Stop talking about culture – deal with behaviours

Proper ding dong this week. I have a fabulously enjoyable back-and-forth with the brilliant Professor Rob Briner.

At one stage Rob says: ‘If you tell someone – whose favourite thing is organisational culture – and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea – they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen. To be fair I’d already acknowledged that I agreed on what he was saying that behaviours are more important than culture. Also I’m more than a culture fan, I promise.

But it’s a sign that it’s an outstanding discussion. Rob’s key point was that the idea of culture is vague and subjective. Rob says that culture is ‘a description. So if you want to change something, you don’t change the description of it, you change the cause of it.’ He says we should be specific about what we’re trying to change, not just wave our arms and mouth ‘culture’.

We discuss if an obsession with scale is the curse of modern business.
How to build effective organisations.
Why you should focus on being specific about culture.

It’s worth checking out some of Rob’s posts. For example: Does changing culture change behaviour?

Rob asked me to share the following bio:

Rob Briner is Professor of Organisational Psychology (Queen Mary University of London) and a Research Director at Corporate Research Forum (rob@crforum.co.uk). He has been promoting Evidence-Based Practice in Management, HRM and Work Psychology for almost three decades.

His recent research with Corporate Research Forum includes reports on Evidence-Based HR and how HR can more effectively drive organisational performance.

He also leads CRF’s Work Psychology Network which has produced reports summarizing the best available and most practical work psychology theory and evidence around a range of topics including motivation and performance, assessing potential and behaviour change in organisations.

He has also produced a series of short posts on LinkedIn where he explores various popular ideas about behaviour at work (e.g., learning styles, psychological safety, growth mindset, happy-productive worker) and asks about each: Is that really a thing? That question is answered through a combination of critical thinking and using reviews of scientific evidence.

We mention the podcast If Books Could Kill.

Rob asked me to share the following bio:

His recent research with Corporate Research Forum includes reports on Evidence-Based HR and how HR can more effectively drive organisational performance.

Transcription

Bruce

Rob, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could introduce who you are and what you do.

Rob Briner

Yeah, so my name is Rob Briner I am a professor of organizational psychology at Queen Mary University of London and I’m also director of research at the Corporate Research Forum. So I have a kind of partly academic job, but partly a job working with HR practitioners as well.

Bruce

No, not only have you been on the podcast before talking about evidence led work, you’re one of my favorite followers on LinkedIn and I’ve linked to you on the top of the show notes, largely because you feel to me, like you play the role of the kid sitting at the back of the classroom saying, I’m not sure there’s any proof for that. You’ve got like to me, you’ve got this compelling ability to ask us to

Rob Briner

thank you.

Bruce

check the facts of what we’ve been told. Is that how you see your role? Is that how you see your role as sort of the troublesome challenger?

Rob Briner

Yeah.

Well, I happened to be doing things and then people told me like you, well, that’s what you’re doing. And that’s what I realized I was doing. And I kind of thought, doesn’t everybody do that? And I realized after some time, no, everybody doesn’t do it. It reminds me a bit, it’s a bit like maybe the kid at the back of the class, or it reminds me of course of the emperor’s new clothes. So everyone’s saying, aren’t the emperor’s clothes beautiful? They’re lovely, aren’t they great? And the kid’s going, but the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

So I see a lot of naked emperors and I see a lot of people saying how beautiful the clothes are. And I suppose, yes, it’s not even necessarily consciously what I’m trying to do, but it turns out that’s what I am doing. And I say, think it’s because I hope, I generally hope everyone’s doing this, but as I say, apparently they are not.

Bruce

do the origin of your cynicism, what do you think the origin of your skepticism is?

Rob Briner

Yeah, well, I’m glad you get I’m definitely skeptical. I’m not cynical, because a lot of what I do is not driven by the idea of people don’t want to do good and want to help. think people do want to do good and want to help. So the skepticism is about saying what you’re often trying to do. I don’t think it’s necessarily kind of very useful. And I guess what it’s what it’s driven by in a way is a number of things. I think it’s things like waste. So I see businesses and organizations and individuals within them just wasting lot of time and effort and energy on things that

just aren’t very effective or maybe even quite harmful. And I find that sort of irritating. an irritating thing. Like the kid saying, the emperor’s got new clothes. The kid gets irritated because everyone’s saying they can see something the kid thinks isn’t there. So I think it comes a bit from the waste, but it also comes from, and this is why it’s not skeptical, sorry, not cynical, think it’s skeptical, is that think organizations and businesses could be doing so much better. And I’m sure you’d agree they could manage people, they could manage businesses, they could be much more effective.

if they got rid of some of this stuff that just isn’t helping very much. So it’s driven, I think, by that. think by A, it’s a waste. B, think organizations just could be doing so much better than they are.

Bruce

Yeah, so like, you know, as someone who comes across your posts pretty frequently, actually, I think because I sort of tend to like all of them. You’ve taken on some of the big topics. I just wonder if we could do a sort of a fun, a little run through some of the, not necessarily fads, but terms we’ve pushed back on. The first one is the idea of workplace engagement. I wonder if you could sort of talk about…

Rob Briner

Mmm.

Sure.

Bruce

Whether that’s a helpful term, I’ve seen you sort of talk about the challenge of trying to categorize that.

Rob Briner

Sure.

