopic focus on beating rival Airbus for a large American Airlines order of the 737 Max in 2011, which likely caused production-related risk-taking.
While many factors influence work-environment effectiveness, growing evidence suggests two are critical: challenge and threat. To develop the optimal environment, it’s best to assess your environment using a matrix based on challenge and threat levels, resulting in four distinct zones:
- Complacency Zone (low challenge, low threat)
- Frustration Zone (low challenge, high threat)
- Burnout Zone (high challenge, high threat)
- High-Performance Zone (high challenge, low threat)
Only one—the High-Performance Zone—maximizes your team’s ability to thrive, through its combination of high challenge and low threat. This article will help you understand how to move your team and broader organization into the zone where true excellence happens.
The 4 Types of Work Environments
Threat and challenge come down largely to what happens in our brains. Things perceived as threats–such as an imminent negative performance review–diminish the performance of our prefrontal cortex and put us into fight-or-flight mode, compromising cognitive functioning. Challenge, in contrast, engages the brain, facilitating creativity and problem-solving.
Here are the four types of work environments based on threat and challenge levels.
Complacency Zone. This low-threat/low-challenge environment is comfortable but unengaging and, ultimately, unmotivating. Leaders provide support and stability, but don’t push for or facilitate performance. Consequently, people feel safe but aren’t inspired to give their best or grow.
Frustration Zone. This low-challenge/high-threat zone lacks the same stimulation as the Complacency Zone, but without that environment’s supportiveness, leading to anxiety and frustration. It’s marked by things like micromanagement of non-meaningful work and emphasis on avoiding mistakes. The result: decreased innovation, performance, and morale, with high stress and turnover.
Burnout Zone. Unlike the zones above, this one offers high-challenge, but it’s accompanied by high-threat, creating a pressure-cooker environment where many feel unsafe. Leaders push for high performance without necessary support, whether financial/operational resources or mentorship, and feedback is often harsh, if provided at all. The chronic stress shuts down creativity and decision-making, torpedoes performance, and leads many to the exit-door.
High-Performance Zone. High challenge and low threat is ideal: people feel safe and supported but still pushed to contribute at high levels and grow. Getting here requires thoughtful, proactive leaders who set clear expectations, foster autonomy, provide resources, offer mentorship/feedback, and celebrate success. All of it drives engagement, growth, innovation, and performance, as people stretch themselves to deliver because they want to, not because they’re afraid.
Why High-Challenge/Low-Threat Works
Why is the combination of high challenge and low threat optimal?
As previewed earlier, it’s about the neuroscience of our responses to threat and challenge. In a high-threat environment (Burnout or Frustration Zones), we feel we lack the capability or resources to cope. The brain is overwhelmed with stress, compromising functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which controls higher-order thinking such as judgment, decision-making, and creativity. Meanwhile, the amygdala–the brain’s emotional center–gets activated, directing blood flow to our extremities (not our brains) for fight-or-flight; survival becomes the priority, versus coming up with a new strategy or product.
In contrast, low threat paves the way for the brain to be more fully engaged. But if paired with low challenge, engagement will remain low, with potential plateaus for learning and innovation. High challenge, on the other hand, results in the highest level of engagement–no fight-or-flight response–and enables our prefrontal cortex to get to work. Together, low-threat and high-challenge provide a stimulating, supportive environment for our brains to engage and perform.
Get Into the High-Performance Zone
These tips will help you get your team and organization into the High-Performance Zone: low-threat, high-challenge.
Low Threat
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Lack of communication creates uncertainty, and often leads to people thinking the worst (layoffs!). Regular, high-quality communication creates a sense of safety and care. That means communicating changes–including negative ones like poor financial performance–quickly, outlining the real implications, and soliciting inputs. Explain rationales behind key decisions (such as reorganizations or discontinuation of product-lines) to promote transparency and understanding. Boeing clearly could have done better here.
Set clear expectations. Expectation-setting is critical. Set clear ones to minimize uncertainty, motivate, and support: “I know the redesign of this engine housing is a significant challenge, but I’m confident in your team’s ability to deliver a prototype by the end of the quarter. Let’s work together to identify any challenges that could arise and find solutions. What do you think?”
Provide constructive feedback–and feedforward. As humans, we often experience feedback as a threat, especially if it’s negative or ambiguous. Seek constructive ways to deliver appraisals and recommendations. Ideally, provide opportunity for self-appraisal first (“How do you think things went for you this past quarter? What were the positives? What could be improved?”) and build on the reflections that emerge. Make it more of a feedforward session by emphasizing opportunity for growth and offering concrete improvement suggestions.
Celebrate success. We tend to focus on what’s left to do, rather than acknowledge and celebrate what we’ve accomplished, whether a major product launch or navigating a challenging financial period. Celebration nourishes the “reward” circuits of the brain, yielding greater engagement. Big or small, a team dinner or specific authentic praise go a long way to lowering threat and boosting performance.
Foster social connection. A team that feels a sense of connection will perform better on key dimensions. Invest in creating social ties and trusting relationships. Celebrations are one way to, as are team outings–dinner, hikes, bowling, etc.–and simple questions to get to know people beyond their at-work personas.
High Challenge
Set high-fidelity goals–collaboratively. Goals and milestones that lead to them should follow the Goldilocks Rule of falling between too-easy and not-a-chance. When people know they can take steps to achieve something difficult, they’re more likely to enter a “flow” state that drives higher performance. Take scope, timing, team size, and other elements of goals into account and solicit inputs upfront versus goal-setting by fiat or coupling objectives solely to financial goals.
Create mutual accountability. In the highest-performing teams and organizations, accountability is a team sport. It’s easy to focus only on accountability of subordinates, but leaders must voice and honor accountability related to providing resources and support where needed. Set regular check-ins with honest appraisals of what has been achieved, what hasn’t, and why not, with everyone embracing an ownership mentality.
Create options and experience of choice. Motivated people want autonomy, and having choices supports that. Dimensions of choice may include teams to join or work with, projects of focus, location, remote work, and many others. Look for ways to increase options—and, consequently—performance.
Moving into the High-Performance Zone may feel daunting if you’re far from it. But it’s all about a mentality of continuous improvement and small changes that foster an environment where people feel motivated, encouraged, and ready to give their best.
Written by Laurent Valosek.
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