To understand this, you just need to understand two basic principles of human psychology: behavioural conditioning, and cognitive dissonance.
Everybody knows that if you want to get a dog, or a human, to learn some trick, you give them rewards for the behaviour and carry on doing this until they have learned the behaviour that gets the reward. Ideally, you plan so that ultimately they will perform the behaviour without the reward. And this often happens, because the behaviour becomes internalised. The dog or the person thinks to themselves ‘my master likes it when I do this. I want my master to like me. So I’ll do it.’ This might not even operate at a level where the person can fully articulate this. (Don’t know about what’s going on in dogs’ minds to know whether they consciously think such thoughts to themselves or not.)
Then, once they are doing the trick for no tangible reward, the behaviour can get even more entrenched through cognitive dissonance, the phenomenon whereby we try to iron out the creases in our beliefs so that we live in an internally harmonious world. You think to yourself, ‘I’m doing this for no tangible reward. So there must be some reason for this behaviour. Hmmm. I must really like doing it!’ Or, you think to yourself, ‘I’m doing this for this other person, even though it’s a bit irksome to me, and I’m getting no tangible reward. There must be some reason for this. I know – that other person must be a really great guy!’
This last point is a useful hint if you are trying to get somebody to like you. A tried-and-failed strategy is to do something nice for them. Often doesn’t work. Why not? The person often just thinks you must be a push-over. They just think you are doing this for them because they’re great. So, reverse this. Get them to do something for you, preferably something they would not want to do, add cognitive dissonance, and stir. That person will often do what you’ve asked, and then they have to ask themselves, ‘Why did I do this thing I didn’t really want to do, for that person?’ You know the answer by now, don’t you? The person concludes that they did it because the other person, you, is a really great guy. (Or gal; but I’ll come to that later.)
And now let’s return to behavioural conditioning. Because, say you had a trick you really, really wanted your dog or human to learn, and learn well, and learn fast, and learn forever. What would you do? Would you think, ‘Hmm, I’d better give a really, really good reward, and make sure they get it every time?’ You might well think this, but you’d be wrong.
Firstly, as a general strategy, if you give really large rewards, people won’t come to internalise the behaviour. They’ll never get to think to themselves, ‘I wonder why I’m doing this (even though the reward is, quite frankly, a bit puny)?’ They’ll know full well why they are doing it – for the reward. So they’ll never get to internalise the behaviour that’s rewarded. They’ll never get to think that they want to do the behaviour for its own sake. They’ll never come to think that the behaviour itself is a Good Thing. They’ll never come to produce their own justifications for continuing or even deepening the behaviour. (This is why it’s no surprise that bankers and other leaders of industry given massive rewards for their behaviour failed to internalise the ethical and regulatory standards they were meant to be following, with terrible consequences for the economy and for the livelihoods of millions of people lower down the food chain. They never came really to care about what it was that they were doing, so that they wanted to do it well. They just did it all for the oodles of cash. This is also why it’s an ongoing tragedy that the government continues to buy the fallacious line that the only way to get the best leaders of industry running things is to continue to give them massive financial rewards. In fact, it’s a way to ensure that the crisis of leadership continues, as we continue to ensure that they are just doing it for the money, as if that’s the only motivator. The very, very, very last thing we want is to have people running our industry and our financial institutions who are only rewarded by the size of their paycheques and their bonuses. We want people who are motivated by actually caring about what they are doing, and get sufficient rewards from this that they will happily work for a reasonable salary.)
So, if it’s really important that learning is fast and thorough, what you need to do is to give the person or dog you are manipulating rewards – small is good – but give them intermittently. Sometimes, preferably randomly, don’t give the reward. This has the following unexpected result. Instead of thinking, ‘oh dash it, that behaviour doesn’t give rewards after all, I’m not going to do it again’, the dog or human thinks, ‘oh dash it, I didn’t get the reward that time, I’ll try even harder next time. I’ll try even more often.’ Then, oh boy, yes, they get the reward next time! But then not the time after that. Puzzling. ‘Let’s try even harder than before! Let’s have another go right now, even!’ The trick is learned in double quick time, and because the reward comes and goes, the behaviour is internalised fast, and the dog or person will even faster come to conclude that they are doing this because the other person is, well, just a super human being. Instead of sussing out the reality, which is that the other person is a at best careless and unreliable, and at worst, a sneaky, manipulative so-and-so. What’s more, this way of training a dog or a person is much cheaper!!!!