Yeah, so my engagement with engagement has actually been quite long term. So I think I first got interested, I think we’re probably past peak engagement now. But it’s kind of plateaued into very common practice that lots of organizations appeared to get involved with. And when it first appeared and got popular, I guess the issues I had with it were manyfold. But I think the most important ones are firstly, this whole issue, what on earth do we mean by engagement? And

I’ve had the experience, I’m sure many of us have, if you ask organisations, HR managers to tell you what they mean, they don’t really know or they give you multiple different definitions or the definitions they give you is nothing to do with the engagement survey that they use every six months, every year, every month or whatever. So people are not, people have multiple different definitions of the thing they’re measuring with it doesn’t seem to often coincide with what they think it is. So the first fundamental problem from an evidence-based practice perspective is

Can you define what it is you’re trying to affect or understand? And are you measuring it in a way that’s consistent with that? That’s one thing. The second issue is that broadly speaking, measures of engagement correlate really highly with standard, almost 100 year old now, measures of job satisfaction. So there’s an issue there that they’re not measuring anything new, but what it also means is we can look at some of job satisfaction literature if they overlap hugely, which they do seem to.

Is job satisfaction particularly relevant for job performance? And the answer is not really. So the search for the link between job satisfaction, job performance has been described for decades in the scientific literature as the holy grail, something really desirable, but it’s actually very hard to find in terms of the research we conduct. Now, of course, some people are probably thinking now, well, sure, someone’s really, really satisfied. Won’t they perform better than someone who isn’t? Well, no.

They might be too satisfied. They might be just complacent. They might love work and not be performing well. Similarly, someone who’s not satisfied may be doing a fantastically good job. So lot of assumptions there about it. And people often talk about extremes. If someone’s really unhappy, then they won’t perform well. Well, maybe. If someone’s really happy, then they will. Well, maybe. But that’s not what this is about. There isn’t actually, it doesn’t appear to be a very general or strong relationship between those two things. So in the case of engagement, going back to that, people are happily and merrily

Investing again going back to waste a lot of time and energy measuring engagement looking at scores pouring over spreadsheets where on a seven-point scale it’s gone from 3.5 to 3.7 Double thumbs up for that or it’s gone down from 4.6 to 4.3. Oh my god, what’s going wrong? These things on the whole probably don’t really matter much if at all for performance

Add to that most organizations that I certainly work with rarely check that their measures of engagement actually predict anything, anything important for the business. There’s an assumption they do, it is rarely checked. And again, if you look at the scientific evidence, I would say this is almost not what’s not a particularly strong link between those two things. Or to flip the whole thing another way, if your goal is to increase performance,

focusing on engagement is a very bizarre thing to do, given all the other things that might affect performance.

Bruce

Right, right.

So job performance might be one thing that you measure. What else would you measure if you were going to do something that’s slightly more meaningful, slightly more predictive?

Rob Briner

Well, I wouldn’t measure anything because I think this is getting one of the tendencies. Well, it depends what the issue is. I think you have to start with a business problem, start with an organisation issue. So I think underlying what you’re saying there, Bruce, is there is an assumption that we should measure stuff in employees. My question is, well, why? Why? Maybe you want to, maybe you need to, maybe it’s important, but it shouldn’t be a routine thing we do. We should think about what the organisation of business is trying to do, what we want to do.

Bruce

You wouldn’t measure anything.

Rob Briner

and then try and make sure we’re putting things in place that will help to do that. It may be somewhere along the line, a measurement thing comes up, but it also may be it’s not particularly important or relevant. So I think, again, I think behind your question is what’s the alternative to engagement? The answer is, well, there isn’t one because engagement’s not particularly useful. But what is useful is going back to say, what are we trying to do as a business? That’s a useful starting point.

Bruce

Got it. So if someone said, I’m going to set about trying to measure the retention of customers or the happiness of customers or the, the, the, whether people leave our business satisfied. Those things might be measurable things because they’re about business objectives, but they’re not necessarily going to be focused on what the employees are experiencing.

Rob Briner

That’s right. In general, customer attention could be a very important thing for a business. For another business, it might not be that important. For most businesses, it is. Similarly, if you get customers, that’s new customers, that’s also quite important. However, suppose 80 % of the new customers you get leave within six months, then that’s not really very good. So even measures you think are good and obviously good, it still is very contextual. What are you measuring? What is it telling you? Is it to business performance? So in some kinds of businesses where you may be losing customers,

it doesn’t matter if you regain those customers overnight. So again, it sort of depends.

Bruce

Got it, because a lot of businesses measure employee attrition, like the quit rate, and that seems like to be quite a helpful thing to measure from my perspective. Do you not see that as helpful?

Rob Briner

Yeah, yeah. Yeah,

I think it can be it. So again, comes back to the point who is quitting? How you know, in what kind of roles, how easy or cheap is it to replace them as a very vague indicator it might it’s worth it. It’s something you measure might tell you there’s something worth looking at. But again, it depends crucially, who is quitting, why they’re quitting.

if your level of quit is higher or lower than organizations you can really compare yourself to. So simply again, having a dashboard where these things go up and down is only vaguely kind of indicative. But in the case of quitting and attrition, yeah, there’s often a cost associated with that. But I would say it still depends on who is quitting. So if people in absolutely key roles are quitting, that’s disastrous. If it’s people who are quitting because maybe

You can replace them again fairly quickly or they’re quitting for other sorts of reasons. Maybe that’s fine. It’s just a normal thing. You have to cope with this as a business.

Bruce

Got it. I’m just so informed by the work of Zeynep Ton and Zeynep Ton, initially she started working in retail stores, but she says that the one thing that is ruinous for any sort of experience of work is if your organization is carrying a very high attrition rate, because it kills productivity and it ruins the experience of work for lot of people. But I hear your point, that might be…

Rob Briner

Yeah, well, been some meta analyses looking at quit rates, attrition rates in businesses and trying to connect that to business performance. And again, some studies show there might be a link. Other studies show there’s not a particular link. that maybe obviously is some context supported, but in other contexts, it doesn’t seem to matter very much. So I still think it depends. I think the idea

we can look at one thing or another thing saying that is an indicator of something great or terrible is probably not very wise unless you could link it to actual business performance of the things you’re trying to do.

