How did you feel? Embarrassed? Thankful?

 What did you do next? Did you immediately work on removing it, or did you leave it there?

 In this scenario, most people are grateful to receive direct feedback, and are quick to make corrections. But when it comes to our daily behaviors and interactions, why aren’t we so quick to remove the metaphoric lettuce from our teeth?

 Quality of Feedback

“You’re doing fine”

“Keep up the good work”

“You’re a jerk to the people you work with”

“You really blew it on that project”

“…”

 One challenge we have is that the quality of feedback given is poor, if it’s given at all. If it’s positive, it’s vague and doesn’t identify important strengths or actions. If it’s constructive, it’s non-specific and doesn’t provide a clear rationale or course for correction.

 Many models for quality feedback exist, and when practiced, they provide a genuine opportunity to leverage strengths and corral weaknesses. These models have the following elements in common:

SPECIFIC – the feedback references specific events and actions, and provides examples

 BEHAVIORAL – the feedback addresses actions, not personality traits (“you did…,” not “you are…”)

 IMPACT – the feedback includes the perceived impact of the action, positive or negative, and makes a strong case for how and why the action led to that result

 NEXT STEPS – if the feedback is positive, the implied – or explicit – next step is typically for more of the positive action; for negative feedback, the next step should explicitly communicate a different action, and the alternative result that the new action will produce

Quantity of Feedback

Most people aren’t comfortable giving feedback. They say things like, “I’m not the boss, that’s not my job,” or “he won’t listen anyway, so why bother.”

 The problem with these attitudes is they deny the would-be recipient with any opportunity to change. We can’t see the lettuce in our own teeth, and if no one is willing to speak up, it’s going to stay there.

 Many of us struggle to provide positive feedback too. It often feels obsequious, and we worry that people will think we’re setting them up for a request, or trying to balance an inevitable negative comment (the “feedback sandwich” isn’t very healthy).

 One of my best friends always amazes me with his ability to deliver positive feedback. If we sit down to eat at a restaurant, his first words to the waiter are typically to ask his or her name, and then to deliver a simple and authentic compliment. He is quick to find strengths in others, and lets them know when he sees these strengths. There is no request, no follow up comment – he simply points out and appreciates the good he sees in people. When I asked him about it, he told me about a mentor who helped him start the habit, and encouraged frequent, deliberate practice.

 I remember my advisor in graduate school – she was outstanding at delivering positive and constructive feedback that was direct, but also natural and comfortable. When I asked her about it, she said she practiced every day, at work and at home. It was a skill that she had built through deliberate practice, and she was now capable and willing to provide frequent, quality feedback.

 One of the main reasons we don’t all give (and consequently, receive) more feedback, is because we’re not always comfortable doing it. But the best way to get more comfortable is to just do it – positive feedback makes a great playground for practice. So practice, reflect, get better, and do it some more.

 Our reaction to Feedback

Have you ever pointed out the lettuce in a friend’s teeth, and her response was, “no, you’re wrong,” or “whatever, I’ll just leave it there”?

 Ironically, this is often how we react to feedback about things that are much more important than remnants of lunch.

 Our work behaviors are closely tied to our sense of what works, what is most effective, and the best way to do things. This means that when we receive feedback to the contrary, our self-esteem can take a hit.

 Our working behaviors are also complicated, subtle, and open to interpretation, which makes it easy to rationalize, argue, and explain away any feedback that suggests we aren’t quite as effective as we thought.

 This isn’t to say that everyone else has a crystal clear perspective of us, and that our own self-perspective is a clouded muddle. We have to remember though, that those around us can usually see the lettuce in our teeth a lot better than we can.

 I have found this to work well: I try to shift my perspective to assume that at least 10% of what I believe about myself is wrong. This way, when I receive constructive feedback that doesn’t conform to my view of myself, I don’t have to fight the battle of my self-esteem wanting to reject any comment that doesn’t conform to my self-perception. Instead, I can focus my thoughts on critically analyzing whether the feedback is part of that 10% of myself that I assume I’m wrong about, and focus my energy on what I want to do about it.

