Want to be more Effective at Work? Raise Your Self-Esteem!
Want your Company to Survive and Thrive? Raise Everyone's Self Esteem at Work!

Melanie Keveles, Senior Content Editor for WorkLife Solutions, recently conducted a phone interview with Dr. Nathaniel Branden, pioneer of the self-esteem movement and author of Self-Esteem at Work:How Confident People Make Powerful Companies (Jossey-Bass, 1998). Those wishing to learn more about Dr. Branden's work are invited to visit his Web site: http://www.nathanielbranden.net/content/wrk.shtml or email him at .

Just like a psychologist, Dr. Branden spent a good part of the start of the interview asking the interviewer about herself. But she managed to take control of the interview and ask:

Q: What exactly is '"self-esteem at work?"

A: Well the first question is "What is self-esteem?" Self-esteem is our experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. Now what that has to do with is trust in our own mind, trust in our ability to think, trust in our ability to make appropriate decisions. Confidence that success, achievement, love, in a word happiness are natural and appropriate to us.

It would seem that our esteem gets damaged in our culture both in the family and in school. Babies come out feeling all of those things. They trust that someone is going to feed them and they have confidence and they know how to ask for love.

But a baby is not yet aware of the kind of issues that are involved in self-esteem. A baby is not yet confronting whether it can have confidence in its own mind or not. So that requires a much later level of development.

The real relevance of this to the workplace is this: Self-esteem is a basic need that has always been important to people at a personal level, but what has changed is the emergence of an information economy in which there is less and less market for physical labor as such and more and more demand for mind work.

In a modern organization it is no longer an issue of a handful of people doing all the thinking and having all the knowledge and the rest more or less really doing what they are told or trained to do. In a modern organization, we need at every level people who are able and willing to think, take responsibility, make decisions, solve problems at that level without referring it (a problem or issue) upstairs. In other words, we need for the first time in the history of business large numbers of people with a decent level of confidence in their own mind and judgment. This means for the first time in the history of the human race, we need large numbers of people with a decent level of self-esteem. Now that's an unprecedented phenomenon.

And that's really what gave birth to the idea of the book Self-Esteem at Work: to trace out what difference it makes in the marketplace whether one has got good self-esteem or poor self-esteem and to think through the implications for leadership in management.

Q: In your estimation based on what you see out there and the experience that you've had, what proportion of the population would you say has good self-esteem at work?

A: Well it's an issue of degree. I have never met anyone who is totally devoid of self-esteem and I never met anyone who couldn't grow in self-esteem. So it's an issue of degree. Unfortunately many people suffer to a varying extent from problems in the area of self-esteem and they don't necessarily show up at the technical level. But they definitely show up at the human relations level. They show up at the level of how they interact with other people - colleagues, customers, associates of one kind or another, clients.

Q: What is the relationship between self-esteem and this new term we hear a lot about, emotional intelligence?

A: One of the aspects of self-esteem that is profoundly relevant is a reasonably highly developed capacity for self-awareness. Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. My ability to be in contact with myself and my own feelings is a precondition of my ability to understand you and be empathic with you or respond appropriately to you. So that you are definitely going to see some connections between self-esteem and what is now called emotional intelligence. Or what we might call interpersonal confidence.

And it's also something we referred to in the past as "soft skills."

Yes and it's an unfortunate choice of words because it implies something somehow less important. And the truth of the matter is that if company A and company B are competing, and A is doing better than B, it's not likely to be because A has got more talented or smarter people, but what it's likely to be is that they have better management. A great deal of competition today boils down to confidence of managers and leaders to draw out the best in their people.

Q: I loved your list of suggestions in your book for bringing out the best in people. How did you come upon those particular questions?

A: A- working with companies. B- by having a lot of people who work in organizations as therapy clients. Talking with managers. Talking with CEO's. Plus thinking.

Q: So it's a question of what keeps on coming up for people about what's lacking.