Bruce

So we’ve put across through engagement. I’d love you to talk about psychological safety. And this is probably one of the things that I was, I saw a long post by you psychological safety. Is it even a thing was But psychological safety is sort of probably been the most cited idea in work. I’d love to know, you appear to have an objection with it. And

Rob Briner

I don’t have an objection with that. I love it. I love the idea of psychological safety. So it’s not about whether I like it or not. It’s totally irrelevant. The question is, is it useful and helpful concept for organizations and businesses? That’s the key. That’s what I’m asking. So not if it’s useful, whether I like it. So not whether I like it. So the yes, this the thing? So there is this thing, I think I’ve done about eight or nine now of these where I tried to look at the kind of logic and theory and evidence.

Bruce

Okay.

Rob Briner

behind quite popular concepts. And I did this as part of the work psychology network, which is set up at the corporate research forum, which is trying to look at theory and evidence from work psychology, and how it’s used or misused kind of in the workplace. And yes, I chose psychological safety, which is a very common, very popular thing. So the questions I would always ask about this is, can you define it? And again, you know, there’s a lot of question marks over actually how you define it. and one of the challenges here is that

is that people kind of instantly, they know what it means. They feel it’s very intuitive. Oh, yes, I get it. Well, do you do you actually get it? Or is it just? What is it you’re getting? Are we all getting different things? So because it’s intuitive and instant, that’s a big red flag for me, normally with most kind of constructs. So can you define it? Yes, to some extent. But again, the definitions are rather different. Secondly, can you measure it or assess it? And there are again,

questions over the validity, reliability of the measures, even some of the quite popular ones. And again, if you look at the actual items in those measures, it’s often quite hard to link it back to the definition. So you’re measuring something potentially, but what is it? Is it little and clear? So a bit hard to define sometimes, a bit hard to measure sometimes as the debates about the measures. But the key thing is, is does it predict anything important? So you can measure this stuff back to engagement. There’s no point in measuring it unless it’s telling you something important.

The challenge here scientifically is that just are not many longitudinal studies looking at where they’ve engaged from say, sorry, psychological safety goes up, whether it has these outcomes or whether psychological safety goes down, it has other kinds of outcomes. So we just don’t know too much about it. And I think psychological safety is an example of maybe, you know, if I wrote the same thing in five years time, 10 years time, it might look very different. So I’m just talking about what it appears we know at the moment, what seems to case at the moment.

So is idea, is it cause and effecting? And the trickiest thing of all about all this is can you actually intervene? Can you do something to increase psychological safety? And again, there’s very little data and evidence about that. So even if it does link longitudinally to something important, we don’t know much yet about how you can increase it. The challenge, therefore, I think, like a lot of these concepts in the Is This a Thing series, is people are seeing an idea

like Cycle.js has used it and they grab it and say, can we use this thing to help us? And again, my question was, but what are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? Not is there a thing out there you could use that might be useful? It seems to be working completely backwards. What are you trying to achieve? And lots of these concepts like culture change or engagement or attitude, they’re starting with a thing and then trying to work out if it’s useful instead of saying, do we actually understand what the issue is? So it may be in some in some context.

Psychological safety is very important and it links to important things and you can actually do something to improve such as psychological safety. That may be the case, but it also may be the case to a huge number of other contexts where it just doesn’t really matter very much. But you have to start off with what is it you’re trying to do. Psychological safety may be the intervention you want. It may not be. It may be something totally different depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

Bruce

you

But you’ve got a leader here and a leader has just done

sort of an internal piece of work and maybe it says we’ve been tolerating bad behavior inside the organization or that, you know, some sort of bullying or something has come to light. And the leader says, look, our objective for the next year is we want to build a psychologically safe environment. We want to have a place where people can speak up. We’re not going to have those domineering characters displacing things. All that being said, then what would you advise them to do? That’s their goal. It’s quite a…

Rob Briner

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Bruce

It’s quite a noble objective they’re trying to do. You you’ve said, look, want you to know what, I want you to tell me what you’re trying to do. So how would you achieve that goal? Even if the concept is a difficult one to measure, what actions would you take in that situation?

Rob Briner

Hmm.

Well, the first, I think is to understand the specific behavior you’re talking about. So you sort of you said people are bullying people unpleasant. There’s been some incidents and people feel like they can’t speak up while they related or they’re not related. People can be horrible and mean, but people still speak up. So they’re not the same thing. One doesn’t necessarily affect the other, but they might. If, for example, you’re interested in specific behaviors. So again, we did a report on behavior change in organizations.

The first thing you need to focus on and understand is what are the specific behaviours you’re trying to change, number one. And secondly, what’s the incidence and frequency of those sorts of behaviours? And typically, if you look across lots of organisations, it may be psychological safety they turn to, but often what they turn to is culture. So time and time and time again, you see various reports, for example, from police services, from the Grenfell Tower disaster in the UK, from other kind of incidents people see to your point.

bullying, what this is bullying and negative behaviour and they say we must change the culture. And typically, I don’t think that works at all. It’s not clear what people are trying to change. So the starting point is if you think there are some behaviours which you want to change, fairly obviously, you’ve got to understand what those behaviours are, the incidents, the frequency, where they’re happening. That’s the most important starting point.

Bruce

So I was going to come on to like, if we’ve gone through engagement, we’ve gone through some kind of cross safety. was going to ask you about culture next. And, know, I’ve seen you write a lot talking about sort of, with a culture with talking about the climate, whether we’re talking about behavior, could you break down your frustration then when people talk about culture and how, how would you try to, how would you tackle something as holistic then as the idea of culture as a sort of far reaching as the culture in the NHS or the culture in the police.

