Today’s Workplace » Capturing Wages for Off-The-Clock Work in California Retail Stores »

Is time waiting for your supervisor to check your bag before you can go work time? Time between clock out and walk out - paid or not? Interesting question…

Why We Can't Do 3 Things at Once »

infoneer-pulse:

For those who find it tough to juggle more than a couple things at once, don’t despair. The brain is set up to manage two tasks, but not more, a new study suggests.

That’s because, when faced with two tasks, a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) divides so that half of the region focuses on one task and the other half on the other task. This division of labor allows a person to keep track of two tasks pretty readily, but if you throw in a third, things get a bit muddled.

“What really the results show is that we can readily divide tasking. We can cook, and at the same time talk on the phone, and switch back and forth between these two activities,” said study researcher Etienne Koechlin of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France. “However, we cannot multitask with more than two tasks.”

The results will be published this week in the journal Science.

» via Live Science

Are powerful men horny? | Psychology Today »

As Woods is voted best athlete of the decade by Associated Press, his marriage to his wife of five years may be exhaling its last breaths.

Past president Clinton, former New York governor Spitzer, South Carolina governor Sanford lost their clout after their affairs. Although Sanford’s wife attempted to improve the situation, she’s now filing for divorce.

Food for thought

Are powerful men more sexual than their female counterparts or are all men the same, powerful men being more exposed? Are powerful women engaged in similar affairs? Do you believe they would handle them differently? Does society judge these affairs the same?

Interesting to think about…

The 6 Myths Of Creativity | Fast Company »

Based on research of Teresa Amabile of Harvard. I emailed with her about grad school back when I was applying - she seemed super-nice!

Self-entitlement of grads can be a curse »

by Jean M. Twenge - May. 30, 2009 12:00 AM
My Turn

This month and next, thousands of young people will receive diplomas from high schools, colleges and graduate schools. Those graduating this year face the daunting task of finding jobs in perhaps the worst economy since the Great Depression. They also face another challenge: overcoming their childhood of plenty and the sense of entitlement it created.

“Within our generation, we think we have to start at the top,” Chris Ramos, 24, a 2009 graduate of California State University-San Marcos, told the San Diego Union-Tribune. He is not alone. According to a Harris Poll taken last year, 21- to 31-year olds were voted the most greedy and self-indulgent - even by the twentysomethings themselves, who were actually more likely than older generations to agree that the young generation had these entitled attitudes.

A recent study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence is even more disturbing. It found that two-thirds of college students believed their professors should raise their grades if the student simply explained that he or she was trying hard. One-third believed that if they attended most of the classes for a course, they deserved at least a B in the class. Almost a third thought they should be able to schedule the final exam around their vacation.

For college faculty members like me, these findings quantify attitudes that sometimes annoy us. But there is a much more serious consequence to such entitlement, one that falls on the young people themselves: What happens when these students do poorly on a project for their first job but expect praise because they “tried hard?” Or they find that just showing up isn’t enough to keep a job? Or they think it’s OK to miss the big presentation because they have something more relaxing to do? Even before the recession made jobs more precarious, it was clear that the transition between college and the working world would be difficult for many in this group.

Of course, these young people did not raise themselves. It wasn’t their idea for kids’ sports leagues to give trophies to children who merely showed up. Parents told kids they were special and argued with teachers when this specialness wasn’t recognized. Young people didn’t write the TV shows they watched that featured people experiencing overnight success.

Yet young people are now paying the price for these attitudes that have left them so ill-prepared for the realities of the workplace. Sadly, many will find they lack the work ethic and attitude necessary to succeed. In time they might learn, but the lesson will be time-consuming and painful.

To make matters worse, many young people believe that self-centered and entitled attitudes will help them succeed. My research finds that recent generations of college students score higher in narcissism, or having an inflated sense of self, than their predecessors. Quite to my surprise, young people usually readily agree that yes, their generation is pretty self-focused.

