To understand leadership, you need to understand identity

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And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started at vanta.com. This 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 Haslaman. 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 a 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. This 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 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 Haslaman. I 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 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. And so when he stands up there and he speaks in the accent that all of 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. It'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 centre 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. So 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 mobilise 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 variance on that. And you know, in different contexts, not quite that. But but yeah, as you say, this identity leadership is about mobilising that sense of social identity that we've been talking about. It's about catalyzing it within your groups, cultivating it, and then channelling 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, huge 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 Dyck and his colleagues at Goethe University in Frankfurt led out that, I don't know, 42 countries all over the world, everywhere is 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. Yeah. And you've alluded to some of them, then you're going to have a problem leading and 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 connection, that psychological connection between the leader and the other team members, you know, you might call them followers, but the people are doing the followership that makes the leadership work is absolutely critical to team, group, organisational success, absolutely 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 might be you can do other things, you can throw your weight around and you can hold a gun to people's head or, or a stick or carrot, all those things. And that will, you know, 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. And 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. Yeah. 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 what are the other centres? 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 those really, it's about bringing those things together. So yeah, and that's the business. That's the, if you're not doing that, like I can, you know, I 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. But 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? So 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 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 that you know, that's leadership is about bringing people together to do something together they find meaningful. And then through that, you're there accessing all these other benefits that and they would, they would say 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, 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 know, these are often older people who retired, not all, but they come along and they and they do their stuff, metal work, 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 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 and they impose themselves on the group. The sheds that are unaffected, 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 in a circle doing nothing, that's no good for anybody. No, we, what, 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. Notice 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 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 an 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. And 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 lead it 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 are the material dimensions of this? And 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 everyday life, 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 organisational 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, is that people misunderstand that the logic, the logic of that proposition, they 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 changes, kind of most organisational psychologists will tell you is ineffective. And we'll probably say something like 70 to 80% of things fail, although there's some question mark about whether that's really true, but it 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 it shows that if I were to reorganise the organisation 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 a receiving end of that is too many. Okay. And, and just yet management by sort of spreadsheet. And what you see when people do that is you see people's identities being burned 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. And 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 that's you go and do your MBA. And that's going to be what your number one thing is come up with them. Come up with your master plan, how are you going to redesign? I've got to be careful. I don't start channelling Jonathan Pye here. Like, you know, but you know, it's, it's, you know, like how stupid can you be? But tell me this. So you've, you've articulated there, the care model for leaders to think about channelling 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 exists, is an instantiated example of identity. And I was really taken with that. And I scribbled it down. And, 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, and sort of, and 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. Yeah. 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 cuckooing culture as a content is 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, the way that we live this identity out. And it can be very small things up to very big things. And actually, I, you know, I've never really written anything on that. But that's, 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 in that way. But the answer to that other thing you said is, 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 lead. I said, and in a group, anybody, the leader is the other people who the leaders are the people who represent us. Now, they may not be called the leaders, they may not, they may not have paid a lot of money, they're the people, but they are the people who are leading us, 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 the names and getting paid lots of money, you got that wrong, mate, you know, that's just well, there's your problem type thing. So that's what you see in effective organisations 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. And so they're like, I'm just think about, I mean, let me just think about my work team, we had a big meeting, I say we're all, we all try to come in like once a week on Wednesday, and we were there, there was maybe 20 of us, I think, talking about all of our plans. I think, 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, they've organised, we're going to Tempin Bowling. Okay, not everybody wants to do that. That was a thing, we had a bit of a thing, 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 structure? I'll ask the students, all these things. Everybody around the table is, is making a contribution. And all of the stuff we've done in sport and our colleagues in the sporting arena who kind of do all this, and again, people like Katrine France and 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, 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 organisations is around saying, hang on a minute, you've got a leadership development programme, but the only people who get on that are the senior management or something, or 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. 