good behaviours at work

8/13/2019 Good Behaviours at work

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Why is it tough to make good behaviours stick?

The Cedar team enjoyed hosting a thought-provoking lunch recently, where a diverse group of Leadership

Development and HR Directors from banks, insurers and fund managers discussed what leadership looks like

in a complex and changing financial sector. We are grateful for their participation and found the conversations

that developed fascinating.

One observation from that session seemed to resonate above all else. Everybody in the room was describing

the incredibly busy lives they lead trying to implement positive working cultures and leadership frameworks that

will boost overall corporate performance. The cumulative wealth of experience in the room compels us to take

what they were saying very seriously. But the key point at which we all came up against is, very simply, how do

we make it all stick?

This simple question cuts deep into the psyche of all thinking HR professionals, both in the City and beyond.

For decades, HR have been tasked with the almost impossible task of creating good behaviours at work,

through reward, performance management systems, talent development and the threat of sanction. HR gets

blamed if things are not put right, becomes discredited in unhealthy firms and reduced to a data processing

function. Much has been written on this, but sufficed to say good people management requires genuine

support from the top.

I would argue that the corporate scandals that have rocked financial markets over the past five years were not

rooted in poor economic regulation but poor social regulation. The efforts ex-post to mitigate risk through over-

mechanising the people function merely serve to give hard working HR folk a big headache. And despite this

extra legislative burden, the simple question has still remained. How do we make good behaviours stick? You

cantintensively farm trust in banks or other financial institutions. You cant commoditise or dial uprespectful

interaction, cultural sensitivity, an appreciation for someone elses point of view or a collaborative management

style. Unfortunately, the human brain doesnt work like that and neuroscience has begun to shed light on why

that is. The schematic here illustrates a summary of what seems to drive what from a brain-based perspective


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The diagram shows how events are processed. The profoundly social and emotional nature of the brain

indicates that performance will be foundationally affected by emotional processing of any event and state of

relationship between people involved. These feelings (step 5) are what create behaviours and it is these

behaviours which drive our performance at work.

Therefore, efforts to gain performance by improving culture, through leadership programmes, talent strategies,

training, communications, new rules or off-sites are nothing if the relationship between person A and person B

on the ground does not improve. And relationships improve if behaviour changes. But behavioural change

requires physical change to the brain by creating neural growth that supports new behaviours and neglecting

neural pathways that entrench unwanted behaviours such that they start to wither away. This is a different

proposition to much of the therapeutic or cognitive bases of intervention that overly focus on problem

behaviours, as if trying to unfreeze them with conscious willpower. The brain will do all it can to resist change

to existing neural patterning and make this process well-nigh impossible, which might explain why so many

change initiatives fail. If done well, coaching works by allowing people to bring to awareness non-conscious

emotions driving existing behaviours in a safe place, model different ones and practice new ways of interacting

that hardwire and become normalised.

As City folk are paid to think rather than to do, coaching also comes into its own as a way of helping people toimprove their thinking. Not to do their thinking for them, but to create conditions for people to think better for

themselves. It also serves to help create better team dynamics by helping leaders create good thinking

environments at work, saving considerable time in unproductive meetings.

If we can stop second guessing what we think peoples brains need, as seen through our own eyes, and help

them become masters at thinking for themselves, things will get better. Define solutions not problems: pivotal

to this is the art of helping people have their own insights. Then the coaching job is supporting, encouraging

them so these insights turn from thoughts into habits.

But why doesnt this happen? Why is coaching only used for remedial or reward/developmental purposes at

Board level or for high potentials? No doubt budget is a constraining factor. But consider the transformational

effect of each individual having 1 good insight each per week at your firm. Think of the rich seam of ideas that

would ensue, genuinely stitching people and teams together in common purpose, driving huge productivity

improvements. The standard response (training) is largely ineffective - giving advice, solving problems for

them, trying to work out how people think and then correcting it. Save your money. It rarely works.

People dont want to be managed, they want to be unleashed. Gen X and Y think differently. They want

freedom/independence, to feel a belonging at work and to enjoy themselves. Giving people ownership is key;

telling them what to do just doesnt seem to workany more. There is a significant body of clinical and work-

based evidence now that attests to this fact. If someone always late for meetings is reprimanded, the short

term threat of sanction might work for a while but it simply heightens anxiety and diverts attention away fromwork and back to problems that led to lateness in the first place. Even rewarding punctual attendance at

meetings (say with better assignments) reinforces neural pathways associated with the habitual problem.

However when people solve things themselves, the brain makes patterns and emits a rush of dopamine. The

reward response from ownership can be stronger than a bonus. In these cash-strapped times, that should be

of serious interest to banks in particular.

Leadership style must move from command and control to coaching. People give of their best under optimal

conditions of each domain of SCARF (Rock 2007), a model for collaborating with and influencing others. These

5 domains either activate reward or threat responses in the limbic system and determine neural circuitry that


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drives behaviour. Coaching approaches deliver higher performance from staff, yet are hard to implement

without trust. Prescription, hierarchy, instruction and autocracy dont work.

Successful leadership has always been founded on self-awareness, self-belief and self-responsibility. By

definition, leaders make decisions daily, and to do so requires these personal attributes. But leaders dont just

live in the C-suite. Middle managers, team heads and support managers represent the engine room of most

businesses. It is here where the difference can be made. After all, athletes have coaches, from club level to

professional, so why should people at work not have the same? If nothing else, it would show they matter to

the firm in the way that being sent on a training course never will.

About the author

James Parsons is an executive and careers coach, using a body of knowledge from neuroscience to inform his

work. He has a background in strategy consulting and investment banking and as such, has sat where many of

his clients sit now. His brand is one of tough love, able to be compassionate yet constructively challenge his

clients thinking on a range of issues at work. Understanding that trust -based, fair organisations are built from

the top down, he is especially keen to get leaders to examine possibilities for creating positive cultures at their

firms in fearless, imaginative ways.

He has extensive experience coaching people in leadership roles in professional services firms, financial

services and law firms, as well as offering workshops in areas such as networking, career management, team

behaviours and using social media effectively.

e:[email protected] m: 07966 691848 s: parsons.birchgrove
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]

good behaviours at work

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