Find your culture super-spreaders

21 Aug Find your culture super-spreaders

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Inside my mantra that ‘culture is how people do things on repeat’ sits a secret. While every person’s choices and behaviour matter. Not everyone carries the same influence. And before you jump to leadership. Which, yes, leaves a mark. There are others in less visible roles who, whatever room they enter, have an outsize effect on people around them.

In his book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell examines the phenomenon of super-spreaders. The rare few people, who, because of their physiology, breathe out more virus particles than others, infecting many, many more than other people.

He quotes from a British COVID study where “researchers deliberately infected 36 willing volunteers with Covid. All of them were young and healthy. They were all exposed to the exact same dose of the exact same strain at exactly the same time under exactly the same conditions. All were then quarantined in a hospital, enabling the researchers to put them under a medical microscope, monitoring and testing every symptom and vital sign. And what did they find? A full 86% of all of the Covid virus particles detected in their group of infected volunteers came from … two people. Airborne viruses do not operate according to the Law of the Few. They operate according to the Law of the Very, Very, Very Few.”

Now the virus analogy might suggest culture super-spreaders are always a problem, and certainly we’re hardwired to more easily notice bad behaviour. Everyone gossips about the selfish co-worker, less so the person who always says thanks and acknowledges other’s work. But, while influence is not exactly agnostic to outcome, it also can swing positive with the right push.

Back to Gladwell’s ‘law of the few’, we’re not talking dozens of people, and even a handful might overstate how many. It’s not someone on every team, although somewhat influential people do exist in every team. Super-spreaders are orders of magnitude more viral; they emit more ‘drops’ than anyone else. Their actions atomise intent over everyone they encounter, spreading their behaviour and choices.

Want to know why a previously high-performing organisation or team suddenly craters? Or conversely, a struggling one surpasses all previous measures? A super-spreader might lurk among them! Either way, these extremely influential individuals become your ticket to boosting behaviour or stopping a slide in its tracks.

But finding them is tricky, because their actions ripple to others. A bit like locating an epidemic super-spreader, you’ve got to work backwards and examine where you see extra impact.

Engagement surveys won’t help you find them. They only tell you how people felt back when you ran the survey. And if you’ve got a super-spreader in your midst, that’s almost certainly old news by the time you analyse and share the data. Performance reviews have a better chance, but only if you’re looking beyond skills and individual results for how that worker interacts with and infects others.

Look for pockets of sudden change. In the early days of COVID, a super-spreader attended an international company conference held in Boston. Seemingly overnight, cases went from single digits to hundreds and spread from there. A conservative estimate of those subsequently infected globally, is in the hundreds of thousands.

Social media posts going viral act in a similar way. Someone posts something provocative and it may languish for only a few to see. Then someone with loads of followers reposts it, quickly creating a tsunami of reposts and commentary.

Change generally happens incrementally—1% at a time. But a super-spreader can radically alter how quickly things shift. “It changed overnight” is exactly where you need to look. Because policies, programs or processes rarely infect how people behave as quickly as that one person everyone is watching and copying.

Epidemiologists think some conditions increase a superspreader’s impact. One is dehydration (so, yes, when you’re sick, drink plenty of water). In organisational terms the ‘water supply’ also matters. What messages are you repeating? Do your big and little choices consistently show what you care about? A reliable supply of water means positive super-spreaders share what matters and limits the negative particles naysayers can spread.

Once you figure out who your super-spreader is, what you do depends on their behaviour and choices. Are they aligned with the direction you’re headed? Or sinking what you stand for and dragging others down with them. One gets promoted, the other removed. But keep the golden rule of managing performance in mind in how you handle them. Praise in public and correct in private, because that’s another way to elevate what gets noticed.

Noticing your super-spreaders isn’t an invitation to vilify or target. Some people are simply not right for your particular bus. But understanding if someone has an extraordinary impact on how you do things is vital to a healthy culture. And for the success of what you’re trying to achieve.

Thanks for reading.