When Is It Virtue Signaling and When Is It Leadership?: Behavior Change in the Workplace
While I was trying to find an interesting angle on workplace leadership, I was grateful (for the first time?) to run face-first into peak Twitter. Washington Post journalist Megan J. McArdle was having a wonderful debate about why she was wearing a mask in her profile picture. The thread blossomed into the fragrant flower that most Twitter wars become, but I think this specific stretch was my favorite:
You didn’t need it in the car at that moment. The assumption being that this semi-famous journalist put on a facemask, took a picture, and made it her avatar not because she was genuinely concerned about a pandemic that has killed almost a quarter million Americans, or that she was following the rules at her grandmother’s nursing home (which was the actual case), or even that she thought it was a funny comment on the times…but that it was a naked, obvious attempt to be holier-than-thou, to shove the masses’ collective face in her good deed.
Megan was accused of classic virtue signaling, maybe my favorite gift of the late 2010s. It’s a great phrase for online discourse: jargon-y, not immediately accessible, acidic, dense-but-light enough for anyone to fling far and wide, and — probably its most effective attribute — utterly uncharitable toward the accused’s motivations. It purports to originate from the UK, but it often feels most at home as an evergreen insult-at-hand toward those on the progressive spectrum as they flash various badges of respectability, social affluence, obnoxious do-goodery, and other moral grandstanding. What I find fascinating about the term is that it weaponizes the general anxiety of being told what to do, or more to the point, the anxiety that what one is currently doing is wrong or insufficient. It performs a nimble jiu-jitsu on our own evolutionary tic — the fact that it’s nearly impossible to change our minds — and instead places the blame on the virtue signaler for even daring to try.
It brings me back to the last great dust-up that we had as a nation about a piece of fabric: the Great Seatbelt War of 1984. Even though the automobile debuted before the 20th century, and their status as fiery death traps well confirmed by the 1930s, seatbelts weren’t even an option in commercial cars until the mid-50s (and only 2% of people choose the $27 add-on). It took Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed combined with overwhelming evidence from field-testing to get consistent usage up to a measly 15%. In 1984, the state laws started coming down to deal with the grisly consequences, first in New York, then spreading westward. The pushback was immediate and intense: lawsuits, rampant disobedience, and the contention that it was safer(!) to get thrown from a car crash than wear a seatbelt. Today, over 90% of Americans wear seatbelts. Seatbelt resistance is, quite literally, not a thing. But I’ll tell you something: I lived through that war, and I never wore seatbelts as a kid in Indiana. I also, though, never looked at someone putting a seatbelt on and thought, “Quit rubbing your elite ways in my face!” You never heard of someone taking off their seatbelt to spite someone else. At least, it never registered that way.
What changed…?¹
What changed is that we’ve decided more stridently who can and cannot tell us things. This seems to be a cultural shift ushered in by the internet age. Now to be fair, whether you’re talking about facemasks or seatbelts or cigarettes on airplanes, one has to do a bit of a balancing act when talking about an American culture created centuries earlier. You have to square the Tocquevillian idea of America as a “Nation of Joiners” against its fetish for rugged individualism. There aren’t many cultures where people like to be told what to do from authority figures, but Americans hate it. They hate to be ordered to do something, but they may hate it even more when it’s broadly implied from the culture at large. Oddly though, they remain quite susceptible to persuasion and behavior modeling; think of all the recent behaviors that have evolved very quickly in the mobile age, to becoming fluent in a dizzying array of text-ready acronyms to the rapid retirement of words like “gay” and “retarded” in everyday banter. So…behavior change still happens all the time; we just can’t agree in the open that’s what we’re attempting to do.
This create a problem for workplace educators and culture creators. It’s incredibly difficult to model behavior in 2020. This is made even more urgent in the wake of online radicalization, racial reconciliation, continued gender inequities, general incivility, and other longstanding cultural rot. When we look at, for example, why most D&I training fails, we run into familiar backstops. Mandatory training breeds resistance. It’s seen more as a PR move than an actual effort to improve. People think “the other guy” has the problem. On and on and over and over, force and trust are the levers upon which behavior modeling succeeds or fails. Force breaks trust, and without trust behavior does not change.
This is not just “In my day…” complaining. Workplace culture in the past really was a top-down phenomenon, and still is in places around the world (try calling your colleague by their first name in Japan, for instance). You either thrived in Jack Welsh’s uber-corporate General Electric, Nolan Bushnell’s wild-ass Atari, The Donald’s insular and back-biting Trump Organization…or you didn’t. But today’s Western work cultures are more bottom-up phenomena, even more so in the era of COVID-influenced distributed workforces. So for guardians of these cultures — founders, HR leaders, educators — how can you aim for meaningful culture change without getting tuned out as noise or, worse yet, a performative virtue signaler? Think about these tips:
HIRING IS THE BEST DEFENSE. AND OFFENSE.
There’s a saying in filmmaking: a good movie is 70% casting. If you can get Meryl Streep for your community theater rendition of MacBeth, I say don’t think too hard and just do it. The same principle applies to workplace culture: the right people need to be there for it to work. But behind this banal advice is a tougher-edged flipside. Leaders should be less certain of their ability to “coach up” people into the culture. That candidate’s aggression under stress or this co-founder’s secretive nature is less likely to melt away in the face of well-meaning mentor sessions down the road (and even less so over Zoom). Choose the team wisely. This goes for early-stage entrepreneurs too, who often think of themselves as too bootstrapped to have culture as a top concern. That amazing salesperson who moonlights as a malignant narcissist will probably change your mind about that…
While the perennial advice of “hire slow, fire fast” is controversial, the controversy usually lies on the hiring side. Observing and acting quickly on the evidence that someone is not a fit is still pretty bankable.
