304. Decoding Group Identity: Insights for Business Leaders with Dominic Packer (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 304 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about the Power of Us. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is a refresh of my conversation with Dominic Packer, co author of the Power of Us. I've referenced this episode and the book the Power of Us countless times since it first came out back in November of 2021. It's amazing how often our identity and that it's shaped by the bonds we share with others comes up in in discussion. Maybe not that amazing, since it should be pretty obvious, I guess. But I always love when I learn things that make it so. Something I always sort of knew or suspected but never really thought about. And it brings it to the forefront in a way that I start to see it everywhere and can credit a great researcher, author, or two of them. In this case. It's like those things you can't unsee, like the arrow pointing Forward in the FedEx logo. I wasn't looking for it, but now I can't stop seeing it. When that comes with really useful knowledge into what makes us human and how we relate to other people, it's pretty awesome. And one time recently where this book and its insights kept popping into my mind constantly is while I was reading the new book for the Culture by Marcus Collins. As you might have guessed, Marcus is the guest on this coming Friday's episode. So it felt like the perfect time to refresh this episode with Dominic discussing the Power of Us. As you listen to the episode today, I want you to think about your own identity and how it shifts throughout the day. You likely aren't exactly the same a hundred percent of the time. For example, I'm different when I'm talking to my husband than to my kids, then to my mom, then to my podcaster friends or a parent at the school. My identity shifts and so my experience shifts. The things I pick up on in one context are different than they might be in another. This is so important as brands consider how they message to people. You can't just pick a target market or demographic and say this is always who they are and how we should message to them. 100% of the time. That makes no sense. Timing, context and so many other factors matter, but we tend to forget that in business. Dominic and I are going to discuss this in the episode today and Marcus explains it in such an amazing way that absolutely blew my mind when I first read it in his book. Definitely another one of those things that I can't unhear, unthink or unknow. What is it? Well, you'll need to listen to find out of course. So if you aren't already subscribed to the Brainy Business podcast, now's a good time to do so to ensure you don't miss that episode when it comes out this Friday. And don't forget that the shownotes for the episode include all sorts of goodies, including related articles, books like the Power of Us and for the Culture, as well as links to past episodes and more. Those notes are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 304 all right, let's talk about the power of us. Dr. Dominic Packer, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. This is exciting.

Yeah, absolutely. We are going to be talking of the Power of us, of course, but before we, you know, jump into concept in the book, which I mean, I guess when you talk about yourself it's definitely going to lead to things in the book. But for those who don't yet know, you tell us a little bit about who you are and how this all kind of came about.

Sure. So I am a social psychologist. I'm a professor at Lehigh University which is in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I co wrote this book with a friend and long term collaborator named Jay Van Bavel. He's a professor at New York University and we met nearly 20 years ago, which is hard to believe, when we were graduate students at the University of Toronto together getting our PhDs in psychology. That's when we first met and we started working together and we've been friends largely ever since and ended up writing this book together over the last couple of years, mainly during the pandemic, which was a process unto itself.

Yeah, interesting. So I wrote my book in the Pandemic as well and I think there was this balance of a lot of extra time in some ways where you're not going anywhere. But I didn't have the co author of where and you guys being located in different states and I'm sure that presented some difficulty of not being able to be in labs and meeting in person.

Yeah, I think we'd had this romantic notion of so I'M not that far from New York City where Jay is. Takes about an hour and a bit to get in. Had these visions of going in and meeting in coffee shops and spending afternoons writing.

I bet.

And then in reality, we were both locked in our respective homes with our small kids running around and we joked that it was the book written through 10,000 text messages, which was often the most efficient way to communicate.

Yeah, yeah. Or things like. I know I've used things like Voxer. I don't know if you've ever where. Yeah, you can do the little voice notes much easier.

We use Google Doc a lot and just co edit at the same time. And we would schedule times just to meet on Zoom and write. So we would both be there on screen, not talking, both writing. And it would hold us accountable, you know. Yeah, a bit like being in the same room, though not as fun.

