Read an Excerpt
Trust Factor
The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies
By Paul J. Zak AMACOM
Copyright © 2017 Paul J. Zak
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-3767-4
CHAPTER 1
The Science of Culture
At Sanganer Camp in north India, the wall dividing the compound from the outside world is two feet high, low enough that even children can climb over it. Sanganer Camp is an open prison village with 170 families and three guards. Each prisoner is serving a life sentence for murder.
Prisoners, all of them men, must be in the camp from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. but otherwise can work in one of the nearby villages. Their families live with them and are supported by the men's work. In the last decade, there have been only six escapees, and in 50 years, no prisoner has committed another murder. This prison, and others like it in India, grew out of Mahatma Gandhi's view that even prisoners deserve a second chance. Family is important. Most prisoners are entrepreneurs; that is, they start a business to support their families. The mantra at Sanganer is "Trust begets trust."
It turns out that "trust begets trust" is just how the brain works. In experiments I began running in 2001, my lab showed that when someone is tangibly trusted by a stranger, the brain synthesizes the signaling chemical oxytocin. We found that the more trust one is shown, the more the brain produces oxytocin. In these experiments, we measure trust by the amount of money someone takes out of his or her account and transfers to another person — a person who cannot be seen or spoken to but is a real person who is in the experiment. The reason to send money to a stranger is because the experiment is designed so the money grows threefold during the transfer. Here's where it gets really interesting: The amount of oxytocin made by the brain of someone who receives an intentional transfer denoting trust predicts how much money he or she will return to the stranger who had initiated trust — even though the receiver of the largesse is under no obligation to return a penny.
These findings blew a big hole in the traditional view in economics that only a sucker trusts others because trust will never be reciprocated. In fact, 95 percent of the hundreds of people we have tested in experiments who receive money denoting trust release oxytocin. These people show they are trustworthy by returning money to an anonymous person who took a chance to make them better off. This tells us a lot about human nature: Trust begets oxytocin, which begets trustworthiness in return. Think of oxytocin as the biological basis for the Golden Rule: If you treat me nice, my brain makes oxytocin, signaling that you are a person whom I want to be around, so I treat you nice in return. Trust is part of our evolutionarily old repertoire of social behaviors.
How do we know this is true? In these experiments, my lab rapidly drew blood before and after people were trusted in various situations to measure the surge in oxytocin, studies that have been replicated by other labs. But the brain does many things simultaneously. So to prove causation, we developed a way to safely infuse synthetic oxytocin into living human brains (through the nose). In these experiments, those receiving oxytocin, compared to those who got a placebo, showed more trust in strangers by sending them more money, and the use of oxytocin more than doubled the number of people who sent all of their money to a stranger, exhibiting maximal trust.
The full story of this discovery and how oxytocin provides new insights into human nature and human society is not essential to understand how trust makes companies perform. The most important thing to know is that oxytocin works by activating a brain network that makes us more empathic. For gregariously social creatures like human beings, empathy is a valuable skill. Almost everyone over six years old can cognitively forecast what someone is likely to do by putting himself or herself in the other's shoes (this is called having a theory of mind). This ability helps us understand how others will behave. But empathy gives us additional information about others; it tells us how another person is feeling, or is likely to feel, in various situations. This tells us why someone is doing something.
I call oxytocin the moral molecule because when the brain releases it, we treat others well, like we would a family member. Oxytocin-stimulated empathy means if we were to hurt someone, we would share that person's pain. Since we do not like pain, empathy motivates appropriate social/moral behaviors. Human beings have highly developed empathy because it makes us more effective social beings. Prosocial behaviors like being trustworthy sustain us in communities of other people, including in organizations. As social creatures, we only survive in groups, so having the neurologic capacity for empathy and thereby an enhanced understanding of appropriate social behaviors has increased our likelihood of survival. But it gets even better than that: Oxytocin makes it feel good to be part of an organization. Our brains reward us for cooperating and treating others well, including being trustworthy when we are trusted. Trust begets trust.
The neuroscience gets really interesting when we go beyond what human brains do on average (scientists' favorite phrase) and ask where the variations in human behaviors come from. A large part of my research on oxytocin over the last decade (using several million dollars of research money) went into determining what promotes or inhibits oxytocin release. Isn't that the key question? Why does your colleague who gets promoted turn into a raging jerk? Or, why do you soften your "it's all about the numbers" stance when reprimanding a colleague when you learn his young daughter is ill? Our social brain changes its activity to help us adapt to the people around us and to our own physiologic state. That means that even though I am sure you are a good person, I know that sometimes you yell at your spouse or are snarky with a clerk when shopping. From your brain's perspective, treating the people around you with kindness is usually, but not always, the right response.