 Feedback is a critical component to maximizing performance. So let’s get more comfortable telling people about the lettuce in their teeth, and be willing to take it out of our own.

That’s when one individual asked a simple – but very thought-provoking – question: “How do you create a new habit?”

Many change initiatives – be they training efforts, organizational changes, or personal changes –  have the goal of lasting change through new habits. Oddly though, they rarely seem to specify exactly how these new habits are supposed be created. The result is often wonderful intentions that are overcome by the incredible power of old habits. New Year’s resolutions are forgotten by Valentine’s Day; Weight is lost, but then gained back; those messes in the garage keep coming back, despite our best intentions to keep it organized.

Without lasting change in our behavioral habits, lasting change in our results isn’t likely.

So, based on thought, research, conversations, and some reflection, here is a plan that makes the process of building a new habit a little more concrete.  This is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of every possible variable, but rather a simple process that can help link intentions to results.

(A) Identify the habit you want to build

 (B) Learn how to do it (if new knowledge and skills are required)

 (C) Break it into small, manageable behaviors (observable, easy to identify whether they’ve happened or not)

 (D) Keep this / these behaviors front of mind

• Create reminders for yourself to think about it (e.g. notes in highly visible places)
• Talk to other people about it – let people know what you’re trying to do
• Keep learning about it – make your knowledge on the topic deeper and wider

 (E) Find (or even create) opportunities to use your new habit (this is much easier when the behaviors are front of mind)

• Build it into a routine that already exists
• Put it into your calendar
• Teach someone else how to do it
• Do it again and again and again and again…

 (F) Maintain the new habit – stay disciplined and keep using your new routines and reminders to keep you from slipping back into old habits!

 Good luck!

Team building activities span a wide range, from simple group outings to spend time together, to games that involve working together to toss balls around or build puzzles, to more intensive interventions that include psychological assessments and deep discussion. Most “team building” seems to be thought of as event-based team activities intended to help get the team to develop more effective work processes.

Another element that these team building initiatives commonly share is that they occur without any ongoing reinforcement or support, which is often why they rarely lead to any real, sustained change.

People, and by extension teams, cannot be simply “upgraded” the way we would upgrade a machine with a new part, or update a computer with new software. Team building should not be thought of as applying upgrades; team building should be more like an exercise plan. No one would spend a full day exercising in the gym and expect to experience lasting physical change. That kind of lasting change can only come through consistent (and often singularly less time-intensive) efforts over time – through creating new habits. If team building is to make a difference, it should look more like an exercise regimen, and less like a birthday party.

An impactful – that is, one that makes a difference – team-building initiative should be a dedicated effort over time to change the way the team works together, with specific leading and lagging indicators to help us know (a) what we’re trying to change, and (b) whether or not we’re changing it. Essentially we’re trying to change the culture of the team (i.e. “the way we do things on this team”), and this isn’t something that can be done with a single point-in-time event. Single events can help, but they must be reinforced with consistent communication, feedback, incentives, process design, etc., if lasting team change can be expected to take place.

Leadership is a responsibility to achieve results in a sustainable way – this sustainability comes – in part – through a servant attitude:

 “My job is to serve the people around me – my customers, my boss, and my people. And because my people are the ones who actually create the things that serve my customers and my boss, I had better take good care of them!”

Consider the best leaders – peers, bosses, or direct reports – you’ve ever worked with. Did they view their roles as serving or as being served?

One issue that derails so many leaders is that they view leadership almost like royalty (“Do what I say! I’m here to be served”) – this leads to poor treatment of those around and below them, which creates so many of the leadership problems we face, like misalignment, frustration, cynicism, and numerous other organizational productivity killers.

Great leaders view themselves as servants, serving others first.

 In The Hazard of Having an “Accidental” Brand, authors Jonathan Knowles and Richard Ettenson argue that many organizations – many of them large and well-known – do not truly understand their own brands.

Brand here is defined as the nature of the experience of the customer who interacts with your product.

They say, “Company leaders should ask the question ‘Do our executives truly understand — and can each of them articulate — the nature of the customer experience on which the growth and profitability of the business depends?’”

