Leaders: Learn the Neuroscience Behind Change Resistance to Master It

In the rapidly advancing world of technology, all business leaders must be agile in order to avoid fading into the background. They must be able to pivot, adjust their vision when presented with innovative strategies, and adapt to the major workforce trends headed their way. All of this requires one basic component: change.

Yet change is not so easy for humans and can breed anxiety and fear. But that’s not just because we are creatures of habit. Neurosciences and cognitive sciences show that change is difficult for humans for three core reasons.

Three Core Reasons for Resistance to Change

1. Habits are powerful and efficient

Your brain creates a mind map that sorts reality into a perceptual order and creates effective, quickly established habits. This means your brain limits what it sees and reality conforms to past perceptions.

Why is this a problem? Because it means all of your lessons in life and business keep you from seeing things in fresh ways. Counter-intuitive isn’t it? The more experience you have, the more limited you can become. We’ve all seen leaders “stuck in their ways,” and know how frustrating, and potentially damaging to the business, this can be.

2. Your brain hates change

When you’re learning something new, your prefrontal cortex has to work very hard. And your brain uses 25% of your total energy! It’s no wonder why we feel worn out and our head hurts from learning.

3. You have to “see and feel” new ways of doing things

To really make a change, you can’t just read about something; experiential learning is critical. Why? Because as you learn, your brain actually changes, reflecting new decisions, mind maps, and reality sorting. So when change presents itself and you haven’t experienced what that change will be like, your brain will hijack the new thought patterns and try to put your mindset back into the old way of thinking.

These three factors paint a surprising picture: the limitations to growth are really self-imposed by the mind maps of former successes. All of our past perceptions hold back what we are able to perceive in the present.

Besides this unconscious self-limiting behavior, the fear that change elicits is also limiting. This is called “fear conditioning.”

What is Fear Conditioning?

The brain stores all the details from a particular fear stimulus, such as time of day, images, sounds, smells, and weather, in your long-term memory. That makes the memory “very durable,” but also fragmented, triggering the full gamut of physical and emotional responses every single time a similar fear stimulus shows up.

As research from the University of Minnesota explains it, “Once the fear pathways are ramped up, the brain short-circuits more rational processing paths and reacts immediately to signals from the amygdala.  When in this overactive state, the brain perceives events as negative and remembers them that way.”

So remember that initiative that totally bombed? Your brain may be using that experience to prevent you from other, more successful initiatives.

What Neuroscience Tells Us about Fear

Neuroscience has more to say on the topic of fear. The main thing to note is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off. So when our brains anticipate loss, we tend to hold onto what we have. In simple terms, fear prompts retreat, which is the opposite of progress. And what do leaders need? Progress.

So how can leaders take all of these facts about change and fear in stride and make progress anyway? What do you do if your brain is constantly fighting change, yet you need to make changes in order to push your business to the next level? Here are three pre-emptive steps to take in order to initiate and become accustomed to change.

What Can You Do to Initiate Change?

1. Get out of the office

Stop going to your industry trade shows; see what other industries are doing instead. Don’t focus on current market segments – look at new ones.

2. Go exploring

Transform into an amateur anthropologist and spend a day in the life of your customer or non-customer. This helps you listen to real pain points and quickly come up with new solutions to persistent problems.

3. Build an innovative culture

It’s a big leap from thinking you are innovative to being innovative. Being innovative requires you to build a culture of innovation. How do you do that? By creating a methodology that encourages people to share ideas.

4. Experience the changes yourself that you’re asking your organization to understand

In “Neurosciences and Leadership,” David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz tell us: “When people solve a problem themselves, the brain releases a rush of neurotransmitters like adrenaline.” This rush will inspire you to embrace and champion the change you are requesting of your teams.

Do you have any tips for instigating change in an organization? I’d love for my community to hear them.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

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Three Tips to Manage a Toxic Work Environment

Organizations are full of individual and group relationships. Even if you work on a small team in a mid-size organization, it’s possible to have over 25 different working relationships when you consider a relationship with each person on your team, peers, colleagues on other teams, clients and vendors.

