WARNING : for any seeking recovery or any info on beneficial mental health practices , I do not have any formal education on this subject and in fact have no college education at all .
The word ALL makes this question difficult. It presents the black swan fallacy, meaning that you would need perfect and complete knowledge of EVERY swan in the world and every swan that ever existed or will exist to say with total accuracy that black swans do not EVER exist.
People used to believe that no swans were black in many parts of the world but eventually black swans were found and so the idea that swans are never black was debunked.
You would need a perfect understanding of who is and is not a narcissist and who is a cult leader to answer this question.
The literature on cults makes it clear that cult leaders need the traits of dishonesty and willingness to harm cult members through abuse and exploitation to be cult leaders. I believe Margaret Singer in her book Cults In Our Midst and Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism concur on this point.
But the literature on human predators has no consistent set definitions for the various types. One expert will define terms like narcissist, sociopath, malignant narcissist, and psychopath one way while another will define them in a contradictory way.
There is not a set scientific evidence based definition system, so it is difficult to be accurate.
I think the way that Martha Stout defines these terms in The Sociopath Next Door is helpful personally.
The crux of this point is a person defined as a sociopath and not a narcissist could in theory be a cult leader.
In a recent strategy meeting we attended with the leaders of a Fortune-500 company, the word “culture” came up 27 times in 90 minutes. Business leadersbelievea strong organizational culture is critical to success, yet culture tends to feel like some magic force that few know how to control. So most executives manage it according to their intuition.
We’ve found that answering three questions can help transform culture from a mystery to a science: 1) How does culture drive performance? 2) What is culture worth? 3) What processes in an organization affect culture? In this article, we address each of these to show how leaders can engineer high-performing organizational cultures — and measure their impact on the bottom line.
How does culture drive performance?
After surveying over 20,000 workers around the world, analyzing 50 major companies, conducting scores of experiments, and scouring the landscape of academic research in a range of disciplines, we came to one conclusion:Why we work determines how well we work.
It takes a careful mix of mission, management, and culture.
One2013 studyillustrates this well. Researchers asked almost 2,500 workers to analyze medical images for “objects of interest.” They told one group that the work would be discarded; they told the other group that the objects were “cancerous tumor cells.” The workers were paid per image analyzed. The latter group, or “meaning” group, spent more time on each image, earning 10% less, on average, than the “discard” group — but the quality of their work was higher. Reshaping the workers’ motive resulted in better performance.
Academics have studied why people work for nearly a century, but a major breakthrough happened in the 1980s when professors Edward Deci and Richard Ryan from the University of Rochester distinguished thesix main reasonswhy people work. We built on their framework and adapted it for the modern workplace. The six main reasons people work are: play, purpose, potential, emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia.
The work of many researchers has found that the first three motives tend to increase performance, while the latter three hurt it. We found that the companies most famous for their cultures — from Southwest Airlines to Trader Joe’s — maximize thegood motives, while minimizing the bad ones.
Playis when you are motivated by the work itself. You work because you enjoy it. A teacher at play enjoys the core activities of teaching — creating lesson plans, grading tests, or problem solving how to break through to each student. Play is our learning instinct, and it’s tied to curiosity, experimentation, and exploring challenging problems.
Purposeis when the direct outcome of the work fits your identity. You work because you value the work’s impact. For example, a teacher driven by purpose values or identifies with the goal of educating and empowering children.
Potentialis when the outcome of the work benefits your identity. In other words, the work enhances your potential. For example, a teacher with potential may be doing his job because he eventually wants to become a principal.
Since these three motives are directly connected to the work itself in some way, you can think of them as direct motives. They will improve performance to different degrees. Indirect motives, however, tend to reduce it.
Emotional pressureis when you work because some external force threatens your identity. If you’ve ever used guilt to compel a loved one to do something, you’ve inflicted emotional pressure. Fear, peer pressure, and shame are all forms of emotional pressure. When you do something to avoid disappointing yourself or others, you’re acting on emotional pressure. This motive is completely separate from the work itself.
Economicpressure is when an external force makes you work. You work to gain a reward or avoid a punishment. Now the motive is not only separate from the work itself, it is also separate from your identity.
Finally,inertiais when the motive is so far removed from the work and your identity that you can’t identify why you’re working. When you ask someone why they are doing their work, and they say, “I don’t know; I’m doing it because I did it yesterday and the day before,” that signalsinertia. It is still a motive because you’re still actually doing the activity, you just can’t explain why.