But, they argue, this is a good thing - it’s necessary to be self-centered to succeed in an increasingly competitive world. You have to self-promote, and you have to have lots of self-confidence to make it.

Unfortunately this strategy is unlikely to pay off. Highly self-centered people are often overconfident and take too many risks; studies show they are more likely to drop out of college and to produce highly volatile results that can bankrupt companies. Entitled people create conflicts with others.

And self-promotion, very useful in the correct dose, can prove toxic if used too heavily or combined with a haughty attitude. Even high self-esteem, though good in some ways, does not cause success; the definitive research review found no definite link. As just one example: In the U.S., the ethnic group with the lowest self-esteem is Asian-Americans, who also demonstrate the best academic performance.

The good news is that many young people are motivated, hard-working and not entitled. Even in this economy, they will succeed. For those still expecting a trophy just for participating, the road will be longer, rougher, and filled with the potholes created by an upbringing of unrealistic expectations. The silver lining of this recession is that they will learn this lesson sooner rather than later. And, hopefully, we can raise the next generation to avoid the curse of entitlement.

Jean M. Twenge is an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University and co-author of the recently released book “The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement” (Free Press).

Run Effective, Google-Style Meetings by Focusing on Data, Not Politics - Productivity - Lifehacker »

If you’re interested in getting more from meetings than a gaping sinkhole in your schedule—and who isn’t?—these tips from how Google handles meetings can help. Of great importance is focusing on data, not politics and grievances.

Photo by ghindo.

The folks over at Business Week interviewed Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president of search products, who is known for running a tight and effective meeting. She shared six great guidelines for holding an effective meeting including one of her long standing rules: “Don’t politic, use data.”

This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will give the green light to a design created by the person he or she likes the best, showing favoritism for the individual instead of the idea.

Mayer believes this mindset can demoralize employees, so she goes out of her way to make the approval process a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships.

Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.” This works for Google, because it builds a culture driven by customer feedback data, not the internal politics that pervade so many of today’s corporations.

It’s far more effective to look at what the data says than it is to let a meeting turn into a whine-fest where your whole team is taken away from productive work to hear the less-than-happy members complain. Check out the rest of the article at Business Week to see some more of Mayer’s techniques, including holding office hours—a carryover from her days as a professor.

Have a strategy you use in your workplace for increasing the effectiveness of meetings? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

How to Run a Meeting Like Google [Business Week via O’Reilly Radar]

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

Interview Mistakes - Bad Job Interview Techniques - Cosmopolitan.com »

Did you know the decision to hire is made in 15 minutes or less? Scary, huh? With that in mind, Cosmo surveyed human-resource pros* to find out which job-hunting sins you may be making.

You Say, “This Is My Dream Job”Even if you mean it, 69% of recruiters will brush that off as an insincere cliché they’ve heard way too many times before. Ban the bogus phrases “I think outside the box” and “I’m a team player” from your vocab as well, and come up with your own way of describing how much you rock.

*Cosmo teamed up with the Society for Human Resource Management for this survey of 500 human resource executives.

(This is just the first of several tips… not that any are all that Earth-shattering, but people still make these mistakes.)

Why You Should Be Nice To People At Work »

A bit of unexpected wisdom from Miss J. Alexander, a runway model coach that is best known for his appearances on America’s Next Top Model, on why you should be nice to people on the job:

The worst habit a model could have is not being polite to the people that they’re working with, and not respecting them or the job.

Some girls come into the job and don’t have a nice attitude towards the people that they’re working with. When you create great harmony at work, everyone gets the job done. I think a model should be able to come in and feel comfortable and make people feel comfortable around her.

** HEADSLAP **

I have never once thought about trying to create great harmony at work. I’ve tried to be nice to balance my tendency to be scarily analytical, but the scope of my ambition was merely to put individuals at ease. A greater harmony, though, is what I think we all seek on the job, which is the precursor of the flow state where everything’s going great and humming along. Must reflect on this more.

