Prestige behaviours: the hidden force shaping your team’s culture
You know when someone introduces you to a single idea and everything clicks? When the connections between previously isolated challenges and experiences suddenly light up in your head like neon? I had one such moment when I first came across the concept of prestige behaviours.
It came courtesy of a conversation with Hannah Lownsbrough, the ever-wise former CEO of SumOfUs (now Ekō) and, at that time, interim Strategy Director at Forward Action. We were talking about my struggles to get Forward Action team members to truly embrace shared learning from failure - or, more accurately, what they perceived as failure (more on that later).
The team was great at sharing learnings from projects that delivered great measurable results - lots of donations, big email list growth etc. However, they rarely shared insights from projects that performed less well on those metrics, despite months of me encouraging people to do so.
"I don't get it," I was saying. "We've built a no-blame culture where everyone feels supported and appreciated. I’ve been banging the drum on this for ages. So why isn't it happening?"
“It’s because sharing impressive results data is Forward Action’s number one prestige behaviour,” Hannah explained.
What are prestige behaviours?
Prestige behaviours often fly under the radar, but they are one of the most powerful drivers of both culture and decision making. Few teams are aware of their own prestige behaviours, but every team has them - and once you identify them, you’ll often find you can suddenly explain many of the key dynamics within your team.
As Hannah defined it, prestige behaviours are the activities that earn your team members attention, praise or status. They’re loosely shaped by your team’s values and ways of working, with a healthy dose of personality dynamics thrown into the mix. All of us like prestige - so, naturally, your team will prioritise those activities, even at the expense of explicit personal or team goals. As a result, your team’s culture and behaviours can end up misaligned with the objectives it needs to achieve.
Prestige behaviours come in all shapes and sizes. At one organisation I worked with, prestige came from being seen as having "too much on your plate," even if workloads were in fact manageable. This led to an unhealthy culture of long hours and an unwillingness to help colleagues out - "sorry, I've just got too much on."
At another, a central prestige behaviour was policing colleagues on how they used language, to the extent that staff sometimes spent hours debating it while to-do lists gathered dust. I’ve even worked with an organisation, led by a former writer, where writing ability was given so much prestige that those seen to be the best writers were sometimes promoted ahead of candidates with skills more relevant to the role.
The prestige of measurable success
So, how were prestige behaviours manifesting at Forward Action?
From the beginning, Forward Action's values and operational model were proudly rooted in delivering measurable results for our clients. We founded the company in part to push back against the "if it looks good, it is good" approach some other agencies were taking to digital. Measuring our impact was not only central to our test-and-iterate approach, we saw it as a matter of integrity.
Over the years, we reinforced this value through a wide range of cultural tools. One of the most significant was a Slack channel we created for our team to shout out each others’ successes. Joe & I encouraged people to share their results in the channel, then made sure we were always on hand to praise their achievement.
Essentially, we established “publicly sharing good measurable results” as a prestige behaviour. But giving a behaviour status doesn’t just promote it - it also suppresses behaviours perceived to be opposite.
Because, crucially, giving prestige to reporting great results is subtly different to giving prestige to getting great results (although the Forward Action team remains exceptionally good at that). We were recognising the headline - “great results achieved!” - not the work that lay behind those results.
Unintended consequences
The unintended consequence was that our team was reluctant to talk about work - even excellent work - that didn’t deliver great measurable results. This applied even when it had been deeply impactful in ways that were more difficult to measure. In particular, team members were often doing vital capacity building work to help our clients through the early stages of getting a digital mobilisation programme up and running - everything from hammering their tech into shape to building buy-in with key stakeholders.
As time went on, Joe and I increasingly saw this capacity building as some of Forward Action's most impactful work. However, because our "great results achieved!" prestige behaviour was so firmly entrenched, the team viewed projects that built capacity without delivering great measurable results as less prestigious, or even as failures. We therefore struggled to build dialogue within our team around how to do these projects well.
How to change your prestige behaviours
Fixing this took months. Eventually, Forward Action got to a place where both capacity building and measurable results were seen as impactful, and the team were comfortable sharing lessons about both.
We learned a lot about how to shape prestige behaviours in the process. Here’s our six-step guide:
Spot your existing prestige behaviours. This will help you evaluate if they are constructive and need to be reinforced, or destructive and need to be changed. Getting a range of perspectives will be particularly helpful; explain the concept to managers and ask them what they see as prestige behaviours. Remember, you’re not necessarily just looking for what gets praise; receiving attention, influence or sympathy can also attach prestige to behaviours.
Think through the impact of your desired behaviours. How will your desired prestige behaviours really influence your culture and ways of working? Be really intentional about the specific behaviours that are valuable to you - think of the difference between reporting results and getting results I talked about above. Don’t try to do too many at once - you’re more likely to move the needle if you only try to build 1 or 2 prestige behaviours at a time.
Model them yourself. No one has more impact on shaping prestige behaviours than leaders. At Forward Action, this meant Joe & I proactively talking about our “failures” and what we’d learnt from them. We created a new Slack channel dedicated to this kind of learning and posted in it often, as well as talking openly about mistakes we’d made and what we’d learnt from them in our day to day interactions with the team.
Ground them in shared goals & values. We didn't just want to get people comfortable with learning from failure; we wanted to reframe what our team saw as failure altogether. To do that, we re-wrote our mission statement to put capacity building at the heart of how we defined impact. By grounding them in our core purpose, we ensured that the behaviours we were trying to encourage would genuinely move us towards our goals as an organisation.
Give them airtime. Embedding a new prestige behaviour takes time and repetition. At Forward Action, we got our whole leadership team to shift from shouting out great results to praising progress on capacity-building projects, each time linking it back to our impact mission. We also made a point of seeking out team members individually to congratulate them on previously un-lauded work, like overcoming a difficult data challenge or bringing a key stakeholder onside.
De-prestige incompatible behaviours. This will vary depending on the situation, but it will sometimes be necessary to take away prestige from existing behaviours. For us, this was subtle - redistributing airtime from measurable results towards recognising capacity building - but in some instances you might need to more proactively challenge behaviours you want to de-prestige.
If this article has got you thinking about your own prestige behaviours, we’ve devised a light-touch culture audit that will help organisations identify and work out how to change them. If you’re interested in learning more about it, get in touch at alex@modernchange.uk.
