Corporate Culture and High Status Chimps (Yeah, I’m Smirking)

How we celebrate and recognize specific behaviors has a big impact on whether those behaviors are mimicked and passed down and through our society and our organizations.  And it is something we share with our relatives the chimps.  

Chimpanzees Model High Status Behavior

A recent experiment with chimpanzees showed that when given examples of different behaviors modeled by chimps with “low status” and those with “high status” the observing chimps:

“overwhelmingly preferred the technique used by the more experienced, higher-status individuals”

This is very, very interesting to me from a few perspectives.

One

I know from my own studies of psychology that consensus and social proof are very strong influencers of behavior – we do look to see what others are doing to see what is correct.  But we also look to those we assume have higher authority and status for directional cues for our behavior.  Combining those two things is like gasoline on a fire – super-charging the effect.

B.

Status is something we “confer” on others either through titles, expertise, or simply age.  In other words, within our organizations there are those that have “status” based on a specific skill, the alphabet soup after their names – or the letters before their names (ie:  CEO, COO, VP.)

3.

Without a specific strategy for determining the behaviors we want to model at our company we by default, look to those that have status for our cues – and model those behaviors.

IV

In addition to the titles we assign in organizations, recognition and reward programs are proxies for establishing status and behavioral norms in our organizations. 

The net of this is a well-designed recognition and reward program confers status on individuals – and their behavior is then more likely to be modeled by others.  The downside is in the absence of a strategic recognition and reward program your employees will look to those with the titles – the high status chimps in your organization – for behavior cues.  

If those chimps are behaving well you’re in good shape.  But, like chimps at the zoo, if they’re throwing crap around then you’ll get a lot of employees throwing crap around.

It’s just human nature.  Or should I say – chimp nature.

Just an FYI – You may be interested to note that our DNA is between 95% and 99% identical to the chimpanzee (closer than a rat is to a mouse) – banana anyone?

On another tangent – a favorite line of mine from “The Horizon Has Been Defeated” by Jack Johnson is:

“because people are lonely and only animals with fancy shoes"

Here’s a video of Jack singing that song – the line is at 1:40 I think… (those getting the email may have to click through to the post to see the video)

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