by Sarah Bate | 8:00 AM August 20, 2014
If you’re in management, much of your job consists of creating the conditions under which people in the organization can do good work. You work to understand what makes it hard for them to be productive, and help them clear those hurdles. It should interest you, therefore, to know of a challenge that likely affects a percentage of your colleagues, but is rarely acknowledged: face blindness.
Formally called prosopagnosia, face blindness is a cognitive condition characterized by the inability to recognize other people from their faces alone. The condition can be so severe that it affects the recognition of close family members and friends, or even one’s own face. People with face blindness do not have a general lack of knowledge about other people, and can immediately recall what they know about a person once they have realized their identity.
Traditionally face blindness has been reported in a small number of people following brain injury, yet in the last decade it has been revealed that as many as one in 50 people have a developmental form of the condition. These people have never experienced a brain injury or other developmental disorder, and have normal vision. Their difficulties with face recognition seem to extend back to early childhood, and some evidence suggests the condition runs in families.
Some well-known people have been forthcoming about having the condition – such as the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, the artist Chuck Close, and the business investor Duncan Bannatyne – but public awareness of it remains quite low. Thus, most unaffected people take their face recognition skills for granted and it does not occur to them that someone might struggle with this process. Meanwhile, while many with face blindness find ways to cope, many others experience feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, and guilt when they fail to recognize familiar people. Indeed, even those who know themselves to be face blind often choose not to disclose their condition publicly. They might instead simply avoid personal, social, and occupational situations where they would be required to recognize the faces of familiar others.
Begin to imagine the experience of face blindness, and it quickly becomes evident how some workplaces make the challenges greater. For instance, although a person with face blindness may often be able to compensate for their difficulties in office environments where each individual has a fixed position behind a particular desk, they may struggle to recognize colleagues when encountered in an unexpected or generic location, such as at the coffee machine. The use of “hot-desking” is particularly challenging, since it foils most of the compensatory strategies the face blind use to avoid embarrassing misidentification errors. Many face blind people also struggle in meetings, as seating arrangements are seldom pre-planned and location cannot be used as a cue to recognition. Finally, difficulties are exacerbated in occupations where there are fewer non-facial cues to recognition. Think, for example, of workplaces where uniforms are worn. For that matter, men’s business suits offer few distinguishing characteristics to aid person recognition.
Face blindness can also bring about difficulties in interactions with clients. Many people with face blindness worry that they will appear rude, disinterested, or incompetent if they fail to recognize a client upon a second meeting, and believe this may directly influence their performance at work and consequently opportunities for progression or promotion. Some face blind people use clever compensatory strategies to address this issue, such as arriving particularly early for meetings so the client has to approach them, rather than vice versa. However, such strategies are not fool-proof and can still lead to embarrassing failures of identification.
Put all this together and it seems evident that a manager attuned to an individual’s face blindness could make a positive difference to that person’s performance. There hasn’t yet been much research directly focused on the effects of face blindness in the workplace, but one study concluded that the occupational difficulties are potentially as great as those posed by stuttering and dyslexia – conditions for which specific assistance is available.
It is a problem, therefore, that many face blind people are reluctant to disclose their condition at work. This is mostly for fear that employers will not have heard of or understand the condition, or that they will be held back from interactions with key clients and will not be considered for promotion or managerial roles. While laws (such as the Equality Act in the UK) are in place to punish such discrimination, many people fear that low public and professional awareness of face blindness will nevertheless act against them, and, regardless, that even an understanding employer could not assist them with their difficulties.
The fact is that several actions can be taken to assist a face blind colleague. In office environments, free-standing name plates can be displayed on workspaces, and also taken along to meetings to assist with recognition. Colleagues can be advised not to take offence if the person fails to recognize them, and to establish at the start of a conversation that their identity is known. When a face blind employee is required to meet clients or externally-based colleagues away from the office, they may benefit from the presence of another staff member to quietly assist with identifications and introductions.
Finally, it is important to note that, even if a person with face blindness is succeeding in a workplace and does not experience the anxiety and negative consequences described above, there may yet be strong reasons for the condition to be acknowledged. However well an employee copes with their face blindness, in some settings the inability to recognize a face raises health and safety considerations, and it is important that employers think through these implications. Likewise, there are settings in which, if a person’s face blindness were widely disclosed , it might put them at risk – perhaps because they come into contact with vulnerable or potentially threatening populations.
Regardless of the setting, a face blind person should feel able to disclose his or her condition to an employer. There can then be a carefully considered decision about how widely to share this information – and, regardless of disclosure, certain measures can be taken to assist the individual. All of this will happen more as awareness of the condition rises, and managers learn to recognize challenges that have always existed, but to which most of them have been blind.
SARAH BATE
Sarah Bate a lead researcher in the Centre for Face Processing Disorders at Bournemouth University, and author of Face Recognition and its Disorders (Palgrave-Macmillan). Her current work examines the nature of face-processing impairments in adults and children with developmental or acquired forms of prosopagnosia (face blindness). For more information please visit www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org.
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