These indirect motives tend to reduce performance because you’re no longer thinking about the work—you’re thinking about the disappointment, or the reward, or why you’re bothering to do it at all. You’re distracted, and you might not even care about the work itself or the quality of the outcome.
We found that a high-performing culture maximizes the play, purpose, and potential felt by its people, and minimizes the emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia. This is known as creating total motivation (ToMo).
Take, for example, anexperimentconducted by Teresa Amabile at Harvard. She assembled a group of poets to write a simple short poem on the topic of laughter. Before they wrote anything, she had one group read a list of “play” reasons for being a poet (“you enjoy the opportunity for self-expression” or “you like to play with words”), and she had the other group read a list of emotional and economic pressure reasons (“you want your writing teachers to be favorably impressed with your writing talent” or “you have heard of cases where one bestselling novel or collection of poems has made the author financially secure”). She found that the play group created poems that were later deemed about 26% more creative than the poems of the pressure group. The play group’s higher total motivation made a difference when it came to performance.
How to Measure Total Motivation
We survey employees of an organization, asking six questions–one for each motive. Each question ...
What is culture worth?
Creating a business case for culture isn’t impossible. While it is difficult to measure whether someone is being creative, proactive, or resilient in the moment, it’s actually not difficult to calculate total motivation. Using six questions, one for each motive, we can compute an organization’s ToMo using very simple math (see the sidebar for the calculation) and then determine its impact on performance.
Take for example the airline industry. Players share the same terminals and use the same planes, but customer satisfaction differs widely across carriers. When we measured the total motivation of employees of four major airlines, and compared their cultures with an outcome likecustomer satisfaction(as measured by the ACSI / University of Michigan), we saw that an organization’s culture (as measured by ToMo) tightly predicted customer satisfaction.
In other words, cultures that inspired more play, purpose, and potential, and less emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia, produced better customer outcomes. We saw this play out in retail, banking, telecommunications, and the fast food industry as well. And the impact isn’t limited to customer satisfaction. In one hedge fund, the highest performing portfolio managers had higher total motivation. And in one retail organization we worked with, we found that the difference between a low-ToMo and high-ToMo sales associate was 30% in revenues.
What processes in an organization affect culture?
We have asked thousands of managers how they would define a high-performing culture. Most don’t have a great definition. So here is one: Culture is the set of processes in an organization that affects the total motivation of its people. In a high-performing culture, those processes maximize total motivation. When we measured how different processes affect employees’ total motivation, we learned a couple things:
There is no silver bullet. Many processes affect people’s ToMo at work. By surveying thousands of US workers, we measured how much the elements of a workplace — from how a job is designed to how performance is reviewed — affect ToMo.
What the chart shows is that while we tend to think that leadership matters most to motivation, other processes can have an even bigger impact. The x-axis shows the ToMo scale (which goes from -100 to 100). The grey bars represent the range to which each process affects an employee’s total motivation, as gathered from survey responses. For example,how a role is designedcan swing total motivation by 87 points. A badly designed role results in ToMo scores as low as almost -40, whereas a well designed role can result in a ToMo as high as almost 50. That’s huge, given that in many industries, the most-admired cultures tend to have 15 points higher ToMo than their peers.
Some companies make special efforts to design a highly motivating role. Toyota encourages play by giving factory workers the opportunity to come up with and testnew tools and ideason the assembly line. W. L. Gore & Associates gives peoplefree time and resourcesto develop new ideas. And Southwest Airlines encourages their people to treat each customer interaction as play — perhaps you’ve seen how some flight attendants have turned boring safety announcements intocomedy sketches.
The next most sensitive element is theidentityof an organization, which includes its mission and behavioral code. For example, Medtronic enables its engineers and technicians tosee the medical devicesthey’ve made in action, so that they can see the purpose of their work. The Chief Talent Officer at UCB Pharmaceuticals told us how he recently started inviting patients to executive meetings, so the people making decisions can see how their work makes a difference. And a Walmart executive told us that he kicked off management meetings by reviewing how much money his division had saved customers—rather than how much money Walmart had made.
The third most sensitive element is thecareer ladderin an organization. Recently, many companies have concluded that their system of evaluating their people, which drives the promotion process, tends to destroy performance. Systems where employees are stack-ranked or rated against each other will increase emotional and economic pressure, reducing total motivation and thus performance. As a result, companies fromMicrosofttoLearare moving away from performance review systems that foster unhealthy competition.