I definitely, I know people that do the writing groups and there was actually early in the pandemic, a session of stuff that was promoted on Twitter. I think that was like, hey, we're all going to do like. So they had people like Simon Sinek and others that would come and do like a five minute blip at the beginning and then everyone sits on the call for an hour or whatever and writes across the world. Which was kind of a. It's kind of a cool thing and a funny thing in that we need that sort of accountability to stick to writing. But I think that's actually a very maybe interesting way to lead into the power of us. So what insight do you have on that sort of collective of why, like knowing others are watching us over Zoom, even though they're not. They're supposed to be writing too. Like, why does that impact and make us feel like we should. We're actually going to stick to what we said we were going to in that process.

I mean, that's a great question. So the book fundamentally is about how group identities, the groups we belong to, can become part of who we are, our sense of self, and then what the consequences of that are ranging from sort of basic perceptual processes. So what we even taste and smell all the way up through large scale social processes like leadership and movements for social change, maybe even revolution. But in the middle there sort of our day to day group experiences where, yeah, you're part of a collective, maybe you join up for a writing group with the goal of both maybe feeling some accountability, writing a bit more, but also I think the social support aspect of it. Right. Just feeling connected to others, going through Some sort of similar experience to yourself gives you a sense of belonging and social connection, which is really valuable. And one of the key insights in the book, drawn from a lot of research over the years, ours but also many other people's, is that when we take on an identity, a group identity, we are very likely to be influenced by the norms of that group. So that what other people in that group are doing and what they value is very likely to become the same sorts of things that we end up doing and valuing ourselves. So in that writing group, you know, you're quite likely, if everyone else is sticking to their tasks, you're quite likely to embrace that same sort of behavior yourself.

Yeah, definitely. The social proof, the hurting parts of us feel that we're being. We would be judged. Everyone else is doing this, so I better do it too.

That's right. So one of the things we talk about in the book is that there's sort of multiple reasons why the sort of social proof for me, effects occur. One is that sort of social pressure aspect, which is sometimes called normative influence, where you're just feeling the pressure, everyone's doing this, and if I don't, I stand out in potentially some negative way. And maybe my writing group's just not going to want me to come back because I'm not a good member. There's a second kind of influence, though, which is just informational influence, which is we look to other people just to figure out what is a sensible thing to do. And so, again, this is a reason why a writing group or other kinds of groups that are task oriented can be useful because you can just learn tips from people essentially about how is it working for you. And that consensual kind of information is just information that we use to guide our own behavior. And then the third reason that can be quite powerful, maybe not so much in a writing group, but for example, if we think about things like political identities, is the norms of those groups become a way by which we express those identities. By acting like one of us, we are expressing to the world or signaling to the world that we hold this identity and that we care about it, and it's important to us. That's another reason why we often end up conforming to the norms of the groups we belong to.

Yeah, and I think it's important. The book does a really great job of, in that introduction, talking about just sort of the sweeping aspects of usness, I guess, and being part of different groups. I really like the way you talk about different identities and how it's not that I am just one thing, but I kind of shift or morph within the groups of being a parent and then a fan of Kate Spade and someone who drinks chai tea lattes or whatever. There are all these different kind of collective identity pieces. Can you talk a little bit about those aspects of human nature?

Definitely. So one of the things we describe early on in the book is something called the 20 statements task or test which is sometimes given by psychologists to get a sense of what is somebody's identity. And basically it just involves filling out the phrase or completing the phrase I am 20 times. So you can say I am Canadian, I am male, I am a professor. All would be things that would part of my identity. And what's interesting about this is first of all that it's actually easy for most people to come up with 20 self defining things pretty quickly off the top of their tongue or top of their head. So there's clearly already multiple aspects to the self. And then when you look at the kinds of things that end up on the lists, you can group them in various ways. Some of the things that will get listed as self defining are really personal characteristics. So things that make me as an individual different from other individuals. These are often our personality traits or perhaps unique skills we have or a hobby we're really passionate about. Other aspects of the self will be relational. So it's the roles you have in relation to other people. So being a daughter or a father or being a student in relation to a professor. Those aspects of the self are sort of defined in relation to specific others, also often very important in our lives. And then the third category which we end up focusing on most for most of the book are what we call collective identities or social identities which are defined by the groups we belong to. And these can be everything from your race, your religion, your gender, your nationality, but also occupation, occupational based groups, or even just being the fan of a particular sports team. And for different people, it's different collective identities that matter. But for many of us, some really key aspects of ourselves come from these groups. Right. These, these become very important to us. We become very emotionally attached to them and they drive a lot of the way we think about the world, the emotions we feel and the decisions we end up making.

