Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (10 page)

As we've seen, hierarchies can help teams and organizations collaborate more effectively and operate more efficiently. But at the same time, steep and strong hierarchies suppress the voices of the less powerful and can lead team members to their tragic death. So how do we leverage the benefits of hierarchy without the downsides?

Johns Hopkins Hospital tried to find a way to do this when they explored how to reduce critical mistakes during surgery. Every surgery carries risks, especially those of infections. A particularly problematic infection is a central-line infection because it spreads the infection through the whole body and massively increases the risk of mortality. So in 2001, Johns Hopkins implemented what they
thought
would be a simple but effective solution: a straightforward five-part checklist of sterilization to prevent infections when putting in a central line.

Their solution was a failure. The checklist did little to stem the tide of infections. Why? The problem was that for more than a third of patients, the doctor skipped one of the crucial steps
even while using the checklist.

So, Johns Hopkins Hospital turned to a radical approach. They authorized the lowest-ranked members of the surgical team—nurses—to intervene if a doctor skipped a step on the checklist. They also empowered the nurses to ask questions about the timing of the central line removal. By getting nurses to speak up and share their concerns, the hospital prevented numerous infections and saved many lives.

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School popularized a simple yet revolutionary phrase to describe the conditions within a group that encourage the less powerful to speak up:
psychological safety
. In psychologically safe environments, team members feel encouraged to ask for clarification, to point out critical errors, and even to share new and challenging ideas. These psychologically safe environments produce fewer errors and more innovative ideas.

Psychological safety is particularly important in hierarchies without any prospects of advancement. Even in the military and the Catholic Church, lower-ranked individuals have a path to move up. But nurses will almost never become doctors. This rigid barrier between nurses and doctors makes communicating across professional boundaries difficult, and ultimately limits the quality of care. This steep hierarchy can lead to alarming errors, such as when a doctor used the shorthand R.EAR to indicate that a medication should be put in the
right ear,
but an unsure nurse didn't feel comfortable asking for clarification. Instead, she administered the medication, uh, rectally. Of course, it is easy for medical errors to happen, but they become
more
likely when individuals defer without seeking clarification. The fear of being marginalized and punished for asking questions of those in charge all too often guides people to pursue the seemingly safe and silent route. At Johns Hopkins, psychological safety was created structurally and officially: They put nurses in charge of the checklist, which empowered them to insist that the doctors follow the proper steps.

Often it is the day-to-day behavior of the powerful that determines whether psychological safety exists in an organization. With simple steps, the powerful can diminish barriers and create a sense of inclusiveness. By openly soliciting the input of others, the powerful can curtail the fear of speaking up. Small gestures can also provide people with an unexpected sense of inclusion. For example, when surgeons invite nurses to seminars previously reserved for physicians, it not only elevates the status of the non-surgeons, but it also expands their knowledge and scope.

We can start to understand when and how we need hierarchy to be successful. To solve complex, dynamic problems and make the best decisions, leaders need access to the most complete and varied information. To ensure that the perspectives and wisdom of the less powerful are brought to light, leaders and institutions need to promote psychological safety for their lower-status members. And for complex tasks, these efforts can generate tangible benefits.

But we still need to know who is in charge. In the operating room, we still need the surgeon to lead and direct the operation. When deciding whether or not to go to war, we still need the president to rally the troops or call them off. And once a decision has been made, we need hierarchy to produce the coordination necessary to successfully
implement
that well-conceived decision.

So, for a group or organization to achieve the highest level of success, we need to learn how and when to fluctuate between more versus less hierarchy. We need to figure out what type of hierarchy will enable our team to cooperate so that it can compete effectively.

By understanding a few basic principles, you can make hierarchy win with the fewest casualties along the way. Whenever we use a hierarchy, we make a trade-off between coordination and voice. Hierarchy creates a fundamental tension between suppressing individuality to achieve synchrony and denying key insights from those below.

So here are some key rules that can help you decide when to have more versus less hierarchy. For interdependent physical tasks, we need coordination and therefore hierarchy can win here. But for complex, dynamic decisions, ones that require the involvement of different perspectives, hierarchy can lose and even kill. To make the best decisions, leaders need to create psychological safety that encourages broad participation. And finally, almost every group still needs a leader, someone who sets the vision and the course and integrates all the different perspectives to make the final decision.