Culture is an ecosystem.The elements of culture interact with and reinforce each other. One example is sales commissions. In general, we found that having a sales commission decreases the ToMo of an individual. However, if that individual also believes that their work materially helps their customers, the commissionincreasestheir ToMo. This makes sense through the lens of total motivation: if you don’t believe in what you’re doing, the commission becomes your motive. That’s low-ToMo. If you do believe in what you’re doing, the commission is gravy. It may even help you track your progress, increasing play. That’s high-ToMo.
What leaders can do
Looking at all these processes together, it’s clear that culture is the operating system of an organization. Senior leaders can build and maintain a high-performing culture by teaching managers to lead in highly motivating ways. For example, one study of bank branch managers showed that offering high-ToMo leadership training led to a 20% increase in credit card sales and a 47% increase in personal loan sales. CEOs should make a business case for culture (with a budget) and enlist HR and business leaders to improve the elements that affect culture, from role design to performance reviews.
Even without redesigning processes, however, team leaders can start improving the total motivation of their employees by:
Holding a reflection huddle with your team once a week. Teams we’ve worked with hold an hour-long huddle once a week in which each person answers three questions directed at encouraging: 1) Play: What did I learn this week? 2) Purpose: What impact did I have this week? And 3) Potential: What do I want to learn next week?
Explaining thewhybehind the work of your team. One executive at a retail store told us she often introduced a new project by saying, “We have to do this because Linda [the boss] asked for it.” This was motivating through emotional pressure, which was hurting her team’s performance. So she started explaining why a project would help the customer instead.
Considering how you’ve designed your team’s roles. Does everyone have a space to play? Think about where people should be free to experiment and make that clear. For example, a Starbucks manager told us that he lets each employee experiment with how they connect to each customer, and a bank manager we worked with said he encourages people to suggest process improvements. Then ask if everyone has the opportunity to witness the impact of their work, and think about what might help them build a stronger purpose. Finally, find out where each team member would like to be in two years — and come up with a plan to help their reach their potential.
A great culture is not easy to build — it’s why high performing cultures are such a powerful competitive advantage. Yet organizations that build great cultures are able to meet the demands of the fast-paced, customer-centric, digital world we live in. More and more organizations are beginning to realize that culture can’t be left to chance. Leaders have to treat culture building as an engineering discipline, not a magical one.
LM
Lindsay McGregoris the co-author of theNew York TimesBestseller,Primed to Perform,and the co-founder and CEO ofVegaFactor, a technology and consulting firm dedicated to ending low-performing cultures. Previously, Lindsay was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, focused on large scale transformations. Lindsay earned her bachelors from Princeton University, and her MBA from Harvard University.
ND
Neel Doshiis the co-author of theNew York TimesBestseller,Primed to Perform,and the co-founder ofVegaFactor. Previously, Neel was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, and the CTO of Genesant Technologies and Technology Director of Finance.com. Neel earned his bachelors in engineering from MIT, and his MBA from the Wharton School.
Radical and rising economic inequality is no secret — and now, neither is its cause. New research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the massive upward redistribution of income our nation has suffered these past four decades can largely be attributed to policies intentionally designed to suppress the wages of American workers.
To be clear, wage suppression was not an unintended consequence — it was the intentional outcome of policies at the legislative, regulatory and corporate levels deliberately implemented to keep wages low. As a nation, we chose to suppress wages on behalf of the rich and corporations — and with spectacular success.
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In the post-World War II boom, from 1948 to 1979, wages broadly rose across the wage scale largely in lockstep with economy-wide productivity,helping to build the largest and most prosperous middle class the world has ever seen. But after 1979, the interests of the wealthiest Americans sharply diverged from everyone else. Productivity, net of depreciation, rose by 56 percent between 1979 and 2017, a period during which the top one-tenth of 1 percent saw their earnings soar at least five times that rate, while median hourly compensation gained only 13 percent and the bottom one-third of workers actually saw their real wages fall.
We conservatively estimate that this 43-percentage point gap between productivity and median compensation — this shift of national income from labor to profits and from the bottom 90 percent of earners to the very top earners — is costing the median American worker nearly $10 an hour — almost $20,700 a year for a full-time worker.
