The promise of behavioural leadership

Andy McComments off.

The widespread neglect of behaviour in organisations creates a tremendous opportunity for transformative business leaders — those elite few who are willing to invest the time, focus and energy to do something new to achieve something great.

(Originally posted in 2019, updated in January 2020)

Behaviour change isn’t instant or effortless. The process isn’t flashy and doesn’t typically capture headlines like other advances such as cloud migration or nanotechnology. But the transformation afforded by behavioural leadership is no less sustainable or lasting for being quiet. In fact, practitioners are not eager to publicise results precisely because, as one senior leader put it, “This really, really works!” In other words, for a growing number of companies, the fact that behavioural leadership is flying below the radar is part of its appeal.

So, let’s have a look at some real business headlines:

• A Fortune 500 health care insurer obtained a 438 percent return on investment while also dramatically improving employee engagement numbers and customer service rankings — in just 18 months — by shifting from “production first” to “customer first” behaviours.

 

• In nine months, a third-world refinery owned by a major petrochemical company achieved a 70 per cent reduction in environmental incidents, along with a 50 per cent increase in production and a 75 per cent jump in employee commitment, by shifting from “heroic effort” behaviours to “prevention through problem surveillance” behaviours.

 

• An industrial company reduced costs by £500 million.

 

• A mining operator cut costs by $400 million, while also improving safety by 200 per cent, through shifting from behaviours associated with “working hard” to behaviours associated with “ownership and accountability.” This yielded a 30:1 return on investment.

 

• A leading pharmaceutical company saw £500 million in increased productivity at one of its plants thanks to behavioural changes that drove significant improvements in production error prevention and line change over time.

Behavioural leadership, of course, isn’t just for organisations in obvious need of changing how things are done. It can significantly enhance performance in organisations even when they are running at what appears to be the top of their game.

 

Consider what happened at a global chemical company’s top-performing plant. While the plant’s team was working to build behavioural leadership into its operations, corporate announced an immediate 10 per cent cost-reduction mandate. Turning to the numbers, the plant manager advocated one area for improvement: reducing costly unplanned shutdowns. Plant leadership implemented a plan to change just three high-impact behaviours.

First, every person in operations and maintenance on every shift inspected designated areas visually, aurally and tactilely for equipment abnormalities.

Second, they recorded what they observed.

Third, they reported any suspected problems to the appropriate people.

By year’s end, despite 30 years of steady progress toward reducing unplanned shutdowns, the plant further decreased the rate of unplanned shutdowns by an astonishing 75 per cent. That alone was worth about $50 million in annualised savings, but when scaled across the company’s nearly two-dozen additional plants the behaviour breakthrough was even more significant.

Rigorous statistical testing has confirmed that the results discussed above can be attributed exclusively to behaviour change. Hopefully, these results can help you appreciate just how much paying attention to behaviour can pay off. After all, in effect, the decades-old science of behaviour has the potential to trigger a quiet revolution in companies that apply it. Though subtle, behavioural leadership is a catalyst for profound new insight that drives new action and new results.

 

THINKING LIKE A GAME-CHANGER

At Conduit Consulting, we firmly believe that competitive advantage in any industry or geography will flow as much from behavioural leadership as from new strategies, processes or technologies. In fact, we argue that behavioural leadership is required to fully realize the potential returns offered by any existing or new strategies, processes and technologies because it reduces the hidden human barriers that so often scuttle successful implementations.

 

Furthermore, in a global business environment, disciplined attention to behaviour will help businesses solve and avoid disruptive cultural clashes. As more businesses turn to innovation as a path to growth, a focus on behaviour will help companies embed deep cultures of creativity and openness across their organisational levels and regions, enabling innovation to persist over time.

 

When you finish reading this article, ask yourself if you are an innovative leader who seeks competitive advantage that cannot be easily replicated. Are you a game-changer who does things beyond the norm in order to achieve things beyond the norm? Do you value substance over flash? To gain results, are you comfortable pushing into your discomfort zone?

