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Usually, the failure to change behavior, improve performance and impact on business results 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 prevents it from achieving that result. 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. Senior managers and HR professionals need to understand several things about how leadership skills are ingrained: 1. Skill learning is physical. The first thing you need to know is that all behavior—including the behavior of leaders—is triggered by neurological events. These events happen in the brain—not in the skin, not in the muscles, and not in the bones. A supervisor will use a new leadership skill consistently only after he or she is able to perform the behavior automatically without thinking about it. For a new skill to feel natural and comfortable, an extensive network of neurons (brain cells) that trigger the behavior must be interconnected. This physical cell-by-cell linking-up process is stimulated by repetition of the behavior over time. This process is the very essence of skill development. The end result is a complex network of neurons that coordinates perception, analysis and decision-making, triggering the leader’s cognitive, verbal and physical behavior. This is the physical reality of behavior patterns. No neural network, no skill. Or put a different way, if you want to improve a leadership skill, the developmental program must sufficiently stimulate the brain to grow the dendrites until they make new neural connections, forming a more effective pathway. 2. Ingraining a leadership skill takes time. Leadership skills are complex. It usually doesn’t take long for a reasonably intelligent individual to remember a visual image, a fact, or even a concept. However, changing a pattern of behavior takes much longer. This is especially true of leadership skills, which are among the most complex of human skills. These behavior patterns link several kinds of mental processes: perceptual, emotional, intuitive, conceptual, factual and ultimately behavioral. The only thing that can stimulate dendrites to grow and connect is repeated behavior—lots of repeated behavior. Practice, practice and more practice. Anyone who has learned a complex physical skill knows this is true. It takes an amazing amount of practice to learn how to hit a golf ball with a sand wedge, or to serve a tennis ball for a winner, and so on. Hit a thousand golf balls. Hit a thousand tennis balls. Before a skill can be ingrained, and even while the skill is in the process of being ingrained, the brain has to make the behavior pattern happen without the neural network. So even with a difficult effort of concentration, performing the skill will feel awkward and frustrating. With persistence and after the connections are finally in place, the effort will finallly seem like second nature—easy, comfortable and automatic. And best of all, once the brain cells are connected, the person “owns” the skill. The neural network that drives the skill is physically interconnected, and for all practical purposes the skill may now be considered permanent. If you’re one of the millions of fans who follow the career of Tiger Woods, you probably know that 2004 wasn’t one of his best years. At the beginning of the season Tiger made a number of changes in his swing. The changes were designed to make the world’s best golf swing even better, but 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. Here’s the point: Tiger Woods is one of the all-time great professional golfers, and he practices hitting balls several hours every day. But even Tiger had to invest an entire year of persistent effort before the new patterns became ingrained and he achieved noticeable improvements in his game. So excellent instruction isn’t enough. Even after the best training sessions money can buy, at first a golf skill or a leadership skill will feel strange and difficult, and initially you won’t be able to do it well. The brain hasn’t had the time to grow and connect the neural pathways that enable you to carry out this behavior in a comfortable, routine way. And when doing something feels awkward and doesn’t produce the desired results, you’re likely to fall back on old, comfortable habits. This is why an extended period of practice, practice and more practice is needed to ingrain the new behaviors introduced in training. Because leadership skills are a lot more complex than golf skills, the required period of reinforcement is typically many months. 3. Changing a behavior is harder than learning it for the first time. To compound the challenge of ingraining a new behavior, leaders in training programs aren’t learning brand new behavior patterns. More precisely, they’re making changes in interpersonal behavior patterns, which they learned initially while growing up and reinforced consistently throughout the decades of their lives. So learning new patterns means working against comfortable, well-established patterns. This represents a significant problem for everyone involved in leadership development. Because it takes months of consistent, persistent repetition of new behaviors to connect the neurons, the old patterns are always there to fall back on when frustration occurs or when there is a lack of reinforcement in the environment. This is why so many participants eventually revert to their old way of doing things a few months after even the most outstanding training programs. In summary, there are neurological limits to how fast a person can ingrain a skill. It takes more than assessment, more than training, even more than the combination of the two to make permanent changes in on-the-job behavior. However, if you coordinate behavior-based assessment with behavior-based training, and follow this with an extended period of reinforcement of the behaviors on the job, you can ingrain a skill. And the beauty of it is, once a skill is ingrained, the neurons are physically connected. An ingrained skill is like swimming or riding a bicycle. The only way to get rid of the behavior pattern is to replace it with another, more satisfying ingrained behavior pattern. The only thing that can disconnect the neurons of a behavior pattern is the atrophy of old age, and death. The skill is virtually permanent. The bottom line: Very few organizations follow leadership development programs with an extended period of structured, 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. So what's the solution? How would you structure a training and development program that accomplishes all that? Train-to-Ingrain is a reinforcement-intensive leadership development process that creates permanent, measurable improvements in leader behavior.
Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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