Absolutely. And is there anything. So if someone's going to make this list of, you know, 20 just kind of to jump in and think about their own identities, is there anything telling for them? If you go in and it's all a bunch of personal stuff versus group Stuff or it's just what came to mind first. Anything to keep in mind.

I'm not sure it's super diagnostic necessarily. I mean, I think one thing that's usually the case is that people will possess a set of fairly chronic identities, things that they think about a lot, right? This is aspects of themselves that are just the forefront of their minds often because their, their roles or their collectives or their personal aspects of self that they're sort of engaging in and engaging with on a regular basis. Right. So often these things are the things that make you stand out in some way. So a particular identity is more likely to become salient to you in a context where it differentiates you from others. So for example, for a woman working in a male dominated industry, her gender or sex identity may well be more salient to her than would be the gender identity of the men in that same workplace, simply because for her it's something that makes her stand out or be different from other people, say in her work group. So that's one key aspect of what makes different pieces of identity more or less salient to us. But the key, or a key idea is that even in the same person, during the course of a single day, different aspects of themselves will come in and out of focus. So we wake up in the morning and you know, you're preparing your kids breakfast and it might be self as parent that's particularly salient to you. And then you get in the car and you're listening to the news and it might be your political identity that becomes salient, right? You hear about a politician doing something you agree with or something you think is really stupid and you're thinking about the world through the lens of your politics. And then you go to work and it'll be your occupational identity that's going to drive most of your behavior throughout the day. And then, you know, you go home at the end of the day, you're a parent again and maybe a romantic partner and so on. And we're all aware, I think at some level that our behaviors are not exactly the same at those different points in the day when we're operating through these different identities and that our preferences might be a little bit different and even our goals and our decision making might be a bit different.

Right? And it may feel like, I think to some people that we're very discerning in how we're going to let a group or anything impact our own identity and that it would take a while to infiltrate into our actual core of who we are. But what, you know, things have sort of found. And you talk about in the book of some things really silly, like shoes can determine, you know, make you have a huge kind of Romeo and Juliet style rivalry against the other side of town, or even being told that you're a fan of a particular artist can make you, you know, think differently about people in the other group. Can you talk a little bit about and you can choose either of those examples or something different. Different. But people, if you're intrigued, know that they're in the book so you can check them out.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So, yeah. In addition to having these sort of chronic aspects of self that someone might think about all the time, one of the fascinating things about identity is that it's also flexible and malleable and adaptive to current circumstances. And what that means fundamentally, or the way we think about it is that it's as if we have a readiness to identify. So that if a new way of dividing up the world comes along, a new way of categorizing ourselves perhaps in opposition to some other group of people, we're often very quick to jump on that, at least for a while, to try it out and see what happens. So we see it as a type of readiness. And so we tell a story in the book early on about a little quaint little town in Germany which during the Second World War, I should say prior to the Second World War, there's two brothers who live in the town and they co run shoe making business. They're both cobblers. At some point during the Second World War, they have a falling out and they come to loathe and to test one another and they split the company into two and they sort of reform as two separate companies on either side of the river in this town. And the companies grow, and as they grow and all the town's residents become employees of one or the other, it divides the town in a fierce rivalry. And the town ultimately becomes known as the Town of Bent Necks. Because there's this legend that as people walk around, they look down at each other's feet to see what kind of shoe they're wearing. And if it's the right kind of shoe, they're. They're then friends and they can affiliate. And if it's the wrong kind of shoe, well then you're automatically an enemy. The brothers took their rivalry to their deaths. They're buried at opposite ends of the town cemetery. After they died, things eased a little bit in terms of those tensions. And the two companies in question are known to all of us. These days as huge successes. Adidas on the one hand and Puma on the other. And what's interesting about that story isn't really that two brothers have a falling out, right? I mean, this happens all the time in families. It's that it divided a town, right? That everyone else went along with that and affiliated with one of the brothers or the other, and then based on those identities, guided their own behavior. People couldn't go to bakeries on the wrong side of the river. People weren't allowed to date each other across these town lines, like you said in a Romeo Juliet onto Capulet kind of way. And this seems absurd, right? Because it's shoes. And doesn't seem like the kind of thing that we often think about when we think about group based divisions, which might arise from politics or fights over resources or major political differences. Here it's shoes. But it relates to a lot of the research that we've done over the years and that we're inspired by on how categorizing the world can produce identities and group based differences. And so we describe, for example, these classic Studies from the 1970s known as the minimal group experiments, which you alluded to, where it turns out that you can take a set of people, simply flip a coin and say, if it comes up heads, you're in group A. If it comes up tails, you're in group B. Divide them up that way and people will immediately take on those identities and start to feel like, hey, I'm a good group A member, and start to discriminate in favor of their group and start to like their own group members more, even though they know it's arbitrary and random and meaningless and they've never heard about group A before. So again, this idea of a readiness to jump on board with an identity depending on circumstances as they come about.

