To understand leadership, you need to understand identity

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1:10This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. So this is the second episode, the second conversation with Professor Alex Haslam. And one of the things I mentioned in the first episode was how actually an understanding of identity and exploring identity starts to give you system thinking about how every team works. I mentioned in the previous episode that I've got another podcast immediately after this one with Jeremy Holt. Jeremy Holt is a sports scientist and he found, fabulous piece of research, he found that sports teams that have strong identities are about 50 % more effective, 50 % more successful than sports teams that don't have strong identities.

1:52This stuff starts when you understand it it starts to explain the fabric of the universe around us it starts to explain how we connect with other people and so i'm delighted to to give you the opportunity to explore further if you've not heard the first part i would recommend going back and hearing that but here's my second conversation with professor alex haslan

2:19I wonder if we could come on and talk about that, leadership and the specifics of leaders. Some of the most applicable research I've seen from you and the people who work in your area with regards to work is this notion of asking workers if the boss is a good example of the sort of people who work here. That notion that the boss is in some way emblematic of being the in-group is a manifestation of the sort of people who work here. And so you occasionally see, I did, I went to London Fire Brigade about 12 months ago and it was a real point of pride, you know, the leader of the London Fire Brigade, working class man who's come through the ranks.

3:07And so when he stands up there and he speaks in the accent that all the colleagues speak, and he looks like one of them who has ascended, and he behaves in that way. He's a very vivid, clear example of the boss is a good example of the people who work here. Now, there's a couple of things along the way where we've lost sight of that, where increasingly with a growing CEO pay gap, maybe the bosses no longer look like they're one of us, and there doesn't seem to be an obvious path. but also adjacent to what we were talking about earlier, when we've got this sort of narcissistic sense that the bosses think that they're better than everyone who works there because they've prevailed in a very individualised system.

3:52It's not in service of the bosses feeling like they are a good representation of the people who work there. And I just love to think about that, this idea of identity leadership. How can people channel the idea of being an identity leader? Yeah, yeah. Well, just to underline the point, So absolutely everything you said is just absolutely right. And it's not just like right in a sort of interesting peripheral kind of way. It's right in a major way. It's absolutely front and center of the leadership space. Like if you want to say what's the best predictor of a person's leadership or perceived leadership, and that's their ability to influence other people.

4:31So that's what we're understanding leadership to be. It's an influence process. So can you influence me? Can you tell me what to do? Can you mobilize me and channel my energies in particular ways? That's what leadership is. What's the biggest predictor of your ability to do that? Okay. And if you said to me, Alex, I'm going to give you a million dollars and I want you to put all your money on one horse, like as a predictor of that outcome. Okay. And whatever it is, and I'm going to do that. I would put all my money on the item. This leader is a model member of my group. Okay. Now, there's variants on that and, you know, in different contexts, not quite that.

5:11But yeah, as you say, this identity leadership is about mobilizing that sense of social identity that we've been talking about. It's about catalyzing it within your groups, cultivating it, and then channeling it towards collective outcomes. So leadership is about social identity management fundamentally. That's what leaders are. They're people who bring us into groups, who keep the groups together and direct the group forward. And that's all of our research is kind of around that. So identity leadership, which is this idea that leaders are people who create, advance, represent the thing you're talking about and embed a sense of shared identity.

5:50Huge amounts of data now supporting the importance of that. We've got this Global Identity Leadership Development Project led by some colleagues, as well as Rolf van Dijk and his colleagues at Goethe University in Frankfurt, led out that, I don't know, 42 countries all over the world, everywhere. It's a cross-cultural thing. Yeah, this leader is a model member of my group is the thing. And if the answer to that is no, they're not, and there's a million and one ways not to be a model member of the group, and you've alluded to some of them, then you're going to have a problem leading and but being a model member of the group can leading by example it takes many many kinds of different forms there are other components of identity leadership that i've talked about as well like making us feel like we're a part of a group but yeah that that connection that psychological connection between the leader and the other team members you know you might call them followers but the people who are doing the followership that makes the leadership work is absolutely critical to team, group, organizational success.

6:55Absolutely critical. And without that, you're not going to be very effective. But fundamentally, the point is you're not going to be doing leadership. You can do other things. You can throw your weight around and you can hold a gun to people's head or a stick or a carrot or all those things. And that will achieve certain types of things. But again, the data is very clear. If you're really interested in leveraging human capital, then you have to absolutely be in the business of working with social identities and representing us and being perceived to embody what the group is about so that you represent the sort of aspirational state for group members is absolutely critical.

