by Aaron Levy
Training should give your leaders new skills and help them change their behaviors — to go from being a top individual contributor to a leader of people. As a leader, their success is dependent on the success of the people they’re leading. It’s quite a shift in perspective from sales metrics or project deadlines. Building and practicing those skills and implementing significant changes in behavior require consistent effort and commitment—and, above all, time. Simply learning what to do over the course of one or two days or even every quarter doesn’t lead to people acting differently in the long run.
HABIT FORMATION AND THE BRAIN
Our brains aren’t wired to adopt a new habit quickly. No matter how good and engaging the presentation is, habit formation takes time. It occurs only when a new action, such as listening with intention and attention, is practiced over and over. Each time you practice listening in this new way, neurons in your brain fire and create a new neural pathway. The more you practice, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and the easier it is for you to make the new skill a habit.
Imagine you are walking through a field of ten-foot-tall grass. You know you want to get to the other end of the field, but you have no idea how to get there. Forming a new habit is like walking straight into the field, without a map or a path to follow. Once you walk in, it can often be scary, overwhelming, and tiring.
But eventually you will find your way out and onto your new path. Although the first trip through the field was hard, the more often you take the path, the more you mat down the grass, the more signs you put along the route, the easier it becomes for you to take the path—the more habitual it becomes.
The neural pathway for a new skill can be created or rediscovered in one session, but for the pathway to be strengthened, you need to practice deliberately, in a way that is purposeful and systematic. You have to do the work and get feedback on how it went so you can analyze the outcomes and learn from each practice attempt. Roleplaying with peers is a safe way to start, but it doesn’t replace the real thing. To practice effectively, you’ll need to implement the new skill in a real-life scenario—and that’s also how you’ll have to reinforce this skill with your managers. Only when applied in the real world will you start to get the genuine feedback you need to validate, adapt, and adjust your mental model of what your new skill looks and feels like.
Real-world practice doesn’t usually go as planned. It’s highly likely that something will go wrong or get off script, and that’s when you’ll really get to learn. It’s like trying to ride a bike for the first time; you’re going to fall, and in falling, you learn. When this happens, it’s important to reflect on what went wrong, what could be improved, and what you can carry over to your next attempt. If you take this approach, you’ll be able to adopt the skill as a new habit, and it will serve you well in business and in life.
A PROCESS FOR HABIT DEVELOPMENT
Since I know you’re committed to challenging the status quo, to achieving results, to giving your leaders the tools and skills to transition from individual contributors to powerful leaders, here’s the process we will use throughout this book to maximize the probability of habit formation in yourself and in your managers. (You can also use this to structure your own training to optimize action.)
Phase 1: Learn
In the learning phase, you’re absorbing insights, information, and research around the new skill. You’ll learn about the common pitfalls for the habit, what works, and why the habit is crucial to becoming a powerful leader. Learning the skills, why they are valuable, and how they theoretically can be applied to the workplace is key. It’s the context, the reason to keep paying attention.
This is where most training programs spend 90% of their time. I suggest spending only 10% of any training session on the teaching and knowledge-building phase. It’s simply not as important as the application.
Phase 2: Apply
In the application phase, leaders practice applying their new habits; it happens during in-session application and through realworld application.
In-session application occurs in the moment when the leaders learn a new skill. It’s key to put the skill into practice right away. Ideally, you’ll spend 80%–90% of the time applying the new skill with your managers and reflecting on how it can be improved. By doing this, you’ll walk with your leaders through the field of grass enough times that it’s easier for them later to take over, to practice on their own. In this phase, we are activating the neural pathway and strengthening it.
You can simulate real-world application of the skill in a designed homework assignment or activity to make it easier for your leaders to trigger their new pathways. Applying the new skill outside of the safety of the training brings a whole new element to learning. It’s no longer structured. It can take a leader out of their comfort zone because they are now asked to take the path through the field completely on their own, which is exactly where growth occurs.
As you’ve seen already, I’ll give you action items and activities to do and to share with your team. Only in doing these activities will you begin to get out of your comfort zone, practice the skill, and strengthen the neural pathway. If you’re thinking, This is great to use for my team, but I don’t need to do the activity, you’ll find it much harder to execute. It’s easier to deliver something you can empathize with and have experienced yourself. It builds a stronger connection in your brain than knowledge alone can.
Phase 3: Reflect
Reflection is the component that’s most often skipped. When we try a new skill with a team member and it backfires or is painful or embarrassing, we might say, “Well, that didn’t work.” But that crucial moment of discomfort is actually your opportunity to learn. What worked? What didn’t? Why didn’t it work?
