An HR executive asked, “How do you know when someone comes up after a speech if they’re going to pat your head or slap it?” I laughed. Challenging the status quo is risky, but after 2,000 speeches I’m starting to get the hang of it. I don’t want to cause trouble. I just want to educate.

OK. I lie. I do want to cause trouble.

But then they asked me, “Why aren’t you teaching how to drive performance with organization-wide programs to build employee self-esteem?”

I know why they asked. There are over 10 million hits on organization-wide efforts for this. Many company programs show leaders how to develop self-esteem in their employees:

• Recognize success.
• Give credit where credit is due.
• Give awards, certificates, and bonuses to let employees know they are appreciated.
• Share their success with others.
• Avoid negative statements.
• Provide constant recognition.
• Acknowledge and celebrate their achievements.
• Help them recognize they are unique just the way they are.

These are wonderful ideas!

So why don’t I teach it?

........ um, data. 

Autopsy

I was actually around when the self-esteem movement started. Through a friend, I met the guy who started the organization-wide self-esteem crusade, California legislator John Vasconcellos (Vasco).

He was steering a bill in 1986 to establish the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, or the “Self-Esteem Commission.” Vasco convinced people that low self-esteem was the cause of unemployment, educational failure, child abuse, domestic violence, homelessness, and gang warfare. He said that raising a population’s self-esteem would be a “social vaccine,” saving the country billions.

The movement spread.

A large proportion of the US and UK believed in Vasco’s social experiment back in the 80’s and immediately abolished the idea of losing (failing, mistakes, dealing with right vs. wrong).

Parents and educators set off on a mission to save the world. Everybody received an equal prize just for efforts, not their results. In effect, everyone won. Kids grew up being told by their parents and teachers how wonderful and special they were. To get them to believe they were intelligent, important, talented, beautiful, and inherently good, changes were implemented organization-wide in schools like:

• School awards being based on participation, not results.
• Ds and Fs being replaced with participation awards.
• Red pens being forbidden. They were far too “aggressive.”
• Competitive sports were eliminated because kids couldn’t cope with the pressure to win.

Many schools jumped on board. One school in Lancashire, England—Barrowford Primary— had such rigorous adherence to a self-esteem program that, in 2014, they wrote to pupils who didn’t perform so well in their exams:

"These tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique. . . . They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play . . . sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school.

Teachers were discouraged from punishing or defining a child as naughty, or raising their voices. The kids were to be treated with unconditional positive regard

But that wasn’t enough. On their sports day, all the year groups were handed participation ribbons.

WTF is a participation ribbon? 

This is not a Saturday Night Live skit or an Onion headline. This really happened.

But all these good intentions and nurturing of self-esteem did produce higher achievement, correct?

No.

Busted

Vasco’s plan backfired spectacularly.

When researching for my book Winners and Losers, the evidence for protecting people from experiencing mistakes and losses in order to build their self-esteem always ends badly.

The result of the Barrowford Primary?

An assessment report found that the school had “emphasized developing pupils’ emotional and social wellbeing more than the attainment of high standards.” In 2015, the school received the lowest teaching ratings and the lowest exam results.

Well, at least that was over with.

No.

Additional research unleashed more interesting data from around the world as a body of research emerged that validated the self-esteem movement hurt kids.

• In the US, the first-year A average in high schools rose from 18 percent to 48 percent as SAT scores fell!
• Keith Campbell, professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, found that building up self-esteem while neglecting to support attainment does not serve our youngsters well. He said, “We live in a world of trophies for everyone. Fourteenth-place ribbon. I am not making this stuff up. My daughter got one.”
• Narcissism rose as evidenced by selfie-snapping millennials.
• Gifted students severely underestimated their own abilities, adopted lower standards for success, expected less of themselves, underrated the importance of effort, and overestimated how much help they needed from a parent.
• Esteem-building praise of failing college students caused their grades to sink even further.
• Giving kids the label of “smart” did not prevent them from underperforming. In fact, kids who were told they were “smart” ended up performing less well in tests than they’d performed before after they’d been given this label.
• Scholars from Reed College and Stanford University found that praised students become risk-averse, lack perceived autonomy, have shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.
• Esteemed psychologist and author of international bestseller Mindset Carol Dweck’s research on overpraised kids strongly suggested that image maintenance becomes their primary concern, and they are more interested in tearing others down.

