Tag: leadership

Is The Biggest, Unchecked Business Disease – Behavioural Waste™?

The biggest, unchecked Business Disease – Behavioural Waste™

Organisations believe in leadership development as there are $billions invested in leadership development every year, made on the assumption that “better leaders get better results”. Some, more focused (maybe informed) investors focus their leadership programmes on engagement, assuming better leaders create more engaged employees and teams and that then leads to higher productivity, better results.

If leadership development programmes are an investment, what’s the ROI?

Why make assumptions when the facts are there, if you care to look?

Well one thing is true and has been unequivocally proven that changing and improving attitudes and behaviours will improve performance (1). So it’s great to know that all those $billions spent on leadership are based on having the right belief. It can work! And that is also true in every part of life and can simply be seen in athletes and sports people, where focused training, changing behaviours by doing something marginally different will increase performance. You only have to look at the stories behind Olympic and Paralympic athletes, broadcast on most TV networks, to see where they started and how they progressed. The whole idea behind terms like ‘marginal gains’ is nothing new but has been exposed to a much wider audience thanks to TV, the Press and social media.

But who notices those improvements in sports people can be replicated in business, or other areas of one’s life? What if you saw the Head Coach as the COO, driving the business forward?

Interestingly, books like “Winning” by Sir Clive Woodward demonstrate the processes that Sir John Whitmore (of coaching fame) and his team were practising in businesses way back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In sport, it’s also well known that talent isn’t enough and Woodward’s TCUP (Think Correctly Under Pressure) made the difference between winning and losing. The bottom line is that attitude and behaviour makes the real “sustainable” difference to performance.

If you changed your mindset and believed everyone were talented in your organisation, how would that change your thinking?  

Now if that’s got you thinking differently, and prepared to take the first step, the burning question is…

Where do we start?  Behavioural Waste

There’s lots of great advice from evidenced and relevant research that says mostly the same as Sutton and Rao (2014) in their book “Scaling up excellence: Getting to more without settling for less”, highlighted in the Harvard Business Review in 2014. They point out the intuitive good sense that before leaders attempt to adopt good practices, it is necessary to remove the bad; and that this can be done by

“… identifying and reducing destructive and negative attitudes and behaviours that block the adoption of necessary change.”

In other words, the importance of removing embedded avoiding and blocking behaviours before introducing innovative practices. The authors’ research found that negative interactions with bosses and co-workers have five times more impact than positive ones to the extent that bad behaviours usually swamp the good, undermining the “scalability” or wider adoption of new excellent practices.  A key insight from this kind of thinking is the power of encouraging leaders and employees that they are “doing the right thing” when they start to focus not just upon their own needs and wants, but upon the people affected by their actions.

Eliminate or Reduce Behavioural Waste™ (BW) – the business disease

We could list all the negative behaviours and disruptive activities that could be in existence in your business. The 10 Fatal Leadership Flaws  –  Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman (2009) – are all in that list.

But it’s easier to define them in what they are collectively –

Behavioural Waste TMBehavioural Waste™ – all forms of behaviour that divert energy, talent and resources away
from the personal or organisational purpose


Rao and Sutton and others have merely pointed out that (1) above also works in a business setting. Change (negative) behaviours and results improve, and you can now innovate, value-add and grow. Now the question is

“ How much Behavioural Waste™ have we and what do we do to get rid of it?”

Well the key is you don’t have to get rid of it and eliminate it. Reducing it so it doesn’t prolong and impact the business performance is good enough. Pareto’s 80-20 rule still exists here!

Organisations will have 3 forms of BW that can be quickly identified : Personal, Cultural and Systemic.

Each of these BW are business diseases and with the right diagnosis coupled with the right remedy, you can permanently get rid of them. A leader that operates their own agenda for personal gain, “do as I say not as I do”, or constantly uses management (MBA/MA) speak for effect are not the engaging, inspiring examples for your employees.

Next Steps?

Being a leader puts us all in a position of making decisions, but only those decisions that are ours to make. As you are still reading then there are now 4 choices:

  1. Free chapter of Recycling Behavioural Waste download – the business disease http://bit.ly/BusinessDisease
  2. Assess your own organisation’s BW http://bit.ly/MindFitFootprint
  3. Do something else
  4. Do nothing – keep doing what you’re doing and hope your medicine works

As ever the choice is always yours.

So what’s your choice? If you choose any of the above we’d like to have your feedback on what influenced your decision.

What ONE thing ALL Great Golfers have?

Is it a great swing? No, some great swings don’t produce the results the golfer desires, and that is frustrating.

Is it a fabulous putting stroke?  No, because if you still don’t sink putts, you don’t succeed.  If you really want to get on your knees and learn some more technical skills, then fine.

However the real answer lies in having a great mind set – resilient, adaptable and able to block out negative thoughts and negative self-talk.

Sometimes the biggest problem is in your head. You’ve got to believe you can play a shot instead of wondering where your next bad shot is coming from.

Jack Nicklaus

Thanks Jack, but we don’t need you to tell us, we know it! It’s common sense and we tell ourselves all the time. So why does it work sometimes and not others? The simple answer is if you were Mind Fit we guarantee it will improve your golf – great golfers also need to develop the technical part of the game. It is all about focused effort and practice, and so is being in the right mindset when on the course.

 

It works like this; if you believe that the shot you are about to take is doomed to failure and your focus is on the ball going where it shouldn’t, then that is what is likely to happen. A friend said that he knew that his ball was going to go into a bunker and I could hear him rehearse failure. He was right. It was a perfect shot into the bunker!

 

Now in addition to imagining failure, many people who play golf focus on the technical side of the game and get annoyed to varying degrees when they are unable to put together in one stroke all the variables that make up a successful action. If that’s you, you’re acting on information overload. You can only focus on one thing, not a hundred things simultaneously.

Be honest, how often do you know exactly what you did that led to a poor shot? Did you blame your stance, your club, the ball, the course, the weather, the ducks …?

We use a process of natural learning to make this clear.

For a moment, can you imagine ( or remember) the amount of focused effort a 4 year old needed just to hit that plastic ball with their first plastic club. Through encouraging them and their unbridled enjoyment, within ½ hour the ball was being hit with every swing. That’s natural learning.

 

Natural learning is action based and used successfully by the top performers and one of the simplest examples is when we learn to ride a bike. We get on it and do it – sometimes with assistance at first with stabilisers, or a friendly helping hand. Technical knowledge to improve your bike riding comes later. Olympic athletes use this form of learning and spend most of their time practicing one aspect of their sport until they get that part right. Then they put it all together. Most golfers unknowingly, go to play an unsuccessful game. They don’t practice or focus on one input variable at a time so there can be no improvement, and you are setting yourself up to fail. If a shot goes well they put it down to luck – or ‘I’m feeling good today!’

Success depends almost entirely on how effectively you learn to manage the game’s two ultimate adversaries: the course and yourself

Jack Nicklaus 

We can’t help you with the course, but we can with help with you. By being Mind Fit, you have a learnt ability to perform to your optimum in different situations, through ‘can do’ attitudes and behaviours. So it will help your golf, your work and in fact all parts of your life. Most of us like to think we are ‘can do’ people (have you ever said I can’t do that?) but there are other options. Despite being unique and complex people, there are only three options relating to how we behave and perform. You’ve met the first. The other two, ‘can’t do’ and ‘won’t do’ attitudes and behaviours demonstrate a mind where effective performance will be curtailed significantly. So be honest with yourself, what state do you operate from and where would you like to be?

You can go from poor, to good, to great so if you want to play a better game start by conducting your own reality check. Identify exactly what you do at the input end that leads to the result you either want or don’t want. If you don’t know what you are actually doing how can you improve? And one thing, if you believe you’ll be shouting ‘Fore!’ a lot, you best take extra liquids as you’ll be delaying your visit to the 19th.

Mind Fit is about performance and leads to better results.

Get your head right then your game will improve.

If you don’t believe us or Jack Nicklaus, there’s always another bad day on the golf course that might convince you. 

Want to be one of the great golfers? Start with you.

To check where you operate from download the Mind Fit Map. 

If you are on Linked-In, come and join our group Mind Fit Golfers and find out more. We intend to hold some learning events on ranges and courses, and perhaps hold some tournaments – when you’re ready!

Change your mindset, change your business

What’s the best marketing message you have ever seen?

Nike’s “just do it” campaign increased their share of USA sport shoe business from 18% to 43% in 10 years.

In the jobs market CV’s arrive at an alarming pace thanks to the internet and social media, and jobs in the UK can be oversubscribed by hundreds if not thousands. How do you get to the top of that list, or at least in the top 3?

But you’re selling products and services, what has that got to do with you? The answer to that is it has everything to do with you – you’ve got the same problem – if you’re not at the top of the pile your customers will go elsewhere. And thinking how others might do it better, could be your most innovative move.

Some businesses have woken up to the simple fact that standing out in the crowd is one way to succeed.

Most reading this will already be making the excuses: we’re not that creative; haven’t got the time others have; budget is already stretched; we don’t need to stand out; our customers know who we are…

For those that want to succeed, are open to change your mindset and grow here’s one of our favourites…

No budget for training in today’s climate – really?

You’re in great company if you answer YES to the following question.

Have your employees been on a time management course and still can’t manage time effectively?

The fact is that more than 70% of training failure comes after the training is completed, according to comprehensive ASTD study in 2006 (http://www.astd.org/) . The major factors were that employees didn’t get a chance to apply what they learned soon enough, and there was no effective culture of follow-up and coaching.

You may be surprised but there’s actually nothing new here. Research by George Alliger and Elizabeth Janak (1989) found that the correlation between training and change in the workplace to be poor. More recently the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in 2007 state it is “….no better than random chance”.

People return to work after the training and soon fall back into their old mindset and habits. The training even though of great quality, invariably results as a waste of time, effort and money.

Kirkpatrick 1959 is recognised as the measurement of training  and in an article “A fresh look after 50 Years” by Kirkpatrick Partners they say “the end is the beginning” ie start with the performance level 4, and work backwards through attitude and behaviour change level 3.

The problem is businesses are putting most of their time into designing, developing and delivering training (Level 1 and Level 2) and it’s no surprise then they only get a fraction of the benefit. They spend hardly any time on the follow-up activities that translate into positive behaviour change and impact on the business (Level 3 and Level 4) .  Some companies turn to psychometric tests which start to address the issue but then mostly end up saying ‘We’ve done the tests, given the feedback, now what?’

It’s not surprising it has evolved this way – it’s cheaper.  The more we look at interventions this way, and the easier and cheaper it becomes from the explosion in Elearning, the more short cuts we’ll take and fall into the same trap. But without an improvement, it’s also a false economy – the short cut doesn’t work.

There is hope as advances in neuroscience and psychology support the unique Mind Fit process. There’s now a simple, proven and cost effective way to shift attitudes, behaviours and mindsets. Importantly for any business is that the change is sustainable and starts immediately following the intervention.

So, what’s the point of developing people in today’s climate? First, the climate doesn’t matter. People are your best asset and with a positive behavioural change they will improve your business.

Growth, in the current unpredictable state of the economy, will only come from your existing resources.

 

To learn more and how you get into a Mind Fit state take the simplest first step and read the book  Mind Fit For Success , by Graham Williams