In the work we do with leaders at Raise The Bar, we structure in a coaching session precisely at this point. It’s a time for the leader to reflect on what worked well and what could have been done better. If we miss this phase, it can halt the habit from forming altogether.
During a reflection session, my client Leila was explaining how her homework was a total and utter disaster. She held the critical conversation she’d been fearing for weeks with one of her employees, and it completely blew up in her face. She was not only upset about the incident but also discouraged about her ability to lead. I began by asking her to reflect on what specifically about the conversation hadn’t worked and what she learned from it.
After rolling out a new internal ordering policy, Leila noticed her employee Kira failed time and time again to follow the new guidelines. At first, she thought Kira was making an honest mistake; but after a few weeks, Leila internalized the failure, telling herself that Kira must be purposefully disregarding the policy. When Leila finally approached Kira about the issue, she tried to let go of this bias but ended up asking Kira to explain what it was about the new policy she disagreed with. As soon as Leila heard the words come out of her month, she realized she’d made an assumption that Kira had knowingly disregarded the policy. What she got back was immediate defensiveness from Kira. It took a few minutes, but eventually Leila was able to more clearly state the issue and learned that Kira had simply been misunderstanding how to follow the guidelines.
What started out as a disaster actually wasn’t so bad. In fact, Leila left realizing that, with a few tweaks in how she had set up the meeting and laid out the situation to Kira, she could have had a really productive critical conversation. She realized that, although it had been a painful meeting, she did get the outcome she’d been hoping for: Her employee felt heard, understood what needed to change, and was willing to make the change.
Had Leila not taken the time to reflect, she likely would have avoided her next critical conversation until her inaction similarly blew up in her face and it could no longer be ignored. Instead, she left with a better understanding of what worked and what didn’t, of what she should do differently next time, and an appreciation that the sooner she had these types of co
nversations, the better it would be for all involved.
The reflection phase serves two purposes. First, it holds the leader accountable to completing their homework and taking the pathway through the field of grass outside of the training. Second, it allows the leaders to assess and evaluate how they did and how they can apply the new skills better in future interactions.
They won’t perfect the delivery of a habit on their first attempt, so this phase is important to reemphasize how habit adoption is a learning process. Even though the leader is not actually practicing the new skill in this phase, the act of reflecting nevertheless triggers the newly created neural pathway and sends the leader through the field of grass a few more times. By the end of this phase, a leader will have visualized, practiced, and reflected on a singular skill hundreds of times, making a new pathway in the grass and moving from a skill to a habit adopted.
The learn-apply-reflect model is designed to get your leaders practicing skills and putting them into action. The quicker and more frequently a leader can take their new skill, apply it to a real-life situation, and dissect their performance of it, the quicker the skill becomes a habit.
WHAT’S THE POINT?
Culture is the sum of all the actions in your organization. Changing an organization’s culture requires changing the behaviors and actions of your leaders—the people who have the biggest impact on the actions of your entire organization. It starts right here, by working with your leaders on adopting the habits that will make your organization succeed.
TOP TAKEAWAYS
• Creating and incorporating new habits into our life require us to do the work and to be both consistent and deliberate so that we can learn and improve from each of our mistakes and successes.
• According to McKinsey & Company, adults typically retain only “10% of what they hear in classroom lectures.” Now think of how much of that 10% we are likely to take action on—it’s a very low percentage. Learning in a one-to two-day training is not sufficient to drive sustained change in behavior.
• Behavior change occurs when a new action is practiced over and over. It’s like walking through a field of grass. The first time through the field, you’re creating a new path; each time after, you’re matting down the path more and more while also putting signs up along the route, making it easier to find and take the path.
• The first phase of habit formation is learning, where you learn insights, information, and research around the new skill. Spend only 10% of any training in this phase.
• Phase 2 incorporates putting your new learning into action, through practice in the training session and in the real world.
• Don’t forget phase 3! It’s where you reflect on how your practice went. What worked? What didn’t? What needs to be changed for next time?
• To turn a new action into a habit takes visualizing, practicing, and reflecting on a singular skill hundreds of times, thereby strengthening the new pathway in the grass until your leader can take the path without thinking.
ACTION ITEMS
Take stock of your current training programs (either internal or external client trainings).
• What phases from the learn-apply-reflect model are you currently implementing?
• What phases are missing?
• What changes would you need to make to ensure better adoption from the training?