7:36And I mean, the technical term for that is identity prototypicality. So you're seen as a prototypical group member. And a prototypicality is hugely problematic for one's leadership credentials and efficacy. And you mentioned the issues that might come with that, like the CEO pay gap is the one that immediately springs to mind because it's just so front and centre. but but what are the other sense if people are thinking okay that i want to be i want to embody this idea of identity leadership is that about reading what the group currently represents or is it trying to articulate a version of where the group is going yeah well it's both of those things i mean a lot of our stuff we do in sort of leadership development space is about precisely exactly what you just said like it's about you have to understand where we are you have to understand where we want to get to and then you have to help the group chart a course to it so So it's about bringing those things together.

8:32So, yeah, and that's the business. If you're not doing that, like I can, you know, again, I've worked long enough to have been exposed to some very good models of leadership and some very, very average models of leadership. And the average ones are all about the leader being completely physically and psychologically absent, like missing in action, and actually having no interest in or engagement with the group. So you just feel forgotten about languishing. And in many ways, I think that kind of indifference is sometimes worse than being treated badly. If your boss bullies you, at least you think they care about you.

9:11But if they just don't even acknowledge you as this, I think that's just terrible. So that. But yeah, what are the components, right? It's an easy acronym to remember. Just leaders have to care for their groups. They have to care about their groups. they have to what see they have to create a sense of group membership so this leader brings people together makes people feel as if they are part of a team of something important okay so you create the group if you think about some of those studies we're talking about earlier we're doing a lot of research in the health space at the moment leadership in that space what's that it's about creating a water club or what was the thing you did a zumba class or the thing you know that's leadership is about bringing people together to do something together that they find meaningful and then through that you're they're accessing all these other benefits that and they would they would say they're that person we've done a lot of work in australia around australia with men's sheds really fascinating i love working there and and okay and it's really fun really interesting there's a lot in western australia and they've got about 250 sheds there and we've got a lot of data from these sheds you might say and they're really interesting a little men's shed you you know these are often older people who retired not all but they come along and they and they do their stuff metal work a bit of woodwork they do some community stuff sometimes they do really interesting kind of projects as well what's the difference between a good men's shed and a bad men's shed well the bad men's sheds are the ones which where someone is come in to a leadership position typically on the basis of the fact that they were a great leader in a former life and they have a very strong sense of themselves as a great leader and they are now going to give the shed the benefit of their great leadership and and so they and it's basically sort of no i'll tell you how to do this because i'm a great leader so they they and they impose themselves on the group the sheds that are run effectively are ones in which the person comes along and works with the team creates the team does the thing that brings new members on board when they come in they welcome them into the group they you know they they go to trouble to make people feel they belong there and that they're at home there and that and if they do that they're perceived as doing leadership regardless of whether or not they've got a formal leader role so that's you've got to create the group you've also got to advance the group you've got to move the group forward so towards some some goal that it values so yeah just getting us all together and sitting around the circle doing nothing that's no good for anybody no we what was you know like if we're and we do a lot of stuff in sports teams you know well what we want to do is get better as a football team or as a netball team or whatever it is that we do okay a good leader is going to try to find ways to advance the group you know that might be about bringing people who've got particular skills or doing blah blah blah but they're interested in promoting the group and they promote the there's two things they do they promote the group over themselves and again what bad leaders do is actually what the group is just a vehicle for their own personal self-aggrandizement.

12:16Notice I said personal self-aggrandizement, not self-aggrandizement. Okay, because there's collective self-aggrandizement. That's fine. That's what groups kind of do in a particular way. Anyway, anyway. So there's A. The R is what we just said, represent. You've got to represent and embody what the group is about. You've got to capture it. You've got to be the epitome of what the group is about and what the group wants to be. Okay, so that people can look up to you as emblematic and aspirational. Someone, yeah, that's the sort of person that I want to be. And the more I'm like that, the better I'm going to feel about myself.

12:47And that's the basis for influence. And the final thing is the E. That's embedding. Now, that's really important. Really important in the leadership space because an awful lot of the leadership literature, scholarship, writing, is around the idea that kind of leader and the psychology of leadership is around the idea of what type of person you need to be, maybe what traits or attributes or things, behaviours even, that you do in the abstract. But it's what type of person are you? And that's not really the question in leadership. The question in leadership is what are we doing? What's actually, what are the material dimensions of this?

13:29And again, part of what good leaders do is create structures, physical, material, other things that bring people together and allow them to live out their group membership. So they embed that identity, that collective identity, in the group's life and allow people to live it out. Now, that's really such an important part of the leadership landscape. And it speaks to lots of classic data in organizational psychology and leadership about the importance of initiation of structure. So leaders are indeed people who structure and restructure things. Where it goes wrong, and it really goes wrong a lot, is that people misunderstand the logic of that proposition.