We see these rules play out at the design firm IDEO that we discussed earlier. When the tasks are intellectual, IDEO minimizes hierarchy to promote equal opportunity participation in the service of developing new ideas. Even in this stage, there is a leader, but this person merely facilitates the generation of ideas. But when the best idea needs to be identified, implemented, and produced, IDEO turns back to hierarchy. As intellectual integration turns into the need for physical coordination, IDEO reinstates hierarchical order through a division of labor that is well synchronized. And the leader turns from facilitator to general. Collectively, IDEO knows when to have more versus less hierarchy. And, as a result, it wins again and again and again.

Earlier, we described how comparisons and power regulate much of human psychology. Here, we have articulated how and when hierarchy within a group can help it operate more effectively. Next, we integrate these ideas to explore hierarchies
between
groups, and how our group's standing within a society can constrain the type of behavior we are allowed to engage in. We will show that it is good to be the queen. But because women have less power than men in society, queens face many more constraints than kings do.

In 2005, the president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, created a firestorm when he answered a question about why there were so few women in engineering and science at the very best universities. He pointed to the “different availability of aptitude at the high end” and suggested that ability, rather than issues of “socialization and patterns of discrimination,” could account for gender imbalance in the sciences. In short, he conjectured that men might have what it takes to do well in science, while women don't.

Larry Summers is not the first to suggest that there are biologically based gender differences in aptitude; this idea has been posited countless times and in countless ways for centuries. It is telling that perhaps one of the most common and popular conceptualizations of gender—epitomized by John Gray's mega-bestselling book,
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
—is that men and women are essentially
different species of people.

This depiction of gender is wrong.

We're not claiming that biological differences between the sexes don't exist. Rather, we offer three fundamental insights. First, gender differences are far more subtle than we commonly believe. Gender differences are not categorical—black or white. Instead, they are shades of gray. Indeed, after examining the data from over 13,000 participants, Harry Reis of the University of Rochester found that men and women are far more similar than they are different.

Second, there is one clear difference between men and women in the United States and through most of the world: the amount of power each has in society. Despite the great strides that have been made in promoting gender equality, women and men are not currently competing on a level playing field. So to understand gender differences we need to understand
power
differences, and the fact that men have so much more of it in just about every modern culture.

Building off this power difference brings us to our third point: Gender stereotypes are deeply ingrained and impose constraints on the behavior and actions of women. To understand differences in how men and women behave, we need to start with an understanding of how men and women are
expected
to behave.

To put these issues into perspective, let's consider some numbers. In the United States in 2013, women earned only 77 cents on the dollar compared to what men earned. And if we look at those at the top of the corporate ladder, the picture looks even bleaker. In 2012, only 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were women, and women made up only 17 percent of the corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. And the imbalance isn't limited to existing organizations: Even starting a business is tougher for women. Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard University studied 90 entrepreneurial pitches from three competitions for investors. Even when the content of the pitch was identical, she found that 68 percent of the investors funded male entrepreneurs but only 32 percent funded female entrepreneurs.

You could turn to gender differences in competencies and skills, as Summers did, to explain these differences. If men are better at math and science than women are, then maybe they get the jobs that pay more. And in fact, if you look at standardized test scores, men do outperform women in math. For example, in the United States, males have scored between 33 and 36 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) than women in every year since 1994. At first blush, it looks like Larry Summers might be right, that “different availability of aptitude” could explain why women don't succeed as often as men do in math and the sciences.

But to really understand what's going on we need to dig deeper into the data. That is what Luigi Guiso of the Einaudi Institute did when he set out to test whether this math gap that Larry Summers so famously attributed to biology could be attributed instead to power. He collected data from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that reports results for a quarter of a million 15-year-old students from 40 countries. If you look at that data set overall, you would find the typical gender gap.

But when Luigi looked more closely, he found that the size of the gender gap varied considerably across countries. And when he looked at different factors to try and understand what could explain where the gap was largest and where it was smallest, it turns out that the gap was closely related to the level of
gender equality
in each country (as measured by the political empowerment index and an index of women in the labor market). In countries with the highest levels of gender equality, the gap in math performance disappeared. In fact, in Iceland, the country with the highest level of gender equality, females actually
outperformed
males in math. In other words, women only demonstrated inferior math ability in societies where they lacked power. But why?

