Blink and you miss it... or did you really?

How tall are you? Depending on your answer, you might unknowingly have had an easier time being promoted than your shorter colleagues…

This discovery is one of the many fascinating topics explored in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, a compelling book that draws on both neuroscience and psychology. Hard to put down, Blink challenges and impresses in equal measures. It examines how our unconscious snap-judgements shape our lives and have far reaching consequences for ourselves and those around us; from politics, to work, art, sport, and love. It seems highly relevant for anyone involved in recruiting and developing teams to digest the key theme in this book. As we all strive to make recruitment processes fair and equal, this book uncovers both the obvious and the much less obvious forms of discrimination.

Gladwell’s work effortlessly weaves together powerful and persuasive examples of how we are all, what he coins ‘thin slicing’ and making decisions and judgement with ‘instantaneous impression and conclusions’. He shows the reader how these snap judgements are made in the unconscious even before we have awareness of them. An example that I found particularly striking concerns height! Being only 5ft 2in myself, and married to a 6ft male, the subject immediately grabbed my attention. Gladwell had polled over half the US Fortune 500 list of CEOs and overwhelmingly they were white males. However, what was also revealed was that most were around 6ft tall. In a country where 14.5% of males are 6ft, 58% of the CEOS were 6ft or taller. Of the millions of male Americans under 5 ft 6, only 10 from Gladwell’s sample had made it to CEO level. Gladwell’s research went on to show that taller people actually earn more per year than shorter people with exactly the same qualifications and experience. It is hard to deny that this is likely to be caused, or affected, by what we ‘think a leader must look like’, even though we may not be conscious of this stereotype. Gladwell concluded that ‘we see a tall person and we swoon.’

This made me reflect about how we, in Education, assess staff and promote into leadership.  Do we avoid these unconscious judgements effectively enough? Is it possible that this even extends to students, on occasion - how tall are your prefects, or your head boy or head girl? I am sure that most of us would recoil in disgust about the possibility of these unintended judgements, but I think it is certainly something worth looking at and checking.

Diversity is quite rightly high on the agenda and a major consideration when appointing to leadership posts, but clearly, we also need to consider how other elements of our unconscious judgements may be affecting our appointment decisions. 

I leave you with two final thoughts …

1. Please add Blink to your reading list and school library

2. Take 5 minutes to consider the heights of those at the top (pun intended) of your organisation…..

By Claudia Clark, Research and Marketing LSC