Rob Briner

Well,

is you just I think you just identify one of the key problems all encompassing a holistic. It’s everything, isn’t it? It’s everything. And you can’t, you know, tackle something that’s everything. It’s just impossible. You can’t do it. It can’t be done. So that gives you an important clue about some of the I think the main issues I think more of the culture culture change idea.

Bruce

But really,

that true? you know, I get it and I get sort of, no, I get that you’re sort of the contrarian voice who’s pushing back, but let’s look specifically at some of the issues in the police. An issue where WhatsApp groups were openly sort of undermining the authority. There was a sense of they were tolerating things that…

Rob Briner

Yeah, of course it’s true. Of course. It’s like saying I want…

Bruce

There was almost like a counterculture within the organization, just tolerating bad behavior. Or in the NHS one recently, the Nottingham report, senior leaders for whatever reason, weren’t participating in the exploration of wrongdoing. I get what you could say. I get you can say, well, this is not just a campaign. This is not just posters on the wall. It’s not just one person standing up. But I just don’t fully buy that you cannot re-engineer an organization to eliminate certain behaviors. And I get it. get, you know, standing up and saying, this is difficult or beware of simple answers to complicated problems. But I just don’t fully buy the being cynical about things gives you a pass and that sort of is the, is the solution. Go on. Yes. Yeah. Specifically, you seem to be suggesting that you cannot change.

Rob Briner

So, can you repeat that question, Bruce? What’s the question?

No, I’m suggesting, I’m suggesting, no, I’m suggesting the absolute opposite. I’m suggesting you absolutely can change. Okay, it’s really important, Bruce. I’m not saying you can’t change behavior. There’s hundreds of years of theory and evidence and data that you absolutely can. So I have no doubt about that. So let’s just dispel that. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, culture is not a good route to doing that. It’s not a good way to do it. In fact, it’s very poor way to do it.

Bruce

the culture within the police.

Go on. Go.

Right.

Rob Briner

So I agree with the objective. Let’s say we have, and it doesn’t happen much, but let’s say we have got good measures and good assessments of these behaviors. I totally agree. They are things we want to change. My question is, what is the most effective way changing them? And from my understanding is culture is pretty useless. And I’ll tell you some of the reasons why. But you actually mentioned one of the problems that we talked about, of counterculture. One thing is, people assume organizations have a culture. That is highly contentious.

because it’s making assumptions. We feel we can see the culture. You go to a new workplace, you go to a new office, you say, can feel this culture. The amount of data you have about that organization is minuscule. So you’re not in a position to judge it. But I guess as know, cognitive biases, we want to see patterns and things that are consistent in the world around everything kind of make may help us make sense of it. It’s kind of a bit ridiculous. It’s a bit like it’s going to the north of England.

saying, oh, I went to Sheffield where I lived for six years. Oh, everybody was really friendly to really friendly culture. It’s just nuts. Where you know, how can you possibly have enough data to make that kind of judgment? Are the norms of behavior? Sure. But then like your example, the WhatsApp group in the metropolitan place, the question is, how many people doing that? Is it shared? Is it not shared? What actually is the problem with that? So the first issue around cultures, is there a culture?

And people never really ask that question. They just assume or you just can feel it. It’s just a vibe. You can kind of sense it. No, you can’t.

Bruce

Is there not, you know, your whole point quite frequently is, you know, demanding a specificity of definition, saying, look, rather than sort of being non-specific about what you mean, but could we not define culture as the norms of behavior inside an organization?

Rob Briner

You can but then but then you’re not trying to absolutely that’s exactly what I’ll go on to. That’s exactly my next point. So the next point is, is cultural often defined as the way we do things around here, right? What’s the way we do things around here? It’s behavior. So you get into the bizarre situation we say let’s change the way we do things around here to change the way we do things around here. You know, it’s entirely circular, you want to get away from the way we do things around here to what the specific behaviors you’re trying to change.

Because again, the way we do things around here is assuming there’s a series of norms, there may be, but there also may not be. Let’s go back to the Metropolitan Police. I don’t think the way that group was behaving, as you yourself pointed out, was a norm in the whole of the Metropolitan Police. It was some groups of people, as far as we can tell. So again, it isn’t the way we do things, right? It’s the way some people do things around here, the way other people do So there’s different sort of things going on. So it’s very, very circular. And typically,

culture actually describes behavior, it doesn’t cause it. So when people talk about I can feel the culture, can see behavioral norms, behavioral norms are description of behavior, they’re not necessarily the cause of it. And even as you say, and I agree with you, norms of behavior might affect other people’s behavior, or when you observe those norms, that is absolutely the case. But the key thing is you still then need to change the behavior.

So if there’s a group of people behaving in a way, and maybe there is a norm for that behavior, what you need to do still, let’s just put culture out of the picture and say, we still need to change those behaviors. Then that’s real question is, how do we change behavior? And as I say, there’s hundreds of years of research into this in many different kinds of fields, from psychology, from health psychology, to social policy, which is almost never used in organizations.

Bruce

So when I use the definition of culture, which is the behavior inside an organization, whether encouraged, rewarded or tolerated, I guess what you’re saying is it’s too oblique to talk about that for that. And actually, if we want to change the behavior inside an organization that specifically target the behaviors inside the organization. Is that what you’re saying?

Rob Briner

Yeah. And your point about the specific behaviors that are rewarded or tolerated. Well, hold on a minute. It’s ambiguous. know, there’s people behaving badly, getting rewarded. There’s other people behaving well, getting rewarded. It’s not that straightforward. Organizations are quite complicated, particularly larger ones. There’s different things going on. So think there’s some rewards going on here, there’s some punishments going on here, there’s other things going on there. But it’s not this monolithic single thing.

I think it’s absolutely not. There might be subcultures and other kinds of things, as you said, but it’s not a single thing. exactly the point is you need to target the behavior. If you look sort of, I’ll give you an example I did in the behavior change report. If you wanted, say, your mate or your mate said, I want to go to the, I want to get fit, I want to go to the gym more often. You want to say, well, what we need to do, we need to change the culture about your attitudes about the way you think about going to the gym. We need to really work on that and change.

the way you think about it, your norms, what you think. No, you just help them go to the gym. You say, let’s go to the gym, I’ll come with you tomorrow. We’ll go at two o’clock, we’ll just go for half an hour. We’ll do these kinds of things. I’ll come with you and then we’ll do it together at end of the week and then we’ll do it together in the week. And through that process of doing it, it wouldn’t necessarily work, but it’s more likely your mate will learn that going to the gym is not a bad thing. They will change their attitudes towards it. And again, typically,

Attitudes are often regarded as a consequence of behavior within psychology, whereas often organizations’ attitudes are seen as a cause of behavior, particularly they’re not, it’s usually kind of the other way around. So to change behavior, you actually have to change the environment, and it is a bit to do with rewards and incentives, those sorts of things as well. And it might be also role modeling. It might be, there’s lots of techniques you can use to try an shape behavior, particularly, but specifically it’s around changing the context of the environment.

of those behaviors and focusing crucially on the actual behaviors you want to change. And my feeling often with culture change, when it comes to bad behaviors, is people say this because it’s a way of kicking the can down the road. So let’s say you’re aware of bullying behavior, other kinds of things. You know, I think just saying it’s the culture, it’s a way of not really tackling it. It’s a way of kind of avoiding it and creating a lot of kind of confusion around it and not saying, no, come on, what are these behaviors? Who is engaged in these behaviors?

Where are they going to be? Why are they? Is because we selected people badly? It may be nothing to do with the culture. It may be your selection process, maybe like in the Metropolitan Police, is absolutely awful and you keep recruiting people who just going to behave like that. So it’s not the culture, it’s the way you selected people. But the key thing always is to start with specific behaviours.

Bruce

So I wonder if notwithstanding your frustration with the term culture, it almost feels like the way that people describe culture is what you perceive as the consequence, the outcome of behaviors. So for example, quite we witness culture when

when something has been tolerated, bad behavior has been tolerated by a person. And so we might perceive, you know, there’s a perception of culture, whether it exists or not. There’s a perception of culture and people might go, there’s a toxic culture around here because those managers are allowed to do this or that person’s allowed to do this. Got it, got it. And so it’s the attitudinal outcome of behavior and the sort of consequence of that to some extent, in as much as it exists, you would say.

Rob Briner

Yeah. So if we observe behaviors and we think we observe a pattern, which again is still highly questionable, but let’s say we think we observe a pattern, then yeah, we tend to sort of call that culture. That’s, there’s a culture of this in this organization, there’s a culture of this in this bit of the organization. Yeah, it’s a description. So if you want to change something, you don’t change the description of it, you change the cause of it. And that’s where

All this other stuff coming. And a good example of some of these, we move away from the negative behaviors towards sort of more positive behaviors, quite often people are asked to be proactive. Come on, Bruce, you’ve got to be more proactive. You’ve got to collaborate more. These are meaningless terms. These are not behaviors. These are just not behaviors. What do you mean by collaborative? What do you mean by proactive? Give me the behaviors. Tell me what they are. Observe them. Model them.

You know, it doesn’t mean anything. you might get, you know, things like 360 appraisals where people got these vague terms in and then no one knows what they mean or be innovative. What on earth does that mean? So again, if you want someone to say to your mate who you’re trying to encourage, come on, you’ve got to be get fit. It’s utterly meaningless. If you say, no, let’s go to the gym on Tuesday. Bang, at two o’clock. Bang, you’ve got something. Telling someone they’ve got to get fit is pointless.

Bruce

Now we’ve sort of taken on that you’ve written about engagement. it a thing? Psychological safety? it a thing? Culture? Is it a thing? What other topics have you taken on there? I’ve seen you at one point took on wellness apps, but what else have you sort of said? Is this a real thing about?

Rob Briner

Yeah, and I would say that in these things, I’m not debunking them. I like to give my role. Well, actually, someone told me I’m not a thought leader, I’m a thought provoker. And to go back to the beginning, why? Because I think some of these concepts are not necessarily helpful and people need to think a bit more about where they are or not. I’m not trying to debunk. And also because if you debunk, people don’t like it. So if you tell someone, bruised it, their favorite thing is organizational culture, and then you tell them it’s not a very useful idea.

They don’t like it. So I’m not trying to do that in those columns. I’m trying to sort of say, let’s think about it a bit more. So other ones we talked about, some of them are more obvious. And I guess they’re probably are a little more like debunking, just because the evidence is so clear, things like MBTI, or personality type indicators, and the issues around that, they’re not really valid psychometric measures. However, in that one, I also pointed out that it’s maybe other kinds of validity that people just like it. So people just like using them.

So although I may be coming to it and a psychometrician might be coming to it, is this a good measure of personality? Actually, the users don’t really care. And that’s kind of okay, as long as they’re aware they’re not measuring personality. There’s still questions around the ethics of that. But anyway, that’s another one. Learning styles is another fairly kind of straightforward one where there’s a reasonable amount of evidence now. And it doesn’t seem, that people have learning styles to begin with. They have preferences, sure. But if you match someone’s preferred

way of learning with the way to live the learning, it doesn’t seem to make any difference. That’s kind of that’s got another one. Another classic one is 70 % of change initiatives fail. That’s the very common one. Another one is growth mindset. So the idea you can split, you know, you can measure people’s belief in how much they can change and learn. And this again will predict outcomes. And this is really good example. So growth mindset is used really widely in schools, for example.

