Why Leaders Fail to Change Behaviors
☀️ A sunburn is good feedback. ☀️
Forget to apply sunscreen at the beach all day and you’ll pay the price. The sunburn is natural feedback for your behavior.
And this works pretty well for changing that particular behavior. One or two bad sunburns will get you back on the sunscreen train pretty quick.
But this kind of consequence-based feedback doesn’t work for everything.
If you shout at your kids to “stop playing video games or else…” they might just laugh at you. (kids these days!?)
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Humans don’t like it when others mess with our autonomy. Sunburn feedback works because we understand we’re the reason we’re in pain and the fix is easy.
Sometimes leaders think the best way to exert their will on their team is to try to threaten sunburns.
But we’re good at mental jiu jitsu🥋 in these situations.
The leader says “I’m going to give you a sunburn if you go out in the sun!”
And the employee goes: “Fine, I’ll just stay inside and watch Netflix.”
And the leader goes: “If I catch you watching Netflix I’m going to give you a sunburn!”
And the employee goes: “Fine, I'll just watch YouTube instead.”
This game can be played for a while. RTO is a good example.
And these aren’t lazy employees, they’re just humans.
As a leader, if you want to influence the behaviors of your team, you’re going to have to do it the harder, but more effective, and honestly more humane way:
👏 Encouragement.
🙌 Positive reinforcement.
📣 And yes some feedback.
Princeton recently published the latest Handbook of Social Psychology, available for free.
For nerds like me, it was a weekend killer. I got lost in it.
And now I hope to help you benefit from my nerdery.
Here are 3 key ideas to support positive behavior change in your organization, straight from the latest academic research, no sunburns required.
“In daily life, most of what we do and think is influenced, intentionally or unintentionally, by others.”
Behaviors are influenced by perceived social norms.
If you want to affect your team’s behaviors, you have to model, highlight, and reward the norms you want. If you have unsavory norms and people are rewarded for them, those will spread. Most of what leaders combat is the secret norms that are rewarded, the ones they don’t know exist.
Those norms have to match the value judgements of the audience
One of the reasons RTO has met such resistance is that it doesn’t pass our value assessment. When the average employee is told to drive an hour to the office for collaboration and innovation, and then sits on a Zoom call in a noisy office with a crappy cafe, the value of the office mandate comes into question. The commute, the extra time, all start to degrade the value judgement. A change has to be perceived as easy and offer value in some way.
Make the new behavior easy
Choice is one way that change is stifled. Instead of having people sign up for training, enroll them by default and have them opt-out if they’d like. Instead of asking people to complete the engagement survey, have it as part of their performance review - the raise only added to your salary when you finish it (I know the HR leaders are freaking when I say that)
These are simple strategies (hard to do, but not hard to understand) that we tend to forget. Of course there are many more…
Read the full report here
By Adam Allred