And is that, I mean, really kind of rooted in being that herding species to have that feeling of safety you want to conform to whatever group you happen to find yourself in in that moment is maybe a little bit.

The way I typically think about it is that groups are a tremendously useful tool for human beings. They're fundamental to our survival. We don't have scales or sharp teeth or pretty easy prey. And the way humans have succeeded is by getting together, right? We band together in collectives and collectively can achieve things that no individual can achieve on their own. And the way I think about this readiness to affiliate or form a social identity is that it's really a readiness to seek or to find cooperative opportunities with others. And so if you get lumped together with a set of other people, either because an experimenter has flipped a coin or because some circumstances thrust you together, producing what we call a sense of common fate, which can be things like crises, emergency situations as well, that when that happens and we start to feel that sense of common faith that we have something in common, we see it as a possible opportunity to cooperate with each other. And we seem to again have this readiness to take advantage of that. It doesn't mean it will succeed, but it sort of sets us off on the right foot so that we immediately extend a little more trust to the people we share a group identity with or believe we share group identity with. And by doing that, extending a little more trust to them and then receiving a little more trust from them in return, it can really facilitate cooperation and collaboration and allow us as groups to achieve things that we couldn't on our own.

So I have kind of a two part question thinking about on the business side of applications here I teach a class on internal communication and change management and how behavioral economics and behavioral science ties in with that. And I know that we end up with issues of siloed teams very often. And so, you know, I'm on the marketing team and you are finance and we don't get along. You know, I've talked in that way on the show before about increasing, you know, your circle of empathy and who you consider as part of your team. Like we're the team of company versus the departments we're in. As one side, if you have tips, additional tips or anything, your thoughts on that? The second piece being when someone is brought in new to a team or if someone is, you know, coming in, whether they are coming from that dreaded sort of rival team within the office or they're like completely new, maybe they came from a competitor or they're just into a team that's, you know, already really, they get along really well and maybe it feels uncomfortable that you're the new guy, you know, what sort of tips might there be, you know, both on the business side of helping to welcome new people into the group so that they feel like they're able to participate fully right from the get go and. Or as someone who's new to a group, tips there. And I apologize. There are like a thousand directions. I think you can take all of what I just said, but I wanted to get it all out before I forgot. So answer that however you feel good.

Okay?

Yeah.

