Despite a multitude of books on leadership, it really is not a complicated topic.  Behaviorally speaking, leadership amounts to what a person says and does every day.  It is this behavior and the downstream impact of it that determines organizational culture, drives results, and it is largely this that causes people to be happy, frustrated, engaged, or disengaged at work.

The Reaching Results team has pulled together a group of international experts to talk about the notion of Simplicity in Leadership at this year’s conference in Chicago on June 14.  This year’s leadership conference will feature 3 well-known keynote speakers, as well as a series of business leaders and behavioral science experts including the Reaching Results team.  The conference will be held at the Hilton Rosemont/Chicago O’Hare.  Full conference details can be found at www.reachingresults.com/2012conference

Keynote Speakers

Alasdair Cathcart is President of Bechtel Power Business Unit.

Blogger’s Note: We’ve seen Alasdair several times and he always delivers a fabulous talk along with memorable stories and useful tips.    

He has worked at Bechtel for 22 years in such places as the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the United Kingdom. As president of the Power GBU, Cathcart oversees its four business lines: Fossil, Nuclear, Renewables, and Communications & Transmission. He has full responsibility for the GBU’s operations, including business development, project execution, customer satisfaction, and unit profitability.  Mr. Cathcart has spoken at BMT conferences in Manchester, and always receives rave reviews.  Here’s a sample:

• “Absolutely FANTASTIC truly inspirational, I’m so glad I came to the conference for this session – I loved the idea of reverse mentoring and also spot bonuses for good behaviors – I plan to implement both within my division with immediate effect!”

• “Wow – what can you say about this man. A confident, informed and insightful presentation. Bravery, imagination and belief perfectly articulated amongst real life stories. Never be afraid to try, engage with all and fail fast – great takeaways”

• “Really good the guy is on a different level and demonstrated that doing what you say really does produce benefits. Thought the ‘Fail Quickly’ idea was brilliant. I need to be brave enough to use it more! “

Mr. Cathcart is one of the best leaders out there, at the leading construction contractor in the US.

Dr. Aubrey Daniels is Chairman of Aubrey Daniels International (ADI).

Blogger’s Note: I’ve known Dr. Daniels for 20 years now, much of what I learned early in my career is due to his writing and support.  He’s had a huge influence on our understanding of behavior in business. His presentation style is world-class and he will undoubtedly deliver some memorable stories and useful tips.     

Dr. Daniels is the world’s foremost authority on applying the scientifically-proven laws of human behavior to the workplace. For more than 30 years, he and his esteemed colleagues have helped the world’s leading organizations employ the timeless principles of behavioral science to re-energize the workplace, optimize performance and achieve lasting results.

Aubrey is the author of six best-selling books widely recognized as international management classics, including: Bringing out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement, and Performance Management: Changing Behavior That Drives Organizational Effectiveness.  His books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and French and have been licensed in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Romania and Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Daniels is often cited as the “Father of behavioral science in business.”

Howard Lees is Managing Director of Hollin Consulting.

Blogger’s Note: We’ve called Mr. Lees a ‘behavioral savant’. He constantly surprises and amazes audiences and clients with his insightful and expert understanding of behavior and how to create the environment necessary to achieve long term change.    

He has authored 7 books including Behavioural Coaching, and BBS for Leaders.  Howard started Hollin Consulting in 2004 after a career in Civil Engineering and Project Management, holding a senior position with the Bechtel Corporation. Hollin is focused on delivering training and coaching in behavioral management techniques (BMT) which is a blend of behavioral science and project management skills. Howard was also a founding member of the international group, the BMT Federation which is a collection of like-minded enthusiasts in the use of behavioral science to improve business and safety. BMT members collaborate on research, delivering courses and speaking at international conferences.

A recent review of one of Mr. Lees’ talks simply said, “More learning per word than any other presenter.”

Pre-Conference Workshops – June 13

On June 13, we will hold two ½ day workshops at the conference hotel (details are at www.reachingresults.com/2012conference).  In the morning, we will hold a BBS Leadership workshop – presenters include Dr. John Austin, Howard Lees, and Bob Cummins.  They will discuss the BMT approach to BBS and how to teach behavioral leadership skills through the organization.

In the afternoon, we will hold a Behavior Management & Lean workshop, to discuss behavioral ideas for unlocking the power of lean for your organization.  That workshop will be led by Dr. Nicole Gravina and Shannon Loewy.