Rob Briner

So anyone listening to this who’s got probably kids in primary school, high school, would probably have come across their kid coming home with something about growth mindset. And what’s interesting about that is A, you’ve got the problem of defining it, it’s all very clear. B, you’ve got the issue of measuring it, whether it’s measured or valid. And the third thing is some of the biggest kind of meta-analyses that pulled together lots of studies in the educational setting seem to suggest reasonably clearly that it doesn’t actually predict much at all about whether people

will learn and progress and attain more. So therefore, why have interventions to try and increase this thing called growth mindset, even when it’s quite difficult to do if as a consequence, it won’t actually help attainment very much. So again, it’s another really good example. I growth mindset sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? We all want to have a growth mindset. We don’t like a fixed mindset. Let’s help everyone with growth mindset. The problem is maybe it doesn’t really matter very much for attainment. So we can try and measure these things, but it’s just

pretty much a waste of time. And actually going back to the school example, there are probably other things you can do to really help kids learn that is probably not one of them.

Bruce

Yeah, mean, you’re speaking my language there. I just wonder though, I mean, one of my favourite podcasts is there’s a podcast which sort of disabuses us of all of these things about growth mindset. It’s called If Books Could Kill and it’s sort of like a quite, yeah, it’s quite a gently caustic dismantlement of all of these popular things. And it’s brilliant because, you know, especially sort of taking on books that are, I think,

Rob Briner

Yeah, I he’s speaking my language. I just wanted to…

Bruce

provable like grit by Angela Duckworth. It goes into the, really sort of savages the pseudo science behind them, which in its own way serves to discredit the whole field of psychology when people are sort putting these things out there. And it extends beyond that. The Jonathan Haidt book is probably one of the most influential books in the last couple of years. The books about anxious generation and most of the science in that is disprovable. it sort of, it does damage the field. But I guess the question then might be in that perspective where so much evidence that is presented to us turns out to be untrue. If someone who finds themselves listening to this podcast with the goal of trying to improve their work, trying to make their work better, how would you help them orientate themselves? What would you say to them as a manager, a leader listening to this thinking, I want to make my make my own work better. I’ve heard that engagement isn’t good. I’ve heard that we shouldn’t just be doing these sort of pulse things. Psychological safety, I’ve now put a sort of question mark through it. Growth mindset, I’ve decided not for this year. What would you advise them with a sort of a slightly more positive perspective that they would set about trying to use to sculpt their own workplace?

Rob Briner

Hmm. Well, I think first, I sort of say I don’t think it is negative to say maybe that’s not very useful. It can sound negative in an age where everyone has to be very positive about it. But actually, it’s incredibly positive thing to say to say to someone that thing you’re doing probably isn’t really helping. Maybe you should think about it in other way. That’s fantastically positive. You know, I know it doesn’t sound like that. And it’s framed because of this positivity bias we have that it isn’t. But what I suggest is it’s a bit like if someone is surrounded by a box of tools and they said, well, you know, I tried a hammer, that wasn’t really good. Then I tried a pair of pliers, that wasn’t great. I used a screwdriver. Yeah, mate, you know. What you say to them? What you say? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? Forget the tools. Just put them aside. Put all these solutions, grit, cyclical safety, whatever. Put them to one side and think about what you’re trying to do.

And I think that is the key starting point. And in case of organizations and businesses, what is the business trying to do? What is the business trying to achieve? And how can you as a manager help the business achieve those things? So firstly, you need to know what the business’s objectives are. Don’t just assume, find out what they are, or hopefully someone would have cascaded those to you. Think about your role and think what can I do to help the organization achieve those objectives? And be very clear about understanding what the issues are before you do anything.

around thinking about solution. So I would say the key thing is to not get distracted by all these shiny objects and think, you know, come on, let’s go back to basic. And the problem I think that is it sounds really boring. That’s the problem. It’s not exciting. It is actually, you know, going back a sense to what are the issues trying to deal with. It’s not about finding a best selling book. It’s all about having an inspirational TED talk person telling you about a great thing.

wonderfully inspiring stories. Sorry, it’s a bit dull, but it’s about trying to do what works, given what you’re trying to do. So I think that’s a really important starting point. I’ll say all those things you mentioned, I think typically are just distractions from helping the organisation be successful. There may be circumstances, absolutely, where you go through that whole process, you identify, you understand the issues really well, you understand what you’re trying to do.

You look at a range of options and solutions. You look in this toolbox and it may turn out. Yeah, you do actually need a screwdriver, but it may also turn out. You don’t need any of those things. You need something completely different. So again, it’s about saying what is the issue? And then once I’ve understood what can we do about it?

Bruce

Is the villain here scale? Because what

you sort of described to me is that if I had a manager running a team of six people, 10 people, their issue is going to have a specificity to it. It’s going to be involved in, it’s going to be very precise. And the problem is when organizations scale to 100 to 200, to a thousand, to 10,000, these an attempt to try to bring a consistent holistic solution. And that’s where…

Rob Briner

Yeah.

Bruce

conversation of scale come in. And you’re exactly right. You know, when you attempt to measure culture across a thousand people, there’s no consistency about what people perceive the values to be, what people perceive the incentives to be. So it’s to some extent, if the actual enemy here is scale, that you’re trying to say the problem for our whole organization is screwdrivers, when actually there’s going to be someone who needs a score, someone who needs a… Actually, the solution should be potentially

Rob Briner

yeah.

Bruce

gifting some degree of agency to everyone in every situation and removing this sort of disempowered scale and trying to allow people to use their own initiative in their… Is that what we should be thinking about then?