Now consider this in terms of your personal brand, which we might describe as: the nature of the experience of interacting and getting work done with YOU.

 …which begs the question: do you have an accidental brand?

How Much Effort is Needed?

Influencing others to change their behaviors isn’t easy – if it were, we’d all be doing it. Situations that resist being changed for the better are so for a reason. Change is hard. But there are people who are good at it – there are people who, without having any formal authority, make hugely impactful changes in their personal and professional lives, and even in the world. What have they figured out that gives them the influence that so many of us find to be illusive?

These influencers know that one or two strong barriers to the change will often over power our attempts to influence. What good is clarifying what we want people to do if they are subtly incentivized not to do it? How can we expect people to use a new process if they can’t find the tools they need to do it? Influencers know that they need to overwhelm these situations with as many complimentary influence tactics as they can, which they combine into a consistent, comprehensive influence strategy.

What would that look like?

In any situation it’s critical to first identify the key behaviors that will lead to the outcome you want. Are you trying to lose weight? Increase customer satisfaction? Introduce a new process? Develop leaders? Before doing anything else, figure out the exact behaviors people should be using to get to that result, and communicate it to them. One of the biggest barriers to influencing change is ambiguity – people don’t change if they don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to do. And remember, people connect more with feeling than they do with facts – communicate in a way that makes people feel something; draw people in by helping them experience life before and after the change.

Second, find ways to tap into intrinsic motivation in the people you are trying to influence. Can you make the key behaviors inherently pleasurable by making them fun or linking them to a sense of accomplishment? Can you connect the key behaviors to people’s values or sense of self? Can you help people believe that they are truly capable of making the desired change by helping them experience the success of enacting the key behaviors? Can you enlist credible and connected thought leaders to help build social support for the key behaviors?

Third, proactively manage the environment. Consider how the physical layout of the environment will support or challenge what you’re trying to accomplish by making the key behaviors easier or more difficult. Equip people to be successful by providing them with the knowledge, skills, and tools they will need to enact the key behaviors. Build sustainability by helping people transform the key behaviors into habits – hardwire the key behaviors into routines and schedules.

Finally, remain flexible. If your first attempt at an influence strategy doesn’t seem to be working, be willing to bend and flex until you find a way that works.

Watch out. Planning and executing a comprehensive influence strategy like this sounds simple, but it’s frequently undermined by a lack of total commitment. People often want to pick and choose influence tactics, like items on a menu. If an influence tactic seems like it will be more time-consuming than is convenient, we leave that one out. If another tactic doesn’t seem easy or intuitive right away, we might not use that one either. The problem with this approach is that it usually ends up with stalled influence efforts. We want to influence a change, but aren’t willing to invest the time and effort to do so. We’d rather pick a couple of easy influence tactics, and hope that it’s enough. The unfortunate side effects of this approach are that (a) the problem usually remains, and (b) we grow frustrated that our influence attempts didn’t work, and we resort to complacency and wishing that we could simply force people to change (“or else!”) through formal authority.

Influence masters know to over determine their chances for success. The scope, force, and complexity of an influence strategy should overcome the scope, force, and complexity of the thing(s) we’re trying to change. For a simple issue like oversleeping, it can be as simple as getting a louder alarm clock and placing it across the room. For more complex issues – like changing a company’s organizational culture to be more performance driven – the strategy to influence change needs to be much deeper and comprehensive.

Great influencers don’t just try to make the desired change possible, or likely to happen – they make it impossible not to happen.

 (1 of 10) Decrypting the “Impact Gene”

(2 of 10) Find the Behaviors that Matter

(3 of 10) Communicate Key Behaviors

(4 of 10) Keys for Motivation

(5 of 10) Building Necessary Capabilities

(6 of 10) Enlisting the Right Support

(7 of 10) Using Incentives for Change

(8 of 10) Influencing Change without Saying A Word

Use Physical Space

Could someone become a better listener simply by rearranging her office?

What if you arrange the desk, chairs, and computer so that the only thing in her field of view when she speaks with a colleague is that person, and not other people outside the office, missed calls on the phone, or emails popping up on the computer monitor?