I mean, you might need to remind me, but yeah. So I think the Question of groups that occur within groups is a really good one. So yeah, in many company corporate situations you have different divisions or different units and people can form identities at that sort of subgroup level. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think people can get a lot of sense of connection and be really motivated to do well on behalf of their subgroup that I identify, whether it's the marketing team or the manufacturing team or whatever it might be. But as you're suggesting, that could sometimes potentially be harmful. Right. If that rivalry goes too intense and teams that really do need to cooperate with one another at some point or some level are unable to do that because they so dislike each other, then you've got a real problem. One of the key things about identity is that they are these identities are that they're often multi leveled. That is, you can hold identities that at one level are in opposition to each other. It could be the manufacturing division versus the marketing division company, but they're embedded in a larger group or what we call superordinate identity, the company as a whole. And that if you shift people's focus from their lower level identity to their higher level identity, and especially if you can create the conditions where they need to cooperate with each other, they have common goals, and at that superordinate level, it can bring them together and reduce some of the tensions and the rivalries between the lower level identities. And this doesn't just occur in companies. Of course, you can think about political situation in the United States. You've got Republicans and Democrats, clearly rival identities at one level. But then at a superordinate level, if you can bring it into focus, there's the national identity, self as American, which subsumes these two political parties. And there have been times in history where the polarization between political parties has been reduced because people come to focus on the needs and the goals of the superordinate identity, the national identity. And after 9, 11, it's a really great example of that. How per time political identities became less important to people and supporting the broader national identity became more important fundamentally in an organization. This is a major challenge for leadership that you need to create the conditions by which people can see themselves as part of something larger than just their immediate subgroup, if that's what you're striving to do. Right. And people need to see that there really is an organizational identity and understand what that is and what we're striving for. And part of that is sort of a rhetorical strategy that leaders can engage in the way they talk about who we are and what we're trying to do and help people understand how what they do as an individual, but also what their subgroup does contribute to that larger scale goal or mission. But it's also being aware or wary of the way incentive structures can be set up to cause people to really feel like they have to identify in one way or another. So often this is takes the form of incentive structures being overly individualistic. So in many cases, evaluation structures are set up to really only evaluate individual employees on their own. People get rewarded for individual level performance and that's going to really drive them to see themselves as individual. The most important thing in this workplace is me and how I perform. And if you only promote, say the best performers in some say sales metric sense, but don't promote people who are maybe the best collaborators or the best team members, then you're incentivizing an individualistic identity rather than a collective identity. Likewise, if you have set up, say, a zero sum kind of resource structure in your company so that if marketing gets more resources, then manufacturing gets less and vice versa, then inevitably you are splitting those identities or pitting those identities against each other. Members of one group will legitimately feel like we have to fight with them because if we don't, or if we don't win, they get the resource and we lose out. And so you want to not only talk about us at a broader level, but also be aware of how you're allocating resources in ways that might be creating these identities and undermining your broader mission.

Right. And I've seen, you know, you were talking about incentives where companies don't often realize that perhaps the, you know, the sales team incentives are in, you know, direct argument with customer service or something. And so in order for customer service to get their incentive, sales can't, and not intentionally, but their goals are, you know, in opposition in such a way that when sales wins, customer service loses. And then you end up with this argumentative that's not necessarily in the, you know, allocation of resources internally in that sort of intentional way, but that. Yeah. So really looking at all of your company goals as a whole and how they work together and being able to say, you know, how can everyone win with this? You know, and setting universal goals can really help with that too.

Right. You're trying to create a superordinate identity that's meaningful, that it really is the case we have goals in common and that by all doing our jobs, we are legitimately contributing to that collective goal. And if people can see that and understand that that's what's happening, then that's very motivating. But if there's a sense that, well, actually what this other group is doing is somehow undermining what we see as the broader collective goal, like, then that's not a healthy dynamic and I think demotivating for people.

Yeah. So one of my favorite points within the book comes very, very early on, and I wrote down the quote, and I'm going to talk about it here in just a second. And we can really, I think, delve in on this. And I think it's something that a lot of companies would really struggle with. And conceptually it feels a little bit. I guess it would be counterintuitive to where we may think that our teams are only doing well, our company is only doing well when we have this harmonious, amazing experience, and it's shiny, happy people all the time. You have an entire chapter about dissent, but starting off, and it's on page 12 of the book for when everyone picks it up and you go check this out. But it says dissent is quite hard, and people only do it because they care deeply about a group. Can you talk more about dissent and why it's important for groups and especially for businesses?