Rob Briner

Yes, I think,

yeah, I haven’t actually thought about that before, but I think that’s actually that is one of the main barriers here in that within a small organization, small team, people can see what’s going on, often much better. And there’s a lot more nuance. Whereas if you scale up, you kind of lose that a bit. So I think that’s absolutely right. And I think the problem is that people try to impose from the top a kind of solution to problems they don’t even know exist or maybe exist a little bit in some context within the business,

which just is going to be irrelevant and not work even harmful to the rest of the business. So certainly most of the work I’m doing at the moment is very much exactly to your point saying be specific. So it’s a bit like saying a business leader might say we want everyone to be proactive and entrepreneurial. No, you don’t know. A you can’t even define it. You can’t say what the behaviors are. Maybe why does everyone need to do that? Maybe some people do. So to your point, it’s a really good example of where you’ve got scale.

some leader perceives we’re not entrepreneurial proactive enough. What they mean is I have seen some people in some settings, in some parts of the business where if they behaved in that way, I think it would really help. Fantastic. Do that. Don’t do this. We all need to be entrepreneurial and proactive. Because most people are going to scratch their heads and say, just don’t know what you’re talking about. Why is that relevant to me? Quite rightly. So maybe that is an issue. about trying to sort of to…

Imposed from the top which is a scaling up solution that might be really helpful here to everyone and everything I think that is a major barrier

Bruce

Yeah, quite often when you see some of the challenges that organizations have, think, firstly, I think of the United Airlines flight 3411, which was a few years ago, flying out Chicago to Louisville on a Sunday night. And it hit the news, it hit people’s social media feeds because one passenger was dragged off the flight, ended up suing the airline, made $140 million in a settlement. But the issue when they did a post-mortem run on it was that there was not a single person on the flight who was able to increase the amount of incentive to get passengers off. so because they had no one who was empowered to make a decision, there was no agency there at all. They dragged someone off with catastrophic consequences. And quite often that’s sort of a parable for modern work for a lot of people. They’re just not allowed to make decisions. And so you’ve got this sort of environment where

Rob Briner

Yeah.

Bruce

someone comes along and says, the new culture is dot dot dot. And it’s a vague and irrelevant term for you, but you’re trying to do anything at scale, ends up producing an answer to something that isn’t there. I wonder if that’s it for me.

Rob Briner

That’s really good. And also, you we want employees to think critically, we want managers to think critically. And it’s, you know, a great example of this is so called resistance to change. And most times I’ve seen this, my understanding of it is most times, people have resistance to change is because they have genuine, and if you like, well founded objections to what is being proposed, they have a view about why it not work. Organizations may say that as a negative thing. Oh,

don’t resist change, but actually they can see what might be going wrong with this. And I think often it is that level of the individual or small team where you want people to push back to think critically, to wonder whether what they’re being told to do is useful or not. If people just, as it were, follow orders and just do, we’re now having this culture, then it’s very difficult, I think, for a business to apply intervention solutions. They’re actually going to be effective. And I think at

Yeah, think a lot of people feel they can’t object to things. think going back to psychological safety, I don’t even think it’s about that. It’s just about, we just have to do this because, you know, head office has said we have to do it. So we just need to get on with it. And it’s back to your point about rewards is often people are rewarded for getting stuff done. And this is one of the most depressing things I think around organizations in general, this whole concept of deliverables and targets and outputs. All that sounds marvelous.

But the problem is if you reward people for that, that’s what people will tend to do rather than say, I don’t agree with this deliverable, I don’t agree with this output, I don’t think it’s going to work, whatever the objection might be, they just always have to do it get on with it. So I think that’s, some of the stuff I’ve done, I think I’m trying to get away from the idea of outputs and targets and that sense of performance more towards trying to facilitate and encourage behaviors that will lead to those outcomes you want, because by the time you get the outcome, it’s too late.

It’s a bit like, I don’t like sports analogies, but it’s a bit like a sports analogy where you might say, my team performed really well, but they lost. And what you mean by that is they were engaging in all the kinds of behaviors that should have led to success and the outcome you wanted, but it didn’t quite work. And I think we should be focusing much more on helping and supporting people engage in the behaviors that you think will lead to the outcomes, rather than just looking at the outcomes themselves as a kind of guide to how well people are performing. Because often it’s not sales team,

that gets terrible leads, the sales team is trying to sell a duff product. You know, judging them by their performance by the outcome just doesn’t make any sense.

Bruce

I wonder if you could help us. There’s a couple more things I want to ask. And one of them is sort of helping people navigate their way out of this. So, you’ve sort of, you’ve marked our card to say that beware of some of these things that sort of seem simplistic and maybe sort of thing that you see marketed to you in a book. I guess the new and emergent danger is that someone who maybe in the past had found themselves picking up a book thinking, I’m going to try and apply this to my team.

Bruce

Now they might find themselves going to AI and saying, how could I solve this? And the AI gives them a pretty articulate description of what they need to set about doing, presumably drawing on the same flawed evidence that we’ve had before. So what would you do? So someone’s taken your advice. They’ve decided specifically what they’re trying to do. They’ve specifically sort of sat there and define the problem, design the challenge, they’ve got a small team. What’s their next step from your perspective? Because the challenge is quite often that people now might have brought some precision to the problem they’re facing. They don’t know where to go next. Where do I go next? What would you advise them? What would they do next?

Rob Briner

Yeah, so I think that’s a really good question. think, I think, so understand the issue is one thing, and then thinking what can we do about it’s the second stage of this evidence based process. And again, you know, I would really encourage people to have more confidence in their ability to sort of work it out for themselves. So what I mean by that is, is quite often my senses, people do have a good understanding of what might be effective.

But what it means is, rather than just saying, I need a solution, most of the problems we’re dealing with, there aren’t solutions. Solution implies there’s a thing you can do that will fix it. There isn’t. There’s multiple things you can do. We’re not solving a maths problem or an algebra thing. There isn’t an answer. There are no answers. There are lots of things we can do. Each of them will have costs and benefits and maybe have no effect. So I think that second stage of what can we do about it is thinking, what are the different options we could have?