According to the 2014 Globe force survey, 78 percent of people who work between 30 to 50 hours per week actually spend more time with their coworkers than with their families. Having friends at work increases organizational commitment, improves employee engagement and increases overall employee satisfaction levels. However, unhealthy work relationships decrease each one of these factors. 

Impact of unhealthy work relationships

A Harvard Business Review article states that there are three traits top leaders use to maintain healthy and powerful relationships: a clear purpose, an understanding of the kind of relationship needed and a commitment to pursue that relationship even in the hard times. In addition, healthy relationships include trust, integrity and respect.

While we all want healthy work relationships, unhealthy work relationships can develop. Unhealthy work relationships lead to workplace stress, higher disengagement and lack of loyalty. About $500 billion is lost by the US economy because of workplace stress. According to a study by Queens School of Business and Gallup, disengaged workers have 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents, and 60% more errors and defects. Lack of loyalty leads to the increase in voluntary turnover by about 50%.

One thing that creates unhealthy work relations is organizational power dynamics, which refer to how different levels of employees deal with each other and where one of these employees / groups is more dominant than the other employee/group. This use of dominance does not involve use of force; instead it uses workplace influence, which could be created by gender, organizational hierarchy, ethnicity, social bias and other factors.

The development of careers, particularly at senior levels, depends on acquiring power. How does this happen? Individuals gain power in absolute terms at someone else’s expense. As most organizations have a pyramid structure, there is a scarcity of positions as one moves up the organizational hierarchy. This is what determines how the power dynamics play out.

How can leaders spot unhealthy power dynamics before the workplace relationships become toxic?

Three Tips for Managing Workplace Power Dynamics

1. Create clear, professional boundaries

Regardless of the organizational size, ensure there are established, professional boundaries in the workplace. For example, if a boss calls a direct report on the weekend, is the direct report expected to return the call on the weekend or on Monday? Is alcohol allowed on the workplace premises and if so, what are the norms when someone says something inappropriate or wants to drive while under the influence of alcohol? Finally, what is allowed or not allowed while traveling? Establishing workplace norms prevents an imbalanced power dynamic from occurring.

2. Monitor language

Words matter because words become thoughts and thoughts become behavior. So be mindful of the accepted organizational verbiage. Expressions such as ‘Man up!’ or ‘Don’t be so emotional and sensitive’ are generally said by one gender about another gender and therefore sexist. ‘You don’t understand how the game works’ shows an imbalanced power dynamic, as one person implies that s/he is smarter or more experienced than the other. Someone regularly saying, ‘That’s not what happened’ can create a feeling of gas lighting, making the other person question reality and become subservient in the power dynamics. So listen for language that may inadvertently create an unhealthy power dynamic.

3. Notice office volatility

Employees are human, and regardless of how talented they are, every person has flaws. Some of those shortcomings may create a volatile work environment, which creates havoc on work relationships and causes stress for everyone. The key to managing this volatile environment is to manage individual responses. Take time to learn what triggers people’s emotions and avoid conversations that can contribute to the overall volatility. Employees need to stay calm rather than engage in office drama.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

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How to Train Your Staff With A Decreasing Budget

In our last blog, How to Use the 70/20/10 Model to Develop Careers, we discussed the “what”, “when” and “how” of using the 70/20/10 Adult Learning Model for employee development. Now let’s discuss the “why”.

Managers face daily decisions to ensure their team gets what’s needed for success. But with budgets getting smaller, it’s hard to stretch resources. After reading this blog, you will learn several tips on how to stretch your training budget, spend wisely, plan strategically and still meet your employee development goals.

The “Why” to Employee Development

What is the return on investment (ROI) for a manager who wants to allocate time and financial resources for her employees? Simply put: a better prepared employee is a more productive employee. According to the Association of Talent Development (ATD), companies that invest in training employees see a 218% higher income per employee than companies that don’t. The 70/20/10 model for employee development is one effective tool to leverage the current talents of your staff and build stronger teams, which increases the organizational bottom line.