14:20They do what philosophers refer to as logicians. They affirm the consequent, which is to say they assume that... So leaders, effective good leaders, create change, create positive forms of change for the group, right? But the point there is they do it for the group and on the group's terms and in ways that make sense to the group. So they work with the identities to embed them. And effective change leverages existing identities. Ineffective change, which we see a lot and most change, as kind of most organizational psychologists will tell you, is ineffective. and will probably say something like 70 to 80 percent of things fail although there's some question mark about whether that's really true but and doesn't matter a lot of change fails why because it rides roughshod over social identities it destroys them well again a lot of our research there is like actually no i'm i'm a great leader and now i'm gonna i've got my spreadsheet here and i and it shows that if i were to reorganize the organization this way we'd save this and this i mean how i mean honestly like the number of times i've heard that in my career the number of times i've been on receiving end of that is too many okay and it and just yeah management by sort of spreadsheet and and what you see when people do that is you see people's identities being burnt at the stake of going up in smoke and of course that's what drives resistance to and the negative outcomes of change is actually you take valued identities and then you trample them underfoot and give people nothing in return.

15:56And as we've been saying all the way through, it's bad for people's health. It's bad for their well-being. It's bad for their performance. But you go and do your MBA, and that's going to be what your number one thing is. Come up with your master plan. How are you going to redesign? I've got to be careful I don't start channeling Jonathan Pye here. Like, you know, but, you know, it's, you know, like, how stupid can you be? But tell me this. So you've articulated there the care model for leaders to think about channeling identity, create, advance, represent and embed. I saw you talking online or you responded to someone online and you were talking about culture and you said culture, in as much as you believe it exists, is an instantiated example of identity.

16:38And I was really taken with that and I scribbled it down. And look, you know, it would be no surprise after the conversation that we've just had that you really believe that identity is right at the core of human experience. But what you're describing there, that care model, is basically the boss is in charge of creating this culture and embodying it and sort of sustaining it. And I see almost everything that the boss is doing there, the leader there, is about creating this culture. and I just, maybe I've misinterpreted that. I'd love to get your take on how you perceive leaders in culture and identity.

17:18Yeah, yeah. So firstly, yeah, that's right. I mean, I think, yeah, you've got the point that, yeah, I think it's about identity. Yeah, well, that's, yeah, that's good. Yeah. So, yes, I do. And, yeah, and so what is culture? Yeah, and I do, and culture is hugely important. So I'm not poo-pooing culture as a concept. It's incredibly important. But what is the culture? What is the culture of an organisation? Yeah, it's instantiated social identity. It's who we are and all the things that indicate who we are. It's our values. It's the structures that we have. It's the things that we do, the way that we live this identity out.

17:48And it can be very small things up to very big things. And actually, I've never really written anything on that. But I've never read anything about culture which has disabused me of that view, that fundamentally what you're talking about is instantiated social identity. And when you're talking about leadership and culture, we're talking about it in that way. But the answer to that other thing you said is, I think, quite straightforward. I never said the boss. I said the leader, right? And I don't think the boss is always the leader. I said in a group, anybody, the leader is the other people who, the leaders are the people who represent us.

18:23Now, they may not be called the leaders. They may not have paid a lot of money. But they are the people who are leading us, the people who are influencing us. now what you so firstly if you restrict leadership to people who are the bosses or the people with fancy titles on their names and getting paid lots of money you got that wrong mate you know that's just well there's your problems i think so that's what you see in effective organizations is is everybody's doing leadership and everybody is doing the things that i've talked about everybody is trying to embody what the group is about everybody is coming up with activities and structures that embed the groups at 2D.

19:00Like, just think about, I mean, let me just think about my work team. We had a big meeting yesterday. We all tried to come in like once a week on a Wednesday, and we were all there. There was maybe 20 of us, I think, talking about all of our plans. I think pretty much everybody around the table volunteered something that they were going to be doing that was going to take the group forward in some way. Someone was saying, oh, what are we going to do for a social activity next Friday? and this was some postgraduate students i'll call them out hannah and sophie thank you very much okay that they've organized we're going to emping bowling okay not everybody wants to do that we're gonna that was a thing we had a bit of a thing that's going to let's do that and they do other things we're going to have a writing retreat in october who are we going to invite to that what are we going to do what's the strategy we'll ask the students all these things everybody around the table is is making a contribution and all of our the stuff we've done in sport and our colleagues in the sporting arena who kind of do all this.

19:55And again, people like Katrine Franson, Philip Bowen, Sean Figgins, Matt Slater, Jamie Barker, a whole range of people working in this. What's the difference between a winning sports team and a poor sports team? In a poor sports team, the only people who do leadership are the people, are the leaders. In a good sports team, everybody does leadership in the ways that I've described. So the real goal of that space is to create leaderful teams. So that's really the goal, is leaderfulness. And again, I think a lot of our stuff in organizations is around saying, hang on a minute, you've got a leadership development program, but the only people who get on that are the senior management or something.