Notes & Thoughts -

So I only recently figured out anything about “America’s Next Top Model” and unfortunately there isn’t a huge amount of information out there that really seems to back up the idea that being nice creates a more pleasant organizational culture and/or any sort of real increases in performance. (If you’re interested, “being nice” is probably most similar to the OCB or organizational citizenship behaviors literature in Industrial-Organizational Psychology - basically, doing nice things around the office that are NOT part of your formal job duties.)

Being a CEO Is No Cakewalk And Boards Need to Get CEO Search Right »

Released: 11/23/2009 10:00 AM EST 
Source: Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)

Newswise — Succession planning should be an ongoing process for boards of directors, not a periodic activity.

When Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis unexpectedly announced in September he was stepping down at the end of the year, the BofA board had to accelerate its process in finding a successor.

Naming a replacement is not a simple scenario, said Constance Dierickx , a senior consultant in the Atlanta office of RHR International, who works with companies on CEO succession issues. “The BofA board has changed considerably in the past year and it may not have had time to review the existing succession plan, or perhaps it did and did not think it was adequate,” she said.

In an RHR study, 95 percent of board directors agreed that CEO succession planning is an important business continuity issue but fewer than half felt they were prepared for it. In fact, 40 percent said the company was unprepared for a CEO’s sudden departure. Also, 57 percent said they did not know when the CEO planned to leave and half said they had not seen the company’s succession plan in the past year.

The BofA board is not alone. With CEOs exiting their jobs at a rapid pace (834 CEOs left their jobs between January and August of this year, according to global outplacement research firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas), numerous boards are faced with succession decisions.

Some boards are prepared but many are not, said Randall Cheloha of the Cheloha Consulting Group in Wynnewood, PA, who has been working with organizations on succession planning for more than 20 years.

“Not too many years ago, imperial CEOs were fairly common. The CEO told the board who the successor would be, not the other way around. He or she ran the succession process with an iron hand and the board usually went along,”

But all that has changed over the past 10 years. “Corporate scandals and executive indictments have led to new levels of board engagement. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 resulted in a sea change of increased expectations, accountability and transparency from boards,” said Cheloha.

Sarbanes-Oxley has led many companies to burden their corporate secretaries, chief financial officers and others with a major increase in their workloads to insure the company was in compliance and their boards were kept fully apprises, said Cheloha. Also, changes in the makeup of boards directly affect new CEO selections, he added. “There are more constituencies to satisfy. In addition to major shareholders, financial analysts, employees and former executives, some companies, particularly those that received large government bailouts, have directly or indirectly been asked to change directors and add new players to their boards to represent the new constituencies, including the federal government and unions.” 
According to a July Associated Press report, the federal government owns 61 percent of General Motors with the United Auto Workers holding a 17.5 percent share..

These new shareholders have a large say in how companies like General Motors, BofA, Chrysler, Citi and American International Group (AIG) operate and will play an important role in naming a CEO successor. 

In BofA’s case, government officials will have veto power over the board’s choice of a new CEO as well as approving his or her compensation package. 

One of the most important functions of a board is developing a succession plan, said Cheloha, “I am surprised at how many companies are still not fully prepared to replace their CEOs,” he said, pointing to a Mercer Delta study that found nearly 50 percent of major companies did not have a realistic succession plan.

“That’s not to say they do not have a plan,” said Dierickx. “Too often plans are written and then filed away to gather dust. Succession needs to be frequently revisited and should be a board priority, the same as finances and other business issues boards face.” 

Dierickx calls succession a planned process that begins with the board being fully aligned in the direction it wants the company to go and the strategy needed to get there. “It is important to focus leadership requirements around those expectations. The best results (in selecting a new CEO) come when the board has clear knowledge of the leadership traits the company needs to achieve its goals,” she said.

Once that has been determined, the board can then concentrate on selecting the person to be the next CEO. “The selection process goes much smoother when the board is aligned about the leadership qualities needed to achieve the organization’s goals,” she said. 

