Stop the presses: Brand new leadership ideas?

A couple of minor techniques for developing new, better habits that actually could be very important

By Dave Crisp

Can we constantly expect brand new ideas in the area of leadership and HR strategy?

Probably not, but hope lives eternal and it’s amazing what keeps emerging from a continuing focus on one key question: What stops so many senior executives, teams and organizations from applying basic HR and leadership concepts that we know for certain make for better results, engagement and retention of key employees?

Bloggers, speakers and journalists will continue to write about this until we get an answer everyone can absorb and apply. I was surprised to see a great contribution about this recently. But I suspect, like many, I got excited by it and then a day later I can hardly recall why I got wound up. It seemed so obvious and logical and so much like information we already know that it’s easy to discount it. As a result I have to get myself wound up again, and I wondered why.

The answer seems to be that, because it sounds like much we’ve heard before, it loses some of its validity. Do you find yourself reacting that same way?

The piece I saw is from ‘strategy + business’ (a site I wasn’t familiar with) talking about how to change people’s behavior and organization culture, also known as habits, via a “modern understanding of brain research.”  Here’s the thing: they refer back to Adam Smith’s theories (in the 1700s) – that’s how long this discussion has been going on, not just (like most HR concepts) the last 100 years or so.

The drift is that to change habits is tough and requires constant repetition and encouragement… and habits are what perpetuate behavior and “culture” of organizations (which is just everyone’s combined habits). They’ve wrapped this old observation in new jargon — brain research — and some of the findings are generally interesting, but they simply reinforce these basic observations we already know, have known since at least Adam Smith’s time and yet don’t find management people acting on very often.

Yes, it clearly bears repeating but, having repeated it, have we learned anything new? That’s what we always ask ourselves. The answer in this case is yes. We learn a couple of big organizations have changed their cultures through this process. (That’s important, but minor because although we hear lots about change efforts that don’t work, these aren’t the only ones that have.) We learn modern scientific research confirms what we generally know, so we are on the right track. There’s some biology at work that it helps to understand and counterbalance — and our beliefs are validated. (Those are always helpful, but again, not totally surprising.)

More importantly we learn a couple of seemingly minor techniques for developing new, better habits that actually could be very important.

First it’s clear the objective isn’t to eliminate old habits (you can’t), but to install new, stronger ones that will take precedence over the old  through endless repetition (in this case endless means you can’t let the focus shift rather than meaning it’s drudgery).

You can figure out your old habits by watching your behavior closely, decide rationally what you want to change and start practicing — and persist despite how scary or annoying or frustrating it seems at first. And we ought to surround the core habit with as many new, supporting habits as we can possibly develop. Eventually the new behaviors become “the way we do things here” and you’ve achieved your goal, provided you keep practicing, the more consciously the better so as to ensure when people aren’t thinking about these things they will automatically do the right thing. What you can’t do is order it, enforce a bit of practice and then stop and expect the new, good behavior to continue.

So it’s been logic, it’s been observed for centuries, now it’s scientifically proven and it’s what we all strive to figure out — how to change culture. Shouldn’t that seem unbelievably exciting? Let’s actually do it this time.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.