1/3/23, 6:58 PM How To Make Good Habits Easy And Bad Habits Hard

FORBES LEADERSHIP LEADERSHIP STRATEGY

How To Make Good Habits

Easy And Bad Habits Hard

Christine Comaford Contributor

I write about leveraging neuroscience to create remarkable leadership.

Jan 17, 2016, 03:58pm EST

My friend is an elementary school teacher specializing in

emotionally disturbed kids and working on a campus dedicated to
that population. She spends the first month of school teaching her
students how to behave in the classroom: how to line up, how to
greet her every morning (she asks them to look her in the eyes, say
“good morning” and shake her hand), how to transition between
subjects and stations, how to pack up at the end of the day…etc. She
teaches very little else that first month, “just” habits.

A month sounds extreme, but she has the fewest incidents of

physical violence on a campus where physical restraints are
common and her students log in more hours of actual, disruption
free, learning than any other classroom there. You see, no one ever
taught that group of children how to behave in a culturally
appropriate way. They just got in trouble when they couldn’t hold
their emotional issues and didn’t have good habits to fall back on.
By explicitly training them in habits that support learning and
cooperation, she creates a positive culture in her classroom.

Culture is made up of many habits. Many of which we don’t think

about, or think are unimportant.
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1/3/23, 6:58 PM How To Make Good Habits Easy And Bad Habits Hard

Which Of Your Habits Are “Normal”?

What habits does your team consider normal? Do people put dishes
in the dishwasher or leave them in the sink for someone else? Do
people put bowls of sugar out in front of their diabetic teammate
who’s trying to abstain? Do people communicate when something’s
going wrong or do they hide?

Some habits may seem trivial but they add up to a total culture.
Think about Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly where the argument (as
told by Gretchen Rubin) of the growing heap is:

If ten coins are not enough to make a man

rich, what if you add one coin? What if you
add another? Finally, you will have to say
that no one can be rich unless one coin
can make him so.

In other words, things add up. Eventually one very small thing, one
trivial incident causes a blow up, or creates an “I don’t care”
culture, or one coin makes a man rich.

What kind of culture do your teams’ habits add up to? A culture of

open communication? Of trust? Of support?  Do they create safety,
belonging and mattering?

Or do they add up to fear, distrust, and competition? Is Critter

State prevalent?

What kind of culture would best serve your strategic goals?

Make “Good” Habits Easy, “Bad” Habits Hard

Okay, so you looked at how your team’s habits add up to your

culture, and you see some room for improvement. Now what?

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First look around (and enlist your team to look around) for the easy
fixes. Do you make the “bad habits” (things that do not support
your desired culture) hard and the “good habits” (the things you’d
like to see more of) easy? Or even fun?

It’s amazing how humans will habituate themselves around things

that are more convenient.  That’s why retailers love the “one click”
shopping button (and why I blocked mine). How can you make it
more convenient for your team to engage in the habits that support
your organization’s values? How can you make it inconvenient to
do otherwise?

Making the habits we want to encourage fun also adds to their

allure. In Sweden a piano stairway decreased escalator use and
increased stairway use by 66%.

If the little things are in place, how much more likely is it that your
team will feel comfortable calling on each other when something
major goes wrong?

The Pitfall Of The Reward Strategy

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When first seeking to change organization-wide habits, it can be

tempting to employ a Behavioral Approach, i.e. the carrot and the
stick. One problem with extrinsic rewards is that once the reward
(or punishment) ceases, so does the behavior. Our brain has then
been wired up to get something and if it doesn’t get that (even if we
like the activity) we won’t do it as a habit.

In fact a study (Lepper et al. 1973) about intrinsic and extrinsic

rewards on motivation using children and drawing showed that
rewards had the exact opposite effect and actually reduced
motivation.  In the study, children were selected who already liked
to draw. Those that were offered a reward to draw not only did the
least amount of drawing during the experiment, but also long
afterwards.

In addition, the Behaviorist Approach (rewards and punishments)

draws attention away from problem solving. As it turns out
attention is our most precious commodity when it comes to habit
change.

Creating The Habits We Would Like

According to David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz in their informative

article about the brain and organizational change, “Try to change
another person’s behavior, even with the best possible justification,
and he or she will experience discomfort. The brain sends out
powerful messages that something is wrong, and the capacity for
higher thought is decreased. Change itself thus amplifies stress and
discomfort; and managers (who may not, from their position in the
hierarchy, perceive the same events in the same way that
subordinates perceive them) tend to underestimate the challenges
inherent in implementation.”

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The key seems to be in how to create and maintain focused

attention on problem solving and the desired habits. Once things
move from the frontal lobes into the basal ganglia they no longer
require fixed attention. They’ve been grooved in, and we no longer
have to decide anything or experience those uncomfortable error
messages.

Thomas Malone and Mark Lepper identified several sources of

intrinsic motivation:

Most habit change experts agree that the small step, one (or a very
few) things at a time work best to form new habits. But mostly we
want to target one thing at a time and lock it in place. Eventually all
those small things add up to a big SmartTribe culture.

What habits would you like to change at your company?

Christine Comaford (@Comaford) of SmartTribes

Institute combines neuroscience and business strategy to help
leaders get what they want. Her latest NY Times bestselling book
is SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together.

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Christine Comaford

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