Both Dierickx and Cheloha say that organizations need to devote more time to developing their own candidates and that boards need to have much greater awareness about who is in the talent pipeline.

Companies should be recruiting top talent to assume key leadership positions and board members should be monitoring their development, said Dierickx.
And, she adds, a company should be grooming a cadre of potential leaders. “Situations can change rapidly and organizations should not be putting all their eggs into one basket. If a company is relying on one person to be the future CEO, that person could leave for another job or become sick or something else could happen and the board no longer has a top candidate,” she said.

While there are many well developed tools to assess potential leaders, Dierickx has found “deep interviews” to be effective. “To a trained person, nuances and comments during an extended conversation can reveal a lot about an individual,” she said.

Cheloha said traditionally boards heard only a report from the CEO about internal senior executives and their succession readiness without actually looking deeper into the organization. “It is critical for boards to get first-hand information about prospective CEO successors and top executives and get to know and work with them.”

It can make a difference. Dierickx has a client who the board did not know five years ago. He was given developmental attention more as courtesy because of his position within the company but was not considered a serious candidate for a top job. However, he excelled in his assignments and as the board got to know him, his stock rose and eventually was selected as the CEO and is doing quite well, she said.

Dierickx and Cheloha say that companies should look inside for their CEOs since studies show that leaders selected from outside the organization have a high failure rate.

Yet, boards often feel they have to look at outside candidates because they think the company needs to go in a different strategic direction and outsiders are not connected to any of the company’s current problems. So, they turn to someone who has had success at another company.

But past success is not predictive of the future, said Dierickx. Too often boards do not take into consideration corporate culture, which can disable a CEO from outside the organization.

Another danger is cronyism on the part of some board members. When faced with a CEO decision, board members often begin thinking immediately of “who?” rather than address the entire succession process. They will push for a former colleague, someone they know from another board, or someone they’ve met who they think is good and don’t always look at what the job will demand or consider the company’s current operating situation, noted Cheloha. Boards need to carefully look at the needs of the company and then match candidates to what’s best for the company.

Cheloha recalls a situation where a board brought in someone they thought to be capable. He immediately replaced the top management team with colleagues from his former company, upsetting the company culture, hurting morale and causing a number of high potential insiders to leave.

At the same time, an internal successor can lead to problems as well, especially affecting the morale of senior team members who were not selected. Also, there is always the risk that top executives may leave taking other key personnel with them.

But that doesn’t have to be an outcome of selecting an internal candidate, said Dierickx. “A thoughtful and methodical process will prevent an exodus of talent in most succession scenarios. It is often a lack of care that leads to the loss of talent; usually talent in which there has been a substantial investment,” she said.

So, for boards of directors, selecting a new CEO is never a sure thing and is almost always a tricky proposition.

However, creating a carefully planned succession process that matches talent with the organization’s strategic goals will make the extremely important task of selecting a new CEO more likely to be successful.

The time and investment in creating and applying a solid CEO succession plan is an investment that will pay dividends to the company for years to come, said Dierickx. “Selecting a CEO is not a one-time event. It’s a process that boards and top management must take seriously and treat as an ongoing situation.”

Not doing this can expose a company to significant risk.

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is an international group of more than 7,800 industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists whose members study and apply scientific principles concerning workplace productivity, motivation, leadership and engagement. SIOP’s mission is to enhance human well-being and performance in organizational and work settings by promoting the science, practice and teaching of I-O psychology. For more information about SIOP, including a Media Resources service that lists nearly 2,000 experts in more than 100 topic areas, visit www.siop.org.

SIOP’s 25th annual conference will be April 8-10 at the Hilton Hotel in Atlanta, GA.

More than 4,000 members will attend, including many of the world’s top workplace scientists. There will be hundreds of peer-reviewed sessions spanning a wide variety of interesting topics related to current workplace issues. For more information, contact Stephany Schings or Clif Boutelle at SIOP at 419-353-0032.