Here's the science. High levels of stress inhibit the release of oxytocin. You know this already: When you are stressed out you are not your best self. Most everyone understands this short-term failing and will accept an apology for a transgression. By the time we are six or seven years old, we recognize social transgressions. Everyone around us is giving us feedback, subtly and not so subtly, on whether our behavior is appropriate or not. Constantly. Oxytocin and the brain circuit it activates function as a moral compass, telling us what our social group believes is right or wrong. Each group establishes a culture, a set of social norms that we transmit to group members explicitly, often through stories, and implicitly when we provide feedback to others through facial expressions and by our actions.
The other potent oxytocin inhibitor is a chemical that has a profound effect on brain activity: testosterone. My group has shown in experiments in which we dosed men with synthetic testosterone that it causes them to be selfish and entitled; that is, high-testosterone males share less with others and demand more from others. It's all about them. You already know who the least empathic humans on the planet are: young males. Men have five to ten times more testosterone than women (and get in more fights, take more risks, and commit more crimes), and competition and status increase testosterone in both sexes. Promotion? Testosterone goes up. Hot new romantic partner? Ditto. Earned a $2 million bonus this year? You might just become an unmitigated ass if you are not thoughtful about putting a check on your behavior. Testosterone whispers to our brains that we have won the social lottery and makes us behave like demigods. It also increases libido. No surprise that CEOs, presidents, and movie stars have affairs.
But nature modulates aggressive behaviors. After age 30, testosterone begins to fall in men and continues thereafter. The good news is that a man's ability to behave prosocially generally increases with age. You can actively promote oxytocin release and capture its benefits, including increased interpersonal trust and improved health, by modifying your default social behaviors. I'm a six-foot-four high-testosterone former jock, but I earned the nickname "Dr. Love" by actively forging connections with everyone I meet. One way I do this is by hugging people when I first meet them. My lab has shown that touch causes the brain to make oxytocin. A hug is a "brain hack" that stimulates an immediate, though temporary, emotional attachment. If I can do it, you can, too. As we'll discover in the chapters that follow, the goal is to seek a balance between the high motivation and drive we get from testosterone and the cooperation and teamwork that come from releasing oxytocin.
Let me illustrate the amazing neural ballet the brain does at work by describing an experiment I ran on a rugby team. Rugby, like business, requires intraorganization cooperation and interorganization competition. By taking blood before and after ruggers warmed up for a match, I found that the warm-up caused increases in oxytocin, testosterone, and fast-acting stress hormones. Most interestingly, oxytocin levels went from being dissimilar before the warm-up to being more similar afterward. The rugby players were clearly pumped up for the match as evidenced by the increase in testosterone and stress hormones, but their brains discriminated between teammates and competitors in order to cooperate to win the match. This is exactly what an effective culture does at work: It focuses colleagues on cooperation to overcome the competition. Oxytocin and the neurochemicals with which it interacts can be harnessed to maximize teamwork at work.
Every biological system, including the brain, is an economic system. The brain has limited resources that it seeks to deploy efficiently in order to help us survive and thrive. The brain doesn't burn the calories to synthesize oxytocin without a stimulus for its production. (Actually, a little bit of oxytocin is made all the time just to keep the system working, but this does not affect social behaviors.) While a smile at colleagues or an "attaboy" out of the blue can induce a small oxytocin spike and the attendant increase in cooperation, moderate stress endured as a group is an effective oxytocin stimulant. When your team is working on a big project, you have to come together and get things done. The memory of petty slights and personality quirks fades as teamwork takes over. Oxytocin has been shown to increase not only trust and cooperation but also forgiveness. So it is easier to apologize for past failings when working together intensively (just in case you want to resolve those issues).
I have tested oxytocin release in the bedroom, board room, and bivouac. It occurs everywhere. I have documented more than a dozen ways to stimulate oxytocin production in my experiments. All it takes is a positive social interaction without too much stress or testosterone. Oxytocin just might be the molecule that makes us human. At least it is the molecule that creates our humanity. By understanding a little about the neuroscience of oxytocin, you can harness humanity at work. Believe me, the people at work want this.
