I attended a seminar recently where the neurological and physiological challenges of behavioral change were being discussed when the following sentence was uttered: “What you know is comfortable, even when it’s bad for you.”
Though I consider myself to be an up-to-date student of behavior change, this powerful encapsulation of what we experience ourselves and see in others felt like a brand new concept. Even when we know a behavior is bad for us, it’s challenging to replace it with one that is more productive. The new, “better” habit feels so strange and awkward … and we keep circling back to the old way in spite of ourselves.
In working with organizational leaders, the evidence of this sort of challenge is plentiful. Individually and within their businesses, there are methods of doing things they know are not as productive as they might be – or even harmful – yet, these very intelligent, successful people stay tethered to these bad habits. When these practices are challenged, denial or defensiveness often is the first reaction.
If the reaction is strong enough, it can scare off the effort to help them. All of this ensures these leaders and their organizations fail in moving towards success. If you’re committed to being helpful in building on the recognition of the need for change, you need to be steadfast in your determination to overcome the attachment to the familiar and to get them to act to change their reality.
Here’s how:
• Shift the conversation away from the obstacles and toward the outcomes. This is key to relieving people from the desire they may feel to deny, resist, and/or defend what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Asking questions is a powerful tool, and tying your probing conversation to the desired outcome is a pivotal ingredient in keeping the focus on success and better creating openness to the change that is required to get there.
• Lay the foundation for better with concrete, accessible steps. This helps the leader(s) get their heads around change by making it less daunting in terms of scope and time horizon. Moving away from broad concepts and harder-to-realize ambitions helps clear a path to action, getting people unstuck and providing the opportunity for wins they can build on emotionally and substantively to give maintain momentum.
• Speak truth to power. Perhaps THE most effective way to move leaders to action and keep them walking the talk is to watch what they do, listen to what they say, and reflect all of that back to them. Even when we’re consciously working to be different and better, we can’t see ourselves as clearly as the experienced eye of a thoughtful observer can. It’s also true that living too long in an ecosystem where you’re the top dog and people around you only ask “how high?” when you tell them to jump has the potential to rob you of constructive pushback. Part of the impetus of change is giving people around us the permission to challenge whether we’re asking for the right things to progress toward and to achieve your intended and desired outcomes. We need the critical feedback of our teams; and, by inviting them into the process, we can not only validate or optimize our assumptions and approach, we gain a much greater level of buy in to whatever course of action ultimately is adopted.
While human nature is to gravitate to the familiar, allowing ourselves to be leadership couch potatoes is unproductive for us and unhealthy for the organizations we love. Seek out the new and the less familiar – try it on, and see what happens.
It may feel a little weird at first, but it will do you a world of good.