The way that the environment is arranged shapes how we interact with it, and with other people, often without our conscious knowledge. Humans usually use the path of least resistance when choosing what we do – that is, the behaviors that are easiest to do are also the most likely to take place. For example, organizations that want to foster more team collaboration between certain people can use the layout of the working area to put these people physically closer together – as a result, they often find that these people form stronger relationships and work more collaboratively. Consider the example of the chronic over-sleeper who places the alarm clock on the other side of the room, forcing him to get up and out of bed in order to turn it off. Consider the chocolate lover who manages to lose weight by simply not keeping sweets in the house.

Equip People for Success

Making the right choices easier and the wrong choices harder is a simple way to make the desired key behaviors more likely to happen. Managers who want to encourage their employees to think critically when making decisions can consistently ask critical thought questions regarding the decision process when employees come to them with a recommendation or decision – the employees will likely become used to having to answer these questions, and begin asking these questions as part of their own decision process. Teams who want to encourage use of a new process can make the process as simple and easy as possible, and possibly look for ways to make old, outdated processes difficult or impossible to use.

Part of making the right behaviors easier is equipping people to use them. For example, if your goal is to eat healthier food, you can “equip” the kitchen with several healthy choices that are easy to prepare. Similarly, if you are a manager trying to get your team to operate with more of a customer mindset, you can “equip” them with the knowledge and skills necessary for them to enact the desired key behaviors. When you provide the necessary tools, training, and resources, you make it easier for people to perform the key behaviors, making those behaviors more likely to happen. Keep in mind, however, that equipping people is only one piece, and like the other influence strategies, unlikely to create sustained change by itself.

Build Habits

A third way to use the environment to our advantage is to create momentum for the desired key behaviors. This is done by creating habits and “hardwiring” the right behaviors.

Have you ever had to push a car from one spot to another? It’s much harder to get the car moving than it is to keep the car moving, isn’t it? Habits are the same way: they take effort to create, which is a big reason that change is often so hard. But once habits are formed, they become part of our routine and are much easier to sustain.

One way to help form habits is to hardwire them into our behavior. This means creating processes and mechanisms that ensure that these key behaviors will occur. Consider the young professional who wants to make a habit of reading, but can never seem to find the time. By planning 10 minutes (only 10!) for reading each morning, and relentlessly committing to keep this time, he can create a habit that becomes easy to sustain once he’s used to it.

Seemingly arbitrary deadlines can also help. Consider the team whose strategic meeting that is highly important, but keeps being put off because it never feels as urgent as the daily fires that must be put out. By putting this meeting on the calendar and committing not to move it, the team can ensure that it actually takes place. Sometimes a deadline – while seemingly arbitrary – can be a good way to ensure that important (but not urgent) things actually take place.

 Humans are creatures of habit and routine – the more we can hardwire the desired key behaviors into our habits and routines, the more likely those behaviors are to occur consistently.

Remember This

The easier the key behaviors are to do, the more likely they are to happen. You can impact the ease of use for these behaviors by arranging the physical environment to support the behaviors you want. You should also equip people with what they will need in order to enact the key behaviors. Finally, try hardwiring the key behaviors into schedules, building them into routines, and transforming them into habits, to ensure sustainability.

 (1 of 10) Decrypting the “Impact Gene”

(2 of 10) Find the Behaviors that Matter

(3 of 10) Communicate Key Behaviors

(4 of 10) Keys for Motivation

(5 of 10) Building Necessary Capabilities

(6 of 10) Enlisting the Right Support

(7 of 10) Using Incentives for Change

Which Kind of Carrot Best Helps Your Cause?

External incentives can be a helpful compliment in an overall behavior change strategy, but are often insufficient or even counter-productive by themselves.

First, external incentives do not build an inherent pleasure in the behavior we are incentivizing, which means that when the incentives stop, the behavior isn’t likely to continue long-term either.

Second, introducing incentives can actually reduce the likelihood of a desired behavior that was previously being done because it was inherently pleasurable.