Absolutely. So groups are valuable for the reasons we've already talked about in that they help to coordinate people's behavior. And if we feel like we're all part of a group and we share this identity, it tends to make us more conformist. We tend to go along with the norms of that group, which is very often a good thing. Right. This means we are cooperating with each other. We're aligning our behavior in ways that make sense for the group. But of course, circumstances change, and what we've always done isn't necessarily always going to be the best thing. We might start to become less competitive, or what we were doing before is no longer as productive as it used to be. And for that reason, it's really important within groups that there be divergent opinions, that there be new ideas, that people can come to work and make a different suggestion that, oh, maybe, maybe we should do something differently than we've been doing. And the reality is the groups are often quite resistant to that. That standing out, doing things differently or expressing different views is not always appreciated. Very often that kind of dissenting behavior is regarded as annoying or slowing us down or making us less cohesive, as you said, which can be a threat to a group. So we've got this duality. On the one hand, we really do need divergent ideas that's how you innovate. Lots of research showing it makes groups more creative and often more productive in the long term. But dealing with dissent isn't easy, and it often triggers these negative reactions. And so what we find almost paradoxically or counterintuitively, is that both the people who are the most likely to conform to group norms, most of the time, the most identified group members are also the most likely to dissent when they see something as problematic in a group or something as needing change within their group. And the reason in both cases is because they care a lot about the group. And most of the time they agree with what the group's doing and they like the norms. And so for that reason, because they care about it, they're going to go along a lot, lot. But if they come to see something as problematic, it's because they care that they're willing to speak out. Whereas someone who's not as identified, not as invested, is more likely under those conditions to actually step back, to sort of withdraw and keep silent because of the risks of speaking out. It may just not be worth it to them to incur those costs, whether it's being ridiculed by their coworkers or just disliked more or potentially punished by their bosses. So to speak out is to take a risk. And to take that risk, what we often find is you need to have some level of identification with the group. You need to care enough about it to take that chance.

So I think there's a very interesting balance here where of course you don't want in your company to have this culture of dissent, like telling everybody in every meeting we should be fighting each other constantly and raising questions and thinking that everybody's off. So that's not good. But you also don't want this complacency and people never speaking up. So is there any recommendation that you have or things that you've seen as far as businesses where there is a really good balance or a way to introduce, I guess, healthy dissent, that would be helpful.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to distinguish between people who are just troublemakers and rabble rousers for the sake of it.

Right.

Just because they want to be difficult versus dissenters who are actually trying to change the group in ways that they regard as positive as for the better, whether they're right or wrong about it, they are motivated. Their goal is to make things better. And those are two pretty different kinds of people. And certainly you don't want to create a culture where people are just gravel rousing all the time. Just stirring up trouble for the sake of it. And in reality, those are probably not your most identified group members or organization members. Right? They're not doing it for the company, they're doing it for themselves in some way. In contrast, you do want a culture where the people who are strongly identify with the group do feel like they can speak up when they see something as problematic or when they see something as a possibility for change and improvement. And a key idea here is that you want to create what's known as psychological safety. Psychological safety, the term gets batted around a lot. And sometimes people think what it means is it's a place where no one ever gets their feathers ruffled or feelings hurt, but that's actually not really what it means. Psychologically safe environment is one where people actually do feel comfortable speaking up and speaking out and being critical and being divergent. And they feel comfortable because they know it'll be okay. That when they offer alternative ideas, it's not going to get them ostracized, it's not going to get them rejected. The boss isn't going to jump down that throat. People will listen to it and evaluate it, and they may ultimately decide, no, we don't think you're right. But they get a fair hearing, and they know that when they come back to work tomorrow, they're not going to be punished or suffer because yesterday they said something that people disagreed with. And in those environments, you have employees who feel like they can express themselves and offer their ideas, in contrast to an environment where it just feels like we've all got to sort of toe the line. Because anytime anyone speaks out, they get slammed for it, or the boss no longer calls on them and there's these social sanctions held against them. So you certainly don't want to again create an organization where everyone's acting out all the time. I would suggest that's not an organization where people are really identified with it and pursuing the collective goals. You want an organization where your people are identified and they really value the collective goals, but they're engaging with them creatively. That is, they are thinking about, well, how could we pursue these goals better? How can we better achieve what we want to achieve? And if they're thinking about that, they will have ideas that are different. They will sometimes diverge from what you thought was the best course of action. And you know what, sometimes they might actually be right.

And so I'm not sure if any of your research gets into this specifically, but just in case, if someone is the type of boss that gets feels ruffled whenever anyone does question them or bring something up that may be a little bit different, Is there any sort of tip to be more open to the group, just to kind of change your own kind of internal bias or perspective on that to help create a culture where dissent is embraced in the right context versus, I guess, squashed.