MAYBE DO LESS ACTUAL VIRTUE SIGNALING.
So…there is quite a bit of virtue signaling going on out there. It’s not all in your heads, and it’s not a bad thing to stress-test why and how your organization is expressing its values. One great way to do that is to ensure that a company’s values are expressed, quarter over quarter, through some measurable way in the company’s goals. There are many ways to do this — OKRs, SMART goals, PPPs — but choosing one of these systems can hardlink how these values are tangibly connected to the organization’s future. It’s a lot easier, for instance, to overcome pushback for a pricey D&I initiative when it’s made clear how diversity positively impacts the bottom line.
What’s more…there’s no crime in just being silent, even about things that people care about. The belief that, because you have a megaphone to your lips that you have to speak is not true.
POSITIVE VOLUNTEERING BEATS NEGATIVE COMPLIANCE.
There’s a sharp distinction between behavior change and behavior modeling. Changing behavior is often reactive; it speaks to negative consequences and compulsion, leading people to dig their heels in or mentally opt themselves out of the group needing intervention. Giving space to volunteer for, say, communication skills training gives people a mental reward for opting in, opening them up to learn more. Setting rigid diversity quotas is less effective than letting a team manage itself while leadership organizes hiring fairs in more diverse areas. Simply put, when people feel more control, they are more open to changing their ways.
That said, setting up an incentive system based on positive volunteering takes more time and investment than a reactive one of compliance and punishment. Plan accordingly.
BUT ALSO…DRAW LINES IN THE SAND.
Promoting agency in culture development is important…until the asteroid is headed toward Earth. Then the velvet gloves must come off. Of the many reasons Jacinda Ardern and New Zealand handled COVID-19 so well — in contrast to America’s debacle — was that the lockdown came swift and hard. The country sealed up on March 15 and only essential services were open for an entire month. Mask-wearing was almost religious. There was no volunteering, no touchy-feely debate sessions on whether they were really free or not (Spoiler Alert: they were). As a result, Kiwis can go enjoy their rugby games while in the U.S. we’re surpassing our summer highs in infection rates while foiling attempted kidnapping plots of elected officials.
This is all to say, leadership needs to be very clear what the company is about, what it stands for, and what that looks like in action (not just on the website). When that clarity is there, culture creators have more leeway when they’re heavy-handed about some things (we will have a balanced male/female board) while more flexible about others (how employees dress).
HAVE A PLAN FOR CONFLICT.
I was surprised when I started interviewing L&D leaders a few years back and learned that “difficult conversations” were the thing they had the most trouble with organizationally. Conflict at work is a longstanding problem, but generational differences have exacerbated it, with older workers being more confrontational and younger ones being more avoidant. WFH has made conflict resolution even more elusive. But an essential part of leadership — maybe one of those lines in the sand described above — is how an organization handles inevitable conflict. Leaders should commit to a conflict resolution scheme, and stick to it. Otherwise, the more aggressive styles will usually “win,” organizational trust is lost because people don’t feel psychological safety, and behavior modeling becomes harder to pull off. Conflict resolution may not feel directly related to leadership, but it is.
WORK THE SYSTEM, NOT THE PERSON.
The above examples demonstrate that people haven’t changed. They are still motivated by incentives. But setting up direct transactions to produce outcomes betrays a clumsy understanding of how incentives work. I’ll tell a story of my own lawlessness to illustrate this. As a professor at Cal State LA, I spent all last year receiving urgent emails from the university to complete some sexual harassment training I’d never heard of. Nothing about it from the Department Chair, it just kept showing up, screaming in my inbox from the very beginning. Immediately I thought, “This training is going to be so bad. I’m clearly just ticking a box for some bureaucrat down-campus. I have no time to do this right now. If I never respond, these will end someday…”
And I was right. Haven’t received an email in months, and I’m proud to say I never kowtowed to these politically correct overlords who basically accused me of rape/sarc. Now make no mistake: we both lost out here. They lost one more person toward whatever organizational goal they were trying to hit, and I possibly lost out on an opportunity to better identify harassing behavior, to know who the point of contact is on campus, to learn how to counsel students, and so on. Had the Chair or someone from Faculty Affairs ever trudged over to our little building to personally make the appeal, I almost certainly would have done it. Had they come into my inbox as if I wasn’t already a delinquent, I probably would have done it. Instead, I saw it as a chance to teach a silent lesson to a faceless nag, instead of an opportunity. Sound familiar?
And that’s just it right there. Great leadership is usually about outlining the opportunities instead of detailing the consequences. Virtue signaling is about treating the viewer as an audience to a performance of leadership. At times, reins need to be grabbed, but mostly it’s about communicating trust and facilitating agency to reach a shared goal. What people are often saying when they yell “virtue signalling!” is actually, “I don’t trust you, so your motives must be false.” But that charge is hard to level against someone when they’ve actually earned that trust. That takes work and planning. Good luck.
¹ Some people are thinking, “Hey, we’ve always hated showy, moralistic, performative do-gooders back to olden times!” That’s true, but it would require a larger article than you probably want to read about how virtue signalers have changed (less religious, less aristocratic) and how reception to virtue signaling has changed (we have much less appetite for it).
Justin Wolske runs CASEWORX and co-founded GRID110. He teaches at Cal State LA and lives in Long Beach, CA. This fall, CASEWORX is teaming up with education leader Started two run two advanced workshops on goal-setting and conflict resolution. Inquire within.
