Managers Need Scripts to Say and Do the Right Things

Why We Love Time-Travel Tales

Source: Shutterstock

By Daniel Butcher

People love stories that involve time travel, from books such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, and the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (adapted into a TV series) and shows such as Doctor Who and Quantum Leap to comedy movies such as Groundhog Day, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Hot Tub Time Machine and action/adventure films such as the Back to the Future and Terminator series.

What’s so universally compelling about the concept?

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that the appeal of time-travel stories is that people often imagine what it would be like to travel backward and forward in time.

“We live in any given moment, but in those moments as we mentally time travel, we can remember select things, we can forecast things, and so we can create whatever story we want,” Shipp said. “When we see it in movie or show form, it fascinates us to be able to move into the future and see, ‘How did that play out?’—there’s a little bit of certainty that comes with that, so that’s one element.

“Another part of that is that we forget how things change,” she said. “For example, we assume, ‘If I am in an accident and suffer an injury and I lose the use of my legs, I would be so unhappy,’ and there’s a lot of research on this; yet we know that people have happiness set points.

“We forget the resilience that we have over time.”

Popular fantasy

“I was just thinking about this today in terms of the weather,” Shipp said. “We’re having this really weird cold snap in Texas, and so, of course, my brain is thinking, ‘Well, if this is what the weather is going to be from now on, I’m going to move someplace else.’

“But that thought assumes this experience would be the same in another 10 years, rather than be temporary or change in another way,” she said. “What do I know about what the future holds?

“Some of those time-travel films get us thinking about the elements we’ve forgotten about the past or what might be in the future, so it’s as much a fantasy as it gives us something to sink our teeth into when we think about what’s continuous versus what’s changing.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

What to Do When Your Boss Asks You to Work Late

By Daniel Butcher

You recently started a new job and your boss asks you to work late. Do you say yes, do you try to come up with a compromise, or do you say, “no way!”?

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article related to this topic with TCU colleague Hettie Richardson, said that when she had recently begun a new job as an assistant professor, there was an important meeting scheduled from five to nine p.m.

“I said, ‘A work meeting scheduled for after most people have left? What are you doing? I have to get home and take care of my son,’ but to this group, that was just normal because they wanted the privacy for the meeting’s sensitive topic,” Shipp said.

“When we get in situations like these, we have choices—we can either just go to the meeting deliberately and entrain to that schedule, or maybe we could passively push back and say, ‘I’ll be there, but I’m only going to stay from five to seven,’ or we could actively resist and say, ‘This isn’t right; this disadvantages people who don’t want to work in the evenings so I’m not going,’” she said. “Yet there are different outcomes that can happen in response to that decision.

“Sometimes it can be good because you may resist a meeting that others also think is mistimed—but other times you may be viewed as a rebel who is unwilling to adapt your schedule.”

Beyond meetings, Shipp said that there are other examples where it isn’t a simple choice between full compliance versus resistance.

“There are times when your preferred timing doesn’t match the situation, but you respond by creating an even more strict handling of time,” Shipp said. “Maybe you’re in an environment that doesn’t give you any structure about when and where to work but only evaluates your outcomes, given that different people experience time individually, they may each put their own structure in place, and that may further inform what happens at the team or the organizational level.

“Because individuals have views of time or ‘temporal schemata’ for how they interpret their schedules, they view the world through this temporal lens,” she said. “We each have these temporal schemata based on childhood and early work experiences, and that lens is how we each think about time and use time individually.

“We can’t assume that people will just naturally entrain to team or organizational schedules; we really have to look at each individual and see if there’s more going on behind the scenes.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

When It’s Time to Look for a New Job

By Daniel Butcher

Sometimes it makes sense to say “This too shall pass” and weather the storm at work. In other cases, it’s best to jump ship.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article on how people craft career narratives that affect how they fit in their current organization with Karen Jansen of North Carolina State University, said few jobs are forever.

“You thought you were going to stay here forever, and then your boss suddenly leaves, and you get a horrible boss,” Shipp said. “That’s a big event in your story, and how well you fit now has changed, so in response to the question ‘Am I going to stay here?’ is now very different.