We maybe could do this, go back to the metropolitan police example. It could be a selection problem. Okay, that’s one potential solution. It could be a leadership problem. Maybe that’s another thing. It could be a blah blah blah, whatever it is. Look at those potential interventions and actually try and understand which ones do you think are more likely to work and actually put them, actually compare them. So again, a really important thing in general decision making processes is never just looking at one intervention saying, is that going to work? That’s a big mistake.

You always have to have at least three or four different things you think you could do and start to actually compare them. And it may turn out the two are equally, equally out. And that’s fine, toss a coin. But I mean, think that second stage is really thinking what are the different things we could do. I would say generally speaking, when you’re thinking about solutions, looking at a bestselling book is, can’t, I think it’s highly unlikely that’s where the solution’s going to.

It may be, absolutely, but it seems to very unlikely that one idea that someone has promoted the hell out of often using dodgy data or exaggerated data or partial data. I just can’t see that. It could it could be, but it seems quite unlike as opposed to think about other kinds of intervention, other kinds of solutions. So I would really encourage people to sort of think it through for themselves. And back to the beginning, where I’m sort of being skeptical or cynical, you know, in that sense, I’m not at all. So I think people can work out more stuff themselves, but they go over time in all kinds of ways and for a better word, they’re being slightly disempowered to feel they can do that. They’re being a bit beaten down by look, this is what Google’s doing. This is what this bestselling book does. I saw this glue. have to do those things because they’re the smart people and I should do no, they’re not. You’re the smart person. You can work it out, but it does require critical thinking and it does require using data and evidence of different kinds.

Bruce

I’ve got it. So it’s sort of advocating for trusting yourself, building experience, sort of learning on the job, pushing back against the tick tockification of advice, really, you know, like if you see something in the sort of 90, if a 90 minute clip, it’s probably about 90 seconds, if you see something in a 90 second clip, almost by its very nature, it’s too simplistic to be meaningful to be universally applied.

Rob Briner

yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think so. As mentioned before, you instantly get an idea, which is supposed to be very complicated, almost certainly that idea is wrong, because it went straight into some cognitive bias and made you feel good and oh, I understand that’s fantastic. And if you liked it, so what if you liked it? We’re not trying to do things we like, we’re trying to do things we think are effective and work and will help.

I think your other point is it’s a bit about reflecting, you write a lot of it’s about experience and craft, but it’s also particularly around what evidence-based approach, about being explicit, sharing and collectively thinking about the what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, sharing that evidence and that data you’re using to both understand the problem and think about what you can do about it. think that sharing of it is also a really important part of the learning as well.

Bruce

Rob, you’ve mentioned the corporate research forum. Quite often when you post stuff, you put links to stuff that you’re working on or you seem to be, from the outside, seem to sort of building a movement of people who are interested in this stuff. I wonder if you could give us a pointer of where people might go next. What would people, if they’re interested in your perspective here, what would people find themselves doing next?

Rob Briner

Sure. So if you go on the corporate research forum website itself, you can get access to some reports, including ones about things like changing employee attitudes, whether they’re changing or not, things about evidence based HR, things about how HR can drive organisational performance, there’s other kinds of reports there, but also there’s a sort of subsection of that website, there’s something called the work psychology network, which we set up a couple of years ago. And if you go on there,

You’ll find access to quite a lot of reports and overviews and videos. I can give you some of the show notes as well, where you can actually look at some of the work psychology theory and evidence report together to try and help managers and HR people. And this is based on, you and this links to what you’re interested in as well. know Bruce, but it’s based on the assumption that often what HR and managers are trying to do is they’re trying to shape behavior. They’re trying to shape employee behavior, whether it’s through training or incentives.

or punishments or rewards or the way you select people, you’re trying to shape behaviour. The challenge is most, as far as I can see, most managers and HR people have almost no access to the underlying scientific theory and evidence around how you change behaviour at work. So that’s why we set up the Work Psychology Network, is to write reports that are very accessible, but still critical of the work psychology stuff, but also give people frameworks they can use,

thinking about these things a bit more because the problem is now it’s really hard to get access to that. So what you do you get access to the bestselling book or the 90 second TikTok. You get access to the stuff it’s easy to get access to. Getting hold of scientific evidence, as you know, is quite tricky. So what we try to do these reports is kind of summarise it in a way that’s quite kind of accessible. So I think there’s those two things as a general website and also there’s the work psychology network, which is trying to really give people say sort of educate them,

train them into the underlying science that should underlie what you’re doing when you’re trying to change behavior at work.

Bruce

Love it. Well, I’ve linked to those in the show notes. I’m so immensely grateful. think, you know, there’s a lot of people who, if people have listened this far, then they’ve probably had something that they took to believe challenged and, you know, it’s forced a reappraisal for them. And I think that’s almost certainly the most positive thing that they can do that, you know, sometimes shaking yourself out of a really

a simple belief that you’ve had is a good way to provoke yourself and to of actually expand your understanding.

Rob Briner

I think it is and I think it’s also really crucial that people want to feel that idea they loved, is it maybe very useful? The key thing is not to just jump on the next popular idea that seems really appealing. It’s always to say, I’m going to get onto a better diet of theory and evidence and knowledge rather than a lot of this stuff, probably isn’t very sound because the temptation people often say to me, what’s the alternative to engagement? What’s the alternative to cycle safety? Well, there isn’t one. It doesn’t work like that.

It’s not about that. It’s about saying, what’s the issue and what can you do about it? So yeah, absolutely questioning some of these ideas you hold to be true is always important, but equally, it’s not jumping onto the next thing you think is cool.

Bruce

I love it. I loved that discussion. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking so long out of your day to do it. I’m immensely grateful.

Rob Briner

Thank you.