Registration information for the conference is at www.reachingresults.com/2012conference

In a previous blog post, I suggested that bosses should listen to employee complaints and act on them. This would likely reduce complaining overall, because there would be less to complain about. Still, the blame doesn’t fall squarely on the boss, employees could do some things differently, too, and it’s worth spending some time talking about it. Often times, bosses would do some things differently, if they only knew how their employees felt.

I used to be a pretty average complainer, or if I am honest, maybe I was slightly above average (in a bad way) with complaining. In graduate school, griping about classes, students, and how busy you were seemed like a badge of honor.

At some point during my journey of really learning behavioral science, I realized that every time I complained without first attempting to create a change, I wasn’t honoring myself; instead, I was admitting that I was terrible at influencing behavior. Who was I to expect others to follow my advice about how to improve the environment and influence people if I didn’t!

After this epiphany, every frustrating situation was a trigger for me to try something different to influence behavior. At first, I stopped after one or two attempts but I soon realized that the possibilities of things I could try to change the situation were endless … and some of them were even kind of fun. Once, I pulled out a voice recorder and turned it on in the middle or a coworker’s rant. You can imagine that his tone changed right away.

This is not to say that I never tell others about situations that frustrate me. But now, when I do talk to others about frustrating situations, it is usually to seek out some ideas of things I could try. It’s more about my behavior than someone else’s.

I recently had a manager I was coaching tell me that he couldn’t rely on his employees because none of them had any follow through. What are the chances that the organization hired six people with advanced degrees, great work histories, and zero follow through? What was the real problem?

It’s easy to paint yourself as a victim. It is much harder to view yourself as a bigger and bigger contributor to the problem when you let it go on without saying or doing anything different.

I think there are two categories of complaining, destructive complaints and constructive complaints.

Destructive complaints are comments that don’t serve much purpose other than making your audience nod their heads or cringe.  Examples include:  “Management never listens to anything,” “I hate my job”, and “My boss is a lunatic.”  These types of complaints are mostly emotional and they don’t include actions that can be taken to resolve the issue.  It is tempting to attribute these types of complaints to faulty personalities.

Constructive complaints, on the other hand, are complaints with solutions built in.  For example, “I’d submit more close calls in safety if I could just write them on a piece of paper rather than having to use the laborious computer system.”  These types of complaints are pure gold because they are easy wins for management.  Leaders should want people telling them openly and honestly what can be done to make their job better because that makes the leader’s job easier!   I’d say, these types of complaints should absolutely be reinforced with not just a thank you, but some action, too, whenever possible.

But wait, I didn’t condemn the destructive comments yet, and for good reason.

There are at least three potential reasons why people make destructive comments, and leaders can act on each of them:

1)  Sometimes people don’t have the skills to frame complaints constructively and that needs to be coached.
2) There are so many issues that people started making blanket statements to represent them all.
3) Leaders didn’t act on previous constructive comments and this is making employees frustrated and emotional.

Destructive comments are reflective of the organizational culture, especially when they are coming from more than one person.   When you start hearing them a little too often, this indicates that leaders need to spend some time figuring out what the real issues are and looking for some quick wins.

Some people fear that employee complaints are endless.  The truth is, they aren’t, and once you address the top 2-3 issues others start to fall off of the list.

Upset, frustrated, complaining employees is a problem  – a leadership problem. They are an indicator that the current environment needs changing.  This means that complaints should be listened to and acted upon, even reinforced, not punished.

Our BMT course is designed to get behavior started. It’s pretty simple:  If you show up and you do the work inside and outside of the course, you learn enough behavioral science to make improvements at work and at home.  However in general, humans rely far too much on knowledge and knowing (i.e., training) and not enough on what needs to be done afterward to support its application at work.

Remember that antecedents drive about 20% of behavior and consequences drive about 80%?  Training, on the whole, is an antecedent.  This is not unique to our BMT courses, it’s a problem in all courses and workshops.  The real learning happens when you go back and try to apply the training.  Most studies show pretty clearly that without coaching, it’s really tough to get people to use what they learn in training.

So, what can you do after a training course or workshop, to support its application on the job?  The simple answer is to ask leaders in the business to talk to their people about it on a weekly basis.  Think of the things that ‘stick’ in your business – they probably all have people who doggedly bring them up at every turn.  Below, I’ve tried to break this set of behaviors into some simple steps for you to try:

Step 1. Spend a few minutes each week asking your direct reports what they are doing to apply the concepts learned in the training.  Assuming that you see a need to apply the training, give them examples of what is possible.

Step 2. After getting this base behavior going steadily, spend some time encouraging people to find and fix frustrations at work.  Doing this is as simple as asking people what frustrates them, fixing some of those things, and feeding data on the improvements back to people to confirm that the solution made things better.