Many have sought to blame rising inequality on structural changes in the underlying economy, but our research finds that in fact deliberate policy choices are largely at fault. How can we be so confident in assigning intent? The answer comes from the policies that have played the biggest role — excessive unemployment, eroded collective bargaining and corporate-driven globalization — three policies which are inherently focused on suppressing wages that account for more than half the productivity-wage divergence and a loss of more than $5 an hour for the typical worker.
The largest and most obvious is excessive unemployment. The Federal Reserve is charged with the dual mandate of pursuing the maximum level of employment consistent with stable inflation, but since 1979 the Fed has aggressively erred on the side of the latter. Operating under the theory that tighter labor markets inevitably lead to higher inflation as rising wages push up consumer prices, the Fed has consistently reined in job growth by hiking interest rates whenever unemployment approached the allegedly “natural rate” (regardless of whether there was any evidence that inflation was actually on the rise).
The result was an unemployment rate that averaged 6.3 percent from 1979 through 2017, a full point higher than during the previous three decades, intentionally denying workers the opportunity to benefit from tighter labor markets. We find that had unemployment averaged 5.5 percent (a modest goal) rather than 6.3 percent, median wages would have been 10 percent higher in 2017. Had the unemployment rate averaged 5 percent, median wages would have been 18.3 percent higher — at the 10th percentile, 21.2 percent higher.
The Federal Reserve intentionally raises interest rates and slows job growth which results in the diminished power of workers to demand higher wages. This is a fact. Thus, regardless of how seriously you take the inflation threat, you cannot deny that excessive unemployment is a choice — and that wage suppression is its proximate goal. And the same holds true of the litany of other policy choices that play an empirically assessable role in suppressing wages.
For example, the primary purpose of collective bargaining is to bargain for higher compensation, thus any policy that erodes the right to unionize intentionally suppresses wages. The purpose of outsourcing, both offshore and domestically, is to reduce labor costs, and thus to suppress wages. Misclassification, non-competes, anti-poaching agreements, forced arbitration agreements and most other labor market “innovations” are all implemented in an effort to suppress wages. And then, of course, there’s the minimum wage.
Unchanged since 2009, the federal minimum wage now stands at $7.25 an hour. Had it continued to rise with productivity as it had during the post-war decades, it would be $20 an hour today. The whole purpose of the minimum wage is to lift the wages of low-paid workers. Thus, our decades-long policy of eroding the minimum wage, the overtime threshold, and other labor standards can only be understood as a deliberate choice to suppress wages.
In fact, wage suppression has become such a norm that employers appear totally flummoxed at the reluctance of some workers to come back on the job at pre-COVID wages in the midst of a deadly pandemic. It apparently never occurs to them to entice workers back by offering higher pay. Instead, they blame more generous unemployment benefits for creating a “labor shortage.” But in truth, what we have now — what we’ve long had — is a wage shortage created by decades of policies — enabled by economists and implemented on behalf of corporations and the wealthy — deliberately designed to keep wages low.
As our research reveals, our crisis of radical inequality is not an accident. It is a choice. Policy decisions are responsible for rising inequality — and policy decisions can reverse it. It appears that the Biden administration is taking this lesson to heart. The already-passed American Rescue Plan is driving us quickly to low unemployment. Some predict it will reach 3.5 percent by the end of 2022. Policies already underway include:
Rebuilding collective bargaining, raising the minimum wage (legislatively and for contractors)
Policing worker misclassification
Restoring access to overtime for salaried workers
Reinvigorating the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission
The American Jobs Plan targets good quality jobs for noncollege-educated workers. This agenda is a recipe for restoring sustained robust wage growth for the vast majority, finally.
Nick Hanauer is a venture capitalist, founder of the public policy incubator Civic Ventures helped fund the report and is also the host of the podcastPitchfork Economics.
I recently saw the conversation between Chris Shelton and Jon Atack on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast # 298.
I wanted to comment on several issues that were brought up.
Like Chris and Jon I have researched much of the same material and examined many of the same questions.
I want to at first address the division of society which they brought up.
As Jon Atack pointed out the 60% of people in The Empathy Trap by Dr Jane McGregor and Tim McGregor who are called "apaths" and described as going with the people around them exist.
The same 60% have been as Stanley Milgram discovered in his experiments characterized as highly obedient to authority.
Additionally, in his work Adam Grant in his book describes a 60%.
He described 20% as "givers" meaning people who are looking out for others foremost. He described 20% as "takers" meaning people who look to get the most possible for themselves and to give the absolute least necessary for others.
