Making Behavior Change Stick

Through RHR’s Leading at Scale executive development program, we’ve helped thousands of leaders change their behavior in the interest of making themselves more scalable. Indeed, leaders often have to make numerous behavioral shifts to prepare themselves for bigger and more complex roles. However, behavior change isn’t easy.

To change our behavior, we typically have to leverage the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which helps govern self-control, among other functions. The PFC requires more energy than any other part of the brain, and it’s much easier for us to simply operate on autopilot. When we try to change our behavior, the neural connections in our brains and the chemicals in our bodies conspire against us, urging us to respond to familiar triggers exactly as we always have. The PFC is also easily compromised by several factors such as the amygdala hijack (when we have especially intense emotional responses), a lack of sleep, and a sugar crash. To increase the probability of making behavioral change stick, we recommend six strategies with leaders we coach.

Make it Small

When changing behavior, we want to rely on the PFC and self-control less rather than more. Part of the solution is to focus on building tiny habits—a phrase made popular by social scientist BJ Fogg—instead of trying to make large-scale changes all at once. As an example, consider a leader who wants to exercise more. Instead of signing up and training for a marathon, she might focus on the tiny change of simply walking 15 minutes during her lunch break. Often, a small change creates positive momentum and a bit of a snowball effect on behavior change.

Make it Easy

To limit the need for self-control or willpower even further, leaders should structure their environments to minimize obstacles and make behavior change as easy as possible. For example, getting more exercise might be a challenge for a leader who has back-to-back meetings all day. Instead of upending her calendar, the leader might buy and use a treadmill desk, so meetings no longer need to be canceled or rescheduled.

Utilize the Habit Loop

At our core, human beings are stimulus-response animals. The association between trigger and behavior is strengthened when followed by a reward, a process author Charles Duhigg describes as the habit loop. To exploit the habit loop, leaders should identify clear triggers to cue new behaviors. Similarly, leaders should reward themselves in some manner after exhibiting the new behaviors. Our leader who wants to exercise more might use checking her inbox as a trigger to walk on her treadmill desk. Exercise often provides its own reward in the form of elevated levels of noradrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin. As an example of a less organically occurring reward, a leader might binge-watch an extra episode of a favorite TV show the evening after exhibiting a new behavior successfully.

Boost Motivation

Increased motivation typically brings with it an elevated level of dopamine, sharpening the prefrontal cortex to support greater focus and self-control. Leaders can increase the probability of successful change by giving themselves motivation boosts. In some cases, this might involve choosing a behavior that one is already highly motivated to address. In others, it might involve continually reminding oneself of the various benefits to be realized through changing a particular behavior.

Measure Your Progress

Behavior change is often an ongoing exercise in calibration and recalibration. When the leader in our example walks for 15 minutes, does she elevate her heart rate enough to reach zone 2 cardio? Is she burning as many calories as she wants? Feedback from our team and colleagues also helps us gauge whether our behavior is having the intended impact. Adjustments can be made based on the data we receive. Along with recalibration, measurement and feedback drive motivation, allowing us to see tangible results from the changes we’ve made.

Create Accountability and Enlist Support

Measurement also helps us hold ourselves accountable for behavior change. Even though accountability measures often feel more like sticks than carrots, they can have the effect of bolstering focus and motivation for a given behavior change. Our leader who wants to exercise more might keep an accountability log of how much she walks each day. She might also leverage positive peer pressure by making her commitment public and informing others of her progress.

Perhaps the flipside of accountability is support. In trying to change behavior, we can encounter several obstacles: our motivation wanes; we might not be especially proficient with a new behavior; we might try out a new behavior and not get the results we want; we might lose focus and become distracted by other issues and demands. A support partner such as a coach or mentor prevents us from trying to address obstacles by ourselves. A skilled support partner can activate regions in the brain that support behavior change.

–Michael Peterman