Step 3. Once you’ve got this going, you can encourage people to take on a project of their own and make improvements.  You can spend some time with individuals who find an improvement project, to help them make it relevant to the work, data-based, and simple.

This pretty well corresponds to the coaching model that we use, and it promotes often tough behavior change via taking on simple steps one at a time.  In behavioral science, we call it shaping.

Remember, if you’re not reinforcing behavior, you’re punishing it.

So, what do engaged leaders do to increase employee engagement?

1.  Discover what frustrates employees and fix as much as they can. 

Daily frustrations wear people out.  Especially when the people who have the most control over reducing frustrations are the leaders, and they aren’t doing anything to fix them.  If the computer system is always shutting down, meetings are mostly wasted time, and it takes a monumental effort to order a pack of pens, it’s hard to get excited about work.  Employees aren’t likely to bring these problems up unless their boss has specifically asked for them, reinforced sharing them, and fixed what they can.  Trying to increase employee engagement without putting effort into reducing major frustrations is an impossible feat.

2.  Give employees control over their work and don’t micromanage.

No one likes having someone look over their shoulder all day or having to ask permission to do every little thing.  Lack of control over work that you feel competent to complete is a serious drain on engagement and is directly linked to stress.  Engaged leaders look for opportunities for employees to have input and flexibility in how the work gets done.

3.  Understand and use positive reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is a big source of happiness for people and in most workplaces, there isn’t nearly enough.  Research says that students do better in school, work teams perform at a higher level, and marriages are happier when people get about 4 or more positives for every negative.  Sending a bulk, generic “good job” email doesn’t count.  The reinforcers should be personal and specific.

4.  Focus on developing relationships.

Think about someone you highly respect.  If that person praised you for a job well done, how would you feel?  If that same person suggested something you could improve, would you want to improve it?  Now think about someone you really dislike and ask yourself those same questions.  The answers change, don’t they?  The successes are even more invigorating and the tough times are easier to endure when we have robust relationships with our colleagues at work.  We want to do good work for and with people we care about.  Relationships must be developed and nurtured.

If leaders engage in the four behaviors described above, employee engagement will be inevitable.

Yet, it never fails that senior leaders, hoping to maintain this momentum, decide that the best course of action is to create a standard procedure for doing projects.  Because nothing says, “let’s give this all we can!” like an 8-page procedure.

To illustrate why this won’t work, let me provide an example from one of our client sites.  A woman who recently took my course decided her project would be reducing unnecessary and redundant paperwork and was going through each set of paperwork on the site and creating a leaner, and more useful solution.  She had eliminated a lot of stuff already, saving them time and money, and she was everyone’s hero for doing so.  After all, no one wants to enter in the same expense three times.  One of the site leaders said that they had never seen her so motivated.  I would hate to see that spark of enthusiasm squashed by trying to make her fit what she was doing to step-by-step a procedure.

Procedures don’t motivate people, consequences do.

They didn’t need a procedure, they needed champions who would continue to encourage and support their efforts.  They needed a little time each week to work on making improvements.  They needed to create a community of people at their workplace who were highly committed to behavioral science and continued to talk and learn about it after I left.

A lot of times, people say, “that sounds too hard, wouldn’t a procedure be easier”.  It is hard to sustain BMT or any large-scale initiative, but it’s the only way to create a lasting shift in the culture of your organization.  Writing a procedure is easier, and it is also easy to file it away and never look at it again.

It’s what your people do and say everyday that matters, no matter what is written in your procedures.

So, instead of saying, “Jim, you are such a downer,” you could say, “Jim, whenever I bring you a new idea, you tend to list all of the reasons it won’t work rather than thinking about what value it could bring and ways it could work.  It makes me not want to bring you ideas.”

The first one sounds like a trait that can’t be changed and such a sweeping statement might produce a serious blow to the ego and maybe even retaliation.  The second one, while still probably difficult to hear, describes a behavior, the consequence of that behavior, and what you’d like to see instead.  It’s actionable and less likely to make Jim want to throw his coke in your face.

However, I have rarely, until recently, heard people articulate that we should be careful to reinforce behavior, not people.  Some recent research highlights why it’s important.

Researcher Carol Dweck and her colleagues at Columbia University conducted a study with children who completed IQ tests and praised one group for their intelligence and the other group for their hard work.  When asked if, for the next problem set, the kids would prefer an easy or hard test, most of those praised for their intelligence chose the easy test and most of those praised for their effort chose the hard test.

Why would this be?  The kids praised for their intelligence may have wanted to continue to appear capable while those praised for their hard work may have wanted to continue to demonstrate how hard they work.