20:38or you've got$200 per, for a rank and file employee for development, and you're spending 20 ,000 on your senior executives. Okay. There's a couple of problems with that. I thought you employed them because they had those leadership skills. I thought that's why you did them. So the idea that somehow they need, in your own terms, that doesn't make any sense. But surely this is something that everybody should be doing and wanting to do. And if, And I think going back to the men's sheds again, one of the really interesting things about effective men's sheds is that they really apply themselves to the question of how they bring on members and allow them to develop that sort of sense of agency and that sense of leadership.

21:20And some of them, for example, they do things like they have rehabilitation programs for young offenders who are struggling to find a way in the world. And what they do is they bring them into the shed and they, you know, and just make them feel good about themselves and feel there's a place in the world for them and help them to develop self-confidence and some sorts of skills around that, that make them not just effective group members, but potentially kind of leaders. And again, I think that's a kind of natural crucible for leadership, I would say. And if I really want to understand leadership, I'd go to a men's shed rather than to a top FTSE 100 company or whatever.

21:57But again, one of the fictions of contemporary organisational and managerial science is that the only place that leadership is done is in elite organisations and that the only people who do it are the elites at the top of those organisations. Nothing could be further from the truth. But tell me this then. So if anyone is diagnosing, and I was at an event today where someone came over to me and said, look, you know, the dynamic in my team isn't great. Most people, if I ask them to come along to a social event, even if I'm doing it in the afternoon, they don't want to come along. They don't want to, like they did the 10-pin bowling wints that you've just done there.

22:32They didn't want to do those things. If we're going to, you know, sometimes sport isn't a direct parallel, but it helps because it paints a vivid image for us to see. If we're seeing a team that isn't working well, is it in your contention that it's because they haven't got a clear sense of collective identity about who they are, what they mean to each other, and the importance of the group? And sometimes that might be because of leadership actions. It might be because of the lack of sort of collective accountability or collective thinking. Is that what you'd say? if you're thinking about your group culture isn't right the question you might ask yourself is is this a meaningful group to the people who are part of it yeah so look yeah absolutely so here's the thing what's the most kind of so in our field the huge amounts has been kind of written and studied and and if i was to say like what's the single most important like line that's ever been written in social identity research was written in 1982 paper by my phd supervisor john turner who's really the with omitasha one of the main founders of social identity research and social identity self-colonization theories and in that paper he makes this basic very basic observation which is social identity is what makes group behavior possible okay you've really got to think about that and really this but again the point there is if we don't have a shared internalized sense of we-ness we can't behave as a group okay that we to act and again i'm thinking there's great work by sort of cultural anthropologists around that too around and and people like richardson working in the u.s around how culture actually developed and culture's only made possible because people have internalized or able to internalize that sense of the collective the idea that i could do some cave painting on a wall and have the idea that this would be valuable to my group and my group would see some value in it and I'd want to communicate with them in this kind of way that was and his answer to that question is what is what makes culture possible is is social identity so yes okay now sometimes that might be a problem of leadership but there's a whole range of other things reasons why people might not have a sense of shared social identity your friends this person's example right yeah it might be something to do with their leadership I mean did you ask them whether they wanted to do 10 pin bowling I mean you know what did you ask them what they wanted to do that that's a pretty basic thing did you ask them what they can do well maybe they've got so much work that they that actually the idea of taking an afternoon off to do it would be a complete nightmare for them the other thing too is maybe they don't have much experience of of those things so there we were saying we've got this writing retreat in september or october and we were talking about you know how many people coming on and the student reps were saying oh well there's a couple of students who are kind of who bit afraid or scared of going to that and we were and i think our first thing was oh okay right what's that about then why why would someone be you know we're not trying to make it scary but but once you know that someone does then that's a problem you've got to try to solve i mean we've got to then work out okay what's going on there what are we doing wrong that's making this aversive for some people is that because they haven't had much experience of it is do we need to have a bit more of a gentle on wrap on ramp rather than just send you know going off to an island for three days, you know, which might be a bit, a bit confronting, but they presumably, they might also have other things, family commitments, other things, people have other groups, other lives, you know?

26:06So how do you bring those things together? I mean, what I would say and, and, and is I've never really, in my experience, never really ever had a group that couldn't solve those problems. but the key to being able to solve them was that they had to be helped to solve them themselves and and far too often we just just look to impose solutions on groups actually co-designing co-developing solutions to things is absolutely critical without that so again i and i i also think maybe that person is just carrying that bit it's not just their responsibility to solve that let's talk about this in the leadership team let's say why isn't this going what are we going to do but just coming and saying well you will play bowls on Friday that's probably not going to work you know and but what I would say is there is something that could be done to make that group more effective but it's but sometimes it's hard to work out what that is and it's hard to and it's hard to help people to work that out but some you know I mean we saw too in things like the pandemic one of the things about the pandemic was how you know it could really transform the way people kind of related to each other actually often in very positive ways okay so there can be things which suddenly you know suddenly people can sort of see the light and i and again i don't know i've worked in lots of different places and sometimes they're dead and you don't really want to take part in stuff okay and that's hard that's not where you necessarily want to start as a leader but if you can take a group that isn't working and work with its members to make it work then your leadership will be fated and celebrated.