Reviews of over 200 studies of children being protected from losing to boost their self-esteem concluded that their grades and career achievement didn’t improve. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort.

But this doesn't affect us at home. Right?

Well, maybe. This self-esteem mess seems to end up spilling over into simple events like children’s parties. Australia’s Child magazine recently published an article in which the friend of a mother who had the outrageous idea of only having one prize in a Pass the Parcel game at a party described the fallout. She said, “I’m so tired of this “you’re-all-winners” mentality we’re teaching kids; they need to learn that life isn’t always fair.”

It was a risky move . . . horror unfolded in her backyard.

As the large parcel went around, the game finally ended with one child winning. Each child used to the “everyone wins” approach became hysterical and couldn’t be consoled.

One girl stomped and screamed, “But I don’t like to lose! I never lose!”

This lack of correlation between self-esteem and social and academic skills eventually led researchers like Nicholas Emler of the London School of Economics and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University to reach what are now obvious conclusions. Their study found that schools and parents focusing on building self-esteem by protecting children from experiencing failure didn’t result in higher achievement but contributed to low academic scores.

Baumeister was quoted as saying his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

What to do?

Realize that building self-esteem is a good thing. Lou Tice researched and successfully trained others to build self-esteem for over 50 years.

Wait. It works?

Yes, but he implemented it differently. Not as an organization-wide change program, but a personal journey of change for the individual.

Starting with self-talk, he showed how self-esteem builds through taking on personal challenges, feeling free to make mistakes and learn, and becoming a more competent individual as a result. Lou used 'cognitive restructuring' to change a person’s irrational beliefs or cognitive distortions that limit an individual's ability to succeed. Through personal mastery and achievement, a stronger foundation for a more positive self-image is created and, ultimately, a more successful life.

Finally, instead of protecting people from failure, teach them that they can fail, they can learn, they can become stronger from it.

Let's help each other learn from our mistakes, and engage the struggle together.

Protecting employees from failure instead of inspiring them to seek something greater, weakens them, keeps them low, doesn’t inspire them to rise to the challenge, and dilutes the winners.

Feeling motivated is important, for sure. But when the going gets tough, help them embrace and learn, engage the suffering and sacrifice, pick themselves up, and keep moving.

But what if I hire someone who’s never experienced failure because they were raised during the failed self-esteem social experiment?

Well, we don’t want to paint everyone from the “self-esteem generation” with this brush (although stereotypes are a real time-saver). Many good parents didn’t protect their kids, and those kids did learn a lot from losing and failing. Many raised their kids with discipline, consequences, boundaries, and the value of hard work.

But parents that fell under the “self-esteem” spell produced a generation that can become your future employees and customers. If so, you’ll find people who are:
• Self-obsessed
• Unmotivated
• Lack work ethic out of a belief that it’s not possible to lose and you should not have to work hard
• Feel they deserve the participation ribbons they’ve been handed as children
• Entitled
• Unprepared for the real world

Sadly, those who were raised to feel “special” must now deal with the reality that they aren’t.

If we take a more generous view, perhaps the self-esteem movement produced a disadvantaged generation:

Maybe these kids aren’t entitled, but paralyzed.

Maybe they aren’t lazy, but crippled by the fear of losing.

This has caused conflict in the workplace. Work with HR to find ways to onboard and facilitate education, using the techniques that Lou Tice developed to coach employees who may experience losing for the first time while under your employment.

For more info on Lou’s programs, visit https://thepacificinstitute.com/