Creating Your Future Life After Running Your Own Business or a CXO Position
March 4, 2019
How To Communicate To Your People About Change Without People Tuning Out
March 18, 2019
I’m going to talk to you today about the choice we all make – to go to the gym or to eat a donut? And what this means in you helping your business get to where you want it to get to. If you’re interested in engaging the people around you and your team, and putting incentives in place so that they can have a line towards the future, this will be really interesting.
The Challenge
Let’s talk about behaviour change. That’s really the central idea. That’s really the hard stuff, right? Because none of us likes to change. We all resist it, and we all like our current ways. I’ve been reading a book by this guy called James Clear, who wrote this book called Atomic Habits.
And in that book, he talks about the fundamental law of behaviour change. This is where I got the donut/gym thing from. Because faced with the option of, “Do I eat a donut now? It’s so luscious, and I really like pink icing. It’s so tasty, and it gives me so much pleasure, in the moment”.
But going to the gym, that’s going to cause me so much pain. I’m going to have to work hard. I’m going to have to push through my limits. I’m going to have to do that extra rep or push those weights up. That’s really painful. I’d actually rather eat the donut.” Wouldn’t you?
The Fundamental Law of Behaviour Change
This comes back to the fundamental law of behaviour change, that the reason we do things is because of short term pain, to avoid short term pain, or to get more short term pleasure. For many of us, what we’ll do is we’ll eat the donut rather than going to the gym.
This is really important is for you to think about the vision that you want to achieve in 12 months or in three years, and often what we do when we communicate, we say, “You know what? We’re going here, and there’s going to be so much in it for you.”
But people can’t go there with us, because it’s not … They can’t relate to that, to the things that are driving their immediate pain, which is the projects and things they’re working on that are painful that they’re trying to work on. Or what gives them pleasure, which is probably their immediate rewards.
That’s why sometimes we get really frustrated because we know where we’re going, but people aren’t aligning their behaviours with where we want to get to.
3 Things To Set up
What do you think the trick is? The trick is to say, “All right, so how do I align my incentives and the way I set up three things: my systems, my symbols, and my leadership behaviours?” Carolyn Taylor, who’s a culture change expert, talks about those three things:
- Systems
- Symbols
- Behaviours
Your business is aligned to creating pain that gets people to move in the direction you want to, but also getting pleasure from the right behaviours that you want so that they’re in line with your vision.
Summary
Here’s the lesson from this – that most people eat the donut. I’m not saying everyone does, but many people do. You can go one of two ways when you’re wanting to people to change their behaviour in line with your vision.
You can try to convince them to go to the gym, which we know for all of us is really hard, or you can try and align their short term systems, symbols, and leadership behaviours so that people will demonstrate those right behaviours, and that’s about thinking about what’s painful for them and what’s pleasurable for them.
Here’s my little lesson about behaviour change. Think about your business. Think about the people that work with you. How could you align those things so that you achieve your vision quicker, faster?
Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch
Hope this has been useful for you. Leave me a comment down below. Send me a note. Talk to you next time on The Reason and the Road.