A: Exactly.

Q: You also have a wonderful process of sentence completion work. I wondered how you went about creating that and why you think that's such a powerful tool?

A: It existed before in a very primitive form. But I took it to another level entirely in terms of ways you could use it rather more sophisticated or developed than anyone else of whom I have knowledge. It was more or less an issue of experimenting with it first in the arena of psychotherapy and learning new ways you could use it for self-discovery, for self-healing, for motivation, for behavior change. And I kept working with it and polishing it and discovering new applications every few years.

Q: So what happens with it is that people are really resting on their own inner resources as opposed to something external to themselves.

A: Yes. What is really interesting is that it is really often a tool for accessing a wisdom or knowledge you don't know you have. Let me give you an example. I was working in a brokerage house with a group of vice-presidents and they had no background or exposure to the theory of self-esteem whatsoever. And I wanted to introduce the subject of self-esteem and its role in the workplace in a way that might be a little more interesting than a straight lecture. So I asked each of them to write this incomplete sentence: "If I bring 5% more self-esteem to my work _______________." Then I asked them as rapidly as they could without rehearsing or censoring to write out six to ten endings for that "stem."

Now what was very interesting is that although they had not read any books on self-esteem and probably had not given the issue much or any thought, they began forecasting quite accurately in their endings ways in which they would operate more effectively if they "brought 5% more self-esteem to their work." And the point was that at some level (and that's what I wanted to dramatize) they were aware that how they thought and felt about themselves showed up in choices and behavior in the marketplace.

Q: Why do you think we're so savvy but we don't know we're so savvy?

A: Because a lot of this exists at an unconscious level or it isn't that we knew in advance, but if you can think of the right sentence completion it stimulates the new insight in that moment. It may not be pre-existing in the psyche; it may literally be generated for the first time as you end that sentence.

Q: So it bubbles up from inside.

A: Exactly. Like shooting adrenaline into the brain. You're asking your brain to be smart.

Q: What kinds of results are you seeing as you go forward in the workplace with these concepts?

A: People are learning to be more candid with one another. People are learning to take more responsibility. They are more willing to deal with conflicts in a dignified and rational way that permits solutions rather than carry grudges that get in the way of performance.

Q: Would you say it's both an awareness level and a skill level?

A: Yes it is both. It is a behavior change level. If people learn to be more candid or more decent and benevolent in the way they deal with conflicts with one another, that's awareness but it's also learning new ways of operating.

People are willing to deal in a more honest way. To look what the issues are, talk about the issues and be highly solution oriented rather than grudge or resentment oriented. Also, they are taking more responsibility for seeing that problems get solved rather than complaining and waiting for someone else to do something.

Q: What happens when people think they are doing these things but they are actually not "walking their talk?"

A: Then that needs to be pointed out. What happens is that to that extent they are less effective and that person (if they are to remain there) needs to be guided to more appropriate behavior.

One of the things I do in companies is that I have a long list of questions that a manager's asked, a self-assessment list. Then I have the person that that person manages get the same questions written from the point of view of not what do I do, but what does my manager do. So then we're looking for whether there's congruence or dissonance between the manager's self-perception and his behavior and the perceptions of the people who report to him.

There's a principle that is pretty well understood, namely: you're the kind of manager your people say you are. What that means is that if there is congruence between how a manager views his own behavior and how his people perceive it, that's good. But if there's lack of congruence, this is not good. But at least you have something clear-cut to work on now.

Q: In closing is there anything that I've left out that you'd like people to know about your work?

A: Yes. One- that these concepts are useful for everyone - whether you've had a long career or you are just starting out in your career. Also, that any important work can be a path for personal development. Working on yourself is simultaneously developing yourself as an executive, or worker or whatever, making you more effective in the workplace at the same time that you are working on your own development. So it's this paradox: you're being paid by an organization to work on yourself, because in working on yourself, you make yourself a better leader, a better manager, or a better technician.