What is incongruence?

Incongruence is essentially a mismatch between two states that one is comparing. For example, one of my dad’s favorite sayings was, “Do as I say, not as I do” -- He’d often tell us to pick up after ourselves, but rarely did this himself. 

Another example of incongruence would be that management tells teams to work in a specific way (“agile” for example), but do not model this themselves. For example, teams must be transparent and report their metrics upwards, but leadership is not transparent with their decisions or metrics. A common one is managers saying they want people to “work more as a team,” but promoting individual metrics for productivity instead or assigning individuals to projects. 

As you can imagine, incongruence can show up in any number of ways, both at home and at work… for example, between your core values and the values of your employer; between statements and actions of people; expectations held; between how people think you should feel and how you actually feel; and more. 

In this post, I’ll focus on leadership incongruence in the workplace and why it comes with a huge cost.

Why is the concept of incongruence important?

If you constantly have signals in the workplace that display incongruence, this reduces feelings of trust. And reduced feelings of trust cause stress & anxiety amongst staff. 

It turns out that high stress is a potent oxytocin inhibitor. And, reduced oxytocin causes people to interact with others less effectively. On the flip side, research shows that increased oxytocin increases a person’s empathy, a useful trait for people trying to work together to deliver great products and services to customers. 

What’s the cost?

Incongruence often happens at the highest levels in organizations and people often are not aware they’re doing this, or don’t care when they do (Remember my dad? “Do as I say, not as I do!”). But perhaps awareness of the true cost of leadership incongruence is a start.

Incongruence diminishes leadership credibility & trust immediately. And once lost, trust takes a long time to be re-established (if ever). I have observed that past negative events will linger in the organizational memory long after that leader has exited and years after the event has passed - through employee storytelling, the organizational trauma lives on. And this decreases employee engagement, ultimately leading to worse business results.  Believe it or not, research backs this up -- incongruence impacts profits.  

So I believe the chain of events is as such:

Incongruence & dissonance → lack of trust → increased stress & anxiety → reduced ability to work together effectively → decreased engagement → higher incidence of negative leading indicators such as burnout; sick days → worse business results.

Leadership Behavioral Integrity

Leadership “walking the walk” is referred to as “behavioral integrity” by researcher Tony Simons, who hypothesized that lack of this quality would have a measurable impact on business results and led research in this area over 20 years ago. 

Researchers hypothesized that when “employees sense an inconsistency between what their bosses say and do, it triggers a cascade of effects, depressing employees’ trust, commitment, and willingness to go the extra mile.” They believed that the impact of these effects would be a reduction in customer satisfaction and increased employee turnover, which would in turn reduce profitability of the business. They set out to measure this “behavioral integrity” score. And the results were remarkable. 

In the study, workplaces “where employees strongly believed their managers followed through on promises and demonstrated the values they preached were substantially more profitable than those whose managers scored average or lower. So strong was the link, in fact, that a one-eighth point improvement in a hotel’s score on the five-point scale could be expected to increase the hotel’s profitability by 2.5% of revenues.” In the study, no other single aspect of manager behavior they measured had as large an impact on profits.

Research by Paul Zak confirms the results at high-trust companies.

Screenshot from https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust 

Examples of incongruence

• The company sells items that are supposed to be climate-friendly, but doesn’t consider how it can enable its workforce to be climate friendly (e.g., working remotely or recycling in the office)
• An “agile consultant” tries to help people inspect and adapt continually and handle change in the workplace, but puts out a contract or roadmap that assumes nothing will change and everything will be implemented according to plan 
• The stated core values of a company (e.g., collaboration) are in conflict with the reward systems (individual performance and stack-ranking)
• Leaders tell people to prioritize, but are themselves unable to choose which things are more important than others. 

Maintaining congruence could be challenging

The idea that congruence is important is common sense. It seems so simple a task. But it’s still not easy! Management theorists and other social scientists have come up with a few reasons why this is:

• Credibility takes a while to build, but can dissipate after one “mistake”
• Competing stakeholders and priorities 
• Continually changing policies
• Blind spots by leadership themselves

What can you do about it? 

According to Paul Zak, there are eight management behaviors that foster trust. If you are a manager who has unwittingly promoted incongruence, perhaps you can take a look at these 8 areas to foster trust, clarity, and promote leadership congruence. 

1. Acknowledge & reward excellence. Neuroscience shows that recognition has the biggest impact when it occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when it comes from peers, and when it’s tangible, unexpected, personal, and public. 
2. Induce “challenge stress.” Give your staff a difficult yet achievable task, and their brains will ooze positive neurochemicals (warning: only if the task is achievable and they feel regular progress towards it - some might call this “flow”). 
3. Give people autonomy in how they do their work. Many researchers now find that autonomy is a key component for engagement, innovation, and improved business results.
4. Enable job crafting. Let people choose more of what they work on, and they’ll direct their energies to generate positive business results. But that doesn’t mean loosey-goosey - create metrics around what success looks like. 
5. Continually provide clarity to your staff. Lack of clarity leads to chronic stress, which (according to Zak) inhibits the release of oxytocin and undermines teamwork. Transparency, ongoing communication, and openness are the solution. Google Aristotle Project found clarity to be one of five keys to a successful team.  Important note: Just because you think you're being clear, doesn't mean that others do. Example: leaders believe they give 'clear priorities,' but the goals are so large, that it doesn't enable people to make tradeoff decisions. Make sure the clarity is sufficient for your staff, or you'll be missing the point and stress will increase, not decrease.
6. Intentionally build relationships amongst your staff. Leadership often undermines the importance of networking and tells us to focus on completing our work instead. Yet neuroscience experiments show that when people intentionally build social ties at work, their performance improves.
7. Support & enable whole-person growth. Personal growth is tied to professional growth. Lots of studies show that people go through phases of mental growth throughout their lives, called Action Logics. Helping them evolve personally as well as professionally is important. 
8. Show vulnerability. Google’s ReWork (Project Aristotle) studies found the same as Paul Zak - psychological safety is boosted through leadership vulnerability. And that is the top factor by far, of high-performing teams.  

Resources

• Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace: Person-Job Fit, Job Burnout, and Physical Symptoms - PMC
• Responsibility at work: using it to solve value incongruence | HRZone  
• Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies    
• The Neuroscience of Trust        
• The High Cost of Lost Trust
• The five keys to a successful Google team            

Gratitude

Thanks to Christopher McLarty and George Sfyris for providing comments and input to this article.