Strengthening employee engagement and wellbeing. What can we learn from The Traitors?

Here at Addidat HQ we have been a little obsessed with the BBC’s hit TV series, The Traitors, which concluded at the end of last month.? The show created a relatively unique opportunity to observe human behaviour. In essence, contestants are stripped of their psychological and perceived physical safety, and they are required to work together as a group, making strategic decisions without an elected leader. ?Seeing as we’re always looking at the world with an ESG lens, we’ve collated our Traitors’ Top Tips to strengthening employee engagement, wellbeing, and career management strategies.

A synopsis for those who are not familiar with the reality TV show:

22 strangers compete over 2 weeks for a chance to win up to ￡120k.? Amongst the players lie a handful of “Traitors”, who are known to each other but not to the other contestants, known as the “Faithfuls”. The aim is for the Faithfuls to make it to the end, without any Traitors present.? By day, the competitors work together on a series of missions to add money to the prize pot, and by night, competitors are eliminated.? Firstly the whole group discuss and vote out, “banish”, one of the team they believe to be a Traitor; and once everyone has retired for the evening, the Traitors will then choose one of the Faithfuls to “murder”.? There are various other tricks played on the group, ultimately removing all psychological safety from the moment the game starts.?

Our Top Traitors’ Tips:

• Psychological safety is critical to employee wellbeing and performance.? A lack of psychological safety, i.e. feeling comfortable to take risks, make mistakes and disagree without negative repercussions, makes people erratic, stressed, make bad decisions, clutch at straws, and not think clearly, as demonstrated by the contestants throughout the show.? Leaders who promote a culture that embraces failure as a key step to success, and who demonstrate an openness to alternative views and approaches will bring the best out in their teams and will achieve greater results.?

• It’s natural to want to recruit people like ourselves, but it doesn’t yield the best results.? The Traitors get the opportunity to recruit a Faithful when a Traitor is successfully voted out in the round table. In both seasons the Traitors have typically recruited those very similar to themselves and we think this was one of their biggest errors.? The game is set up for The Traitors to win yet they missed out in Series 1 and had a very close call in Series 2 (we could write a full thesis on how Jaz could have switched his votes for Harry, then Andrew, to easily secure a Faithful’s win).? It can feel like the most natural and safest step to build a team with like minded people and look for “cultural fit”, however, a lack of diversity leads to groupthink and restricts the ability to consider all outcomes in strategic decisions. The new QCA code includes the requirement for Boards to mitigate the risk of groupthink and enhance diversity including socio-economic backgrounds, nationality, educational attainment, gender, ethnicity, and age. Maybe they've been watching The Traitors too...
• Have a problem to solve? Employ neurodiverse people.? In the first series, Aaron disclosed his Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis. Watching him in the daily group tasks was inspiring. He approached the challenges with a different view to others and played a key role in the group's success each day.? People with ADHD have several superpowers in addition to their creative problem solving, they can hyperfocus for hours, have higher levels of spontaneity and increased resilience.? In business we are problem solving on a daily basis, recruiting people with different strengths into a team will have long term benefits to an organisation.
• Those who appear as natural leaders, may not be optimal people managers.? When a group has no designated leader, the more confident personalities tend to bubble up and assume leadership roles. Confidence may be one element of leadership, however, active listening, involving all team members, and building confidence and resilience in others are far more important leadership qualities. In The Traitors, the round tables, which were the only opportunity to eliminate Traitors from the game, were largely dominated by a handful of strong characters, yet these more confident personalities were rarely trusted by the other contestants.? If all contestants were able and invited to contribute, it may have yielded better results for the Faithfuls. How managers act and treat their teams on a day-to-day basis underpins team culture, but the vast majority of managers don’t receive any people management training. It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that managers are the number one reason cited for people leaving their job.? When recruiting or promoting people to management positions, look beyond confident veneers into the softer skills which can be harder to teach, invest in people management training, especially when you’re implementing culture change or looking to address attrition concerns.

• People are ultimately in it for themselves; keeping this in mind is key to successful employee engagement.? Despite the bonds that the contestants made, and claims of having, unwarranted, “full trust” in other contestants, the motivation behind their key decisions and behaviours, in the end, was self preservation. Successful businesses of course require employees to be motivated by a firm’s mission, ambition and the success of the team around them. But truly successful engagement strategies recognise our need to connect an initiative or process to personal values or gains for the long term.

Thank you for sticking with us on our completely tenuous excuse to make our office gossip into work.? Any suggestions for our next team TV obsession are very welcome.

Yours, 100% Faithful, the Addidat Team