Now, I was just about to say that none of this is rocket science, but in actual fact, it is. Because rocket science is actually easy: it’s based upon fairly simple maths and physics, and yet with it, you can get a space craft to circle the moon and back, reach to Mars, and travel beyond our solar system. Likewise, with these simple principles of human (and canine, murine, ratine, pigeonine, and to some small extent even feline) psychology, you can literally rule the world. You can certainly rule the medieval fiefdom that is the organisation where you work.
The simple trick is this: behave like an arsehole, but do so randomly.
So, remember that if you are doing something you don’t much want to do for somebody, and seemingly getting nothing out of it, you tend to think either that the thing you’re doing carries its own reward, or, that the other person is really great, or both. If the thing you’re doing is irksome, but you do it because you’ve come to believe that it’s worthwhile although onerous, you might also come to think of yourself as being a good sort of person for doing it.
One thing that this means is that incompetence will be rewarded. And often, it will be rewarded more highly than a consistent display of competence. Here’s how it works. Giving intermittent rewards might be a deliberate strategy to reinforce the behaviour you want. But it might actually also just be due to incompetence or unreliability. Worry not, for this need not affect your high standing in the workplace – in fact, it might even assure it. Because if other people are relying on you in any way, and find that, for example, when they ask you to do something, as a colleague or as a junior, or when they expect something from you as a leader, if they only get this intermittently, they’ll try even harder, won’t they? Let down by you, but trapped – or at least wedged – by all sorts of reasons in their current job, they’ll try to work out how to make things better, or how to justify why they are staying on. They’ll either work much harder to try to get a reliable response from you, or they’ll give themselves a better reason for putting up with your incompetence. They’ll start to think you must be really great at your job, for example. In fact, that might even explain your incompetence – you’re so great, that you’ve got so much to do, of course you are always late for meetings, of course your work is always full of errors, you are so important, because you’re so good, you don’t have time to do it properly; the next thing you know, the poor losers you keep letting down are actually doing half your work for you, and thanking you for it.
Furthermore, especially useful for line managers the world over, the erratic good guy/ bad guy, reliably guy/ unreliably guy works very well in producing a divide-and-conquer management approach to your underlings. Suppose that a member of staff had got some shoddy treatment as a result of your intermittent reward strategy (which might of course be incompetence pure and simple). And suppose they try moaning about this to one of their equals. Well, that second person who was approached in the hope of some solidarity actually got good behaviour from you, because your behaviour is inconsistent. So, not only is the second person going to say, ‘but he/she has been good to me’, they are also going to, at some level, start to think, ‘oh-oh, maybe I won’t always get such a good response’ and lo and behold, they’ll start to work even harder to get a reward from you, and so reinforce their idea that you must be really great. The first person who had a legitimate gripe about your behaviour not only fails to garner support or sympathy from their equals, they get even more isolated and confused because other people seem to have a higher and higher opinion of this person, even though in their experience this person is unreliable and incompetent. And possibly, selectively malicious.
There are ever present dangers of escalation of incompetence of course. Suppose. Suppose you find that you are doing something because some other guy, like a sympathetic colleague, or your boss, got you to do it; suppose you find you aren’t really getting any reward for doing it; and then suppose even worse: that it’s hard to escape from realising that the thing you are doing is not just onerous, or unpleasant, but actually wrong. What is going to happen? First obvious strategy is to convince yourself that it’s not really wrong, or a bit wrong, but justified in the circumstances. Second obvious strategy is to think to yourself that the guy you’re doing this dodgy thing for is not only great, but really, really great, why, boy, you’d so the second mile for that bloke. You’d really risk your neck for him. He’s awesome. Why, look, he led that really great research … why, look, he gets so much money for the centre … why, look, he’s on all those working parties, isn’t he? And he has 20 000 twitter followers! And remember too, as we saw, that if you find yourself doing something that you think is irksome but worth doing, you might then find yourself thinking that you are a really good person … in just such a way, if you find yourself doing something that’s irksome because you realise it’s wrong, you can, paradoxically, end up thinking that you yourself are a really good person for doing that thing … even though, somewhere, you came to this self-belief because you realised you were doing something wrong.
So that’s one way in which it all goes a bit dodgy.
A generalised result of all this is that there will be an official belief that those who work effectively and efficiently and reliably are good and should be rewarded, and an actual, unofficial, invisible belief that says the opposite. Because the people who produce very good results, and do so consistently, are rewarding those who are affected by their actions in the way that is less effective in leading those others to try hard to reproduce good behaviour, and is less effective in leading others to internalise the idea that those effective, efficient people are worth pleasing. If someone always produces good work anyway, why bother to promote them? Why give them a raise? Why bother to lavish them with praise? Why bother to give them opportunities to advance their career? Why jump through hoops to get into their good books?
These difficulties blight the lives of many, but there is some reason to think that women may, as a group, suffer particularly from being on the sharp end of all this. That’s not so say that it’s only women, and certainly not to say that women can’t also benefit from the rewards that accrue to unreliability and random incompetence. But women are socialised perhaps more than men to be dependable supports to others. This might be especially the case for women who’ve returned to the workplace after having had children, for they have had to really learn to be thoroughly consistent and dependable when looking after their families. You can’t say to an eighteen month child, as you could to an adult colleague, ‘oh darn it, I haven’t got any dinner ready tonight, could you check your diary please, could we postpone until next Thursday, or if that’s no good, could you be a dear and pop out to Waitrose to get some shopping and cook up a stir fry for me?’ You’ve just got to get dinner, and you’ve got to get it on time. But translate this phenomenal efficiency back to the workplace, and you’ll find yourself at the same grade ten years after you got back from maternity leave.
So keep your marvellous competence and efficiency a big secret. Treasure it in your heart, but don’t let it be too widely known. Others rise in the ranks because they are inescapably incompetent and habitually unreliable. The unfortunate ones cursed with both practical and theoretical wisdom need to learn a bit of psychology, practice a bit of structured unreliability, and beat the incompetents at their own game.
But there is a PS to this thought. For one thing, I don’t really mean it in my heart that anyone should play this idiotic game. And for another, I do suspect that this is a game that women in particular would find it very hard to win. This hunch is based upon the recognition that, as powerful as behavioural conditioning and cognitive dissonance are to explain much of human life and human behaviour, we are more complex than that. One way in which this is so, is how much we may be driven by unconscious schemas that help us to fit the world around us into comprehensible generalisations. Part of this is tending to have schema that fit individuals into certain types. And since women may become mothers, and often are mothers, then any woman is prone to being seen in terms of the type ‘mother’. Hence, any woman is prone to being judged under the expected norms of behaviour for the type ‘mother’. (Of course there are other types that women might be seen under, but I’ll concentrate on mother for now, because there’s something about it that I suspect is especially pertinent.)
And what are these expectations for mothers? To be perfect, of course. To be consistent, to be there for the infant, there for the child. For humans go through such a long period of helplessness and dependency, that it’s especially important for anyone in that caregive role – usually mothers, and certainly likely to be female if we are talking about unconscious expectations by which we live and think – has to be, in the words of Winnicot, at least ‘good enough’. A mother has to be consistent, has to provide, has to be reliable. So if a mother makes a mistake, or is unreliable, it’s particularly bad. Baby might cry. (Baby might die, actually, at worst.)
So. If a woman fails in any way, I wonder if this means that her failure is taken as particularly bad? This might then form a current that goes against the way in which intermittent reward systems tend to be very effective. And if a woman consistently delivers, not only is this the less efficient way of training the other person to act as you wish, and training them to think you must be great, but it’s only what a woman (seen unconsciously in the mother role) should be doing. So why give it a second thought? Even if it’s your actual mother, all you need do is send her an e-card once a year on Mother’s Day anyway.
This might perhaps be particulary salient for women who actually are mothers, especially those for whom the fact of their motherhood is noticeable in the workplace (they just had maternity leave, they work part time to fit in domestic duties, they don’t go to after work drinks, they have trouble getting away to conferences or other work trips because of childcare, they have to leave on time to pick up the kids). Of course, fathers in the workplace might also be noticeably parents, but they won’t be seen as mothers.
So, miss a beat, and it’s a disaster. Don’t miss a beat, and it’s a slow road to invisibility.