How the Navy Seals Increased Passing Rates | Psychology Today »

It was 10 PM, pitch black and I was in the middle of the woods in North Carolina. My job was simple. I had to erect a 30 foot antennae that would be used to gather radio transmissions so our artillery platoon could conduct fire missions. I had been dropped off from a Humvee along with another soldier in another platoon. We were all alone. He had the same mission but had to set up his antennae about 100 yards from mine.

It was one of many such missions my unit conducted as ‘practice’ in the Army. In the snow, in the rain, in the summer heat we practiced the science of artillery. At least half of the year, every year, we spent in the woods in 3 to 7 day chunks. I thought my stint as a Cannon Fire Direction Specialist (13-E) would be indoors in a command center like the one in the 1980s classic, War Games, starring Matthew Broderick. At least that is what my recruiter told me.

Not!

I was mere yards from the gun line, had to dig foxholes, pull guard duty, man the M-60 and listen to the artillery rounds fired up close and ‘personal’ throughout the day and night. Luckily, I never had to go to war. I served during a relative time of peace (1993-95).

So,- why did we spend so much time living in the woods, firing live rounds and going through the motions? Why were two twenty year olds trusted to set up communications for 2 platoons (100 men) and to guide them into their new base in the woods for the next few days?

Well, we had to do this under as realistic conditions as possible so if we were called to war we would be able to perform our jobs with confidence and without thinking about it. Many of my fellow soldiers had served in the first Iraq War and they continuously relayed how serious warfare was and how we needed to be prepared. Our training reflected that mentality. But the ‘practice makes perfect’ approach isn’t always enough.

Which brings me to the Navy Seals. I will admit that training to become a combat soldier is tough. But becoming an elite soldier such as a Navy Seal or Ranger is tougher. These guys are not only regular soldiers, they also go through further training to become masters of terrain and conditions and to handle situations in hostile territories as a small group or on their own. Their training has to be super intense in order to have soldiers who can actually carry out their missions.

Hence, they had an extremely low passing rate for trainees. According toThe Brain , a show featured on The History Channel, out of 140 recruits (average/each cycle) only 36 would make it. However, they noticed that they were losing good recruits, not because they couldn’t phsyically hack it, but because they had a mental block. It was in one key area; the water. The Navy Seals have a drill in a pool where recruits have to remain under water for 20 minutes. They are equipped with oxygen tanks for air. All they have to do is stay under water without coming up. Seems simple enough.

Well there’s a catch. The recruits are constantly harassed by their instructors who rip off their masks, tie their (air) lines in knots and conduct other general forms of harrassment. The recruit’s job is to notpanic; wait until the attack is over; calmly fix the problem while remaining under water and then wait for the next attack. At the end of the 20 minutes the recruit will be required to kiss the floor of the pool and then will be brought up by the drill instructor.

But the opposite often happens. Soldiers do panic and even with four chances to pass (at different times in the program) many never make it. So the Navy Seals turned to psychology. Using a four step process they increased the passage rates in their program. What did they do? They emphasized what psychologists and communication academics have been advocating for years:

Goal Setting - Mental Rehearsal - Self Talk - Arousal Control

With goal setting the recruits were taught to set goals in extremely short chunks. For instance, one former Navy Seal discussed how he set goals such as making it to lunch, then dinner. With mental rehearsal they were taught to visualize themselves succeeding in their activities and going through the motions. As far as self talk is concerned, the experts in TheBrain documentary made the claim that we say 300 to 1000 words to ourselves a minute. By instructing the recruits to speak positively to themselves they could learn how to “override fears” resulting from theamygdala, a primal part of the brain that helps us deal with anxiety. And finally, with arousal control the recruits were taught how to breathe to help mitigate the crippling emotions and fears that some of their tasks encouraged.

This very simple four step process increased their passing rates from 25 percent to 33 percent, which is excellent in a rigorous program as theirs. It demonstrates that achieving success doesn’t always have to be a complex process. A few minor additions and tweaks may be all that is needed.