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 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. And 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 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. I mean, I think, but 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, 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, 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 Tempin bowling wints that you've just done there. They 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 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 Omri Tasha one of the main founders of social identity research and social identity self-characterization theories. And in that paper, he makes this basic, very basic observation, which is social identity is what makes group behaviour possible. Okay. You really got to think about that and really this, but again, the point there is if we don't have a shared internalised 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 people like Richardson working in the US around how culture actually developed and cultures only made possible because people have internalised or able to internalise that sense of the collective. The idea that I could do some cave painting on a wall and have the idea that this will be valuable to my group and that 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 makes culture possible 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, did you ask them what they wanted to do? That's a pretty basic thing. Did you ask them what they can do? Well, maybe they've got so much work 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 those things. So we were saying, we've got this writing retreat in September or October, and we were talking about how many people are coming on, and the student reps were saying, oh, well, there's a couple of students who are kind of, who are a 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 would someone be, we're not trying to make it scary, 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 it that we need to have a bit more of a gentle on-ramp rather than just saying, going off to an island for three days, which might be a bit confronting, but they, presumably they might also have other things, family commitments, other things. People have other groups, other lives. So how do you bring those things together? I mean, what I would say 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 far too often, we just look to impose solutions on groups. Actually, co-design and co-developing solutions to things is absolutely critical. Without that, though, again, and 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. But what I would say is there is something that could be done to make that group more effective, but sometimes it's hard to work out what that is, and it's hard to help people to work that out. But, 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, 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 feted and celebrated. For 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 old 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. So 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 Ringelmann, 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, they were young men, had to pull on the rope. And if, 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 gonna pull, but I'm not gonna 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'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. The other problem, though, is in those studies, and this is what, in the classic studies book, the work of Steve Carell 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, pulled on the rope. A guy called Jeremy Holt, who did his PhD at the University of Kent, and is now a kind of sports psychologist, again, he, for his honors thesis a long time ago, did a brilliant replication and extension of the Ringelmann study, and it was this simple. He got the people who were 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 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. They'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 the task. It's not a psychological group, in the sense implied by Turner and 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. So often the groups, 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, whether in startup companies or in organizations, that's been the pathway to progress. And 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 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. And then you wonder why maybe post-pandemic, some people are a bit cynical about some of those things. Can we reflect on the post-pandemic change? If groups are so important to us and this sense 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 draw reference to a couple of things that have been reported this year that I think they're 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 described a situation where people are spending about 100 minutes a day extra alone. And he says the interesting thing about this is that 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 Burnham Murdoch, who has done some analysis for the Financial Times. And people have quibbled a little bit around the fringes of it, but broadly the trends, 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. Trending a degree less conscientious. And so you might in aggregate say that people for one reason or another are choosing to enjoy their own company, lean into 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 sort of reducing extroversion, they're spending more time alone. 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. So I believe that's absolutely true. I mean, it goes back to the Robert Putnam book, I think, Bowling Alone, in which he basically charts the decline of social clubs. And the title is about the demise of bowling clubs in the US. But his observation, yeah, that actually that kind of social infrastructure has kind of decayed over time. And I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there's lots of books, I mean, around, there's a book called The Lonely Century, the idea that, 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. I mean, and I think the pandemic was part of that. I think one of the things, there 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 interesting. But I think the general trajectory that's described there is absolutely kind of right. And I think there's many, firstly, there's many reasons for that. I think, again, I think of my parents, who my parents were like, they were like groupies, in a full-on thing. 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 village that they lived, they were in the gardening club, and he did all these other things. 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, and he was, and a lot of charitable stuff and things like that. And my mum too, like, yeah, they found, and again, actually, one of the, they were in groups that they didn't even like the thing, like, you know, they did like gardening as it happens, but they would join a gardening group, the gardening club, because it was in the village, and it seemed like a good thing to do. And there's plenty of things like that they did. Okay, and that was village life for me growing up. And great, really, because, you know, you develop a lot of social skills, and you're put in lots of awkward situations that you have to kind of work your way out of. I thought it was like, again, I was sort of very grateful for my parents for taking me along to these things that I found utterly confronting and alienating. 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 of 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 lock it into communities, especially where it's needed. So, and that, I think, is part of the answer, is that, so Cath and Tegan, the kind of intervention they have around the loneliness, 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 that Cath and Tegan have led on, that's really the only ever really, I think, full-on evidence-based intervention for loneliness. And it's allied with other bits and pieces. But again, it's a well-evidenced now intervention around the world. It's called Groups for Health, very simple. It 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 trying to help them either reconnect with old groups that they've lost contact with or to develop meaningful new group memberships. 