“The fit literature had not addressed that question of change, so we have done some additional work to really explore what that means; we can’t just ask people, ‘Do you fit?’ at a moment in time to get the whole story,” she said. “You and I might report the same numerical number of job satisfaction on a questionnaire, but if the trajectory you’re expecting is going down and the trajectory I’m expecting is going up, I’m going to be super happy to stay, whereas you’re going to be planning a departure—yet, on the engagement survey, it will look exactly the same.

“It’s really about bringing in that temporal context.”

It’s easy to stagnate in a job even after the situation changes for the worse due to inertia. Employees shouldn’t be afraid to examine their changing work environment and make a call whether it still makes sense to be loyal to their employer. As for bosses, they need to actively try to boost morale after a period of more changes than usual.

“What it means for leaders is: You have to ask people, ‘What’s your story? Where have you been? Where are you going, and how does that provide an incentive for you to stay here, at least for the time being?” Shipp said. “We call it temporal baggage.

“When you come to an organization, you bring the temporal baggage of the past and the future, which is, ‘Where have you been before, and what do you expect if you’re going to stay here?’ and we have to understand that whole story,” she said.

“We ask about fit in the middle of things at one point in time, but we need to understand that whole story, and we have to keep asking, because it will naturally change as personal situations or work events change.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Time-Management Hacks Don’t Work for Everyone

By Daniel Butcher

When it comes to time-management tips, people respond to work schedules and deadlines differently, and what works for an early bird might not be useful for a night owl.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that time management is a common headache for many workers.

“There’s still a really big push to better manage your time, and even right now, I’m still seeing elements of post-pandemic burnout,” Shipp said. “My theory is that many people struggle with time management because leaders have never gotten down to the meaning of people’s time at work and an individual perspective of how workers are currently managing—or would prefer to manage—their time.

“Time-management hacks that are so commonly prescribed might work for some people but not for others—for some people, it might make it worse,” she said. “For example, it is widely prescribed to block your workday to work on certain things at certain times—but that overlooks how some people work better in a state of flow, working based on events, not time.

“There’s a couple of time-management issues that have been around for a long time, but we’re looking at them too simplistically, without understanding how people experience and view time individually.”

Instead, experts and influencers are touting life hacks, including time-management strategies, that resonate with a percentage of the population but might not work for everybody.

“It’s really comparable right now to the research on nutrition—they’re finding customized diets that are optimized for different metabolisms and making individual prescriptions for workouts and what to eat,” Shipp said.

“We used to think of this as ‘calories in, calories out,’ but now we realize, ‘Wow, it isn’t that simple, because you could eat the same things as me, but we have different outcomes because we have different biological makeups,’” she said

The same thing goes for individuals’ cognitive makeup and their chronological perceptions of time.

“For example, are you an early-morning person or are you a late-night person?” Shipp said. “That can affect your performance as your time management and task prioritization needs to be shared to your energy level.

“Similarly, rigid work schedules of certain hours in the office may work for some employees but not others,” she said.

“There are so many things that we don’t yet incorporate into workforce discussions that that would help us to get away from these blanket hacks and one-size-fits-all recommendations.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

The Pitfalls of Thinking about Your Jobs Instead of Your Career

By Daniel Butcher

Far too often, workers either stay too long in a job that isn’t a good fit, or, at the other extreme, hop from job to job without a coherent plan for achieving their desired career path.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that when it comes to people deciding whether their current job is a good fit or which jobs to apply for, they shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Put another way, think of each job you apply for in the context of the career that you’d like to have over the long haul.

“Career-planning is a long-lived topic, but in many ways, people have moved away from thinking about careers and instead it’s just a string of jobs—maybe you have this job for a year and that job for a year, but none of them ties into a larger career path,” Shipp said. “One of the things that you may regret is accepting a job without thinking about your fit over time, for example.”

Over time, it’s crucial to plan for the career you want and articulate the story you’re telling yourself, the narrative of what that looks like, and whether the job you’re in or applying to fits that narrative, she said.