Bakari Akil II, Ph.D. is the author of Super You! 101 Ways to Maximize your Potential! Check out his page on Twitter.

The SIOP Exchange: 10 Reasons Your Team Hates You (They Just Won't Say It To Your Face) »

Submitted by the SIOP Electronic Communications Committee

Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC recently published his list of the 10 reasons teams hate their leaders:

“10 Reasons Your Team Hates You:

10. You don’t prioritize. Everything is important. When you do this, you remove your team’s ability to say no to less important work and focus their efforts on critical tasks. The fix: write down all the tasks you have folks working on and FORCE yourself to assign a H, M, or L to each task (and treat it as such). Thou shalt only have 33% of all tasks in each of those three categories - you can’t assign everything a “High” importance.

9. You treat them like employees.You don’t know a darn thing about them as a person (which makes them feel like nothing more than a number). The fix: read this post about 7Up.

8. You don’t fight for them. When is the last time you went to bat for a team member? And I mean went to bat where you had something to lose if it didn’t work out? When you don’t stand up for them, you lose their trust. The fix: identify something you should have gone to the mat for recently and get out there and fight. Get someone that raise they deserve. Go fight for them to get that cool new project.

7. You tell them to “have a balanced life” then set a bad example.You tell them weekends are precious and they should spend them with their family then you go and send them emails or voicemails on Sunday afternoon. The fix: either curb your bad habit of not being in balance or learn how to do delayed send in Outlook so your messages won’t go out until Monday morning.

6. You never relax. You walk around like you have a potato chip wedged between your butt cheeks and you’re trying not to break it. When you’re uptight all the time, it makes them uptight. Negative or stressful energy transfers to others. The fix: laugh, get a remote controlled car or tricycle to drive around the office, or put on a Burger King crown. When you relax, your team knows it’s okay for them to relax too.

5. You micromanage. You know every detail of what they’re working on and you’ve become a control freak. They have no room to make decisions on their own (which means yes, they’ll make a mistake or two). The fix: back off. Pick a few low risk projects and commit to not doing ANYTHING on them unless your team member asks you for assistance. It’ll be uncomfortable for you. Give it a try you micromanaging control freak.

4. You’re a suck-up. If your boss stopped short while walking down the hall, you’d break your neck. Your team hates seeing you do this because it demonstrates lack of spine and willingness to fight for them. It can also signal to them that you expect them to be a sycophant just like you. The fix: try kicking up and kissing down instead.

3. You treat them like mushrooms. Translation: they’re kept in the dark and fed a bunch of crap. Do you ration information? Do you withhold “important” things from them because it’s “need to know” only? All you’re doing is creating gossip and fear. The fix: stop acting like 007 and spill some beans.

2. You’re above getting your hands dirty. You’re great at assigning work. Doing work? Not so much. They hate watching you preside (and they hate it even more when you take credit for what they slaved over). The fix: get dirty. Climb under the proverbial tank and turn a wrench. Roll up your sleeves and pick a smaller project you can handle in addition to your other responsibilities and DO THE PROJECT YOURSELF.

1. You’re indecisive.Maybe. Or not. But possibly. Yeah. No. I don’t know. OH MY GOSH MAKE A DECISION ALREADY! That’s what you get paid to do as the leader. You drive them crazy with your incessant flip-flopping or waffling (mmmm waffles… oh. Sorry… still writing). The fix: DO SOMETHING! Acknowledge you might make a mistake but do something. A team is much more likely to follow a leader who makes decisions (even some bad ones) than a leader who makes no decisions at all.”

To read more from Mike, visit thoughtLEADERS, LLC.

The Psychology of Hasan: The Ft. Hood Shooter | World of Psychology »

By JOHN M GROHOL PSYD 
November 9, 2009

I’ve held off in writing anything about the tragic Ft. Hood shooting, allowing some time for details to emerge and for emotions to settle. Random acts of violence always leave us all scratching our heads, but sometimes the violence seems so extreme, the act so irrational, one can’t help but turn and ask, “Why did he do it?”