27:45For me, the social loafing story and the disabusing of that is an interesting parallel for that there, which, you know, maybe you're a far better person to articulate it than me. But I guess social loafing, to some extent, is still, with some managers, a belief that they believe that people don't necessarily work hard in groups. And that was a long-established belief. Give me the social loafing the whole notion and then the re-evaluation of it. You're right. I mean, in my lectures on group productivity, I always start with the observation that for a lot of people and for a social and organisational psychologist for a long time, the idea of group productivity was like an oxymoron.

28:32So the idea that groups could be productive, only individuals could be productive. And there was really a whole series, a long, long progression of studies dating back to 1920 some studies by a guy called Ringelman, which seemed to bear that point out. I mean, just one of his studies were about a rope pulling task, right? And you had a tug of war type thing, and these young men had to pull on the rope. And shall we say, if one person pulled on the rope, they'd pull 100 kilograms. If two pulled on it, they'd pull 180. If three pulled on it, they'd pull 250. and so every what you saw then was the more people were added the more the group as a whole pulled but individually they pulled less and that's there's lots of replications of that kind of effect and they seem to bear out this thing that yeah well yeah I'm going to pull but I'm not going to pull as hard as I'd pull if I was on my own okay and that's very clear evidence of what is called social loafing there's two points to make about that paradigm which are broadly relevant one is there are kind of coordination problems like part of the reason that they don't pull so well on the rope is because actually you all have to pull at the same time and you have to have sort of rhythm to it and if you don't then it becomes not suboptimal where if you're on your own you don't have that problem so there's a bit of a mechanical problem issue there and you've got to kind of iron that out okay and that and that's also present in some group contexts if you're how does it take one man to dig a one square foot hole, well, a certain amount of time, but 10 men, well, they can't do it 10 times quicker, or women for that matter.

30:11The other problem, though, is in those studies, and this is what in the classic studies book, the work of Steve Carrow and Kit Williams and others, is that the issue in those studies was that when you got the group of people, it was not a psychological group. They were just random other people who turned up, pull on the rope. A guy called Jeremy Holt, who did his PhD at the University of Kent, is now a kind of sports psychologist. Again, he, for his honours thesis a long time ago, did a brilliant replication and extension of the Ringelman study. And it was this simple. He got the people who are pulling on the rope, before they got onto the rope, he got them to engage in a bit of team building activity think about a name for themselves and just to get to know each other and to do and to think of a slogan for themselves as a team so just did some very very basic work to make them not perceive themselves as individuals pulling on the rope but as a team and lo and behold what did you find they pulled as much as the individuals okay and the problem with those social loafing studies is that the groups are not psychologically real.

31:28They're just nominal groups, i.e. just an assembly of groups. They're a sociological group in the sense that these are people who we've deemed to be part of the same category. They're working on a task. It's not a psychological group in the sense implied by Turner in self-categorization theory, in the sense that people have internalized it. When people internalize a sense of shared identity and are working on a task, actually the norm is you can sometimes get loafing because of those coordination effects, but it's actually much more common to get something called social laboring, which is where people actually work harder.

32:03So often the groups, you know, two plus two will equal five because they will develop a norm to be more productive. And indeed, that's basically the secret of economic success around the world in the last 100 years is that where people have been able to build that sense of collective identity you know whether in startup companies or in organizations that's been the pathway to progress and that's allowed that that's also been the core mechanism or thing for as it were the exploitation of workers is getting people to feel that they're part of a team and then getting them to work hard on that basis and then them somewhere down the track discovering they weren't really a team because actually I'm going to fire you and I don't really care about you, which of course some people found out early on in the pandemic.

32:49And then you wonder why maybe post-pandemic some people are a bit cynical about some of those things. Could we reflect on the post-pandemic change? If groups are so important to us and this sense of sort of being part of a cohesive collective identity is so important to us, do you think there has been an impact of the pandemic in making groups less important. And I'm going to sort of draw a reference to a couple of things that have been reported this year. I think there's sort of the nascent data points that we're just starting to see. There's a fabulous writer in the US called Derek Thompson, and he suggested that, he's described a situation where people are spending about 100 minutes a day extra alone.

