Why is it tough to make good behaviours stick?

The Cedar team enjoyed hosting a thought-provoking lunch recently, where a diverse group of Leadership Development and HR Directors from banks, insurers and fund managers discussed what leadership looks like in a complex and changing financial sector. We are grateful for their participation and found the conversations that developed fascinating. One observation from that session seemed to resonate above all else. Everybody in the room was describing the incredibly busy lives they lead trying to implement positive working cultures and leadership frameworks that will boost overall corporate performance. The cumulative wealth of experience in the room compels us to take what they were saying very seriously. But the key point at which we all came up against is, very simply, how do we make it all stick? This simple question cuts deep into the psyche of all thinking HR professionals, both in the City and beyond. For decades, HR have been tasked with the almost impossible task of creating good behaviours at work, through reward, performance management systems, talent development and the threat of sanction. HR gets blamed if things are not put right, becomes discredited in unhealthy firms and reduced to a data processing function. Much has been written on this, but sufficed to say good people management requires genuine support from the top. I would argue that the corporate scandals that have rocked financial markets over the past five years were not rooted in poor economic regulation but poor social regulation. The efforts ex-post to mitigate risk through overmechanising the people function merely serve to give hard working HR folk a big headache. And despite this extra legislative burden, the simple question has still remained. How do we make good behaviours stick? You cant intensively farm trust in banks or other financial institutions. You cant commoditise or dial up respectful interaction, cultural sensitivity, an appreciation for someone elses point of view or a collaborative management style. Unfortunately, the human brain doesnt work like that and neuroscience has begun to shed light on why that is. The schematic here illustrates a summary of what seems to drive what from a brain-based perspective:

The diagram shows how events are processed. The profoundly social and emotional nature of the brain indicates that performance will be foundationally affected by emotional processing of any event and state of relationship between people involved. These feelings (step 5) are what create behaviours and it is these behaviours which drive our performance at work. Therefore, efforts to gain performance by improving culture, through leadership programmes, talent strategies, training, communications, new rules or off-sites are nothing if the relationship between person A and person B on the ground does not improve. And relationships improve if behaviour changes. But behavioural change requires physical change to the brain by creating neural growth that supports new behaviours and neglecting neural pathways that entrench unwanted behaviours such that they start to wither away. This is a different proposition to much of the therapeutic or cognitive bases of intervention that overly focus on problem behaviours, as if trying to unfreeze them with conscious willpower. The brain will do all it can to resist change to existing neural patterning and make this process well-nigh impossible, which might explain why so many change initiatives fail. If done well, coaching works by allowing people to bring to awareness non-conscious emotions driving existing behaviours in a safe place, model different ones and practice new ways of interacting that hardwire and become normalised. As City folk are paid to think rather than to do, coaching also comes into its own as a way of helping people to improve their thinking. Not to do their thinking for them, but to create conditions for people to think better for themselves. It also serves to help create better team dynamics by helping leaders create good thinking environments at work, saving considerable time in unproductive meetings. If we can stop second guessing what we think peoples brains need, as seen through our own eyes, and help them become masters at thinking for themselves, things will get better. Define solutions not problems: pivotal to this is the art of helping people have their own insights. Then the coaching job is supporting, encouraging them so these insights turn from thoughts into habits. But why doesnt this happen? Why is coaching only used for remedial or reward/developmental purposes at Board level or for high potentials? No doubt budget is a constraining factor. But consider the transformational effect of each individual having 1 good insight each per week at your firm. Think of the rich seam of ideas that would ensue, genuinely stitching people and teams together in common purpose, driving huge productivity improvements. The standard response (training) is largely ineffective - giving advice, solving problems for them, trying to work out how people think and then correcting it. Save your money. It rarely works. People dont want to be managed, they want to be unleashed. Gen X and Y think differently. They want freedom/independence, to feel a belonging at work and to enjoy themselves. Giving people ownership is key; telling them what to do just doesnt seem to work any more. There is a significant body of clinical and workbased evidence now that attests to this fact. If someone always late for meetings is reprimanded, the short term threat of sanction might work for a while but it simply heightens anxiety and diverts attention away from work and back to problems that led to lateness in the first place. Even rewarding punctual attendance at meetings (say with better assignments) reinforces neural pathways associated with the habitual problem. However when people solve things themselves, the brain makes patterns and emits a rush of dopamine. The reward response from ownership can be stronger than a bonus. In these cash-strapped times, that should be of serious interest to banks in particular. Leadership style must move from command and control to coaching. People give of their best under optimal conditions of each domain of SCARF (Rock 2007), a model for collaborating with and influencing others. These 5 domains either activate reward or threat responses in the limbic system and determine neural circuitry that

drives behaviour. Coaching approaches deliver higher performance from staff, yet are hard to implement without trust. Prescription, hierarchy, instruction and autocracy dont work. Successful leadership has always been founded on self-awareness, self-belief and self-responsibility. By definition, leaders make decisions daily, and to do so requires these personal attributes. But leaders dont just live in the C-suite. Middle managers, team heads and support managers represent the engine room of most businesses. It is here where the difference can be made. After all, athletes have coaches, from club level to professional, so why should people at work not have the same? If nothing else, it would show they matter to the firm in the way that being sent on a training course never will. About the author James Parsons is an executive and careers coach, using a body of knowledge from neuroscience to inform his work. He has a background in strategy consulting and investment banking and as such, has sat where many of his clients sit now. His brand is one of tough love, able to be compassionate yet constructively challenge his clients thinking on a range of issues at work. Understanding that trust -based, fair organisations are built from the top down, he is especially keen to get leaders to examine possibilities for creating positive cultures at their firms in fearless, imaginative ways. He has extensive experience coaching people in leadership roles in professional services firms, financial services and law firms, as well as offering workshops in areas such as networking, career management, team behaviours and using social media effectively. e: james@untappedtalentcareers.com m: 07966 691848 s: parsons.birchgrove