Major Nidal Malik Hasan is now apparently conscious and talking in his hospital bed, after being shot multiple times by Sgt. Kim Munley, a civilian police officer, who selflessly and heroically put herself in harm’s way in order to save countless of others’ lives. Munley is in stable but good condition and is very upbeat, according to news reports. Virginia Tech helped guide Munley’s aggressive response to Hasan’s shootings. “The lesson from Virginia Tech was, don’t wait for backup but move to the target and eliminate the shooter,” says Chuck Medley, chief of Fort Hood’s emergency services, telling the Christian Science Monitor. “It requires courage and it requires skill.”

It’ll be interesting to hear what Hasan has to say, but don’t be surprised if he sheds little new light on his actions. Criminals often justify their acts with rationalizations that make rational sense only to them.

What is clear is that Major Hasan was a troubled, conflicted individual. Some are calling him a terrorist, which means, literally, the systematic use of terror (a state of intense, extreme fear oranxiety), especially as a means of coercion. I’m not certain what Hasan was hoping to coerce by his actions — perhaps an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? — and I’m not sure he was very systematic about it, since he chose a place where most of have never been, seen or knew much about (an Army training camp). But indeed, if his aim was to induce terror, I’m certain he was successful that day.

Hasan’s Increasing Opposition to the Wars

Hasan increased his opposition to the wars as his military career — and the wars — progressed (he entered the military before the wars). According to the most recent New York Times article, during the past five years, Hasan also began openly opposing the wars on religious grounds. But amongst the rank of doctors, opposition to war is not uncommon. After all, doctors see the bloody reality of war in their work every day. And Hasan — in his work as a psychiatrist as someone who sometimes saw and talked to veterans who returned from combat — likely understood the psychological and emotional toll such combat can have on a human being.

The New York Times also reports that over the past decade, Hasan had increasingly turned to his own religion, Islam, for answers. This is not uncommon for a person to do, especially after he lost both his parents within 3 years of one another in 2001. Combined with the terrorist attacks on the U.S. in 2001, instead of making Hasan more pro-American, it apparently turned him more pro-Islam. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be much an issue for most people. But it certainly could become an issue when you’re fighting two wars against people who are primarily Muslim.

The heart of the matter is this, however — Muslims serve with honor throughout the military, in society and in our government every day. While many of them object to the wars — just as many, many Americans in general do — most of them don’t take forceful, violent action with their objections.

Hasan Lacked Support, Conflicted About His Religion

Hasan was different. He psychologically had difficulty with accepting his conflicting roles as a Muslim and as someone who would be called upon to heal those who are actively fighting Muslims. (As a psychiatrist, while he may have indeed been in a combat zone, it’s unlikely he would’ve seen any direct action himself.) When most of us are seriously conflicted about major decisions in our lives, most of us take actions to find a solution to the conflict — we work it out with others, we talk to a professional, we seek guidance in our faith, friends and family.

Hasan apparently didn’t have a lot of friends and also doesn’t seem to have had much contact with his family. Social support — so important in keeping us connected with society and those around us — seemed to be seriously lacking in this man’s life. He sought others’ counsel and friendship, but apparently did little with the advice he was given and had only a few acquaintances.

Others have suggested motives and behaviors of Hasan that they could not have any direct knowledge of (for instance, how he worked with his patients he saw as a psychiatrist). I’ll leave such speculation where it belongs. Dr. Peter Breggin makes the ridiculous assertion that psychotherapists don’t get burned out, so one of the reasons that led to Hasan’s irrational actions was the fact that he was just another pill-prescribing, uncaring psychiatrist:

The psychiatrists [at Walter Reed] had no interest in anything except medicating their patients.