So in the book, we talk about how people react to what are known as moral rebels, which are how people respond to people, other people doing the right thing. And again, what you often find is people aren't super positive about it, especially if they themselves haven't done the right thing or they themselves haven't had that good idea. And so in the case of a boss, right, if you were trying to cultivate a group where people can share their ideas and can have better ideas than you, which is kind of the ultimate goal, like, wouldn't it be great to have your people come to you with awesome ideas and not have to generate them all yourself? It is really important that you don't squash them even when they're not good ideas. Right. So simply recognizing that, I think is step one, like recognizing that when somebody differs or diverges or dissents, they are not necessarily doing it to be a troublemaker, recognizing that it often is positively motivated. Even if it's wrong, they still are trying to help, can make you a bit more agreeable to it and a bit more sensitive to it. But there's another reason people feel threatened by dissent or by moral rebels, which is that it questions their own sort of knowledge or wisdom or moral goodness. And research has found that you can actually reduce that sort of allergic reaction to these things or negative reaction by helping people affirm their own value in advance. You can have people engage in what's called a self affirmation exercise, where they think about what, what makes them a good moral person or an intelligent person or a smart person. And having validated that in themselves, they're then more open and receptive to other people doing good things or having good ideas or being different from the rest of us. And so I guess for a boss who's really trying to work on this aspect themselves, taking time to reflect on what am I good at and sort of validate that side of yourself. And those contributions you make might then free you up to be a little less threatened when other people bring good things to the table as well.

Wonderful. I'm going to link for everyone listening. So I recently had Dr. Andy Luttrell on the show and he talked about morals very specifically. That gets into a lot of his research and how you can nudge behavior based on moral identities and things like that, as well as an interview I did with Nuala Walsh, which was about whistleblowing. And I know you have some of that in the book and you touched on here. So those episodes are both going to be linked for everyone that's listening to learn more. And of course, there is more info in the Power of Us for when you check that out as well. So as we wrap up here, we barely scratched the surface. Like I said, we kind of like dove deep on a couple things from the book here. But if you were going to talk about whether it's your favorite aspect or what you think is most important for people to know from the Power of Us, what would you want to share for everyone that's listening right now that we didn't get a chance to talk about? Which, like I said, there's tons of amazing stuff in there, so sorry that you have to choose.

No, I mean, thanks for the opportunity. This is really great. So we have a chapter in the book toward the end of the book on leadership, and I think there's some insights that come from thinking about leadership in terms of managing social identities. And that really is our claim that a fundamental task of a leader is to manage the social identities of the people they are leading, to foster it, to build it, to help people experience it and see it, and to enact it yourself. And this sort of highlights a number of things, but one of them is that leaders need to engage in behaviors themselves that are continually validating of an identity and to make sure they embody it. So a sort of fundamental idea that arises from this is that followers are much more likely to be inspired and motivated by leaders who they see as one of us, that they see as possessing an identity in common. They really are part of our group, part of our identity. And this can be a challenge in organizational context where you've got hierarchies where managers, their day to day work can often be quite different from the work that's going on on the floor or going on among employees more generally. And so it takes an intentional, you know, aspect of leadership to make sure you do that identity work, to talk continually about who we are and where we're going and help people see that we really are a collective. And also to be careful not to engage in behaviors yourself that differentiate you too much from the rest of the group because then you no longer seem like one of us and you're not going to be followed as energetically or as enthusiastically and Various things play into this. So, for example, there's research suggesting that large scale pay discrepancies between people at the top of an organization and the average employee are detrimental to that kind of identity. That it's hard to seem like one of us if the CEO earns 300 times the average employee. Right? People pick up on that and they don't see you as one of us in the same sort of way. So being attentive to things like that is really a part of our message. Another example, something sort of been on my mind lately is once people get promoted in organizations, right? You rise up through the ranks. You know a lot of people, you have friends in that organization. And if you become a manager or senior leader, you need to be careful about those friendships and that it not be perceived by other people that your friends, the people you used to know in, you know, at a lower level of the organization, have special access to you or get special favors from you, or in other ways are treated differently than everybody else. Because again, what that's doing is dividing the identity. It's creating an us versus them within your group, which is absolutely not what you want. You want everybody to feel like we really are a collective. We really are on the topic on the same page. We really are pursuing our goals in common. So I think thinking about your job as a leader as one of managing groups, as opposed to say, a set of individuals where I'm just worried about am I paying them enough, am I evaluating them appropriately, do we have the right HR policies? Right. Which is obviously an important part of the job. But thinking about how do I manage this group's identity so that people understand what we collectively are trying to achieve and feel a sense of solidarity, am I providing those opportunities and am I reducing the things that can work against that, whether it's poorly designed incentive structures or treating some people differently than others, or perhaps standing out too much myself as not one of us, that I'm somehow seeming fundamentally different from, from the rest of the group, which is most of the time counterproductive.

