Behavioural Choice and Change (1/2)
The most flexible person usually wins – how to generate choice and change in behaviours at work (1/2)
One of the things you’ll often hear me banging on about is the principle (in my kind of coaching) that:
the person with the most flexibility is the one most likely to succeed.
That is, if you can adapt your approach, change your behaviour, in a way that remains authentic, then you’ll be more likely to overcome obstacles and influence people positively.
In a leadership sense, you might hear people talking about whether or not somebody has “leadership range”, and this is the same thing. Can you adapt your leadership behaviours, the way you do leadership, to best suit the people around you, the circumstances you find yourselves in and the things you want to achieve?
When it comes to dealing with other people, it’s almost always easier to change yourself than to change others. Actually, in my view, getting others to change very often requires us to change ourselves in some way, even if its only to find a better way of communicating with them.
When you see this principle of flexibility in action, it’s a very powerful thing. People sometimes come here to my coaching studio feeling totally stuck. What they’ve got to do is create enough wiggle-room in their circumstances to get unstuck – like they need to spray some WD40 on a bolt that hasn’t been turned in a while.
And the best way to create that wiggle-room, that all-important flexibility, is to work on behavioural choices . On having different ways of going about things.
It seems to me to go a bit like this:
- If you’ve only got one way of doing things, then sooner or later you’re going to get stuck.
- If you’ve only got two ways of going about things, then sooner or later you’ll face a dilemma.
- When you’ve got three or more options, then you’ve got the ability to select what to do and how to do it, in a way most likely to suit the circumstances. Now you have choice.
I’m going to split the rest of this article into two, so I can tackle it with a bit of depth.
Carry on reading below to find out just what it is we’re talking about when we ask people to create choices in their behaviours. What is behaviour? What needs to be going on on the inside (mostly in our heads) and on the outside, when we’re looking for behavioural choice and change?
And then I’ll give some easy ways to actually generate more behavioural choices in this second article next month.
What Behaviour Is
In my very simplistic definition, behaviour has got two important dimensions.
First, the dimension of behaviour that most people consider (because it’s ultimately the only part that you’ll ever experience of somebody else’s behaviour) is what happens on the outside, and it’s this:
what you say and what you do.
This first, outside dimension, of behaviour is the one that most people start with when they’re looking for change. And it’s the kind of thing that’ll get reported to you in a 360 feedback or an appraisal. It’s also almost always the wrong place to start when you’re wanting to generate choice and change.
Where you should be starting, is with the second, far more interesting part of behaviour:
what happens on the inside, to generate what you say and what you do.
From a behavioural point of view, what happens on the inside to determine what you say and do on the outside has got four key factors. I’m summarising like crazy here, just to give you some useful headlines about this stuff. In a coaching session we’d dive into these and have a fun time exploring around each of them quite a bit. And I also know from experience that if you’re reading this because you might want to help yourself or others to create more behavioural choices and to see some kind of positive change in your outcomes, then even just working with this at a headline level can create a great deal of new wiggle-room for you. The four factors of behaviour on the inside to consider are these:
1. Why you do it (what’s your MOTIVATION?)
2. What Outcome you want to achieve (what’s your INTENTION?)
3. The Sequence of words and actions you might take to carry this out (Your STRATEGY)
4. What Evidence will you need to see, hear or feel to know that it’s working (what CRITERIA need to be satisfied?)
Just asking some basic questions and having a few moments reflection on each of those four factors can often be enough to generate new choices and the flexibility to succeed.
