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July 2005

Process, Not Training, Produces Behavior Change

A car mishap prompts this month’s exploration of leadership. It teaches us that behavior change comes from a long-term process, NOT from “training.”

My 20 year-old son was borrowing my car, and as he backed out of the garage, took the driver’s side mirror clean off. (Must have been late for work.)

The car dealer had to order a new mirror, which meant I had to drive around for several days with no driver’s side mirror.

The next day, I made a three-hour, round trip on the interstate. Now, the logical side of my brain knew there was no driver’s side mirror. But, what do you think I was doing every so often as I cruised along the highway?

That’s right, I was glancing at the spot where the mirror should be.

Although the logical side of my brain knew the mirror wasn’t there, the part of my brain that handles conditioned, repetitive behavior couldn’t keep me from glancing where the mirror should be.

Why? Because 35 years of driving, and frequently checking that side view mirror on various cars over the decades, adds up to a lot of mirror-checking. My high school drivers’ ed instructor said that drivers check their mirrors every 5 seconds or so.

(I don’t remember if he addressed reversing out of a garage at high speed.)

All that mirror-checking had wired into my brain this repetitive behavior. So, days after the mishap, before the mirror could be replaced, I was still checking for it.

Daniel Goleman, the Emotional Intelligence guru, describes this “hard-wiring” of the brain in his many books. And, as he points out, when you’ve done something the same way for such a long time, changing that behavior will take a long time as well.

That’s why I believe “training,” as it has traditionally been done, is rarely the solution for anything involving behavior change. Especially leadership.

I explained this recently, and used the driver’s side mirror story, to people who had asked me to do a two-hour leadership workshop for their employees. I told them you can’t expect much behavior change after only two hours, no matter who’s doing the workshop.

Heck, three hours driving without a driver’s side mirror proved that.

An executive gave me his own proof that such training doesn’t work. He said that when he comes home from a day of “leadership training,” the first thing his wife says is, “The training didn’t work. You’re the same guy who walked out the door this morning!”

If you really want to change behavior, you need a process that is long-term, sustained, and reinforced.

A training event that lasts a day or even a month is not
long-term.

And if you do a week now, and a week a year from now, that’s long term; but it’s doomed to fail because it isn’t sustained periodically in between.

By reinforced, I mean that you must be reinforcing the changes throughout the process, and building upon those changes.

Dwight Eisenhower said that “leadership is the one quality you can develop through studious reflection and practice.” The process has to reinforce the changes through practice. This is how we learn.

You just can’t get that kind of behavior change from training, which is an event, not a process. The hard-wiring of our brains just doesn’t allow it.

That hard-wiring is an advantage that allows us to do things without even thinking about them; but that same hard-wiring is a limitation when we’re trying to change behavior, to learn new ways of doing things.

And, if you want to improve your leadership, you must change your behavior.

In trying to change behavior, are you using an event or a process? Do you really expect a training event to change years of hard-wired behavior? How long do you think it would take before you stopped checking that driver’s side mirror?

Until next edition, keep leading the way!

Copyright (C) 2005 by Terry Wall

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