Finally, incentives, even when seemingly appropriate, must be managed very carefully. Creating incentives for one set of behaviors or results often has unintended consequences for other behaviors. Consider a simple example of a typical incentive – the biggest bonus goes to the person who sells the most. Someone who wants this bonus might make unrealistic promises in order to close sales, or even sabotage other sales people. What started out as an incentive to increase sales leaves a wake of unsatisfied customers and angry colleagues. A more subtle example incentive misuse might be a manager who is concerned that her team’s quality numbers aren’t better, but who measures their performance only against the quantity of their output. She has unwittingly created a subtle incentive to neglect quality for the sake of quantity.

So what is a good use of external incentives?

The best external incentives often aren’t huge. Incentives that work well for shaping sustainable behavior are often small rewards that tie directly to the targeted behaviors. These incentives are often non-material, and link to people’s values and sense of achievement. Things like the appreciation for a job well done or recognition for going above and beyond reinforce people’s esteem and help increase the likelihood of the associated behaviors occurring again in the future.

In addition to finding the appropriate kinds of rewards, it’s also important to reward the right things. The results that come from enacting the desired key behaviors are important, but we can’t just reward results. Results are outcomes, and often affected by things outside the control of the people we’re trying to influence. We will quickly frustrate the people we’re trying to influence if we only provide rewards when the results are what we want. What if they have enacted all of the desired key behaviors, but external factors have kept the results from being what we want? To withhold rewards in this case would be counter-productive to creating sustained behavior change. In addition, rewarding only results can motivate people to get those results at the expense of the right behaviors.

In short, the best use of external incentives in creating targeted behavior change is to:

Use incentives as only one part of a multi-pronged influence strategy

The best incentives for encouraging sustained behavior change are often small, non-material, and liked to people’s values

Focus rewards on the right behaviors, not just results

 (1 of 10) Decrypting the “Impact Gene”

(2 of 10) Find the Behaviors that Matter

(3 of 10) Communicate Key Behaviors

(4 of 10) Keys for Motivation

(5 of 10) Building Necessary Capabilities

(6 of 10) Enlisting the Right Support

Many leaders have a vision, but still struggle with getting people on board and aligned to that vision.

Where is the breakdown between having vision and leveraging vision? It’s often as simple as communication.

Having a vision is step one, but simply having it is only part of the story. This vision must also be communicated frequently and consistently.

Communicate Vision Frequently

A colleague of mine once said “vision leaks,” meaning that a vision that is communicated once “leaks” from the mind of the listeners, and must be re-filled again and again. Leaders often seem to think that if they’ve said it once, their job is done.  The job of communicating vision should not be about checking off a box; it should be seen more like the task of keeping a leaky bucket full.

Communicate Vision Consistently

The communication of vision must be consistent over time, because an inconsistent vision sends people off in all directions, and makes the leader appear wishy-washy, flighty, or incompetent.

What would those following you say about your vision?

Humans are inherently social creatures, which can work to the advantage of the aspiring influencer.

Change often involves ambiguity, especially at first. As people move away from tried-and-true behaviors, they often become less confident in what they are doing.

When we are less than certain about the correct behavior in a given situation, we tend to look to others for queues for our own actions. This means that behavioral modeling can be a tremendous resource. Get a few key people to start using the desired key behaviors, and others will likely follow.

But can this backfire if not done correctly?

Any effort involving change typically follows a normal bell curve in terms of adoption.  

Although our initial inclination might be to try to leverage the innovators group to influence a faster adoption rate, this is typically ineffective. Research shows that using innovators to garner support usually doesn’t work, and can even be counter-productive, likely because innovators are viewed as too different from the overall population to be influential models for the desired key behaviors. People won’t buy into messages if they don’t believe or trust the messenger(s) (“I don’t care if Bob says it works – he’s always trying the newest snake oil”)

Instead, smart influencers tap the second group, early adopters. This group is typically viewed as smart, connected (in terms of relationships), and – most importantly – credible. This is the group to target if you want to use modeling to influence the larger population.

 (1 of 10) Decrypting the “Impact Gene”

(2 of 10) Find the Behaviors that Matter

(3 of 10) Communicate Key Behaviors

(4 of 10) Keys for Motivation

(5 or 10) Building Necessary Capabilities