 

If you answer yes to these questions, then think about how deliberately your organisation manages behaviour. Do you see it as a core organisational competency? Do you systematically prioritise and manage behaviour change with the same emphasis that you place on strategy, process and technology? Do you even know the potential upside to be gained from applying behavioural leadership to specific behaviour change initiatives designed for your organisation?

 

Attention to the science of behaviour will determine whether your next change initiative has a positive outcome and deliver fantastic results.  It’s up to you to make the commitment and rise to the challenge. The best leaders aren’t the best because of what they say or who they are. They’re the best because of what they do — and because of what they help others around them do as well.

 

 

THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOUR

French novelist Marcel Proust once observed, “The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Business leaders should think about that line as they ponder why they accept the significant costs that stem from neglecting behaviour in their organisations.

 

Over the past century, an entire discipline has arisen to study and explain behaviour — why we do what we do or say what we say, why we fail to act or don’t say something we should. This behavioural science has the same properties as chemistry and biology: careful observation, data collection, replicability, measurability, laws and so on. And its findings have allowed us to build the related field of applied behaviour analysis (ABA), which has developed proven tools that can improve the performance of leaders, organisations and employees. The disciplined use of these tools is called behavioural leadership, which underpins a reliable, replicable technology for managing behaviour and implementing change.

 

Applied behavioural science and the behavioural leadership discipline can help organisations achieve sustainable results in part because they allow leaders to reassess their own vexing business challenges with new eyes. This new insight drives new action and new results.

 

Keep in mind that when trying to frame behaviour change, organisations typically pay most attention to the triggers or antecedents of behaviour change. For example, workers found to be taking shortcuts instead of following standard operating procedures are often sent for training — a well-meaning and traditional antecedent to achieve desired behaviour. But training frequently fails to achieve the desired behaviour shift. One reason for this, which has been validated by our own experience with Fortune 100 companies, is that antecedents have limited impact on behaviour change if the desired action is not supported by encouraging, timely, important and probable consequences. In other words, when training isn’t supported by a personal reason to change behaviour, employees will continue to take shortcuts when following orders to the letter makes a task harder to complete, especially when they are being judged on speed and not attention to procedure.

 

Ideas don’t win the day strictly on their merit. Indeed, as the history of medicine makes clear, some high-impact behaviours simply aren’t going to change when requested. To get physicians to wash their hands, countless hospitals have implemented a range of solutions for bolstering consistency, ranging from slogans and signs to strategically placed gel dispensers and offers of prizes such as free movie tickets to departments with the best compliance. Even the Hippocratic Oath, which requires doctors to prevent harm, is deployed as a means to convince more doctors to regularly wash their hands. Despite these well-meaning attempts to change behaviour, studies show that hand-washing compliance rates are typically at least one-third of what they need to be — a finding that is both perplexing and unnerving. From an ABA perspective, attending to the consequences of this behaviour is the key to understanding and overcoming this challenge.

 

As the New York Times reported in 2013, Long Island’s North Shore University Hospital began to quickly update health care providers with feedback reports on their actual hand-washing performance. Hand-washing rates in its intensive care unit increased from 10 per cent to 88 per cent. At Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, lapel pins were awarded to strong hand-washers, giving them a visible nod of approval. According to the hospital’s chief of infection prevention, positive reinforcement worked better than verbal warnings or other metaphorical slaps on the wrist. One hospital in Pittsburgh gained positive results via the unthinkable — nurses were encouraged to tell doctors when they failed to follow prescribed hand-washing procedures.

 

Simply put, to influence behaviour change, antecedents must be paired with strong consequences. And when you understand this, you can see (with Proust’s new eyes) just how much time and money invested in planning, communications and training is wasted by failing to also set up effective consequences designed to sustain the behavioural changes required to meet your goals. And this is just one ABA tool. Behavioural leaders possess a whole slew of scientifically validated tools and concepts, the application of which often makes for dramatically different ways of allocating resources and pursuing strategies.

This blog post was originally posted  29/2/2016

behavioural, leadership Posted in: Leadership, Mentoring