“If we aren’t doing long-term career planning and lose the ability to think of ourselves as the protagonist in a continuous story from past to present to future, then people can make job changes that don’t necessarily fit or work any better than where they were before,” Shipp said.

“Many companies in America seem to simply accept this job-hopping trend, recruiting constantly to overcome the short-term tenures that are now so common,” she said. “But individuals can create a better experience for themselves if they give some thought to their career narrative.

“If crafted thoughtfully, they may even find a better fit with an organization that values the same things.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Doing Meaningful Work Makes Time Fly

By Daniel Butcher

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That’s relativity.” —Albert Einstein

When people talk about time at work, they usually don’t think about subjective time, how we perceive time differently, for example, at work vs. on vacation, noted Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on that topic with Karen Jansen of Henley Business School.

“A key to understanding subjective time is thinking about how people interpret time itself—workers often ask themselves, ‘Is there meaning in what I’m doing? Where is this leading me?’” Shipp said. “Expense reports feel meaningless, and most people consider them to be a waste of time, as opposed to, ‘I worked on this big project—it’s going to save lives, for example, if you’re in the medical community.’

“So the same amount of time spent on one sort of task or project vs. another can feel different and have different meaning, and that interpretation of time is really important for how people think and feel about their job and career,” she said.

“Leaders need to consider this different view of time when engaging their teams.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Mental Time Travel at Work Matters

By Daniel Butcher

While many self-help gurus advise living in the moment, most people’s thoughts also tend to wander to the past or the future. That has implications for how people interact with each other and work together.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on that topic with Karen Jansen of North Carolina State University, said that when people talk about time at work, they’re almost always referring to “objective time.”

“Time is measured by the clock or the calendar, so when workers think, ‘What time is a meeting scheduled?’ or ‘Am I managing my time well?’ or ‘December feels different than June,’ they’re always referring back to what they think are fixed elements of time—the clock or the calendar,” Shipp said. “But my research over the years has really been looking at people’s subjective experience and interpretation of time, and when we went into the literature to really explore this more in depth, we found that this is mostly hidden.

“One of the main elements of subjective time is that people mentally time travel,” she said. “They remember the past and they forecast the future.

“At any given moment, 50% of your thoughts are spent in another period of time; you aren’t in the present moment—you’re thinking about different periods of time.”

Other research that Shipp has done shows that people have characteristic tendencies to mentally stay in one or more periods of time. Some people tend to think about the past more often, while others like to plan and imagine what will happen in the future.

“I’m very future-focused, whereas my husband is very much present- and past-focused,” Shipp said. “If you think about it from a work perspective, if people are thinking about different things, if their minds are in different places, they can have conflicts, or they can have complementarities.

“That kind of subjectivity has important implications for team composition or, the flip side of it, team conflict,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Fitting in at Work Seems to Change So Much

By Daniel Butcher

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,” as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, then it follows that you can’t walk into the same office twice. A job that’s a perfect fit one day may not be the next, especially if you get a new boss who doesn’t appreciate your talents or you’re passed over for a promotion.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article on how people craft career narratives that affect how they fit at work with Karen Jansen of North Carolina State University, said that, for most people, it’s a fluid situation.

“People weren’t really talking about how people evolve over time; they were talking about, ‘Do you fit at work or not?’ as if it’s a yes-or-no question, but it implicitly means right now,” Shipp said.

“If I ask you that question today, ‘Are you a good fit at your current employer?’ you can come up with an answer, but you may report an answer that looks different than somebody else who objectively looks the same on paper but worked someplace else before,” she said.

How people perceive fit at any point in time depends on where they’ve been before and what they expect in the future.

“These stories about fit are in medias res, a Latin term that means in the middle of things,” Shipp said. “When we ask people things like, ‘Do you fit?’ one of the things we’re getting is this implicit response, ‘Well, this is right now, but the only way that I can understand right now is to know where have I been and where I am going.’