There's sort of when you were just kind of that wrap up statement there, there's a bit of a dichotomy there. I guess as you are entering or in the like you were talking about, if you were part of the team as a group member versus the manager, having that dissent and standing out is actually a good thing in helping to move the group forward. However, even as you shift into that role, knowing that then being the one who's constantly going against the group and having that same mentality could actually be bad and disrupt the entire group. Even if it was the same behavior you had kind of all the way through your own career. Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that. I think that as you rise up into leadership type positions, it does oftentimes require a total shift in orientation. Your job is actually different. And this can be a major transition and difficulty for people, one that I've experienced myself in my own career, which is you often get promoted based on one set of skills. And then when you end up in a leadership position, it takes an entirely different set of skills. As a professor, for example, I have a set of research skills, teaching skills. If those get recognized, I might get promoted into an administrative position, like a dean type position. Being a dean is not about doing research, it's not about teaching. It's about managing a group of people. And that's a fundamentally different skill set. And so, yeah, absolute sort of behavior that stood out and was positively evaluated at one level may not be as valuable or may be actually detrimental when you're actually trying to lead a group and rally them to do something together.

Right. Well, and I think in that way, within a business, it's also just bringing this full circle to how we started the conversation about the different. The many different identities that we each have. And so when you are having meetings with your own team, being the dissenter, the people that are your subordinates, I guess using just the really basic term, which is not meant to be derogatory in any way, but those who report up to you, if you are the dissenter, could be difficult in causing problems for them. But then on your peer level, you want to be maybe having that dissension because it's accepted at that level too. So knowing that you need to really balance what you're bringing into each identity and each group, your role within it, there's a lot to consider with all of these identities, and I appreciate, and I'm sure everyone else does as well, of all the great insights within the power of Us that they can take to help them to be better leaders and members of the global collective.

Well, thanks. Thanks very much for the chance to talk about these ideas. It's really, really fun.

Absolutely. And so for everyone, we'll have links in the show notes, of course, to go get the book the Power of Us. But for those who want to follow up to learn more, what's the best way to get that information?

So we have a website, it's ThePowerOfAs online. We also have a Substack newsletter which we publish once a week with tips and ideas and things all about identity and group behavior. And that's Subs Substack Newsletter as the Power of Oz at Substack those would be two good sources of information.

Wonderful. Well we will have those in the show notes as well and just want to say thank you again for joining me today. It's been a really fun conversation.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about the Power of Us from Dominic today? For me, as I said at the top of the episode, there's so much I love about this book book and the conversation with Dominic. And while it's all important, what really sticks with me is how our identities shift throughout the day and what that means for brands, as well as how easy it is to get caught up in something that can change what you buy, wear, eat, and so much more. Like the town of bent Necks and everyone looking at each other's shoes because of a sibling rivalry. And let me just say, if you loved this conversation with Dominic, you'll absolutely love Friday's chat with Marcus Collins for the Culture is such a fantastic book that really lives in the same space as the Power of Us. Marcus has spent a lot of time working outside academia, though he is a professor now as well, having done work for Beyonce, Jay Z, the Brooklyn Nets, Budweiser, and so many more. His stories are fascinating and he uses those case studies throughout the book book to teach amazing lessons for anyone in business. Trust me when I say you need both of these books in your permanent collection. And good news, they are of course both linked for you in the Show Notes along with related past episodes and articles and more. It's all waiting for you in the show notes@the brainybusiness.com 304 and just like that, episode 304 on the power of Us with Dominant Packer is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Marcus Collins discussing his new book for the Culture. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.