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May 29, 2015

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Home » Opinion » Book review

Guide addresses factors critical to making change

We used to take a cynical view of changes. In Ecclisiastes it is written that: “the thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”

And an important Taoist principle is “confronting any changes by not changing at all.” In an ideal world, we would allow individuals to grow on their own terms, at their own pace.

But in this competitive market-driven world, profit is derived from buzz, noises and dynamism.

As Nik Kinley and Shlomo Ben-Hur observe in their book “Changing Employee Behavior: A Practical Guide for Managers,” in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business world, changing people’s behavior is “something that managers will have to do well ... if they and their businesses are to succeed.”

The changes in question can mean training people in essential skills, improving their ability to work with colleagues, and discouraging them from doing certain things.

Translating intention into sustained behavior change is far from easy. Just ask yourself: how successful were you on keeping your last New Year’s resolution?

Over recent decades, the number of training programs and workshops intended to adapt people to change has exploded, yet as Ben-Hur and Kinley observe, “even the most wildly optimistic estimates of how much learning from these events is transferred into real behaviors back in the workplace do not go much beyond 34 percent.”

Such techniques have become hopelessly overrated.

According to the book, 99 percent of HR professionals believe that coaching is an effective tool for changing behavior, yet only 19 percent believe that the coaching going on in their business is effective.

Such figures are all the more startling when one considers that training was a US$135 billion business in 2013.

According to the authors, there are two faults with the seemingly endless range of coaching programs. First, they are more about processes and steps than techniques for making changes happen. Second, however sophisticated they seem, they rarely fulfill the two basic steps of first identifying problems and then resolving them.

“The key lesson here is that if you want to change someone’s behavior, their context — the environment and situations in which they operate — has to act like a life-support machine for the new, desired behavior,” observe Kinley and Ben-Hur.

There is plenty of research to support such claims. Studies have repeatedly found that although therapies can be effective at treating depression, the sufferer’s environment is a significant predictor of the efficacy of therapy.

In other words, those who fall back into depression tend to inhabit more negative environments and have less family support than those who manage to avoid further bouts of depression.

Identification and resolution are not enough on their own because one needs to shape, adapt and fine-tune the context which one lives before one can expect a desired change to happen.

The authors identify four factors they believe critical in catalyzing real change, namely: motivation (does a person want to change?), ability (do they have the skills required for change?), psychological capital (do they have the inner resources needed to sustain change?) and a supportive environment (do elements in their working environment support change?).

This is where the book can be helpful. It presents a practical guide with tools and techniques that focus on these four factors and promise to lead to positive changes.

By showing how to create the context or life-support system in which behavior change can be successful, the book offers methods drawn from the fields of psychology, psychotherapy and behavioral economics. In the end, readers should be better prepared to overcome the most common, everyday challenges that managers face.




 

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