33:32And he says the interesting thing about this is that, you know, people frequently post online about the delight of their plans cancelling or their friends bailing on them. And he describes the phrase elective isolation, that people are somehow choosing to spend some time alone. And it's been backed up. John Byrne Murdoch, who has done some analysis for the Financial Times. And, you know, people have quibbled a little bit around the fringes of it, but broadly the trend, you know, we can argue about the scale of it, but the extent of it, but broadly the trend is that people are trending a degree less extroverted, they're trending a degree less conscientious.

34:14And so you might in aggregate say that people, for one reason or another, are choosing to enjoy their own company, leaning to that individualism over the collective. Now, if the origin of everything we've discussed so far is that groups are the things that give us life we might be in a situation where even though that is unequivocally demonstrably the case people are for other reasons whether it's distraction whether it's um sort of reducing in extroversion they're spending more time alone and and i just wonder holistically what that looks like if it's extrapolated and secondly how you might push back against it yeah well firstly yeah like so i believe that's absolutely true i mean it goes back to the robert putnam book i think bowling alone in which he's just you know he basically charts the decline of of social clubs and the title is about the demise of like bowling clubs in in the u.s but his observation yeah that that actually that kind of social infrastructure is kind of decayed uh over time and i think and i think you're absolutely right i mean there's lots of books I mean around there's a book uh Kunz the lonely century you know the idea that you know uh and and also yeah the idea that we've got this kind of pandemic of loneliness at the moment lots of data really speaking to that interesting I mean I and I and I think the pandemic was part of that I think one of the things that doesn't seem to be much evidence that the pandemic actually increased loneliness per se but it certainly increased people's awareness of it which is you know interesting but I think the general trajectory that's described as absolutely kind of right and i you know i think i think there's many firstly there's many reasons for that i i think you know again i think of my parents who my parents were like they were like they were like groupies like in in a full-on thing they my father was in the army but he was in the and then he was in the territorial army and he was and they were in the in the village that they lived they were in the gardening club and they and he did all these other things you know i think people don't round table all this other sorts of things that he was always every night in a week he was sort of out doing something you know and he was and a lot of charitable stuff and things like that my mum too you know like yeah they and they found and again actually one of the they they were in groups that they didn't even like the thing like you know that you know they did like gardening as it happens but they they would join a gardening group just the gardening club because it was in the village it seemed like a good thing to do and there's plenty of things like that they did okay and that was that was village life for me growing up and and and great really because you know you develop a lot of social skills and you you put in lots of awkward situations that you have to kind of work your way out of I thought it was like again I sort of very grateful for my parents for taking me along to these things that I found utterly confronting and and alienating like but you know you really we were thrown in the deep end and you just had to like talk your way out of it type thing so i think that i do think that's a thing and i think that going back to that men's shed thing that's trying to recapture some of that and to and to lock it into communities especially where it's needed so and that i think is in is part the answer is and is that so cath and tegan the kind of intervention they have around the loneliness space i'd say too a lot of people talk about loneliness not a lot of people do much about it right the stuff that we've done and the stuff at cath and seeking of lead on that's really the only ever really i think full-on evidence-based treatment intervention for loneliness and it's and it's allied with other bits and pieces but again it's a well evidenced now intervention around around the world and it's called groups for health very simple does what it says on the tin is like and basically what's that about it's about working with people working with wherever you find them and and and trying to help them either reconnect with old groups that they've lost contact with or to develop meaningful new group memberships and and they can be many in different forms i mean and basically that's the sort of where people now do sort of social prescribing which is quite a big thing in the uk increasingly in australia and some other places basically that's the thing is is that you're trying to plug people into a social matrix but our bit is it's not just saying oh go and do this go and join this choir or go and do this thing.

38:38It's about working with people to find the group membership that matters to them. It's actually about then doing identity leadership with them. And obviously in some ways that's kind of what parenting is about in a very particular way is about trying to help your children find the groups that are going to let them be the best versions of themselves. And lots of parents agonize about that process. You know, what, how do you do that? And it's hard. That's the point, you know, parenting, these things are hard, but yeah, I think if we don't recognize that that's incredibly important work and that we need to invest in our time.

39:12So if you're going back to why this doesn't happen, I think one is, I think people are very time poor. People are stretched. A lot of people holding down lots of jobs. That's another reason, going back to my thing for the four-day week, is I think it would create more space for people to do these things. But they won't just happen on their own. and they've got to be encouraged to do it. I think there's other things like technology and the ways in which technology atomizes us, but doesn't have to. So actually, colleagues of ours in the UK, Juliet Wakefield and her colleagues at Nottingham Trenton University have done a lot of work about people playing on multi-gaming platform-y type things.

