A client shared with me yesterday that his team hadn’t adapted well to changing market needs. It got me thinking.
What insights on adaptability can we glean from a TED Talk, a medical statistic and a lame’ish joke?
The TED Talk (link below): venture capitalist Natalie Fratto looks for founders/leaders with high Adaptability Quotient. Her 6-min talk has a few key points, the first of which is that in an age of hyper-change, adaptability is key.
Next, the medical statistic (link below): 9 in 10 heart patients don’t change their lifestyles post-treatment. In a matter literally relating to life and death, only 10% follow through on advice on What to do to live more healthily.
Finally, the lame’ish joke:
Q: How many psychologists do we need to change a bulb?
A: Only one. But the bulb must really feel that it is safe to change.
What are the insights for the workplace?
- Adaptability – the ability to change our behaviours – is a superpower that enables us to ride each wave of change to higher ground. Absent adaptability, we have no say how each wave sweeps us along and where it discards us.
- Behavioural change is hard. And yet managers are surprised when their teams don’t adopt new behaviours after a quick chat. And odds are that the same surprised manager who’s been asked by his own manager to say communicate more assertively (or less!) has been struggling to do so. It is clearly not enough to just know What to do.
- What else is needed for successful behavioural change? There are many factors. I’ll just focus on one here. The employee being encouraged to change sees the potential change through a lens of risk and reward. While they may intellectually understand the benefits of change, their emotional core views the change as full of risks. What if I fail? What if I look stupid? What will my boss think?
I’ve seen this multiple times with different clients. As hard as an executive works to adopt a new behaviour, their progress is typically slow until their manager has a specific conversation with them.
As hard as behavioural change is, absent the confidence that “my boss will have my back as I start this journey”, change becomes doubly difficult.
So leaders, to get our teams to adopt new behaviours, we need to add our version of this sentence in our conversations with them:
“As you start this change, it’ll feel awkward, but stick with it; I’ll have your back”.