Usually the failure to change behavior, improve performance and achieve business goals isn’t the fault of the training. Even the best leadership development program in the world can’t change behavior if it’s conducted in a context that doesn’t support these results. To be fair this failure derives from a general lack of understanding of how learning actually happens in the brain and what it takes to establish new patterns of behavior.
Making a permanent change in the way a person leads is no different from making a permanent change in any behavior pattern. It’s like mastering a sport skill. For example, Annika Sorenstam and Tiger Woods have dominated their respective pro tours for almost a decade. Have you ever wondered why they’ve been able to achieve and sustain such high levels of performance?
It’s true that both Annika and Tiger are physically gifted and spend a lot of time working on physical fitness. In addition, and they’re serious students of the game. They study club, ball and course technology. They study grass. They study the effects of heat, wind and rain on ball performance. They study every golf course they play on. They study every kind of shot in every kind of situation. They study other players.
But this isn’t the real reason they perform at such a high level. The real reason is practice, practice, practice. Golf involves several skills, and these two dominant golfers constantly seek ways to improve their skills, which they apply and reinforce all the time. Every day. On the course and on the practice tee. Before the round, during the round and after the round. In-season and off-season. Hitting thousands of golf balls, they pay dues in practice that we have difficulty imagining.
And to make the most of this constant reinforcement, they get lots of feedback and coaching. They want to know how they’re doing and whether they should be doing anything differently; so when their caddy or another player mentions something, they listen. They pay a swing coach handsomely to hold up a mirror to their game and provide insights for improvement. They swing clubs in front of video cameras for hours and analyze the playback endlessly.
In short, once they know what they should be doing, they repeat the behavior over and over until the improvement becomes second nature, until it feels so natural and comfortable that they don’t have to think about it to execute it perfectly. They practice it until they ingrain it. All the best players do this. It takes an amazing amount of repeated application, reinforcement and coaching over a long period of time to ingrain a skill.
If you’re one of the millions of fans who follow the career of Tiger Woods, you may remember that 2004 wasn’t one of his best years. At the beginning of the season Tiger made a number of alterations in his swing. The changes were designed to make the world’s best golf swing even better. Even with a world-class swing coach, Tiger struggled all year, winning only one tournament and finishing fourth in total winnings.
But at the end of 2004, his game started to come together for him, and he won two post-season tournaments back-to-back. In 2005 he won his fourth Masters. He placed second in the U.S. Open and won the British Open, leading the field from start to finish. He finished the season with six tournament victories and nearly $10 million in winnings, ranked number one in the world.
Here’s the point: Tiger Woods is one of the all-time great professional golfers, and he hits hundreds of golf balls in practice every day. But even Tiger had to stick with his new swing for the better part of a year before the new patterns became ingrained and he achieved noticeable improvements in his game.
Why is this so? Why does skill mastery require so much application, feedback, refinement, reinforcement and coaching?
The answer is that all behavior patterns—whether it’s the behavior of an athlete or the behavior of a leader—are triggered by what goes on in the brain, where physically interconnected brain cells—“neural pathways”—activate specific thought processes and behaviors.
People will use a brand new skill consistently only after they’re able to perform the behavior without thinking about it. For a new skill to feel that natural and comfortable, dendrites on specific brain cells must grow until they reach other specific brain cells, causing a new network of neurons to be interconnected. This gradual cell-by-cell growth and linking-up process is stimulated by the consistent repetition of the behavior over an extended period of time.
Put yourself in the shoes of the learner. Sticking with a long-term learning effort like this will feel like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, especially when the new neural network isn’t fully formed. So when you start putting what you’ve learned into practice, your brain will try to make the behavior happen without the established pathway. This will require concentration, and performing the skill the new way will feel awkward. As a result, the results will often be disappointing and frustrating. Without a structured program of role modeling, feedback, reinforcement, coaching, encouragement and accountability, you’ll be tempted to fall back on what feels familiar and comfortable: your old way of doing things.
However, if you don’t give up, if you continue to do what you’ve been taught, eventually performing the new skill will seem like second nature—easy, comfortable and automatic. With the neurons physically “rewired,” the only thing that can disconnect them now is brain injury or the atrophy of old age. Like walking, swimming or riding a bicycle, the new pattern is virtually permanent.
Leadership skills are even more complex than sports skills. It may not take long to remember a visual image, a fact, or even a concept. But changing a leadership habit takes much longer. So if you want your trainees to improve the way they function as leaders—permanently, they’ll need several months of on-the-job application and reinforcement after formal instruction.
This Holy Grail of leadership development is a reasonable goal. But while organizations everywhere have sought it for decades, few have achieved it. The reason is that it takes more than the best training money can buy—more than outstanding presenters and rave reviews to make permanent changes in leader behavior. After the course is over, it will take months of follow-up support and reinforcement, including one-on-one performance coaching from the direct manager.
The all-important question: Does your current leadership development program include this kind of reinforcement? Unfortunately, organizations rarely augment leadership development with a structured program of follow-up reinforcement, and participants aren’t consistently encouraged to apply new skills on the job. When the needed repetition doesn’t happen, the skills aren’t ingrained and leaders fall back on their old, comfortable patterns.
