How the study of what makes us human can enable more meaningful behaviour at work – with insights from business psychologist, Lucy Cox
Grasping workplace behaviour is no easy task. While traditional approaches offer some insight, they often fall short of uncovering the deeper reasons behind people’s actions. To gain a more profound understanding of what motivates behaviour, could we draw inspiration from anthropology? And how might this perspective provide new insights into driving cultural change? This article explores these ideas and shares practical ways to bring them to life.
I believe the right approach to culture and behaviour change needs to be centred around a more interconnected and immersive view of the organisation
The challenge of humans
It’s the nature of being human that even with our best intentions, what we say, what we do and what we think we do, can all end up being entirely different, making us unpredictable and confusing. In the same way as we often lack insight into why others do what they do, it’s equally hard to see our own actions objectively and fully understand all the factors that are influencing us.
As a business psychologist and organisation consultant, the challenges I help organisations with are all about the complexities of human behaviour. Often, the focus isn’t just on the individual level (why would that person think/say/do that?), but at the collective level of organisational behaviour (why won’t people just communicate/take responsibility/get on board with this?).
The recent Post Office inquiry got me and my team thinking about how leaders can really understand human behaviour in their organisation – and the alarming consequences of getting it wrong.
Behaviour as the backbone of culture
Let’s start with a simplified definition of organisational culture. In its fundamental form, workplace culture can be boiled down to one thing: collective behaviour. It’s made up of all the behaviours that are observed, encouraged, expected, valued and rewarded (directly or indirectly; intentionally or not) – or the ones that aren’t.
For instance, what sets an organisation with a ‘strong learning culture’ apart from others? The behaviours that make up a learning culture (openly discussing mistakes, frequently exchanging feedback or blocking out time for self-development) will be positively reinforced, often in a variety of ways. We typically put the drivers of such behaviours into one of two categories; the ‘hard’, i.e. formal systems, processes, policies and structures; and the ‘soft’, such as leadership and communication styles, organisational narratives and values.
It’s looking at all of this together – the behaviour in context with the environment – that enables us to piece together the ‘why’ of people’s behaviour and of the organisation’s culture as a whole.
Culture, but different
Our experience of leading culture change initiatives has led to a growing respect for, and use of, anthropology in really seeking to understand the factors driving collective behaviour. If your view of anthropology conjures up images of studying remote tribes for months on end, then you are not alone, and you may wish to read Anthro-Vision, a book by anthropologist-turned-FT-journalist Gillian Tett who makes the case for introducing an anthropological ‘lens’ to business.
Briefly, anthropology can be defined as the study of what makes us human. Where psychology generally relies on experiments to understand how individuals think, feel and behave in different contexts, anthropology looks more broadly at cultures and societies, and relies on fully immersing oneself in a community to generate a deeper understanding of the shared behaviours, norms, rituals, values and ways of life specific to that group of people.
It’s this anthropological lens, characterised by immersive observation, that Tett argues is fundamental to understanding what actually drives people’s behaviour. The core message of the book is that social and cultural context is everything, but we tend to be guilty of forgetting this, falling into the ‘tunnel vision’ trap, and failing to see the insights that could help us make better decisions.
This issue crops up all the time in the form of what we call ‘the habituation problem’ – being so used to the environment you’re embedded in that it’s impossible to see the real factors influencing behaviour. When it comes to culture assessment, this creates a real problem.
We believe that used in isolation, the traditional methods used to understand behaviour and culture – such as surveys and focus groups – fall victim to this and don’t tell the whole story on their own. No single tool or source of insight can paint a full picture of an organisation’s culture and unpick the many, and often invisible, factors that are shaping our collective behaviour.
Here’s how we see this playing out:
1) House of mirrors
By relying on individual explanations of behaviour, we are unlikely to get a full picture of what’s going on in an organisation. Everyone constructs their own narrative on a situation, shaped not only by the information available to them but also by their past experiences, interactions, values, drivers or biases, leading to multiple webs of meaning.
Whether or not they feel they are sharing an honest and accurate view (which can be another issue!), they can only share things as they see them – which will be different from one person to the next. This culminates in a confusing ‘house of mirrors’ exacerbated by the problem of ‘habituation’ where we become less attuned to environmental influences on our behaviour.
What this means in practice is that, if asked why you didn’t raise your concern over a decision made by a senior leader, you are unlikely to respond with: “The culture is one where people who challenge are seen as a problem and an embedded culture of deference to expertise has made speaking out a career-ending move.” A more likely response might be: “My idea is probably a stupid one anyway.”
2) The truth paradox
Much of the time, organisations will run surveys or use other similar methods to try and find ‘the answer’: “What’s the one thing we can do that will make people more engaged, bring them into the office more or stop them leaving?” or “Why isn’t performance where it needs to be?”
Aside from the fact that this relies on explanations that we know from the house of mirrors point to be unreliable, this method is too eager to find easy solutions. Ultimately, there is no ‘one truth’, but multiple explanations co-existing and interacting with each-other (even seemingly opposite ones).
An organisation struggling with engagement may decide to implement a series of new flexible working initiatives, but then it comes to their attention that people are saying they’re leaving because they don’t have enough flexibility. While this might be true, it’s unlikely to be the whole truth.
What if it’s also true that lots of people love the flexibility they have – and what do these two truths together tell us? This highlights the importance of digging deeper. For instance, is there consistent implementation of existing flexible working policies, or does it depend on who your manager is? What type of flexibility do the people who are leaving want? By pushing beyond what might at first appear to be ‘the answer’, you will probably find something more complex – but it will lead you to a better solution.
3) The bad apple
The final, and depressingly common, explanation that senior leaders often resort to, is that their people just don’t get it or, even worse, are struggling with deep-rooted personality flaws that mean they are committed to doing the wrong thing.
Of course, explanations of behaviour that focus on individual personality do play some part in understanding people’s actions but are never sufficient on their own. If someone with a history of innovative and creative work, for example, finds themselves in an environment where this is undervalued, or even suppressed, admonishing the individual for failing to live up to expectations would be to overlook all the pressures and influences on behaviour that make it surprisingly difficult to be your authentic self.
Putting it all together
Traditional culture assessments don’t get to the heart of what’s really going on because what’s really going on is too complex to be captured solely with these tools. Interviews, focus groups and surveys are often geared towards testing out a preconceived hypothesis on what ‘the answer’ is, which, unfortunately, is unlikely to uncover what’s under the surface.
I believe the right approach to culture and behaviour change needs to be centred around a more interconnected and immersive view of the organisation. By using systems-thinking and focusing on understanding behaviour in context, we can take into account the complex dynamics that influence behaviour and culture.
In our team, we are challenging ourselves to be more ‘anthropological’ in how we understand behaviour and we’ve come up with a checklist as a way of embedding an anthropology mindset across all the culture work we do:
- What are we observing here (as well as being told)? By immersing ourselves within the context of the organisation, we will see things that might otherwise be overlooked, left out or exist beyond people’s awareness.
- Who could share a different perspective? If we are interviewing leaders, who else could we speak to in order to build a more rounded picture? (Be that junior team members, customers, stakeholders.)
- What isn’t being said? While it’s important to focus on the topics that do come up, it’s equally important to focus on the ones that don’t. If no one mentions something that seems obvious when looking from the outside-in, what could that mean?
- What preconceptions are we going in with and how can we take them out of the equation? By putting any expectations or biases to one side as best we can, and relying on open, unstructured questioning, we can allow more space for unexpected insights to emerge.
We believe that by making a shift towards immersive observation, deeper questioning and ‘zooming out’ to look at the system as a whole, you can understand people better and, in doing so, enable more meaningful behaviour and culture change in your organisation.
Lucy Cox is a Business Psychologist at OE Cam LLP