When given another round of tests that were equally as hard as the first test, those praised for effort improved and those praised for smarts got worse.  You can read more about this study here:  http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

Think about this study the next time you give a performance review and ask yourself if you are reinforcing or punishing behaviors or traits.

For example, you could ask questions that force the person to agree that they want to hear the feedback.  This includes questions like, “Are you sure you want to hear this?”,  “Are you sure you are really ready for it?”, “Is there any reason I should be holding back the feedback I have for you?”  This creates demand-pull and forces the other person to request the feedback.

Another strategy is to connect disagreeing with the feedback to harming your relationship.  I would only suggest that you use this strategy if the other person not listening and responding to your feedback would indeed harm how you feel about them.  To do this, you could say, “I am not sure if our relationship can withstand this feedback I am about to give but I think it is so essential to your performance that I am going to give it to you anyway.”

You could also ask the person to write down the feedback you are about to give because it is that important.  If it is unusual for you to suggest writing something down, than this small request for increased effort around the feedback will make it seem more valuable.  Asking someone to write the feedback down has the added benefit of creating a record.

Another way to create some demand-pull around feedback is to overload the person with positive feedback.  Once you have gotten to about 10 pieces of positive feedback, most people will ask if there is anything they can do better.

There are probably other ways to create some demand-pull around the feedback you are planning to deliver.  If it’s really important, than it’s worth taking the time to think about how you will deliver it to produce maximum impact.

What do you do to frame your feedback?

Make a plan

If you anticipate that a specific situation might arise, think about what you could say in advance and write it down.  If you find yourself not speaking up because you are worried about how it will come out, you can preempt that by scripting out some things you could say before the meeting.

If you get stuck, write down everything you could possibly say in response to something specific, no matter how ridiculous it might seem, and then narrow down the options to things that might work and won’t get you in too much trouble.  We call this the Response Continuum.

Break the stimulus control

When we are in the same situation over and over again, our patterns of behavior tend to become stable and we get locked in by the sameness of the situation.  This is called stimulus control – when stimuli or elements of a situation encourage the same behaviors.  If we want to do something different, we can give ourselves a little momentum by doing some easy things to make the situation feel different (and therefore alter the stimulus control in that situation).

For example, you probably do a similar routine each morning in your home, but if you stay in a hotel your routine probably changes because the situation has changed.  You can harness this knowledge by changing elements of your meeting.  For example, you could arrive extra early, sit somewhere different than your usual seat, add something to the agenda, bring a water instead of a coffee, etc.  Make the meeting feel as different as possible and before you know it you will be blurting out all kinds of new things.

Get support

Before you go to the meeting, you could talk about the potential issues that might arise with a trusted work colleague who will also be at the meeting.  If your friend is in agreement, you could ask him/her if they are willing to show support during the meeting.  This will provide you with some immediate back up and reinforcement when you express your opinion or ideas. Immediate reinforcement is often necessary to get new behaviors started.

Practice

If you rarely speak up, there is a chance the first time you do it won’t come out perfectly.  That’s okay, the fact that you actually said something means you are one step closer to being able to say the exact right thing.  You aren’t going to go from 0 to 60 in one step, this kind of thing requires shaping.

After the meeting, if there was a situation where you wished you would have said something, take a few minutes to think about what you could have said and even write those ideas down.  Over time, you will get better at formulating your responses more quickly.

We call things that come before a behavior that are meant to prompt or spur behavior, antecedents.  Some antecedents are pretty effective and others, like the New Year’s Resolution, are often forgotten before too long.  Why do some work and some don’t?

Let’s think about antecedents that work well.  I believe most people would say the following antecedents are pretty good at influencing our behavior:  Mortgage payment deadline, plane flight information, fuel gauge, movie time listings, and driving directions.

Those that don’t work as well might include:  Prompts to read long agreements before installing software, complex standard operation procedures, motivational speeches, company values and, of course, New Year’s Resolutions.

What makes the first set of antecedents more likely to influence our behavior than the second?

The answer is consequences.  In the first set of antecedents, there are clear and immediate consequences for following or not following them.  For example, if you don’t look at your flight information you will probably miss your plane and if you don’t look at your fuel gauge you will likely run out of gas.

For the antecedents that aren’t as effective at influencing our behavior, the consequences aren’t as clear or immediate.  For example, if you have ever agreed to a policy without reading it when installing software, has anything negative happened to you?  Do you even know your company values?

So, if one of your resolutions for this year is to keep the rest of your resolutions, your best bet is to associate your desired behavior changes with some clear and immediate consequences.