Irvine’s Hardiness Institute Teaches Companies the Bright Stuff : Education: Seminars, for firms looking to improve management skills and employee morale, stress optimism.

The gathering sounded like a powwow of co-workers huddled around a table in the employee cafeteria--safely out of supervisors’ earshot.

“We’ll be halfway down the path on an assignment, then someone will tell us to change direction,” one fellow groused.

“When somebody at the top says, ‘I don’t care for this one thing in the brochure that your group did,’ by the time (the criticism) gets back down to us, it’s: ‘He didn’t like anything about this brochure,’ ” another man beefed.

“Many of our managers don’t seem accessible, so a lot of people don’t feel they have much control over things,” a woman chimed in.

In the average workplace, such complaints are usually clandestine. But these colleagues were not cloistered in group therapy during a coffee break.

Rather, their company organized this tete-a-tete. Recently, 16 managers of AST Research Inc. filed into a conference room at the Irvine computer maker for doughnuts and a session of the “Hardiness Training Course.”

The hardier the employee, the better he or she can handle the ups and downs of work, lectured psychologist Salvatore R. Maddi. Fostering a robust and positive attitude among staff members, he said, “pays off in spades in terms of greater productivity and fewer sick days.”

Maddi, 58, founded the Hardiness Institute in 1985 while he was a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. A year later, he expanded his counseling service to Southern California when he accepted a teaching position at UC Irvine.

Today, the Irvine-based Hardiness Institute has franchises in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco--in addition to its Midwestern offices. The bistate institute is composed of about a dozen psychologists who conduct seminars for companies looking to improve management skills and employee morale.

AST sought out Maddi when the rapidly growing company--one of the few computer firms in Orange County that increased its staff in 1991--saw a need for stress management training.

“The electronics industry is constantly changing--priorities change, projects change,” said Cathie McIntyre, manager of human resources development for AST. “It’s the nature of the business. How we handle stress determines how we handle change.”

So the firm plunked down several hundred dollars for Maddi’s four-hour workshop, which costs $400 to $2,500, depending on the workshop’s complexity and degree of individual attention.

The day began with an explanation of Maddi’s philosophy, based on his “Hardiness Model.” He devised the model during a 12-year study of 450 Illinois Bell Telephone Co. managers, from the mid-1970s through the ‘80s, as they muddled through the deregulation of the telephone industry.

“It was the largest corporate upheaval in history,” Maddi said of the divestiture of AT&T; in 1981, which saw Illinois Bell become part of a separate company. In his study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, Maddi tested the managers for a variety of psychological and medical aftershocks.

“Some managers performed poorly or became ill, while others actually improved in performance and remained healthy,” he said. The difference: Managers who thrived under stress had sturdy coping mechanisms and optimistic attitudes; those without them didn’t.

Not exactly revolutionary stuff, but companies like to be reminded of such principles from time to time. According to Maddi, the Hardiness Institute has presented training courses to employers and employees at hundreds of corporations.

“There are three components to the Hardiness factor: a coping strategy, a generally positive outlook about yourself and the world, and solid social support,” Maddi said. People who cope well “are able to take the broader perspective and deal directly with problems rather than avoid them,” he said.

Maddi regaled his audience with a humorous vignette to describe the downward spiral of a person “catastrophizing” an event rather than considering the bigger picture.

“A man gets into an argument with his boss,” Maddi said. “He goes back to his desk and thinks: ‘This is terrible. Everyone in the building probably heard our argument. I’ll lose my job, they’ll repossess my home, my wife will leave me, I’ll never get another job because they’ll know I’m a failure. I might as well commit suicide.’ ”

Instead, that same employee could think, “Well, that wasn’t the best way to communicate my thoughts, but at least it was some form of communication,” Maddi said.

Employees sporting an optimistic outlook tend to “have a sense of control over their job--they feel that they can influence the outcome,” he said. “And even when they have a setback, they feel they can learn and grow from the experience.”

A helpful network of family and friends provide “encouragement and assistance rather than pampering, overprotection or competition,” he added. The mate or relative who offers a beleaguered employee only condolences and cocktails, in lieu of problem-solving pep talks, merely aids in avoiding the issue.

After outlining the Hardiness Model for AST managers, Maddi opened the floor to discussion. And so began the soul-bearing around the conference table.

Participants had picked up quickly on Maddi’s counsel to make lemons into lemonade. One employee mentioned the computer industry’s ever-evolving nature: “As soon as you find an answer that fits today’s question, it won’t apply to tomorrow’s question.”

“But change is exciting,” countered a co-worker. “It would be scarier for us to become stagnant.”

Another employee fretted that a continual reassigning of personnel at the company has left some employees unsure of their standing. “If someone has worked here for three years, he’s probably had seven or eight bosses,” the manager said.

“Well, look at it this way: If you don’t like your current boss, just wait a few months and you’ll get a new one,” a colleague said.

Maddi advised the supervisors to concentrate on strengthening their individual work groups rather than looking toward top management for all the answers. For instance, he said, “it’s not very productive to think, ‘If only those people on high would give us more resources.’ You have to work with what’s available.”

He also emphasized that managers should maintain a good flow of communication--or else “people at the bottom of the pyramid will feel like they’re being dealt with arbitrarily.”

And when a manager’s own superior is not providing full information, Maddi said, be honest about it: “To say, ‘I don’t know because they haven’t told me, either,’ is to keep the loyalty of your subordinates.”

At the seminar’s close, Maddi passed out questionnaires for feedback from participants. McIntyre said that most of the evaluations were positive, although some of the employees wrote that their interest waned during the lecture.

But overall, she said, the managers felt they had learned from Maddi’s presentation. “He reinforced ideas I always try to reinforce--that you must pay attention to your people and get to know them, and that you should take control of the things you have control over,” she said.