A key takeaway from this chapter is that culture is not static. It evolves as the people and purpose of the organization change. Most importantly, culture can be managed and continuously improved to increase engagement by volunteer-employees. Next, we'll learn how the neuroscience I've done can be applied to improve your organization's culture.
A culture in which oxytocin is released through positive social interactions is one way to keep people engaged at work, but there are other ways. Many organizations use a fear-based management approach. This has been called Theory X. The science shows that fear-based management is a losing proposition because people acclimate to fear quickly. Fear-inducing leaders must ramp up threats to increase productivity, but there are only so many threats one can make.
There are significant downsides to using fear-based management that treats people like replaceable capital and ignores the role of culture. The most prominent is high turnover as colleagues flee dysfunctional companies. The cost of replacing colleagues is high, from 20 to 200 percent of their annual salary, so creating an engaging culture at work also motivates people to keep showing up.
The stepson of Theory X management is the use of money to motivate colleagues. This idea was popularized by the "scientific management" approach of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor advocated breaking down work into small tasks and rewarding each completed task. Yet survey after survey shows that money is a weak motivator of performance; a recent meta-analysis confirmed this. If you are counting on the golden cage (high pay) to motivate people, you will lose. This approach creates indentured servants rather than enthusiastic volunteers. Since everyone cannot be paid above average, it means junior associates are typically underpaid and often overworked, trying their best to get into the golden cage, but they often endure disengagement and burnout once they get there.
People are paid for their work, but creating the opportunity to express one's intrinsic motivation is the best way to achieve high performance over the long haul. Think of creating an organizational culture where people would choose to come to work even if they were not being paid. That is an organization that thrives on intrinsic motivation. A test of this is the 3 a.m. rule. Highly intrinsically motivated employees send the occasional email in the middle of the night because they are obsessed with solving some problem. If leaders never get 3 a.m. emails, then either intrinsic motivation is low or the objectives of the organization are not challenging enough to motivate outside-of-work rumination.
A simple way to move away from extrinsic incentives to intrinsic motivation is to banish the terms employee, human resource, or even talent to describe those with whom one works. People who choose to come to work and expend effort to help an organization achieve its goals need to be seen as fully developed human beings. Everyone at work is a person with goals and hopes, emotions and a personal life, skills and options. I prefer to call those with whom I work "colleagues," and I'll use this language throughout the book. I also advocate changing the name of human resources departments to human development departments. This change signals that the organization is committed to engaging colleagues with challenges at work while maintaining an appropriate work-life integration.
The culture-to-performance model upon which this book is based is presented in Figure 1. The neuromanagement challenge is to design a culture in which oxytocin can be released many times during the day by positive social interactions. Understanding the brain circuit that oxytocin activates has allowed me to identify a set of actionable ways to design organizational cultures that bolster and sustain interpersonal trust. The empirical tests of this model confirm its efficacy for building trust and for inspiring performance.
To make it easier to remember the classes of management policies that build trust, I've devised a catchy mnemonic. The eight factors that the neuroscience affirms are the building blocks of organizational trust have the acronym OXYTOCIN. This stands for Ovation, eXpectation, Yield, Transfer, Openness, Caring, Invest, and Natural. More than just identifying these factors, the science done by my lab and others provides precise prescriptions for the implementation of the OXYTOCIN policies for maximal impact on brain and behavior. My empirical tests of the model in for-profit and nonprofit organizations show that together the OXYTOCIN factors explain 100 percent of the variation in organizational trust. Thus, there are no other classes of management policies that influence trust.
The model shows that the OXYTOCIN factors can be used as leverage to increase organizational trust. Trust, combined with an organization's transcendent purpose, creates a culture of high engagement. Enthusiastic colleagues delight customers by providing extraordinary service. Customers are appreciative and express their happiness, causing colleagues to experience joy at work ("Joy"). When colleagues get this positive feedback, the organization sustains high performance.
In the chapters that follow, I define each factor, report its individual contribution to organizational trust (the coefficient of variation known as R2 in statistics), and provide examples of organizations that have implemented culture interventions to improve performance. Each of the OXYTOCIN factors explains between 51 percent and 84 percent of the variation in organizational trust. These data come from a nationally representative sample in the United States of working people who have taken the Ofactor survey that I developed. The OXYTOCIN factors are not statistically independent (each factor shares some of the contribution to organizational trust with other factors), so that the sum of the individual coefficients of variation exceeds 1.
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Excerpted from Trust Factor by Paul J. Zak. Copyright © 2017 Paul J. Zak. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
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