39:54And they're really very good for developing a sense of social identity. And you can be parts of chess communities, other types of things where you do things online. And they're very positive for people. So, again, I think working with people to find out what their interests are and to turn those into, leverage them into things that can be shared and lived out with other people is the solution. But, as I said, one thing is time and the other is just policy. You know, I think, you know, we've gone through nearly 20 years of austerity in the Western world, and often the first things that get cut are community services.

40:33Where we are in West London, like, you know, the local libraries are closing down or the community drop-in centre, all those things. There's no funding for those things. Those things are hugely important. And based on the data, they should be the last thing that you would cut. They should be the last thing that you would cut. And yet they're seen as just a luxury and added something that has no consequence. I think things like free transport. I think one of the really good initiatives in Brisbane recently was that the government introduced a flat fare on all public transport of 50 cents, basically nothing.

41:09That just allows people to get and do things. I see in London, as the price of buses has gone up and up and up, you know and the tube that makes it harder for people to just get out and do things and who who yeah if you've got money that's not a problem as i said earlier money you have the good thing allows you to go and do those things if you don't have it it's very hard to do those connection things so again prioritizing that in our policy and me and making and seeing the raising that to the status of first priority and valorizing the people who deliver those services is you know to say those people do those things in the face of you know real challenges and that it's pretty thankless is a bit of an understatement I think that I and I think that the people who do those community services the people who run those libraries those help groups those support groups they are the absolute troopers they are the front line of society they're the people who are really delivering the value for all of us and we need to do more to celebrate them and things like inequality pay inequality and other things and and other things that implicitly devalorize those things are very very problematic and they need to be rooted out is in in my view um and i think those are you know i think that's a massive project um and yes i see and and i and i think that's an answer to on all all sorts of problems i was just in a i was at a conference in london recently on community policing and mental health and the data on is it's all around if you look at where you have really good community policing that's linked in with uh local support groups and a really good shared understanding within a given community actually mental health is much better in that community is far fewer mental health problems but also there's less crime you know like the whole stack you know it's so it's it's a recipe for sort of everything in a way but what's sort of fascinating is the ways in which we've conspired to get it wrong and to imagine that in getting it wrong we're getting it right i'd love to sort of as we wrap up i'd love to ask you a question really just um about your own personal involvement in this study the field that you've done.

43:27Because, you know, down to the fact that the Surgeon General of the US has talked about loneliness, being one of the biggest killers, the rise of social identity work or social identity adjacent work is just growing exponentially. The number of citations on academic papers is growing really strongly. You mentioned John Turner writing that really important phrase. And I just wondered whether, from my perspective as like a lay person studying this, I wondered whether your own work on that BBC show, The Experiment, and the tracking of stress responsivities and the tracking, not just the groups of what was happening there.

44:13This was a repeat of that famous Stanford prison experiment. But I wondered whether that wasn't of equal value to that John Turner comment, because it seemed to produce something that accelerated the whole study of groups beyond something that was just like self-organisation into, oh, right, this seems to have a bodily response on the people involved. I just wondered if you could give a perspective on the development of this study and whether you think that was like a pivot point. Yeah, well, I think for, so I did that with Steve Reicher in 2001 now, so quite a long time ago, and the BBC, no, I mean, it was a moment in time.

44:54I don't think that would ever be done again, something like that. But yeah, I think for us, and Steve had also done his PhD with John and had been working this tradition longer than me. And for us, it was absolutely, it was a sort of, it was a bit of an epiphany in the sense that, you know, we'd always done experiments and groups and stuff, but we never really studied them in that kind of intensive way over a long period of time. And we'd gone into that study with one set of understandings of various processes. And I think the two big things that that study brought home to us in the publications and things that came from it were, one, this thing about leadership.

45:31All of that stuff about leadership really came out of that because you could see the people who did the leadership there were the people who worked with the groups, not the people who were successful in other walks of life or whatever. And to the extent they did the things that we talked about, they were able to get the groups to do things and to make a difference in good and bad ways. And the other thing, though, was, and we had not really gone into this with thinking about this, but we just thought, oh, well, we're doing this. You know, look, we've got these groups in this prison and we've got the prisons and we've got this.

46:04And we had a sort of steering committee of people around the projects, advisors. And I remember we had a lot of the University of Exeter where I was at the time and including Cath and some other clinical psychologists on there and saying, well, if you're doing that, it's going to. And we also had some clinical psychologists who were overseeing the project to just check for sort of health and safety kind of reasons. And they were saying, well, I think you should be looking at these things. So we put in these raft of these measures. As you say, we had measures of stress. We had measures of depression.

46:32We had measures of paranoia and anxiety. And we took daily measures of cortisol, you know, just as a part of that was just it was kind of something to do. Right. But so we did it. And again, Steve and I, and again, what jumped out at us, and we hadn't really anticipated at all, was the way in which the health and mental health of the participants was tracked the state of their group. So as the prisoner group became more emboldened and developed a strong sense of social identity, their sense of support, their sense of efficacy, they improved, their depression reduced, their paranoia reduced. Whereas for the guards, as their identity collapsed, you saw exactly the opposite.