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 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. It'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, 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 it in our time. So 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. And 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. They've got to be encouraged to do it. I think there's other things like technology and the ways in which technology atomizes this, but doesn't have to. So actually, colleagues of ours in the UK, Juliette Wakefield and her colleagues at Nottingham Trenton University have done a lot of work about people playing on multi-gaming platformy type things. And 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. I think what we've gone through, what's nearly 20 years of austerity in Western world. And often the first things that get cut are community services, where we are in West London, like the local libraries are closing down or the community drop-in center, 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 as something that has no consequence. I think things like free transport. I think in one of the really good initiatives in Brisbane, right, recently was that the government introduced a flat fare on all public transport of 50 cents, basically nothing, okay. That just allows people to get and do things. I see in London, like 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, yeah, if you've got money, that's not a problem. As I said earlier, money, the good thing is it 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 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, 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 frontline 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 other things that implicitly devalorize those things are very, very problematic and they need to be rooted out in my view. And I think those are, you know, I think that's a massive project. And yes, I see, and I think that's an answer to all sorts of problems. I was just in a, I was at a conference in London recently on community. conference in London recently on community policing and mental health. And the data is all around. If you look at where you have really good community policing that's linked in with local support groups and a really good shared understanding within a given community, actually mental health is much better in that community. There's far fewer mental health problems, but also there's less crime. You know, like the whole stack, you know, so 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 about your own personal involvement in this study, the field that you've done, because, 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, this 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. I 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, yeah, it was absolutely, it was a sort of, it was a bit of an epiphany in the sense that we'd always done experiments in 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, all 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. 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 prisoners and the guards, and we had a sort of steering committee of people around the projects, advisors. And I remember we had a lot at the University of Exeter where I was at the time, including Cath and some other clinical psychologists on there, and saying, well, if you're doing that, 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 this raft of these measures. As you say, we had a measure of stress, we had a measure of depression, we had measures of paranoia and anxiety, and we took daily measures of cortisol, you know, just as a, and part of that was just, it was kind of something to do, right? So we did it. And again, Steve and I, and again, what jumped out at us, and we hadn't really anticipated it at all, was the way in which the health and mental health of the participants 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. They 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 were all pretested to be psychologically very healthy, and they, and subsequently were too. But by changing those group dynamics and creating particular kind of trajectories for those groups in that study, it 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 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 think disciplinary or sub-disciplinary boundaries in psychology are very, very unhelpful. I think 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 mind, and sees the mind as fundamentally social in the ways that we've talked about. So yeah, so for me, yeah, it was a, yes, it was absolutely sort of critical. I 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, could we go back and revisit that study and talk about it now we know so much? And I think that's not how television works. They just want, no, no, 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 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. Yeah, 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. Hi, this is Joe from Vanta. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation, and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or a growing enterprise managing vendor RISC, Vanta makes it quick, easy, and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started at vanta.com. Most people overpay for car insurance, not because they're careless, but because switching feels like too much hassle. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side-by-side from over 50 top insurers, and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Switch with confidence. Download the Jerry app, or visit jerry.ai slash Acast today. Hey everyone, it's Russell. And Christine. So I just found this mobile game everyone's talking about, Royal Match. Gorgeous graphics and super fun puzzles. Bro, you're late. I'm already at level 700. I play it every day on the subway because it doesn't need wifi. Wait, what? I've got to catch up. Oh, and they just added new mini games. They make it even more fun and challenging. All right, show's over. I'm going to go play. Download Royal Match on the App Store or Google Play today. I'm so grateful for the time you've spent today. What do you think the next steps are 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 in Brisbane 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 Lourve and in Belfast. And I was just talking to a couple of people of ours in Lourve and in Belgium. And there were 40 students from all over the world, young, not all young, different, but mainly young from all, doing all manner of things. We had four streams, social, organizational, sport, and political. 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 Sonic Zubery and I 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 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 we going to do? And part of, I guess, part of having these conversations is about trying to mobilize other people to be part of that collective endeavor. And so, because 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 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 they were 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 not a recipe for, I think, a general level sort of equanimity. Yeah, I'm very positive about that. I always say, like, too, and 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 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. If I want to be depressed, I just turn on the news and honestly, it's just 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 that's the only thing that gives me optimism, I would say, but it does. And that's why I go, that's why I want to carry on doing it. And I think if you've got the right groups and you've got the right motivations, you've got the right theories, the right 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. And 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, really practical application of this. I've been Bruce Taisley, I'll see you next time. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or a growing enterprise managing vendor RISC, Vanta makes it quick, easy and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started at vanta.com. Hey, it's Mark Maron from WTF here to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. And I'm sure the reason you're listening to this podcast right now is because you chose it. Well, choose Progressive's name, your price tool, and you could find insurance options that fit your budget. So you can pick the best one for your situation. Who doesn't like choice? Try it at progressive.com. And now some legal info, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states. Do you speak French? Do you speak Spanish? Do you speak Italian? If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash ACAST. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash ACAST. Rules and restrictions may apply. 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