Patrick McKendry

The Met Gala drew hundreds of fashion and popular culture icons to New York this week.¹ The invite-only event with a $50,000 per seat price is a fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and is often referred to as “fashion’s biggest night”.² The extravagant display usually draws its fair share of controversy as well. Many critiqued this year’s theme of celebrating Karl Lagerfeld, an influential designer with a history of misogynistic and racist opinions.³ Celebrity attendees have also in the past drawn criticism for both the statements they make through their outfits and for the negative impact their fashion has on body image.² Despite its flaws, many of us cannot seem to get enough. According to Google Trends, search interest the day of the event generated about 10x more search volume worldwide than the soon-to-follow coronation of King Charles III to be held only a few days later.⁴

For many people, the most realistic opinion on the Met Gala is mixed. We might not be particularly interested in the fashion industry and find that nothing about the extravagance of the event or its attendees is desirable. We may see it as a distraction from other problems facing our society today. Others might not agree with statements made and lifestyles of attendees at the gala, but recognize that it sure would be nice to be able to spend $50,000 on a ticket and network within that group. And for many, the gala is truly a dream. The same event can be seen in many different ways.

For our work, the same also applies. As we look around at those who have achieved success at our organization, we may not like what we see. That does not mean that these people have nothing to offer us. Many of us look to leadership for a role model but never consider the benefits of an anti-role model. Here we will look at role models, reverse role models, and anti-role models and why you are better off having all three.

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The Three Types of Role Models

We all have people we admire - someone who gives us an idea of how we want to act and gives us a standard towards which to strive. For some that role model is a family member or other childhood hero. It may be a professional in their field who consistently excels at what they do and how they do it. While everyone has a favorite boss, it is rare that we ever get to work closely with a true role model.

But most of us have a boss or peer that we hate working with or have seen someone at the senior levels of our company who we think goes about their role in the wrong way. These reference points also have a lot to offer us. A role model of mine once told me how he had learned more in his career about how he wanted to lead by watching these negative influences and taking inspiration for what he would NOT do. Since then I’ve heard these examples defined by David Cancel - CEO of Drift - as anti-role models and reverse role models.⁵

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The Anti-Role Model

The anti-role model has nothing that we want for ourselves and our careers. They have achieved no notable success in their career and offer little inspiration in the way they go about their work. Said differently, we can learn neither from what they do or how they do it. However, these people provide us value in showing us what not to do in our roles. As Charlie Munger, investing partner of Warren Buffet, says of the inversion principle, “Tell me where I’m going to die, that is, so I don’t go there.”⁵ In our Met Gala example, anti-role models could be the people who travel to watch the attendees walk in on the red carpet and are not attending the event themselves. The anti-role model could also be the fashion icon succeeding in an industry that is not of interest to us and our individual life aspirations.

Most every organization has a familiarity bias, a preference for familiar things, across many aspects of work.⁶ Whether business presentations tend to save questions at the end or intersperse them throughout is a form of familiarity bias. Guidance from senior leadership and recommendations for business strategy tend to display some familiarity bias as well. And the behaviors and mannerisms we use in our day-to-day are more likely to be rewarded with promotion when they match the style of those already in leadership positions. The anti-role model can be helpful then because they can clarify what is not rewarded. They demonstrate the actions and behaviors that are familiarly associated with a slower and less successful career path. As we navigate our own career growth, adeptly identifying people to not be like can help us chart a more productive path.

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The Reverse Role Model

The reverse role model has undeniably achieved what we hope to achieve in our careers. In addition to their success they may even demonstrate behaviors, like hard work or creative strategic thinking, that are worth replicating for ourselves. What separates reverse role models for us is that they hold values that are different from our own and that we do not want to adopt for ourselves. As an example, I have a reverse role model for myself who is highly capable and has advanced rapidly in their career. However, I find that their approach to managing their teams is low-trust and disempowering as they need to be highly involved at every point in every project. While I admire their success I prefer to center my own leadership style around enabling others to have control of their own destiny.

Looking at the Met Gala, Karl Lagerfeld - this year’s thematic honoree - is a textbook example of a reverse role model. Lagerfeld served as creative director for Chanel for almost 40 years and played a central role in defining modern fashion.⁷ But he was controversial throughout his career and many disagreed with his remarks, finding them laced with misogyny, racism, and dismissive of those who did not maintain the unrealistic body of image of his professional models.³ Was Lagerfeld’s style influential? Yes. Were his values and opinions undesirable? Also, yes.