47:19They became depressed. They became paranoid. They were disengaged. And again, this was not because they were, this is not about who they were as individuals, right? they're all pre-tested to be psychologically very healthy and they and subsequently were too but by changing those group dynamics and and creating particular kind of trajectories for those groups in that study you had those massive consequences and i think what we had never done prior to that point was put all those things together and see how the social the organizational and the clinical kind of interact with each other and i think and this is another one of my little bugbears is you know i i think at the start i said i'm a social and organizational psychologist but i prefer just to call myself a psychologist because i i think disciplinary or subdisciplinary boundaries in psychology are very very unhelpful i think you know we have theories we have social psychological theories of things and then we have this organizational thing and then we have the clinical health things and never the twain shall sort of meet and there's very little dialogue across those things i think a lot of the theorizing across them is pretty banal and pretty low rent and isn't very good so actually what you need is high level integrative theorizing that looks in all of those registers and comes up with an integrated understanding of the operation of the of the mind and sees the mind as yeah fundamentally social in ways that we've talked about so yeah so So for me, yes, it was absolutely sort of critical.

48:57I don't know whether it was for other people. I mean, one of the things we've always tried to do with the BBC is to say, like, could we go back and revisit that study and, like, talk about it now we know so much? And I think that's not how television works. They just want – they're not interested in that, which is a shame, I think. But it is still, I think, on the A-level syllabus in the UK, and I still get, I'd say, I get 10 emails from students, high school students a week asking questions about it and that it's nice to be wanted in a particular way. Like, you know, and it's a thing. Yeah, and I think people still find it interesting.

49:34Yeah, it kind of is interesting and it's much more interesting than I think it seemed at the time. I think. At the time, it was just very scary. You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com.

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51:00I'm so grateful for the time you've spent today. What do you think the next steps are in in like studying groups studying social identity studying how this works yeah yeah good question i can i could come up with some things i really don't know the answer i'll tell you what i did do last i just come back so i'm a brisket at the moment but i just come back two weeks ago from a social identity summer school that was hosted by some colleagues of ours in in leuven in belgium and there were 40 students from all over the world young not all young different but but mainly young from all doing all manner of things we had four streams social organizational sport and political and and they worked on projects and ideas and the only there's only two the two things i'd say there is one is we couldn't no way could have anticipated what they would come up with in the course of that week working intensively and the second is watching them work and seeing what they were doing and seeing those things evolve you know filled me with an enormous sense of kind of optimism in terms of their just generative power so and I gave a talk at the beginning and I started with a quotation from Sinek Zubry and said like the best way to predict the future is to create it and I think that was what that's about so and I think and to that I would add yeah don't create it on your own create it in groups so for me that's about what are the groups that I'm in going to do what are the what are we going to do um and part of having these conversations is about trying to mobilize other people to be part of that collective endeavor.

52:33Because if you're going to be doing that with other people, you're going to enjoy it more and you're going to endure it more and you're going to stay the course. I think the thing that's sustained me through my career is, as I said, the groups I'm in. Most of my colleagues in academia are retired now and they've sort of given up, I think, often because early on they imagined this was just a game you played on your own. Not really, no, and that's not a recipe for success. it's just not a recipe for for i think a general level sort of equanimity yeah i'm very positive about that i always say like two i'm one of the reasons i really like teaching and i still continue to teach when again a lot of people want to get out of it is i when i go into a classroom every year and i see what the students come up with i'm filled with a massive sense of optimism when i if i want to be depressed i just turn on the news and and honestly i just is just so i mean so depressing when i want to feel good i just go and listen to a group of students present their ideas about what we could do to make the world better and and i'm you know i'm that's the only thing that gives me optimism i would say and i yeah so but i but it does and that's why i go that's why i want to carry on doing it and i think if if you've got the right groups and you've got the right motivations you've got the right theories or ideas i think there's so so much more to do thank you to alex there's a full transcript to this on the website like i said there's another episode coming immediately after this, which is an application of how you can bring ideas of identity to your own team.

54:00Really practical application of this. I've been Bruce Taisley. See you next time.

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54:43Alex Haslam: Wayfair, every style, every home. Here's a tip for you. There's a podcast out there with fans waiting to be your next customer. They tune in every week, they trust the host, and that host wants to talk about brands like yours in their own words to their audience. The problem is, you just haven't been introduced yet. We're Acast, where that introduction happens. As the world's largest podcast marketplace, we let you browse shows, see who's listening, and book host-read sponsorships or run your own ads all from one platform. Transparent pricing, real-time data, complete control. Start advertising on podcasts by visiting a cast.com slash advertise.