To find out, we can take Luigi's investigation one step farther. If power plays a role in the male advantage in math, we wondered, could we improve women's math abilities simply by manipulating power? And indeed, work conducted by Joan Chiao of Northwestern University has found that simply having women recall an experience with power can increase their scores on a math test. As we saw in our discussion of power, feelings of power help buffer people from experiencing stress and build confidence and focus. Power reduces the anxiety women feel during a math test and allows them to perform at their best.

What these data tell us is that gender differences in performance are not hardwired. Rather, the differences in performance often reflect power disparities and not differences in competence.

Cultural disparities in gender equality impact far more than math performance. Take the most popular sport in the world, soccer. Since 1993, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) has ranked all member countries each year in terms of performance and quality. In research we conducted with Roderick Swaab of INSEAD, we found that gender equality predicts women's FIFA rankings, even after controlling for population size and per capita GDP. When women have more power and opportunity in a country, that country's female soccer team has a competitive advantage.

So, if power differentials underlie some of the gender differences in aptitudes, in everything from math to sports, we couldn't help but wonder whether power can account for two other widely accepted gender differences: the willingness to negotiate and the decision to engage in infidelity.

Imagine that you just landed a new job. Your employer welcomes you and offers you a salary. Do you accept that salary or do you ask for more?

And does the answer to this question hinge on whether you are a man or a woman?

This is the very question that Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon explored. As she has eloquently written in her book,
Women Don't Ask
, one reason that women make 77 cents on the dollar compared with men is because women are less likely to negotiate their salaries after getting an initial offer. In one survey she found that 52 percent of male MBA students negotiated for a better offer, while only 17 percent of female MBAs negotiated; the remaining 83 percent simply accepted their offers without asking for more.

Linda then created a clever experiment to test whether women would be less likely to ask for more even when they were in the exact same situation as men. So she told participants that they could earn anywhere from $3 to $10 for playing a game of Boggle. After each person finished the game, she paid everyone exactly $3. She did not mention at any time that they could negotiate and ask for more. She also didn't inform them why they received the amount they did or provide any feedback on their performance. If people
asked
for more, she gave them what they asked for, up to the $10 limit. And as suspected, the gender difference in people's willingness to ask was striking;
men were seven times more likely to ask for more money than women.
This was not a fluke; in our own work, we've replicated these shocking results.

Interestingly, it turns out that manipulating feelings of power can actually produce these same gender disparities. In a study we conducted with Joe Magee of New York University, we gave people of both genders the following scenario: “You have been asked to be bumped off your flight. How likely are you to ask for a voucher of greater value and/or amenities like an upgrade to first class?” We found that when participants—men or women—were primed with power they were more likely to say they would negotiate and ask for more. That is, by merely priming people with power, everyone behaved the way men did in this setting.

But perhaps the most notorious gender stereotype is that men have a greater propensity to be unfaithful. And this isn't just an unfounded stereotype merely propagated by movies. Numerous studies have found that men cheat more often and with more partners than women. There are lots of theories for this pronounced effect, but most lead back to the idea that women engage in less infidelity because they bear greater reproductive costs than men. In other words, they are the ones who have to deal with the consequences of accidentally getting pregnant. As a result, the theory goes, women have evolved to be more selective in terms of sexual partners in general and with regard to infidelity in particular.

Yet,
power
can increase infidelity—for both men
and
women. Just ask Iris Robinson. Or, better yet, consider a study led by our colleague Joris Lammers of the University of Cologne. He surveyed 1,561 professionals and asked them to rank their position in their organization's power hierarchy on a scale of 0–100, then asked respondents how often they had been unfaithful to their partner (i.e., how often they had secretly had sex with another person).

Across the board, higher-power individuals reported more instances of infidelity. And, consistent with our thesis that many perceived gender differences are in fact power differences, this effect was the same for men and women.

Over and over again, we and others have found that
many well-known gender differences can be reproduced by manipulating power.
In other words: The suggestion that men and women come from different planets is wrong. Men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus. Instead both are from Earth, and how each behaves is profoundly influenced by how much power they have.

So, if these gender differences reflect power differences, can we solve gender inequality by making women feel more powerful? Can't we simply utilize some of the strategies we identified in Chapter 2—recalling experiences with power, listening to high-power music, power posing—to help women improve their outcomes by making themselves feel as powerful as the men around them?

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Changing how powerful we feel only solves half of the problem. Because women as a group have less power than men, they face an additional barrier to acting with power. What the experience of Ann Hopkins shows us is that women are expected to be communal, caring, and submissive. These expectations produce the unfortunate double bind: When women
do
feel and project power, they are punished for it.