the last word
Time for Change
MANAGERS ARE STILL UNSURE ABOUT HOW
TO CHANGE BEHAVIOUR
By Nik Kinley
Madpixblue / Shutterstock
In recent years, many businesses have invested in training man-agers
to coach and develop their people. Yet new research
suggests that far more support for managers is still needed.
Changing people’s behaviour is one of the most difficult and
complex tasks of management. It is rare to find it actually called “be-haviour
change” in any job description. However, whether we call
it coaching, training or development, what we are trying to do is to
change how people behave in order to improve their performance.
Not only is it a difficult task, but most managers appear to be stuck
with trying to do it with a deeply limited set of tools and techniques.
A global survey was recently conducted with thousands of busi-ness
leaders and managers. When asked what the main behaviours
were that they needed to develop in others, the top five respons-es
were:
■■ Drive and work motivation
■■ Management and supervisory skills
■■ Collaboration and teamwork
■■ Interpersonal skills
■■ Attitude
Equally unsurprising as those responses was the list of the main
methods managers report using to change the above behaviours:
feedback, coaching and training. However, when these leaders and
managers were asked how often their attempts to change people’s
behaviour worked, the response – on average – was just under
50 per cent. Half the time it seems to work, and half the time
it doesn’t. And when we dig into these figures further, it reveals
something fascinating.
According to the survey, if you ask managers how confident they
are about helping other people to identify and understand what
behaviours they need to change, 72 per cent say they find this easy.
And if you ask them how confident they are about giving feed-back,
75 per cent say that they find that easy, too. Yet only 35 per
cent say that they are confident about which techniques to use, and
only 10 per cent say that they feel confident about making sure be-haviours
stick and stay changed over time.
However hard and complex behaviour change may be, manag-ers
ought to feel well equipped for the task. One reason they are
not lies in the fact that “behaviour change” is a phrase hardly ever
heard. Fields that have a great deal to say about how to change
people’s behaviour – such as behaviour economics and psycho-therapy
– are rarely referred to and drawn upon.
The words we use matter. The language of “learning and develop-ment”
engenders a line of thinking and the consideration of issues that
are quite different from the ones that are raised if we talk of “behav-iour
change.” The challenge of changing behaviour is just not the same
as the challenge of imparting information or teaching skills, and not
talking about it prevents us from recognizing these different challeng-es
and acting to meet them. To improve the support that we as HR
professionals are able to offer managers, we are going to first need to
change how we talk about the issue. ■
Nik Kinley is a director and the head of talent strategy for the global
talent management consultancy YSC. He has specialized in the fields
of assessment and behaviour change for nearly 25 years.
80 ❚ MAY/JUNE 2014 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL