Yelling Ethics in the Boardroom
“If they cheat for you, they will cheat against you”, writes influence superhero Robert Cialdini in his blockbuster sequel Pre-suasion. Like Spiderman’s uncle Ben, Cialdini realizes that with great power there must come great responsibility. In the past to make his case for ethics, Cialdini often gave the same reasons that many including myself made: bad ethics leads to reputational damage and threatens the long-term success of your company.
But this call for ethics has not worked, so in Pre-suasion Cialdini uncovers bad ethics’ triple threat.
First, employee performance declines at unethical firms. Poor ethics increases employee stress. A Fortune Magazine article found workplace stress to be the number six cause of death in the US. Stressed, absent, checked-out employees cost companies millions. Stressed employees care less about quality and customer service suffers the most.
To test unethical practices on performance, Cialdini setup a study where two teams had to complete a test. The leader of the first team told his team, the team scored 67%, but he was going to report 80%. The leader of the second team told his team the scored 67% and he was reporting 67%. In a subsequent task, the unethical group did 20% worse than the ethical group because after a while they simply stopped working.
To support the real world link to his test, Cialdini conducted an employee survey that asked questions in three areas: company’s ethics, personal stress, and performance. The results revealed a strong link between weak ethics and poor performance. Employees ranked moral stress as the most toxic stress. Put simply, bad ethics kills morale.
The more unethical the culture the poorer the worker’s job performance, second the more unethical their climate, the more stressed they felt at work, and third that particular stress caused their poor performance.
Second, employee turnover increases as ethics decrease because who wants to work for a morally bankrupt company. To test this link Cialdini asked members of both teams in the first study if they would like to switch teams. Fifty-one percent of members on the ethical team took the offer compared unethical group’s 80% rate.
Third, employee fraud illustrates another form of the broken window theory. The people left behind in an unethical company take on many of the same unethical tendencies. To test this threat, Cialdini told members of both groups they had to remain in their original groups, but he offered each participant a chance to see the answers without being caught. The ethical team members did not have a statistically significant number of cheaters but 77% of members in the unethical group cheated.
How to Pre-suade
“Nothing is more important then what you are thinking about right now”, finds Cialdini. So Pre-suasion practices the art of influence by capturing attention. Cialdini captures attention with examples like: Arthur Miller defending a young man who confessed under Salem witch like tactics, the younger Bush inadvertently manipulating the media’s Iraq war coverage, and why Imperial Japan, aligned with Nazi Germany, offered safe harbor to Eastern European Jews.
Cialdini published Influence in 1984, I eagerly awaited Pre-suasion and after slow start in the first two chapters, he shares all his newfound golden nuggets. Like, if you want to sell French wine, play French music; if you want to sell German wine, play German music; and if you want to sell expensive wine, have the customer write down a number higher than the cost. No fool’s gold here - they are all backed by science. Social science at least.
Attention and Association
Where Influence focused on what to say, Pre-suasion focuses on when to say it. Like comedy, timing is everything. Timing depends on attention and association. Quarterbacks and CEOs get associated with too much credit and blame because they are typically in the public’s attention. No one is looking at the left tackle or the trader ensconced behind twelve monitors.
Pre-suasion lists six attention grabbing strategies: the sexual, the threatening, the different, the self-relevant, the unfinished, and the mysterious.
Advertising uses all these methods, but often fails to get the right link. For example, people watching romantic movies respond better to ads that call on being alone by highlighting individuality, while people watching violent movies respond better to ads that call for being together by boasting popularity.
Bringing it together: Unity
In the final section, Cialdini combines his new pre-suasion techniques with his classic six influencers: liking, reciprocity, authority, social proof, consistency and scarcity. Then he presents a new influencer: unity. We respond to messages based on our shared identity (genealogy, geography, etc.) or activity (synchronization and collaboration). Identity politics demonstrates the effectiveness and danger of the unity principle.
As a compliance professional, I applaud Cialdini’s chapter on business ethics. Coerced confessions and media manipulation use persuasion for harm. But these tools can be used for good: when the Japanese general asked the leader of Japan’s Jews why the Nazis wanted them dead, the wise Rabbi replied, “they hate us because we are Asian.”
As the penultimate chapter, Ethics may seem forced or downbeat, but as Cialdini writes, “no one will ever be fined for yelling “ethics” in a boardroom.”
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