On Deservedness

The other day I was tagged into a conversation on Quarantine University about "deservedness", prompted by a blog post written by Joe Bogdan of Lima Charley Network called "Not Everyone Deserves Feedback".

I should note that the article in question is about more than just the subject of deservedness. It is primarily about the efficacy of feedback when the recipient takes a particular posture, and there's plenty of it I'd agree with as relates to effective followership. I will also say that the article did a wonderful job of stirring up conversation and reflection among a number of Air Force leaders, which makes it a strong success in my book.

In this piece, I would like to just touch on that one concept of "deservedness", because I think it's a particularly problematic concept and an important one for us to watch out for as leaders. I think that judgments about "deservedness" are a significant driver of negative effects, and therefore we should be careful about ever allowing it to inform how we allocate our time, attention, and the resources we are charged with granting access to.

Being put in a position of power can be intoxicating. The capacity to choose who are the "haves" and the "have-nots" brings with it a seductive feeling of significance and power that most of us spend much of our lives without. Having agency over not only our own condition but the condition of others gives rise to an odd kind of high and a sense of entitlement that I think leads many into being overly confident in their capacity to make subjective value judgments (many of which orbit around this idea of "deservedness"). We become little demi-gods over our small dominion, and the sense of power and significance only increases as we exercise our capacity to lift up the righteous and punish the unrighteous. One of the first, fascinating things I got to experience when I joined the Air Force was to watch individuals arbitrarily granted power over their peers (at basic training, our Training Instructors picked out "element leaders" seemingly at random) and then see those individuals devolve into petty dictators, buckling under the weight of this burden of leadership, transforming almost immediately into these cruel little extensions of the seemingly sadistic Training Instructors. Immediately what sprung to mind for me was the Stanford Prison Experiment and what Philip Zimbardo refers to as the "Lucifer Effect" in his book of the same name, about the extent to which people will transform and exercise cruelty and even atrocities to conform to a role of power over others. (I should note here that there are legitimate concerns about the validity of the SPE).

These feelings of influence and control are powerful, and they distort the world around us. We increasingly see aspects of it as something to be shaped by our righteous influence and the authority that we were granted because someone with clearly great judgment decided that we "deserved it". We logically might have an obligation to act as stewards of the limited resources available within these systems, to ensure that they go only to those who have earned them, and as well to ensure that they don't go to any who prove unworthy.

The entire question of deservedness is a terribly problematic one, and I'd argue it's well outside of the realm of considerations that leaders ought to be making, because it poses a significant risk to our capacity for ethical leadership.

Ideas about deservedness are enormously influenced by culture. Much of what we consider to make a person "deserving" of anything can vary significantly, influenced by religion, political ideology, and other factors that we should expect to vary significantly across our workforce. This also means that "deservedness" can make for a powerful selection mechanism to drive culture in a particular direction. If we were selected by leaders based on their ideas about our deservedness, and then we extended that same value-judgment logic to who we chose to support or lift up, we can effectively serve as agents of a system that selects for increasingly narrow definitions of leadership potential, and thus reduces the diversity of its leadership cadre. We are most likely to see those like us as "deserving" especially if we were granted the authority to choose the deserving by those like us. You should already be familiar with the fact that serious gender inequities exist among the senior levels of many organizations, and that's a tendency that likely persists as a result of value judgments about leadership potential that are informed directly by culturally informed gender norms. I believe you will see the same effects when it comes to racial differences and ethnocentric, often racist, ideas about what constitutes "professionalism". If we are asked to exercise judgment about "deservedness" of others, we are most likely to find that deservedness among those cut from the same cultural cloth, because they are the most likely to conform to our same standards of what constitutes a "quality" individual. In Susan Cain's excellent book Quiet, she describes how culturally propagated value judgments on characteristics of extraversion have resulted in a workplace culture that continues to punish and suppress those who present as introverted (and how the subsequent reduction of diversity of cognitive types is a bad thing).

One might argue that we reduce these dangerous potentials by simply redefining our ideas of "deservedness" along less culturally specific criteria, but that's not such an easy task. I worry that it's actually impossible with a concept like deservedness. We can't help but make value judgments informed by our culture. We have all been cognitively colonized in one way or another to see the world through a cultural lens (in sociology we call this "socialization") that lifts up some types of behaviors and sees others as lesser. A person whose religious clan dictates that women present in a particular type of way and behave a certain way will see women who don't conform to such standards as less deserving (I recently heard a story of a woman showing up to an Air Force panel interview to be greeted by the phrase "We like women who look like women around here"). What I'm trying to say is that considerations of deservedness are such an easy vector of infection for an insidious type of ethnocentrism that it poses too significant a risk to try and use the concept to our own purposes. There are alternative considerations to employ that pose significantly more utility for leaders and significantly less risk.

I've been thoroughly enjoying Donella Meadows' book "Thinking in Systems" recently. It has helped me exercise more of a systems-thinking mindset about the problems we face in a complex environment. It was this systems-thinking framing that I employed when I wrote this recent essay on the subject of mindsets as drivers of our condition. To summarize briefly, I've heard a lot of leaders, military and otherwise, speak about "mindset" as a foundational point of intervention for those they lead--basically putting the burden of transformation and transcendent growth on the individual who might be going through something challenging. "If you just improve your mindset," goes the common refrain, "your circumstance will likely improve". My contention here was one born of systems-thinking. It doesn't logically make sense to say that the foundational point of intervention for a condition is mindset when mindset itself is a product of condition and context. A person's mindset is downstream from their current and past lived experience. The leader could just as reasonably say "If you just change your condition, your mindset will improve." and I'd argue the reason they don't has nothing to do with efficacy and might even be heavily influenced by culturally imposed ethics of deservedness. I've been in this situation before, where a leader could have intervened and made my life better but chose not to , informed by some sense of principle that was entirely foreign to me. It didn't improve me. It didn't make me better. It made me bitter. It made me resentful. It harmed me, and I harmed the mission.

The greatest leaders I ever had didn't approach me with a critical eye about what I deserved. Their purview was what I needed, what the system we occupied needed, and they considered what actions would most likely pay service to those two considerations. Conversely, the worst leaders I ever had decided that their most urgent responsibility was to be the arbiter of what resources were committed to me. They were preoccupied with my mindset and my deservedness. They effectively made me worse,?and they hurt my ability to contribute to the mission. They refused on principle to give me what I needed to do or be better--to affect my condition in a way that would be likely to improve my mindset. I hadn't considered it when I wrote that essay about mindset, but I think it's reasonable to wonder if the whole "everything derives from mindset" thing isn't heavily influenced by culturally propagated value-judgments like "work ethic".

I'm not saying it's bad to believe in such things. I was raised to believe that work ethic is important as well, so I struggle to detach myself from such value judgments... but I think it's really important that we recognize the difference between culturally imposed values and objective truths about systemic effects. You can believe that it's better for people to struggle and work hard, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the most effective route to a functional workforce... and to impose such a value on those who don't share your cultural standpoint is problematic and often harmful.

It makes the most sense to detach ourselves from such considerations. As leaders, we have an obligation to two categories of things: to the efficacy, growth, and well-being of those in our charge, and the efficacy of the systems that we steward. As I have been trying to make clear here, considerations of "deservedness" don't fit well into that equation. They add a vague, culturally tainted vector for behavioral bias that actually undermines the intended effects of the systems that we culturally diverse individuals occupy together.

There's this other concept from Donella Meadows' book "Thinking in Systems" about hierarchy that I think fits well into this conversation. Hierarchy is useful for large, complex systems. Having systems optimizing effort towards their own nested goals in a way that maximizes efficacy for larger systems has a number of useful benefits. It reduces the amount of information that has to travel across the entirety of the system by allowing a majority of it to remain within the confines of subsystems. Meadows says that "when a subsystem's goals dominate at the expense of the total system's goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization". I believe that considering the factor of "deservedness" is a suboptimizing approach. It takes what is an individual's cultural, values-derived goal --to ensure that time and resource are only doled out to the deserving, and puts it potentially above the needs of the larger system. As far as the system is concerned, the only logical criteria to include in resource allocation is whether it increases efficacy of that individual. As I've said, it is perfectly legitimate and logical for a leader to make decisions about resource and time allocation on that criteria balanced against the needs of the individual, because it aligns with both larger systemic needs and the needs of the individual (in this case viewed as a subsystem of the hierarchical system). Meadows says "To be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system--there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing." We shouldn't strive to win a single argument at the expense of our relationship.?We shouldn't strive for the victory of a political party at the expense of our democracy. We shouldn't be too quick to rush into a direct war in defense of Ukraine if it might precipitate global nuclear war. Unfortunately in the case of large complex systems, the means cannot justify the end.

I'd like to say again that what Bogdan was talking about in his article "Not Everyone Deserves Feedback" was not primarily about deservedness. It was about efficacy, and that is a really important thing for us to consider as leaders. I just think that putting that word in there - "deserves" - gives credence and legitimacy to a tendency and posture that, as I've been trying to articulate here, does not serve us, our charges, or the systems that we steward well at all. Efficacy, on the other hand, is absolutely something we should be concerning ourselves with, and to Bogdan's point in the article, the efficacy of feedback is highly influenced by the posture and mindset of the recipient. I would like to add to this observation however that the efficacy of feedback isn't entirely modulated by the recipient. As in the example of mindset, their posture is the product of an environment and context. You could argue that it's not necessarily the leader's obligation to go above and beyond to rescue every individual from self-harming postures... but I can tell you with absolute certainty that if the leaders who led me were preoccupied with my "deservedness", I likely wouldn't be where I am right now. There were plenty who wrote me off because I was an arrogant, bitter little monster.

But the best leaders I ever had recognized that my arrogance could be redirected and nudged to good use. The best leaders I ever had saw my bitterness as a logical consequence of some pretty serious life circumstances, and they put time and effort and energy into protecting me from my own furious flailing. They brought me in and nurtured my most positive qualities--gave me avenues and opportunities to direct my furious energy towards things that would improve me and serve the larger system. I am here today, doing what I think is pretty good work, because leaders were incredibly generous and gave of themselves likely without any regard for whether I deserved it or not.

These leaders were in the minority, because it is damn hard to let go of our judgments about whether someone deserves our attention and care... and to many it was likely pretty obvious I did not deserve any of that. I was a bad fit for the military. I was a new cultural variant that didn't fit the narrow definitions of quality or virtue that have been reinforced through deservedness-minded cultural selection mechanisms for decades and centuries.

But this is how we evolve. This is how we diversify. This is how we include and promote positive outcomes for both individuals and the systems that we steward. It's by letting go of those selection mechanisms that serve culturally specific goals that might work at the expense of the goals of the larger system.

He's probably right. Not everybody deserves feedback. Who really deserves anything, after all? What I'm suggesting is that we consider such a philosophical question trivial at best. Who cares if my subordinates deserve my attention and time? I certainly don't. I would be ecstatic if I could find a way to give them the enormous gift I was given by my favorite leaders.

And I certainly didn't deserve that gift at the time either. I'd like to think I've earned it in the meantime...