Modern psychiatry is not about counseling and empowering people. It’s about controlling and suppressing them, and that’s a dismal affair for patients and doctors alike. The armed forces have been taken in by the false claims of modern psychiatry.

By contrast, it’s not depressing to do psychotherapy or counseling. As therapists, it’s inspiring when people entrust their feelings and their life stories to us. There is no burn out when therapists feel concern and empathy for their patients and help them to find the strength and direction to reclaim their lives.

I’m not sure where Dr. Breggin is getting his information, but The New York Times noted that Hasan’s primary duty at Ft. Hood was the assessment of soldiers before deployment. In other words, Hasan wasn’t prescribing many medications. He was trying to determine the psychological fitness of soldiers before they left for combat duty. I find it a little unseemly to use a tragedy such as this to push one’s anti-psychiatry agenda (no matter how well-intended).

Hasan’s Steady Escalation Toward Action

In hindsight, the progression seems to make sense as he appeared to step up his religious observation and public objections to the war. One might say that the Internet postings attributed to him, if authenticated, were really cries for help and to be heard — “Look at me, I hate your war and am a loaded pistol just waiting to go off. Let me out of the service.” But investigators hadn’t progressed very far in examining whether to take the postings seriously and if they were even made by Major Hasan.

Between the on-base harassment for his religion, his denial of a request to be released from military service early (although it’s unclear he ever actually formally tried to do this), and his upcoming deployment to the theater of operations in the Middle East, combined with his own anti-war views and unapologetic religious beliefs all seemed to have led to this man committing the most tragic and irrational act imaginable.

As I’ve argued previously, such acts can never be fully understood or explained because at the core of it, they are irrational acts. Many people object to the war, but virtually none of us kill others to make that point. Many people, when they feel like they have no way out of their life and have lost all hope, turn to suicide. But for some reason, a very tiny percentage of people take that inward anger (depression) and turn it outward, against others, in an act like this one.

This isn’t to apologize for Major Hasan’s actions or try to minimize their impact. Indeed, what Hasan has done is to likely change the very way the military looks at its own base security and how it handles soldiers internally who seem to have significant issues that are not being successfully resolved. And perhaps — just maybe — it will again reinforce to the heads of our armed services, the vital impact mental health plays in soldiers’ lives. While it’s possible nothing could have changed the outcome of this particular tragedy, perhaps there are things we can learn to help prevent future such tragedies occurring.

Read more at: Fort Hood Gunman Gave Signals Before His Rampage

Read more at: The Fort Hood Shooter: A Different Psychiatric Perspective

Episode 92: Passion For Your Work is Overrated — The Psych Files Podcast »

I have to admit that I LOVE when pop culture and everyday life meet psychology - Dan Gilbert’s book and the TV show “Dirty Jobs” meet up with one of the classic Industrial-Organizational Psychology models, Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model. So even though this isn’t exactly a new post, I find it worthy of posting!

Episode 92: Passion For Your Work is Overrated

by MICHAEL on APRIL 23, 2009

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Everyone tells you that you should have “passion for your work”. Personally, I think that’s a bunch of malarky, balderdash and hooey. And much of it could be the fault of psychologists who have studied job satisfaction. You might actually enjoy work that you never dreamed could make you happy. In this episode I talk about what Mike Rowe of the show Dirty Jobs had to say about work and how that ties into the research of psychologist Dan Gilbert author of Stumbling on Happiness..

Just because things hadn’t gone the way I planned didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong…the secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. – Ann Patchett in her book What now?

Resources For This Episode

• Mike Rowe the host of Dirty Jobs, talks about the war on work in this video from his Ted Talks speech:
• Dan Gilbert explains his ideas regarding how we all synthesize happiness in this video:
• Here is a really interesting talk by Alain de Botton about factors that affect job satisfaction:
• Job Characteristics Model (developed by Hackman and Oldham) states that an improvement in 5 aspects of a job can increase motivation and job satisfaction. They are:
  • Variety
  • Identity
  • Significance
  • Feedback
  • Autonomy