REFLECTION
• What’s one thing you can do in the next week to increase the impact of your training?
PART 2
BUILD BETTER LEADERS
It’s time to shift focus from the macro level of creating the processes and environment where your leaders can thrive to the micro level. I’ll share key information and applicable strategies for developing the four key skills that will make you and your managers more powerful leaders.
As we move on to part 2 of the book, we’ll address the four key leadership habits in more detail. At the end of each chapter, there’ll be activities for practical application. I suggest setting the book down and putting the activities into practice, then answering the reflection questions that follow. If you don’t want to stop reading, set a reminder or schedule the action on your calendar so that while you read, you can still be practicing the habits of a leader with your team. We want to get those neural pathways firing!
Chapter 4
LISTEN WITH INTENTION AND ATTENTION
“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.”
—Rachel Naomi Remen, author and professor
Intention: Listening is a choice. If practiced, it can transform your impact as a leader.
We think at about 1,000–3,000 words per minute, and we listen at roughly 125–250.1 This means listening is inherently hard. It’s built into our physiology to be difficult. It also means that, before we even get a chance to begin developing this habit, we already have a listening problem. Yet most people believe they are already good listeners, even though they’ve not spent significant time actively training this skill.
How many hours have you put into deliberately practicing the skill of listening? When was the last time you recorded yourself, reviewed it, and received a critique on your listening?
We’ve spent a considerable amount of time deliberately practicing the skills of reading and writing through years and years of schooling. Then we get to the crucial skill of listening. Looking back at your education, how many years have you spent training this critical skill? Likely none is my guess.
Until I went through coaching training to become an International Coaching Federation (ICF) certified coach, I’d never practiced this skill in any deliberate way outside of attending a workshop on active listening, reading a book, or watching a TED talk. Knowing how to listen is a whole lot different from listening well. Building your knowledge around what active listening is and should look like doesn’t necessarily make you good at active listening.
Listening is hard, and we’ve likely not practiced or trained this skill properly, which is why most people suck at listening—and also why most of us go through each day of our lives not being truly heard. Where there is a collective problem, however, there is also an opportunity. If you can improve your ability to listen a little bit, if you can listen to an employee and make them feel heard, it can have a profound impact.
LISTENING DRIVES MOTIVATION
In a 1963 study, Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal, with the help of elementary school principal Lenore Jacobson, conducted a study at an elementary school in California to understand the impact of a teacher’s expectations on student performance. To do this, Rosenthal and Jacobson gave each student a general abilities test and then labeled certain students as academic bloomers. These bloomers, they told the teachers, were expected, on the basis of their test results, to achieve greater academic success. They then told the teachers which students had been identified as bloomers and which had been identified as nonbloomers (the control group). Unbeknownst to the teachers, the bloomers had been selected completely at random, with their test scores having no bearing on their bloomer label. Rosenthal and Jacobson wanted to see if the teachers’ treatment of certain students based on their expectation of the student’s capability would have an impact on the student’s performance. At the end of the study, all of the students retook the general abilities test, and the results were profound.
What Rosenthal and Jacobson found was that the students randomly labeled as bloomers achieved significantly higher scores than the students who were not labeled as bloomers. The students’ success, they discovered, was not correlated to their general ability score; rather, their success was determined by the label they had randomly been assigned by the researchers.2
How does this happen? It can be explained by the Pygmalion effect, which highlights how your belief in someone else leads you to act differently around this person. Your actions, in turn, affect their belief in t
hemselves, leading them to take action based on those beliefs.3
Explained more clearly, by believing certain students had high potential, the teachers gave their energy, attention, and intention to those supposedly better students. They provided more help and gave extra feedback, because they knew it would go further with these high-potential students, the bloomers. The lesson that can be taken from this study is the importance of treating all of your people like high potentials, setting high expectations for everyone. It’s not the label of high potential that increases performance; it’s showing your employees you care.
Sustained motivation over the course of months and years does not come from a sales competition, a rah-rah speech, a ping-pong table, or free lunches. It comes when you show people you care about them as human beings. It comes when you understand who they are and recognize their hopes and desires. This happens when you listen to your team members, when you are intentional about being there to hear them, and when you give them your full attention.
Listening with intention and attention affords you and your leaders a tremendous opportunity to lead on a whole new level—to truly hear your employees and your team. If you can show them you care and make them feel heard, you’ll not only help them connect to you and to their work, but you’ll also motivate them to give their extra discretionary effort to you and your company.
