Stop your fawning, and invest in process as much as in people.
A few weeks back at a CIA base in Afghanistan, a lone Jordanian doctor/double agent managed to blow up seven highly trained CIA operatives, including the base chief. How did he get so close to so many important people? There appear to be several reasons, but one of the most critical is that the CIA fell victim to thinking the doctor would be a superstar operative for them against Al-Qaida. In their exuberance, protective protocol was skipped.
Humans want superstars. We look for war heroes, industry wonders, and sports titans. Their images grace bedroom walls, peer at us from magazine covers, and demand large sums of money to be watched or heard. Marketing superstars are no different. A quick Google search unleashes a stream of ways to find (or better yet, become) a marketing superstar. This “star quest” might not be so bad if it meant only that we buried our noses in Us and People, but as we know, obsessing over stars can lead to all sorts of problems. What’s behind this?
The Halo Effect
When somebody is really good at one thing, we are more likely to believe that person will be better at everything. We believe that Tiger Woods’ unfailing golf skills, for example, mean that he also will be more intelligent, more moral, and a better husband. We translate one type of triumph into others until … voilà … über-success!
Rankism
Humans naturally create hierarchies. Everybody wants to be a “somebody.” A good way to do this is by associating yourself with the superstars that we help create. Following the famous on Twitter, going to book signings, or reading star tabloids, are perfect examples of this. Of course, the shadow side of manufacturing “somebodies” is that others have to be “nobodies.”
Inspiration
Many people hope they will move up the ranks and become superstars like their heroes. Superstars can be very motivating. “They were once like me,” we say, “So I have a chance at stardom too.”
Fear of Death
The assumption is that people don’t want to die, which leads to behaviors such as investing in things that live on after our death. These legacy investments include spiritual beliefs, and cultural beliefs such as “rags to riches” stories that are made incarnate in celebrities including Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey. We “worship” these ideas and people. In several studies, people were more positive toward celebrities when they were first reminded of death, suggesting that we cope with the awareness of death by loving superstars whose fame appears to bring them immortality.
In recent years, the biggest opponent of superstardom has been Malcolm Gladwell, who has made it a hallmark of his populist books. Gladwell fights against the Horatio Alger myth—the falsehood that people move up through the ranks only through Olympian rugged individualism. This quote from his best-selling Outliers is typical:
“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are.”
The “superstar,” such as Horatio, is a myth, and a dangerous one. If you are hiring a superstar in marketing or creative, he or she is more likely to:
• Be more expensive (and not worth it)
• Be less loyal to you (and more loyal to self-success)
• Piss off other employees (because he/she is treated differently)
• Reach too far and fumble. The halo effect doesn’t just affect fans, it also means superstars themselves are more likely to believe their powers are greater, and more far-reaching, than they are.
• Fail more spectacularly than others when they do fall. (The higher you go…)
If marketing and creative superstars are not all they are cracked up to be, what can you do when it comes to hiring?
• Institute trial periods, or try to hire half time before you fully commit. Of course, you can let workers go at any time and workers can leave at any time, but acknowledging this aligns expectations between employee and employer.
• Hire for those things that are impossible to learn, such as personal skills, temperament, and motivation. Many technical skills are actually easier to learn than personality traits, given the right motivation.
• Hire people who believe that intelligence can be fostered. People generally fall into two camps concerning intelligence: they believe either that it is a fixed trait, or that it can be developed over time. You want employees who believe intelligence can be fostered, which studies show is true. These are the employees who will learn and grow.
• Praise employees for effort and not intelligence. In studies, those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks—for fear of failure—and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer.
• Organizations that are most successful are the ones where the system is the star. Good examples of this approach include some of America’s most successful companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Southwest Airlines. As Boris Groysberg, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, says, “It’s so prevalent in our society that people think they become stars because of who they are. We downplay the role of institutions in creating those stars. If you look at what happens when these people leave a firm or organization, they often do not become stars elsewhere.”
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Beware Marketing and Creative Superstars
Stop your fawning, and invest in process as much as in people.
Humans want superstars. We look for war heroes, industry wonders, and sports titans. Their images grace bedroom walls, peer at us from magazine covers, and demand large sums of money to be watched or heard. Marketing superstars are no different. A quick Google search unleashes a stream of ways to find (or better yet, become) a marketing superstar. This “star quest” might not be so bad if it meant only that we buried our noses in Us and People, but as we know, obsessing over stars can lead to all sorts of problems. What’s behind this?
The Halo Effect
When somebody is really good at one thing, we are more likely to believe that person will be better at everything. We believe that Tiger Woods’ unfailing golf skills, for example, mean that he also will be more intelligent, more moral, and a better husband. We translate one type of triumph into others until … voilà … über-success!
Rankism
Humans naturally create hierarchies. Everybody wants to be a “somebody.” A good way to do this is by associating yourself with the superstars that we help create. Following the famous on Twitter, going to book signings, or reading star tabloids, are perfect examples of this. Of course, the shadow side of manufacturing “somebodies” is that others have to be “nobodies.”
Inspiration
Many people hope they will move up the ranks and become superstars like their heroes. Superstars can be very motivating. “They were once like me,” we say, “So I have a chance at stardom too.”
Fear of Death
The assumption is that people don’t want to die, which leads to behaviors such as investing in things that live on after our death. These legacy investments include spiritual beliefs, and cultural beliefs such as “rags to riches” stories that are made incarnate in celebrities including Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey. We “worship” these ideas and people. In several studies, people were more positive toward celebrities when they were first reminded of death, suggesting that we cope with the awareness of death by loving superstars whose fame appears to bring them immortality.
In recent years, the biggest opponent of superstardom has been Malcolm Gladwell, who has made it a hallmark of his populist books. Gladwell fights against the Horatio Alger myth—the falsehood that people move up through the ranks only through Olympian rugged individualism. This quote from his best-selling Outliers is typical:
“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are.”
The “superstar,” such as Horatio, is a myth, and a dangerous one. If you are hiring a superstar in marketing or creative, he or she is more likely to:
• Be more expensive (and not worth it)
• Be less loyal to you (and more loyal to self-success)
• Piss off other employees (because he/she is treated differently)
• Reach too far and fumble. The halo effect doesn’t just affect fans, it also means superstars themselves are more likely to believe their powers are greater, and more far-reaching, than they are.
• Fail more spectacularly than others when they do fall. (The higher you go…)
If marketing and creative superstars are not all they are cracked up to be, what can you do when it comes to hiring?
• Institute trial periods, or try to hire half time before you fully commit. Of course, you can let workers go at any time and workers can leave at any time, but acknowledging this aligns expectations between employee and employer.
• Hire for those things that are impossible to learn, such as personal skills, temperament, and motivation. Many technical skills are actually easier to learn than personality traits, given the right motivation.
• Hire people who believe that intelligence can be fostered. People generally fall into two camps concerning intelligence: they believe either that it is a fixed trait, or that it can be developed over time. You want employees who believe intelligence can be fostered, which studies show is true. These are the employees who will learn and grow.
• Praise employees for effort and not intelligence. In studies, those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks—for fear of failure—and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer.
• Organizations that are most successful are the ones where the system is the star. Good examples of this approach include some of America’s most successful companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Southwest Airlines. As Boris Groysberg, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, says, “It’s so prevalent in our society that people think they become stars because of who they are. We downplay the role of institutions in creating those stars. If you look at what happens when these people leave a firm or organization, they often do not become stars elsewhere.”