Grant described the remaining 60% (our magic 60% again!) as "matchers" meaning people who are not entirely lacking compassion or empathy (the takers) BUT they are not purely altruistic, they want to be treated fairly and are especially sensitive to being taken advantage of, especially sensitive to getting less than others or doing more work or harder work than their peers. They don't want to work hard and support freeloaders, they don't want to ever get less than their fair share.
The book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences by John R. Alford, John R. Hibbing, and Kevin B. Smith described research that found that most human beings have a different reaction to interacting with people and objects. But interestingly enough they found our notorious 20% (once again the takers!) have a very interesting difference - they don't react to people any differently than they do objects! In the analysis of brain activity they described the researchers found that our 20% don't show any difference in brain activity compared to interaction with inanimate objects!
We have many descriptions of human predators and Martha Stout in her book The Sociopath Next Door gave her version describing the defining trait of a sociopath as simply not caring about other people. She emphasized that some sociopaths are violent or cruel. But some don't have violent impulses. Some simply have profound indifference to everyone else.
She described how a non violent sociopath could tear down people at a job or in a family by simply being uncaring, displaying no compassion or empathy.
I want to make a couple other points.
Adam Grant found that givers (we can also say are empathic) help the people around them the most. They help their co-workers, friends, and family the most. This is not opinion or ideology, he analyzed thousands of studies to determine which of our three work styles (givers, takers, matchers) was most productive, most helpful, least productive, least helpful, most disruptive, least disruptive and on and on, because organizations want the best results and they are not likely to listen unless he can show them evidence regarding metrics that effect their bottom line. Plainly, they don't care if you are kind, sensitive to being treated unfairly or profoundly selfish, they want to make profits, the most possible.
He found that givers can be less productive in their own areas but this is countered because they are helping others to do better. They are by far the best employees overall. Matchers don't get taken advantage of because they don't let you do it to them, but they are especially vulnerable to lowering their quality and productivity to match low achievers who are allowed to get away with poor performance for high compensation, especially if it is obvious and long-standing in my opinion. You have to show them that everyone has high standards and they will get with the program, show them that non productive people and shoddy work are acceptable and they will match it, because after all, "if the other people get away with not caring, why shouldn't I? I am no sucker!"
Takers? They may have high stats in some areas, as they may ruthlessly seek rewards when those rewards require actual target attainment, but they will lie, backstab, insult, humiliate, demoralize, and cheat to get their rewards!
The harm that takers do far outweighs any benefit the work they do creates.
Adam Grant emphasized that in his analysis of the effects of the different working styles a taker can harm more than a matchers or giver can help, so your top priority in hiring in spotting takers and not hiring them. Now, given their inclination towards self promotion this is a challenge. Grant realized their Achilles heal. They only help others when it can benefit them.
Ask them if they helped others at previous jobs and they will happily talk about helping bosses and people with connections. They have no record of helping people who have no possible way to return the favor, unless the aid got them positive attention, possibly through their social connections. But they don't have loads of stories that check out in which they helped people with no awareness how it was self serving.
I highly recommend you check out the book Give and Take and the videos by Adam Grant.
I think the people you call empaths and he calls givers are a necessary part of society, the people who are trying the hardest to help others, despite possibly being wrong or mislead at times, often by the other 20% of takers aka human predators who specialize in using people with dishonest tactics.
I believe that empathy and compassion are the best traits human beings can have. Yes, with our other vulnerabilities they leave us open to unethical persuasion, but if you think we might be better off without empathy let me compare and contrast the other 20%. Here we have Carl Panzram, Jim Jones, Charlie Manson, Brian Stewart, David Parker Ray, Leonard Lake, Charles NG, and of course Ronald Hubbard.
I wrote a long series of blog posts on the book The Anatomy of Evil by Dr. Michael Stone called The Depths of Depravity. He described the acts of many depraved people including serial killers, serial rapists, spree killers and on and on.
These men include cult leaders, serial rapists, serial murderers, (Carl Panzram is said to have sodomized over a thousand victims who were boys and men, both out in society and in reform schools and prisons, for one noteworthy example) and other equally disturbing offenders.
I would submit that the society is far, far better off with empathy than with the uncaring human predators. And the other people? The obedient matchers? I say that you need the empathy to make the case for basic human decency to them, without the empathy as a buffer the predators would exploit the matchers largely unopposed. The predators would set the standard the matchers would follow!
You may consider empathy a curse, but I consider it a blessing, for the whole of humanity.