There is a common quip of advice that you should “never meet your idols” and the reverse role model is that reason. We want to believe the people that we idolize and admire from afar are worth admiring and we can only be disappointed by how they actually are when meeting them. In truth, this potential disappointment is the best reason to meet your idols. Identifying and keeping reverse role models can be empowering because it can provide clarity into the truth that not everyone who holds the roles we are looking for is flawless. This can help reduce feelings of imposterism. By realizing that those we look up to are imperfect, we can have greater confidence to pursue our own path to success.

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The Positive Role Model

This is what most people think about when they hear the term role model, and now - given the comparison from anti and reverse role models - we understand it to be someone who has both been successful in an area we are interested in and who shares similar values to us. U.S. Navy Seal Officer Chris Fussell usefully identified that while a role model can be a senior leader you want to emulate, role models can also be found in peers that you think outperform you and in more junior team members who you think are doing a job you used to have better than you ever did it.⁵ Looking once more at the Met Gala, it is important to realize that what makes someone a role model to you is an individual decision. The best role model from the night may have been an event photographer who consistently demonstrates hard work and has built rapport with various notable attendees because of their respectful and personal approach to the trade.

The value of role models is self-evident in organizations. They serve as the blueprint for what we want our model of success to be. They chart a behavioral path that we want for others to follow. Within our company, it is then important for us to remember the critical responsibility we have of creating effective role models. This responsibility spans from hiring practices that evaluate both technical and leadership potential, to in-role training for leaders to develop the needed skills to be effective, to promotion criteria and being especially sure that rising leaders do work the right way. If you can get the right role models in place, the effects can be enduring.

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Why 3 is Better than 1

We commonly receive the guidance to look for role models for ourselves, both for our careers and also for how we live outside of work. Certainly, this is something we should do. But focusing only on a few positive role models is disadvantageous to learning and growing as quickly as possible. Instead, we should create a collection of role models that spans positive, reverse, and anti role models so that we can take advantage of all that these different types have to offer. In fact, there are a few reasons that negative role models can even be more impactful on how we operate than positive ones.

First, bad leadership is painful. I’ve previously written about negativity bias and how it leads us to remember bad occurrences for longer.⁸ Our brain is primed to recall pain in order to avoid it. That same priming also makes us more readily forget those things that are good. This means that we are more likely to hold onto negative experiences we had as a result of bad leadership than we are to keep the positive experiences that great leaders provided to us. If you have worked for a bad leader or on a bad team, it does not have to be for naught. Keeping this person in mind as an anti or reverse role model helps us take value out of that difficult experience and make it a cornerstone of how we want to not lead. Errors of leadership will be common, but we can see our disagreements with the approach of our leaders as a lesson rather than just an annoyance.

Second, negative role models give us multiple ways to learn to grow. If we can learn from negative role models, we do not need to wait for the complete package of a positive role model to come along. I say this graciously, but humans are flawed and none of us have everything figured out despite our best efforts. In Good to Great, Jim Collins defines what he calls “Level 5 Leadership”. This describes Collins’s top-level leadership characteristics as someone who effectively balances personal humility and professional will.⁹ A Level 5 Leader would be an excellent role model, but according to Collins they are incredibly rare. Realistically, we are far more likely to work with someone who can serve us as a reverse role model than we are to work with someone who is a positive role model. When we seek out value from each of these types we give ourselves more ways to learn and grow.

Third, being deliberate about making use of negative role models helps us process the stress that bad leadership inflicts on us and creates meaning from that pain. Research shows that chronic stress can diminish productivity at work and drive worse health outcomes in individuals.¹⁰ Managing stress is important and one of the more effective techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy for stress management is focused on reframing how we interpret the stressors in our lives. By putting energy into establishing negative role models, we can reframe the negative interactions we had with others into something productive and valuable.

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A Final Thought

Not everyone agrees on the value of the Met Gala much like not everyone agrees on the best way to lead a team. To some, attendees of the Met Gala may represent the pinnacle of success for popular culture and the height of fashion, while to others they represent an uninteresting career focus or a celebration of that which is not meaningfully valuable. Similarly, those in leadership organizations may represent the ideal role model to some while being an affront to effective leadership values to others. Both can be true.

Looking at reverse role models, one of their unspoken values may be a framework for productive disagreement and the subtle reminder that we do not need to agree with everyone on everything all of the time. Identifying a reverse role model can give us the ability to look at someone’s success, appreciate and respect what they were able to get for themselves, and still choose a different path forward and way of operating for ourselves. In some cases, we may be close enough to one of these role models to provide our counterpoint to why we think they should update their values. If we believe we can help them to be better as a person or as a leader, we should. And if they choose to disagree, we do not need to disavow them entirely. Full use of the concept of a reverse role model provides us the tools we need to properly process that very few people we meet will match our goals for both the work that they do and the way that they do it.

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References

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The Met Gala & Reverse or Anti Role Models