“And so we looked at the way in which people naturally tell stories, and how it’s not just in the middle of things, but also we’re constantly recrafting those stories as events happen, and now the future looks a little bit different,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

A Challenge of Adapting to a New Company

By Daniel Butcher

New hires face many challenges when they’re getting up to speed at a new organization. One of the biggest is picking up on—and adapting to—scheduling and time management, including how punctual people tend to be and what hours employees are expected to work.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article on this topic with TCU colleague Hettie Richardson, said that people can follow or resist bosses’ attempts to coordinate the pace and rhythm of work.

“We know that people, teams, and organizations have a tendency to synchronize their schedules to things outside themselves. So, if your office work week is Monday through Friday, you start your week over on a Monday,” Shipp said. “You don’t really think about it; that’s just the schedule.

“Teams often schedule things structurally and with their schedules based on organizational zeitgebers, or ‘time-givers’, those pacers that tell you when and how to do things,” she said. “Organizations synchronize more broadly based on events or deadlines such as, ‘This is the time of year when our taxes are due,’ or ‘This is the time of year when our annual reports are due,’ or board meetings, etc.”

Shipp and Richardson focused on the individual level.

“Most people assume that if you have a pacer coming from the outside telling you when something should happen, you should just automatically synchronize to that schedule,” Shipp said. “But we said, ‘Wow, no, we’re dealing with individuals—it’s just not that easy’ because people experience and interpret time differently from each other.

“For example, if I previously worked at an organization and we worked Monday through Friday, eight a.m. to five p.m., then I take a new job, and people stay at work until 7p.m.and then come in the next day whenever they want,” she said. “For me, that feels very wrong—I won’t know why, but I’ll think, ‘No, working from eight to five is normal—these are business hours.’ But who says what’s normal?”

Shipp and Richardson found that there is a range of other outcomes besides simply blindly following an organization’s work schedule.

“If we look at the individual level, you might go along to get along,” Shipp said. “I might say, ‘Okay, I’ll stay till seven and then come in later tomorrow,’ but I’d be doing so deliberately, and I might be frustrated with adaptation to a schedule that’s different from what I’m used to and comfortable with.

“Unless the person can change the broader context to their view, this frustration likely accumulates over time and could lead them to quit,” she said. “So leaders have to have individual conversations to better understand what schedules each person thinks is ‘right.’”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Focusing on the Past vs. the Present vs. the Future at Work

By Daniel Butcher

Are you not seeing eye-to-eye with your boss or a colleague? It may be that you focus more on the past, present, or future than they do—and this could be both good and bad.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University said that talking with your boss and colleagues about your temporal orientations—how often you both tend to think about the past, the present, and the future—can be illuminating and may even enable better collaboration.

“I work with somebody that, when we compare these things, they’re very much present- and past-focused, and so they’re the person that is constantly telling me, ‘You’ve come so far; look at what you’ve done—do you remember this happened five or 10 years ago?’” Shipp said. “Whereas I’m saying, ‘You need to know that my future focus is really pushing me into the future, because things are uncertain, and I haven’t done enough yet—I need to do more.’

“I’m pushing, pushing, pushing, whereas they’re saying, ‘Wait, hold on, savor this, acknowledge where you’ve been,’ and vice versa; ‘I’ve helped that person with strategic planning and things that don’t come as naturally to them,” she said.

“As individuals, we need to understand where your mind naturally tends to go and understand too how other people’s minds might look different than yours.”

Although different temporal orientations or ways of perceiving time can be helpful, Shipp noted that they can also lead to conflicts among colleagues within a team or department or between bosses and their direct reports.

“Originally, I got into arguments with the person with whom I worked, because we didn’t realize what different world views we had—we were literally opposite,” Shipp said. “He would say, ‘Why are you always thinking about this thing going forward?’ and I would say, ‘What? Why can’t you think about something that’s so important?’

“Understanding yourself, making that temporal orientation explicit for yourself and for the people that you work with—that’s when you can start to see, ‘Oh, hey, you’re focused on this other period of time’ so that I might ask you to fill in the gaps of the things that I can’t see because I’m so future-focused,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile