Why social identity is at the ?? of change.

I talk a lot about social identity and how to apply it to behaviour change - which means I’ve shared a lot of insights and experiences over the past few years. This post collates some of the key points into one handy place you can bookmark, explaining why approaching change from a group level viewpoint is so valuable.?Ready for a whistle stop tour? OK lets go.

1. The workplace is like a beehive?

A successful workplace?operates like a beehive. It’s all about the workstreams and wider team cooperation.?In order to understand how a bee colony works, you have to look at the groups within the hive. You won’t get any wiser from looking at each individual bee. And this is a lesson we can use for behavioural change.?

A common practice when approaching team development is to deep dive into the individual.?For example, run psychometric tests to see who likes blue days and who likes green. But our lens needs to go the other way - rather than drilling into each person we should pull back and look at the team as a whole.??

And as you’d find in the beehive, the workplace has an unspoken set of rules that tells employees how to behave. In organisations, people quickly know what is and isn’t acceptable, and they adopt those group norms over their own preferences. People want to fit in and be part of the group.?

When you work on the unspoken rules, you can create new behaviours and ways of working.?

Connections are key

Just like bees, organisations need an outer layer of flowers to create honey. Wider connections enrich their internal culture and intelligence. Organisations must build links to outside thinkers, people beyond their team and organisations connected to it, through formal or informal networks.?Organisations that work only within their team boundaries sit in a limited echo chamber of ideas. It is like a hive with no flowers. It doesn’t work.?

Once we acknowledge that we need to see the behaviours at play as a group, we can then look at what we want to change and the benefits we can reap as a result. Benefits like resilience, wellbeing and sustainability will all bring out the best in people. Social identity approaches are the backbone to achieving these within your teams.?

2. Relationships provide support

“Social identity can give us a sense of connection that helps our resilience,” explains Lesley Mueller, Research and Development Analyst. “It gives us a sense of connection, belonging, meaning and direction.”?

Relationships give us both emotional support and group resilience.

A study found that when faced with an unsolvable puzzle, those who felt part of a group approached the task in a better mood. They reasoned that external factors were the cause of their failure to solve the task, such as a lack of time. Rather than the failure resulting from personal reasons, such as intelligence.?

This study shows that when we are aware of being part of a group, it changes our thought patterns for the better. “Resilience is at its strongest when everyone within the group is accepted as they are and allowed to voice any concerns,” says Mueller.?

How groups influence wellbeing

The more we feel a close part of a group, the more psychological resources we have at our disposal. Being part of many groups - such as our colleagues at work, our family and childhood friends - means if we lose membership to one group, we have others to cushion the loss.?

We find it stressful to move out of social groups. In a study among new students, wellbeing universally decreased during the transition to university. However, this negative effect was lesser for those who more easily identified with the student group.??

3. Group influence on sustainability

Social identity can also impact an organisation’s ability to reduce emissions and tackle climate change.?

For organisations to?create real momentum with sustainability, they need to harness the power of their teams’ group identity. Doing deliberate work to create the right behaviours in teams tasked with finding creative solutions to unknown challenges.

Organisations today are often set up to address short-term goals and problems. Teams need to be responsive and dynamic to day-to-day changes. Decisions are made that look to the short-term. Overall, teams do not have the time, space or team practices to think about the long-term implications.?

When it comes to sustainability, short term actions solve only short term problems. Sustainability actions need to be considered in a broader context and with much longer time horizons.?

Each team has their own identity where certain behaviours enable you to fit in and at the same time, fit in with the overarching culture of the organisation. Applying this to sustainability means there is a more powerful identity at play when addressing group behaviour. Individuals will adapt what they say and do to fit in with the group. It means changing the mindset of the whole group towards sustainable actions and working to longer-term timeframes.?

In our research findings, we identify this through how well connected the team feels as a whole. When there is a high level of connectedness, you will find that:

“Team members feel strongly connected to each other. They engage in good faith; communicate in a positive and open way, support one another and can rely on each other to achieve their goals.”

What is significant about this is that the goals need not be restricted to sustainability. Developing a high level of connectedness within a team can help nudge the behaviours you want to see across a range of business needs. When teams feel connected to the vision through their shared group identity then you create much more collective action and energy.?

4. Social Identity and Leadership

Yet, the key to unlocking the?full potential of behavioural change is found in your leadership team. Teams will look to their leaders to model what is the right behaviours. However, when someone steps into the role of ‘leader’ they also step into a social label that comes with set behaviours and expectations.?

Group expectations of leadership used to operate in a vertical style with the assumption that approval and control flowed from top to bottom.?We trusted that bosses had all the answers and the employee’s job is to follow orders and not rock the boat.?

But actually with leadership - that story has shifted significantly.?Increasingly a leader’s job is not about having all the answers but instead creating the right conditions for collaboration and teamwork. We have new rules of engagement.

Leaders are now tasked with creating an environment of increased collaboration and a more ‘horizontal’ style of leading. Teams are being given permission to experiment, learning as they go along. There is an increased need for everyone to speak up when they see something not working as bosses can’t have all the answers. No-one does.

Leaders are thinking about empowerment, team wellbeing and creating the connection to purpose that allows them to get the very best from their teams. We need a leadership identity to match that.

A social label that works by realising the power of a team, not being a superhero.?We need a label that allows our leaders to live all of the opportunities of 21st-century thinking.

5. Use system thinking

(A?big thank you?to Meriton at?www.Huma.land?for the video production btw)

A key starting point is to truly see the social identity landscape as a system. Different teams have different needs. For example, the needs of HR will differ from that of finance or customer services. Too many change programmes tackle the whole business and not the operating system. Let’s talk about the big story but also the little stories.

We also find an uneven focus at the other end of the individual and psychometrics. People’s behaviours change as they move between groups. The person you are alone is not the person you are in a group. Psychometrics is good for one-on-one coaching to help you be the best version of yourself. BUT if you want to improve a team - you also need to look at the whole and how the parts show up in the whole.?

6 Steps to create a new group identity within your team:?

There are six key steps to building a new group identity within teams. These are:?

1. Willing to listen
2. Simplify the landscape
3. Have conversations
4. Give space for experiments
5. Apply the ideas more widely
6. Integrate into the group norms.?

We expand on each of these steps in this blog?here.

Thank you for reading

There you have it. A whistle-stop guide to why group identities are crucial for culture and behaviour change. We hope you liked it and we'd love to know what you think.

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