For someone that has been in the business of developing leaders for over four decades, it’s embarrassing to have to admit it, but most training courses don’t work. If they did, Gallup would not be reporting that 77% of employees are disengaged.
And if the boss didn’t have a major role in this dismal state of affairs, why would the number one most unhappiness-provoking event in a day, according to the Daniel Kahneman study on happiness, be a conversation with the boss. This is in spite of all the management development programs running at corporations around the world.
It’s not that managers don’t need help. Most of our commonsense actions produce the opposite of what we intend. As an example, the conventional wisdom holds that managers should give feedback to their people, but the classic GE study on performance appraisal in the mid-sixties found that critical feedback drove down performance. And over fifty years ago, George Homans demonstrated that the management staples of reward and punishment fail miserably.
With the advent of cognitive neuroscience, we now understand why. Most of the focus in management development is on behavior, but it’s the higher level networks in the brain, the ones associated with who people are and how they perceive the world, that drive behavior.
Too many of the managers I’ve encountered over my career see themselves as practicing the right management practices, but that’s not how their people perceive them. If it’s to be effective, any practice must anticipate how it will fit into the employee’s perception, the story they’re telling themselves. But with a focus on behavior and the misguided notion that we all see things the same way, few managers are equipped to appreciate the mindset of others.
If we want to be more effective managers, we must take to heart the hard data of science and appreciate the wisdom of Hamlet’s line, “Nothing is but thinking makes it so.” It’s not what we think is the right thing to do, but the way it will be perceived by the people we’re doing it to.
We need to change minds. Starting with our own, we need to accept how limited our perspective is, how much emotion drives what we do, and how fallible that makes us. Before we take any action, we should stop and think about how others will see it.
When it comes to others, we need to stop thinking that reward and punishment are all that drives behavior and recognize the power of aspiration. If we can help people see that what we need them to do will ultimately help them accomplish their deepest aspiration, we don’t have to worry about rewards and punishment. They will do the right thing, willingly.
However we might think it’s physical, we live in a mental world of our making. When management development is based on this simple concept, it will change the minds that will change behavior.