Innovation and creativity are critical in a world of increasing volatility and complexity. McKinsey research indicates that 87% of executives believe innovation is essential to their organization's success, and companies that actively promote a culture of innovation are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers. Despite this critical requirement, a study by PwC revealed that 61% of executives believe their companies do not often encourage risk-taking or experimentation, limiting their ability to innovate.
So why does this innovation paradox exist? If organizations want creativity so badly, why aren’t they enabling the culture to foster innovation? In many cases, while leaders may strive for innovation, they deliberately or unconsciously drive conformity – they listen and look for agreement rather than creating genuine opportunities for their team to challenge and contribute ideas. Conformity is often a silent killer – people have given up on speaking up and providing alternative views because they sense it’s not genuinely valued in day-to-day conversations with management. A 2023 survey by HBR showed 58% of employees avoid giving negative feedback to their managers even when it's constructive, and a Gallup study found that only 3 in 10 employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work.
Understanding conformity
On the surface, agreement sounds like a wonderfully positive thing for a team to have, but agreement isn’t the same as alignment. Alignment means people support the decision, even if they disagree with it. In many ways, a lack of agreement is essential for alignment. If people disagree and have healthy debate and discussion, they are more likely to appreciate the viewpoints of others and be willing to accept an alternative way forward. Conformity occurs when people decide to give in or give up on arguing the point, or decide that near enough is good enough. It is false alignment – individuals saying one thing while believing and doing something else.
Agreeing when you don’t agree to maintain relationships and avoid conflict has a substantial downside for businesses, particularly regarding an organization’s ability to solve problems. Genuine alignment and coordinated effort are severely impaired when individuals and teams conform, which puts business performance and commercial results at risk. The importance of ‘healthy conflict’ has long been emphasised by leadership and high-performance experts, from Bruce Tuckman’s theory on Forming, Norming, Storming, and Performing (FNSP) in the 1960s to more recent models such as Kim Scott’s Radical Candour and Patrick Lencioni’s work on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Lencioni’s view around the ‘Fear of Conflict’ in a team highlights how fear can lead to conformity, as people may worry about retribution or reputational risk if they are seen to be wrong or at odds with those in power. Tuckman’s theory suggests that a team must go through the storming phase, where there is interpersonal conflict, before they can develop a problem-solving mentality and truly perform. In both models, conformity is inherently dangerous, as team members may indicate they will contribute to the coordinated team effort, but in reality, they don’t agree with it. This can lead to unconscious sabotage of the team effort, conscious and overt resistance, or ‘managing up’ so those in power think they’re aligned and performing when they’re not. Whatever the behaviour, it is counterproductive to effort and corrosive to culture and commercial results.
A key reason conformity is often silent and highly corrosive is the appeal to authority, which is the logically false belief that someone knows more because they are more qualified or have more experience - sometimes known as the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). Experience counts a lot, but just because a person has more degrees on the wall or years of service doesn’t necessarily mean their view is correct – many people with degrees once thought the Earth was flat. The second key driver of conformity is the logically false belief of appealing to consensus: "I’m right because a bunch of us think so”. A group of people having the same wrong idea doesn’t make it right – plenty of autocrats and dictators were initially democratically elected by a majority.
These logically false beliefs are pervasive in business, particularly when the leader (the HiPPO) proposes an idea or action, and the team consciously or unconsciously conforms to it. But what if the idea is fundamentally wrong or misguided? Kodak had a great advantage when they invented the digital camera, but plenty of people in the company conformed to the idea of storing the images on film rather than digitally - an idea that cost them dearly and resulted in Kodak becoming a cautionary tale told in business schools.
Measuring conformity
Conformity is incredibly difficult to measure precisely because it is the silent killer of business performance. The irony of doing employee surveys and interviews to measure collaboration is that people are often sceptical that genuine feedback will be actioned, or nervous that the survey isn’t confidential and negative feedback will have consequences. In a poll of almost 10,000 LinkedIn members asking the question ‘How honest should I be about the dysfunction at my job in my annual employee engagement survey?’, 57% of people assumed the survey was not confidential.
Even if people trust the survey and give honest responses, the survey questions typically indicate if the team feels engaged, rather than measuring what is enabling engagement. And most of them are biased towards getting the positive answers they hope to hear. Rarely do they ask specific and uncomfortable questions like ‘In most conversations I feel like my manager would rather I just agree with their ideas’ or ‘I can’t be bothered giving honest feedback because I doubt it will be actioned’.
To get a handle on whether the team feels psychosocially safe to challenge and have genuinely healthy conflict, organizations must measure their people's stress and distress levels and how this impacts their confidence in situations requiring healthy conflict and honest feedback. The level of stress and distress experienced by the team will be directly related to the level of conformity their leader creates intentionally or accidentally.
Conformity is different to other psychosocial risk factors such as anxiety or ambiguity due to the fact that ‘more feels better’ but has negative consequences – very few people are actively seeking more anxiety or ambiguity at work, but they may conform and agree when they don’t agree as a way to lower their anxiety around the consequences of speaking up. Conformity is easy to miss if you don’t have the right tools to measure it – surveys and direct feedback often fail to spot this silent killer of innovation and creativity. Measuring a leader’s direct impact on conformity and other psychosocial risk factors is a more reliable method. To learn more about how to measure a leader’s impact in critical psychosocial risk areas, check out https://tgsleadership.com/knowledge-hub/psychosocial-risk-factors-asca.
Strategies to minimize conformity
The most obvious and effective strategy is to genuinely eliminate the negative consequences and increase the positive rewards of speaking up and not giving in. This is a tricky balance to strike, as businesses can suffer if people are overly intransigent, and they are at risk if they get stuck in endless debate and fail to act. Reducing conformity effectively but efficiently requires leaders to create time and space for discussion, structure meaningful debate, and be skilled at facilitating healthy conflict and using fact-based decision-making tools to reach consensus. Leaders must also ensure everyone is clear on the definitions of facts, opinions, and alternative facts – information that sounds logical and many people believe but isn’t supported by evidence.
Reducing conformity also requires leaders to be less ego-driven and more rational and factual. They must role model and encourage a culture of candour where disagreement about the issue at hand, not personal attacks, is expected, recognized, and rewarded. Innovative teams focus on ‘what’s right’ rather than ‘who’s right’. Often, the ego or experience of the person providing or receiving the information is conflated with the information itself. Collaborative teams examine the reliability of the ‘what’ (facts) without focusing on ‘who’ provided the information, giving factual points for and against ideas, no matter who raises them. Truly collaborative leaders tend to speak last, if at all.
Finally, leaders must have a high level of self-awareness around how their personality, virtues, and motivations impact their ability to embrace and facilitate healthy conflict. In our research, we found leaders with dynamically high levels of sociopathic traits – the ‘Defiant Disruptors’ – were naturally more comfortable with challenging the status quo. Leaders with lower levels of ‘Defensiveness’ received negative feedback from others more constructively, while those with higher levels of ‘Sincerity’ provided more open and honest feedback to others. And leaders with dynamically low levels of narcissistic and borderline traits – the ‘Reliable Roadies’ and ‘Steady Statisticians’ were better at focusing on facts and rational arguments rather than letting ego and emotions dominate decisions.
Conforming to bad ideas, no matter the source of the ideas, is bad for business. The effort of the team gets expended on the wrong problem, or the right solution is executed in the wrong way at the wrong time. A critical role of the leader is to minimize conformity by role modelling and encouraging healthy conflict and disagreement within the team, which is essential to problem-solving. This enables teams to better identify and understand problems, choose the best solutions, and execute these solutions in a focused and aligned fashion.
In a world of compounding problems and alternate facts, leaders need a unique blend of personality, virtues, and motivations to lower conformity, encourage ideas, and optimize the innovation potential of their business. Boards, CEOs, WHS experts, Recruiters, and People & Culture teams need to accurately measure how leaders really think and behave so they mitigate the legislative and commercial risk of poor psychosocial safety in the business.
To find out more about how your organization can measure and improve your leaders’ impact on conformity and other psychosocial risk factors, talk to us: http://tgsleadership.com