We know that the manager cannot motivate an employee to improve; that has come from within the employee. However, managers can create a learning environment for them to grow. How? The first step is to take an inventory of the current staff, using a consistent assessment tool such as a 360-degree assessment, with an objective lens to collect skills data. This full assessment will provide two sets of data in one assessment: strengths and areas to grow. By selecting the right 360 tool, you can complete two tasks at once for the same price, creating cost savings for your budget. This 360 view lets managers begin to leverage the strengths in their staff that can be shared with other employees; it also shows the delta between the strengths and weaknesses, so you can create the best strategy to decrease the weaknesses of the entire team.

Why Are Employees Leaving Your Organization?

In our daily lives, we use personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings to make our decisions. And that’s perfectly fine. They serve us well in many ways.

However, when it comes to improving work performances, personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings just don’t cut it.

Data can improve your own, your team’s, and your organization’s performance; people analytics can help. People analytics is the data that identifies workforce patterns and trends. Here are some questions that can be answered with people analytics:

• How engaged are our employees?
• What skills does my organization need to invest in, to achieve our mission?
• Why are my employees leaving the organization?

These questions and many more are the kinds of questions that people analytics can answer. Even if you don’t regularly use data in your job, you can still learn a lot with people analytics, regardless of your supervisory level.

A brief primer on people analytics

Before we answer why employees are leaving your organization, let’s start by defining a few terms:

Data are facts, statistics, or other items of information. Data are all around us; you just have to know how to look for it, compile it, and make sense of it. We can use data to understand problems and processes at a micro-level (between individuals), at a mezzo-level (team-level), or at a macro level (organizational level).

So who uses data?

One group of people who use data are data analysts. Data analysts organize, examine, analyze and use data to draw meaning. They tend to focus on understanding previous events to describe things that have already happened.

How to Break the Glass Ceiling

Panelists at the IREM Global Summit share best practices for mitigating bias and advancing diversity.

Cultivating talent is the industry-wide mission for the property management profession and all of the commercial real estate. At the Institute of Real Estate Management’s Global Summit last week in San Francisco, an international panel of rising leaders shared best practices and strategies for advancing that goal through diversity.

Signs of progress for women in real estate stand side by side with persistent contradictions. Women entrepreneurs enjoy a rising profile; nearly one-third of all privately held firms are owned by women. On the educational front, women bring more to the table; they hold more undergraduate degrees than men and earn 50 percent more graduate degrees than their male counterparts. Women’s workplace priorities are led by flexibility and quality of life, according to national studies; compensation ranks third.

The speakers also recounted the qualities that women in business tend to bring to the table. “The more diversity, the better your product is going to be, the better your bottom line is going to be,” noted Anne Loehr, executive vice president at the Center for Human Capital Innovation and the panel’s moderator.

Eight Ways to Improve People Processes in Your Organization

People are a critical part of every organization’s balance sheet. Investments related to acquiring, retaining, developing, and inspiring employees are critical to your organization’s success, requiring a thoughtful strategy to build and maintain a productive workforce.

CHCI’s talent life cycle, called PRIDALRM, refers to the interrelated strategies that support the most important assets of an organization – the people. Most of the activities that occur within an organization’s human resources, human capital, and talent management divisions can be distilled to one of the eight components highlighted in the PRIDALRM image. 

CHCI uses PRIDALRM to diagnose problem areas and develop targeted remediation efforts. This systematic approach to organizational performance encourages the interconnection among elements and alignment to outcomes. Let’s review the eight components.

Starting with the “north star” of the talent life cycle, the workforce PLAN sets up a framework that allows organizations to address current needs and identify future opportunities and threats. It helps answer the following questions:

• Does the organization’s workforce have the right capabilities today?
• What resources will the organization need to be successful in five years?
• How can our human capital approach give us a competitive advantage in our industry?

The next component, RECRUIT, is about talent acquisition. Talent acquisition is the organizational process which fills current and future positions and manages the transition of new employees to becoming fully productive. According to research commissioned by Glassdoor, 95% of companies admit to hiring the wrong people every year.  In fact, Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) identified that the cost of a bad hire could be up to five times the amount of a bad hire’s annual salary; so hiring the wrong person is a costly mistake. Here are three categories of questions to ask candidates at the initial hiring process to help determine if candidates are a good fit in your organization: