Embedding Learning When Change and Adaptation Is More Important Than Ever!

Updated August 17th 2023

Imagine if I proposed that the absence of a vital element could render all the investments your company makes in employee learning and development futile, both in terms of time and money.

A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about this problem.

During a zoom lunch date (one of the things I am doing to give myself some work-life balance while working from home),

I asked her what she had going on at work that afternoon.

Her face shifted to irritation and, with an exaggerated eye-roll, she said:

“Ugh, we have another training workshop… this time on motivation during Covid-19. I could not be bothered.”

As a performance psychologist I am fascinated by motivation and so this statement made me laugh. I was immediately reminded that we should never assume people are interested in the same things as us!

Further questioning clarified that my friend had been subjected to lecture-style training sessions with little interaction and no opportunity to apply what she was being taught. These sessions felt like a waste of time to her, and in fact they were, because afterwards she never felt able to implement the knowledge.

The Power of Habits

We now know that at least 40% of our daily actions are habits. Habits are a combination of automatic
thoughts, sub-conscious reactions and established routines. The longer we have been following these
routines, the harder they are to change. Even when we have the desire and the best intentions to
change, the sheer strength of our established neural pathways pull us back to our old ways of doing
things. When we don’t understand the processes behind this, we are left feeling powerless to make our
desired changes a reality. This feeling of powerlessness feeds a fixed mindset, which whispers to us
there is no point in trying hard to change as it won’t make any difference.

But why is learning such a struggle?

Implementing new learning is, at its essence, a struggle against our established habits. It requires a
strong clarity of what you are looking to change and the sheer discipline of repeatedly choosing a new
way of acting or thinking until it becomes your new habit or way of being. Contrary to previous research
which suggested it takes 21 days to form a new habit, we know now that this process can take anything from 3 weeks to
to six months, depending on our focus, determination and how our individual brain works.

So, the problem is this: learning and development training can be waste of time and money if we do not
give people the tools to understand their own learning, take control of their behaviour and implement
what they have learned.

Figuring out how to do exactly that is a priority at Adaptas. As a team, we teach learning and habit
change as a core element in all our training, from presentation skills to higher business performance. We
have seen the benefits of this approach, with clients often reporting back to us that through
understanding their own learning and habit change challenges they were able to take control of their
choices and behaviours and make long-term, impactful changes in work and in life.

The crucial ingredient, as we see it, is habit change.

See more about learning and habit change in Celine’s book ‘Our Learning Brain’.

The Unexpected Side Effects of Habit Change

Anyone who has set, worked towards, and eventually gave up on a new year’s resolution knows that behaviour change is not easy.

We set out with the best of intentions and yet the drag of our established habits inevitably pulls us back into our old way of doing things. Habits sit at the foundation of our daily behaviour. When you look at this process closely, you see that successful behaviour change and learning comes down to successful habit change.

At Adaptas, we incorporate habit change education into all our workshops so that our clients can learn how to create long-term lasting changes and experience the benefits of positive, constructive thoughts and behaviours at work and in life. Through this work we notice that by learning how to effectively change their habits, our clients experience a host of often unexpected, exciting side effects.

Positive Thought. The way we think about ourselves comes down to habit, just like the time we wake up in the morning. Through habit change education, our clients learn to recognise and disrupt negative thought patterns. They often report to us that they feel lighter, are more content and experience enhanced enjoyment of work and general life.

Supportive Beliefs. Our beliefs about ourselves and the world are formed through habitual thought and behaviour. Challenging and changing habits around unsupportive beliefs can completely change someone’s life. Building supportive beliefs allows our clients to move away from fear-based decision making and this can have a hugely positive impact on happiness and performance.

Increased Confidence. Clients often tell us they experience a sensation of increased control over their choices, environment and emotions as a result of understanding habit change. This has a positive impact on their self-confidence as they feel better equipped to deal with challenging situations at work and in their personal lives.

Increased curiosity. Habit change work conditions us to continuously ask ourselves questions about our thoughts and behaviours. This results in enhanced self-awareness and a sense of curiosity about our own learning and potential. Approaching problems from a state of curiosity, rather than fear increases creative problem solving for our clients.

Reduced stress and anxiety. Habit change teaches us about how fear and anxiety is hard-wired in our brains as a form of self-protection. Understanding this process, recognising triggers and learning how to move our thoughts away from our flight or fight response gives our clients the power to reduce their anxious responses with time and practice.

In short, habit change is about so much more than performance. At Adaptas we believe that understanding habit change is a key ingredient to building a happier, healthier life at work and at home. Let’s get started!

A Look Inside An Adaptas Workshop On VALUES

Updated August 3rd 2023

Values

Values are a buzz word these days, but what are they, really? They are identified with single words like honesty, integrity and loyalty. But even with those words to hand, we can struggle to get a handle on what a value is and what it means to us.

Often the serious ones come to mind first. These are sometimes the values we are taught to hold by our families, communities and jobs, values that are heralded in films, love stories and fairy tales. These values are valid, but do they truly represent what is most important to us? What about adventure or enthusiasm? What about stability or calmness, compassion, brilliance or wonder?

Let’s take a quick look inside an Adaptas workshop on values.

A group of coaches-in-training sit with pen and paper in hand. You can feel the pensive nature of everyone’s thoughts as they sift through the layers of words representing the many values they have heard of, taken on board or dismissed over the years. Which ones are mine? Which are the most important to me?

When they are done, each list is as unique as the individual themselves. The next step is to get to know their chosen values a little more personally. Choosing one of their top three values, everyone goes through a short interview process that allows them to dig into what that value is for them. What does it look like? Feel like? What does that value like and dislike? How does that value help? How does it hinder? Thirty minutes later our trainee coaches are deep in conversation. Someone had a burst of realisation at the end of her interview: she wasn’t living to her chosen value as closely as she thought. Another individual reflects on the contradictory nature of two of his values and shares that understanding this has illuminated the contradictions in some of his decision making.

“I find that the ‘ah-ha’ moments that people have, come in when they start to recognise the decisions they are making in their own lives based on values that they either took for granted, or had never named. And it is often a mind-blowing moment. This is because, generally, we take our values for granted and don’t really think about them.”

Dr. Celine Mullins

Orienting to our values can be a powerful source of motivation and clarity. Conflicts are often based in opposing values and by understanding our own values we can find more empathy for the other person’s values and perspective. Difficult decisions can be made clearer by following the guiding light of what is truly important to us. Here at Adaptas, we think and talk about values a lot and we encourage you to do the same!

You never know, there could be some interesting self-discovery waiting just around the corner.

Winning ‘Excellence in Digital Learning’ Award: Our Immersive Sales Star VR Video

Updated August 3rd 2023

‘Immersive Sales Star’ is an IITD Training Award winner.

Institute of Training & Development, National Training Awards is recognised as the premier Learning & Development event for industry. The purpose of the IITD National Training Awards is to promote excellence, best practice and innovation in Training and Learning & Development, and to highlight the importance of this area in today’s business climate.

Excellence in Digital Learning Award.

We are delighted to announce that ‘Immersive Sales Star’ won the ‘Excellence in Digital Learning’ award from the Institute of Training & Development Awards 2019. Adaptas created ‘Immersive Sales Star’ with the Learning and Development Team at FBD Insurance. ‘Immersive Sales Star’ is a number of Virtual Reality simulations of Sales Call conversations being utilised for motor and home insurance customer contact centre training. It is being used to scale best-in-class behaviours and competencies and replace the need for the shadow sessions.

What do FBD say about this VR training solution?

“Great solutions in business are never created by a single individual; they are done by a talented and committed group. This is why we chose to partner with Adaptas Training. Adaptas have been early adopters of using Virtual Reality technology, a medium which enables more immersive staff training. The Adaptas team helped us create an innovative, practical and results orientated training solution to overcome a real business challenge. The ‘Immersive Sales Star’ tool has improved product knowledge which in turn is improving Sales Performance and has eliminated the cost associated with employing a full time Sales Coach”

-John Mulreid, Learning and Development Manager, FBD Insurance

What are the learners saying after using ‘Immersive Sales Star’?

“When I made my first real call, I felt like I had done it before”

“It brought all the jigsaw pieces of the training together for me”

”It makes you feel like you have done a call and achieved the sale”

“It made me feel like I stepped into an expert seller’s shoes”

“It trains you in the exact environment that you’re working in rather than a meeting or training room”

“Rather that skating around the question, I now go straight in and ask directly for the sale”

You can check out the Immersive Sales Star FBD case study here.

Listening Is The Greatest Sign Of Respect You Can Give Someone.

Updated August 3rd 2023

Good communication skills benefit workers, CEOs and companies’ performance.

Every organisation has its own culture. This is largely determined by how its people interact, communicate and make decisions. The tone of communication is set by leadership, ripples throughout all areas within a company and extends to its customers and target audience via its brand.

A positive and uplifting spirit of communication is the fabric of a strong organisational culture that influences job satisfaction, productivity and well-being at work. It goes even further; it improves retention of talented people and cuts down on absenteeism by creating a welcoming and open ethos where workers are happy to engage.

What is good communication?

Good communication is about much more than the practical sharing of information between individuals, teams, groups or departments. The way information is structured and shared, the tone of messages and personal communication styles have a big impact on how information is received and acted on.

As management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker said: “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”

Unfortunately, much of the communication that occurs at work is just the transmission of data. Many people don’t have the skill or don’t believe they have the time to make sure that their communication is understood by the receiver. This lack of clarity or misunderstanding is at the basis of most problems in organisations.

Employees and colleagues feel empowered when there are good communication lines between management and other levels. It builds confidence when truthful, transparent and current information is offered by superiors. It encourages the sharing of new ideas and creates safety for concerns to be expressed.

In reality, many employees resist sharing their opinions and ideas, because they don’t feel psychologically safe. Psychologically safety can be defined as the degree to which people view the environment as conducive to inter-personally risky behaviors like speaking up or asking for help. It also plays a vital role in helping people overcome barriers to learning and change in inter-personally challenging work environments.

Although the concept of psychological safety was introduced as a critical factor in helping people to learn new behaviors and overcome defensive routines 50 years ago, there has been a large body of further research on the impact of psychological safety over the past two decades, popularised by Amy Edmundson.

I love this quote from John H. Bryan, former chairman and CEO of Sara Lee Corporation

“You have to be willing sometimes to listen to some remarkably bad opinions. Because if you say to someone, ‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard; get on out of here!’—then you’ll never get anything out of that person again, and you might as well have a puppet on a string or a robot.”

Effective communication has a major impact on psychological safety. Distorted channels of communication or poorly structured information can lead to distrust, poor collaboration and a secretive, “them versus us” mentality, leading to interdepartmental friction or conflict. It can leave people filling in the blanks themselves, possibly incorrectly, and straying from the core values of the organisation.

Through inclusivity and collaboration, businesses thrive.

Leaders and managers can mistakenly believe that employees lack understanding of difficult issues or aren’t interested, so don’t share them. The same goes for bad news; sharing only the good puts working relationships in parent/child mode instead of those of trusted colleagues.

What do we mean by parent/ child mode? The psychologist Eric Berne developed the idea that people switch between different states of mind on a moment-by-moment basis, depending on what is happening around them. When we are in adult mode, we are rational and assertive, neither trying to control nor reacting aggressively towards others. When we are in parent, we either seek to control or we nurture (to the point where we often dis-empower other people) and when we are in child we shirk responsibility or let our emotions takeover. For example, when a manager takes a parent approach (controlling), the team member might react in child mode. And as mentioned above, when a manager is not transparent with colleagues this often sends them into parent or child mode, either looking to control or retreating from their responsibilities in their role.

Most employees, at every level, are more tuned in than some superiors give them credit for. Just as a customer who isn’t listened to may be lost, a colleague who isn’t heard or included in relevant issues can be alienated. Positive outcomes stem from being inclusive, knowing what needs to be shared, when and which methods of communication best convey it.

Encouraging a healthy communication culture between colleagues is equally important. Now, more than ever, cross-cultural teams with vastly differing perspectives need practices that build understanding, open and honest relationships for effective collaboration. It’s a strategic imperative in such a global, diverse and technologically dominated environment. One negative action, without a consistent culture of positive interaction, can have a domino effect throughout a team or department. A team member that ls left feeling dis-empowered is likely to pass this on and it begins a cycle of negativity, affecting collaboration and productivity.

I see where you’re coming from.

Interpersonal communications skills training is perhaps the most important investment an organisation must consider if it wants its people and its customers to avoid many mistakes that are made in seemingly simple interactions. It builds a foundation for the principles of good organisational communication.

Maintaining consistently positive interaction in the workplace is inherently difficult as there are many intricate aspects to how we interact which are not universally taught. Without even considering the non-verbal elements of communication, speaking alone requires the speaker to perform two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously: conceptualising the information to be conveyed and formulating a verbal message capable of conveying it. It also involves a third cognitively demanding aspect; listening.

The meaning of even the most banal utterance is grounded in a set of fixed assumptions about what the communicator knows, believes, feels and thinks. Every individual views the world from different vantage points, like background, experience, knowledge, education and gender, creating a unique perspective. To accommodate variation in perspective, communicators must take each other’s perspectives into account. As the social psychologist Roger Brown put it, effective communication “… requires that the point of view of the auditor (listener) be realistically imagined.” However, the other’s perspective is not always obvious.

As children, we assume everyone experiences the world in the same way we do. But even though we know better as adults, our judgement of others’ perspectives can be biased by our own points of view (egocentricity). Many interactions fail to achieve the objective in hand due to lack of understanding of another’s perspective and without the feedback which could give the opportunity to correct this. It can lead to poor comprehension of tasks among colleagues and clients can walk away feeling frustrated.

Listening doesn’t always come naturally

Most people speak at a rate of 2.5 words per second, often in a noisy environment with less than clear diction. We are usually unaware how unclear our communication can be. One of the vital skills necessary to be a good communicator is to be a good listener. When colleagues or those who report to you feel listened to and heard, it builds trust and respect, setting the scene for receptivity to what you communicate on an ongoing basis.

Being an active listener means paying close attention to others, including to non-verbal cues, withholding judgement and having a willingness to understand another’s perspective. Emotion expressed non-verbally can be more telling than the words people speak. Focus on tone of voice, pace of speech, facial expressions and gestures. Listen to hear the meaning behind what’s being said.

It helps to paraphrase or summarise what you’re hearing and reflect the feelings expressed. “What I hear you saying is…” When you’re not clear what’s being communicated, make this obvious. “I don’t quite understand what you are saying, could you repeat that?” When giving feedback, make it seem like it’s coming from an ally rather than an adversary.

This is easier the more relaxed you are. When stressed, communication can be abrupt, hurried or rambling, will be difficult to understand and messages may not be absorbed and applied. Your unease may transfer onto your colleague who could act this out by passing it on. Beginning with the idea that you want to help constructively will allow your colleague to pick up the value in your feedback and go away feeling supported. Many people, while listening, are evaluating or judging what’s being said or mentally multitasking and may miss important nuances.

Kevin Sharer of Harvard Business School learned the importance of effective listening while CEO of biotech giant, Amgen:

“For most of my career, I was an awful listener in almost every possible way. I was arrogant throughout my 30s for sure—maybe into my early 40s. My conversations were all about some concept of intellectual winning and ‘I’m going to prove I’m smarter than you.’ The best advice I ever heard about listening… (was) having only one objective: comprehension … only trying to understand what the person was trying to convey to me. I wasn’t listening to critique or object or convince. … as you become a senior leader, it’s a lot less about convincing people and more about benefiting from complex information and getting the best out of the people you work with. Listening … is … the greatest sign of respect you can give someone.”

How does communications training offer benefit?

As result of such a fast-paced and pressurised modern work environment, many leaders and managers are falling short of the type of communication skills that build productive working cultures. Busy people can have blind spots. A leader could be immensely talented but unaware of how he or she may be blocking personal potential with the wrong style of communication or impeding the trajectory of others in a team.

Habitual behaviour can be the most difficult to change as it becomes automatic. It’s not easy to step outside of ourselves and view our actions, and the impact of them, objectively. It can take focus on direct feedback or specialised communication training to clearly see how interpersonal relationships play out.

Well-designed processes challenge participants to complete tasks which reflect typical workplace and life situations. They focus on specific elements of communication to illuminate both positive and negative aspects of interactions. It’s an impartial and safe environment in which to explore the effect of new styles and approaches.

A good communications trainer will lead by example and emulate the traits of a great communicator by:

knowing how to listen to participants’ opinions and needs
waiting until the right moment to interject
encouraging awareness
guiding role play that clearly demonstrates common pitfalls
allowing time for reflection and assessment of how problems can arise
adding professional and personal experience and knowing when appropriate
creating a place of safety so everyone feels free to express
offering challenge when it’s constructive
recognising differences and being open to new opinions
being genuine, authentic and human
bringing participants to a clear understanding of communication that works.

Training is an ideal environment to explore a tendency to jump to incorrect assumptions. Instead of adopting a victim mentality unnecessarily, the habit of looking for another viewpoint can be introduced. Taking time to think and assess before making rash judgments and drawing unhelpful conclusions can avoid needless tension.

Flowers and chocolates at work?

Many companies are aware that good relationships are central to a collaborative, engaged and productive workforce. The cognitive culture is often healthily maintained. HR departments look for shared intellectual values; for traits in thinking and behaviour that fit company culture and a build harmonious team.

But we are still learning how important the emotional culture is to success. In 2014, Barsade & O’Neill conducted research which found that ‘companionate love’— “feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others” at work significantly influences job satisfaction, teamwork, burnout and a company’s financial performance.

The research showed that simply taking a moment to say “thank you” or ask how someone is doing has a positive impact enough to translate into measurable customer/client benefit. It illustrated across a variety of organisations and industries that it was the strength of an organisations companionate love culture that determined employee engagement. Where people felt comfortable to express affection, tenderness and caring, there were higher levels of job fulfilment, more commitment to the organisation and accountability for their work.

In workplaces that don’t experience or promote companionate love there are minimal displays of affection, caring and compassion among workers. People tend to be more indifferent towards each other and are less equipped to deal with situations that are going badly. “It is the small moments between co-workers—a warm smile, a kind note, a sympathetic ear—day after day, month after month, that help create and maintain a strong culture of companionate love and the employee satisfaction, productivity, and client satisfaction that comes with it.” It isn’t enough that people get paid. Feeling appreciated and loved at work is necessary too.

Good team leaders don’t tell, they ask.

Clear and consistent communication is one of the main ingredients central to high employee engagement. But when communication is too controlling, and is a guise for micromanaging colleagues, it can be counter-productive.

BIAC is a thinking, behavioural and adjustment profiling tool created in Ireland and now being used worldwide. One of its most useful aspects is in measuring levels of controlling thinking. The best score in this trait is neither at the top nor bottom, but right in the middle.

To score highly means that a manager, boss or team leader tends to tell his or her people how to operate, instead of supporting and empowering them to creatively come up with strategies and solutions themselves. This approach can block the development of talented people and stifle inspiration. High controlling thinking impacts on psychological safety, mentioned earlier, in a negative way.

Remaining firmly in charge without trusting others to do a good job and use their own initiative doesn’t just affect others. The leader who is overly controlling also suffers by carrying too much personal responsibility and becoming stressed. Their high expectations create habitual and unconscious controlling behaviour and they often cannot see the lost opportunities to allow others to rise to a challenge or the negative impact on themselves and others.

Having a low score in controlling thinking and behaviour also has its disadvantages. It translates into weak decision-making which can allow others to take charge inappropriately, leading to a feeling of dis-empowerment and low self-esteem.

People who are centered in controlling thinking and behaviour, as measured by BIAC, have no difficulty in empowering others but are fully capable of being in charge, when required. They ask open-ended questions, genuinely consider opinions of others and remain calmer and more effective in their roles. They are particularly good team leaders and tend to build dynamic and productive departments.

The benefits of great communication skills can’t be over-emphasised. They improve all aspects of working life, contribute to better well-being for everyone and positively effect results.

A final few words from Kevin Sharer (Harvard Business School & former CEO of Amgen).

“The cultural environment, of course, is going to define every aspect of communication. If you’re in a fear-driven, toxic environment, listening is going to be almost impossible, and I’ve been in places like that. Being the CEO, however, means that you can define the culture by whom you pick for positions under you and by the standards you enforce. I’ve always tried to emphasize an environment of partnership, teamwork, trust, and respect—and anyone with a bullying tendency, we fire. Of course, it’s not perfect; we’re human beings. But we try hard to have every aspect of our culture and of the way we operate encourage the sharing of information—to listen to the facts, listen to the logic, and draw well-formed conclusions.”

“…organizations that don’t listen will fail, because they won’t sense a changing environment or requirements or know whether their customers or employees are happy. In an incredibly information-intensive, dynamic environment, you have to listen or else—to mix metaphors—you’re blind.”

Creating and Maintaining Culture: Leadership of Self and Others.

Updated August 3rd 2023

Understanding Personal Values: Responsibility To Ourselves And Others

Since recently writing a blog about why it is important to understand our own personal values before we can live an organisation’s values, I’ve received a lot of comments, both on LinkedIn and in private messages and conversations.

It’s great to hear from so many people who are really thinking about what their values mean to them and are more aware of considering how their own values drive their behavior, decisions and their choices. It’s also super to see that more people are thinking about how important it is to understand ourselves before we can understand or have expectations of other people, teams and organisations. Additionally great to hear and see people considering where their own personal responsibility to their values and the values of the organisation they decide to work with are, rather than looking to blame. It is clear that we still have a way to go on this. People might be less disappointed when they settle into a role if they know how to look for evidence that an organisation and the people in it are really actively looking to live to the espoused values and holding each other accountable to same

Why Have Values Become So Important to Business?

Research shows that when an organisation creates a strong culture by focusing on values and the day-to-day behaviours that align with these values, the result is an increase in employee engagement. This is at least in part because these values are guiding principles for how everyone in the organisation makes decisions, and what they hold each other accountable to in their actions. An organisation cannot implement its stated values if the values and the ensuing behaviours are not fully understood, and supported by the people within the organisation.

As I think I have made clear at this point, many leaders and organisations are ‘missing a trick’ by not helping people understand their own personal values, before they ask them to live the organisation’s values and behaviours, in line with the culture they want to create or maintain.

The call to “bring one’s self to work” with one’s interior value set aligned with the work-place has been found to enhance individual engagement and organisational success. Yet, organisations are comprised of people from a variety of different personal and professional backgrounds, with different personalities. Therefore it cannot be taken for granted that personal and organisational values will fully align. Awareness is the key, as with all success and contentment in life. With awareness comes choice around the decisions we make and the actions we take.

Why Are Values So Important In Leadership?

A huge obstacle to creating and maintaining a culture that works well for all stakeholders is when senior management fail to consistently role-model the values and behaviours that have been agreed upon. I have seen so many examples of this, some of them quite hilarious in an ‘are you serious?!’ kind of way. Like when the head of training at one organisation expected his staff to be customer focused, friendly and proactive but yet he couldn’t bring himself to say ‘good morning’ or ‘how are you?’ to any one of his direct reports, and indeed only did so in the company of his senior peers.

How can we possibly ask other people to live a certain way when we are not willing to ‘walk the talk’?

The 21st century has been plagued with extensive, and disheartening leadership failures. For example, Enron, AIB, Fanny Mae, Northern Rock, FIFA just to name a few. Of course the stories could be told from many different angles but many charismatic, dynamic and seemingly transformational leaders who rose to prominence in both the public and private sectors have shown evidence of moral and ethical deficiencies.

In response and in reaction to ego, corruption and ethical blunders, people have been looking for something else. Leadership and management theorists have more recently placed an emphasis on the importance of ethics and morality in leaders. What has emerged is values based leadership theories.

The key qualities of a values-based leader have been described as;

self-reflection
balance
self-confidence
humility

Values-based leaders align their own values with those of the organisation in which they work. Self-reflection is a discipline in itself and communicating that through behaviour is a skill. Reflection on the self is not always accurate, because as individuals, we have so many blindspots and unconscious bias.

Leaders Must Model Values To Create A Culture

Values based leadership requires leaders to model values. Ciulla (1999) described different leadership styles and their relationship to values and commented on transforming and servant leadership where the leader demonstrates values but also ‘help followers develop their own values’ which fit with those of the organisation in which they work.

It’s up to leaders and managers to live the values and to help their people understand these values. Where many organisations have made mistakes with this, is where a senior team decides the values, stick them up on the walls around the offices and buildings, send an email out, rather than asking for people’s opinion, and then not living the espoused values themselves. Because, the opinion of the employees is not asked for, there is no buy-in and it becomes a wasted exercise and the leadership teams lose the trust of their colleagues, teams and customers.

One considerable difficulty in developing and maintaining a culture where people hold each other accountable to the Values and Behaviours is that there is a presumption that managers have the skills to implement and share them. As stated previously, this requires self awareness. With the levels of stress, mental health issues, and levels of bullying that exists in modern organisations, we have a way to go when it comes to self awareness in our own behavior; what drives us, what blocks us and the personal impact we have on our working relationships.

What one thing can you do to create and maintain an organisational culture that is values based?

Creating And Maintaining Culture: Living The Values And Behaviours.

Updated August 3rd 2023

Why Are Values Important at Work?

I’ve been having many ongoing conversations with clients recently about Culture; the Values and Behaviours that create a culture.

Working with individuals, teams and organisations to help people understand their own values and then exploring what the behaviours are that enable us to live the organisational values is something that consistently enthuses me.

The ah-ha moments that people have when they start to recognise the decisions they are making in their own lives based on the values that they either took for granted, or had never named is often mind-blowing.

The clarity that teams and organisations get from understanding how our values drive the decisions we make; and from naming the behaviours we can hold each other accountable to can be quite enlightening.

What Have Personal Values Got To Do With Work?

Too often, however, I see organisations trying to encourage their employees to live the organisations values without ever having invited the individuals to firstly get clear on what their own personal values are, and secondly investigating whether their personal values align with the organisations values.

Posner (1979, 2012) defines a value as being something that an individual will make a sacrifice to obtain; or a belief upon which a person acts by preference or an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct is personally or socially preferable.

Examples of values (of which there are hundreds at least) are accomplishment, agility, boldness, calmness, health, honesty, integrity, learning, love, playfulness, passion, purposefulness, respect, reliability, rigor….the list goes on and on.

Do We Really Know Our Values and What is Driving Us?

Generally, we take our values for granted and don’t really think about them.

I remember the first time I did a coaching exercise to work out my own personal values, approximately 10 years ago. Listing out the values that were important to me, I realised my top value was ‘freedom’. Suddenly all the decisions I had been making in my life up to that point made sense. I was being driven by my value of freedom, but it wasn’t necessarily bringing me to where I wanted to be in life. I had to become more conscious of the decisions I was making around this top value.

Our values arise from our beliefs. Many of our beliefs come from our society, our parents, our peers. And therefore some of our values might not consciously have been chosen by us personally. It’s therefore important to get clarity on our own values and ask ourselves if we have chosen them, or if they have been passed on to us by others. If we are living our parents’ values, which many of us are, unbeknownst to ourselves, we are potentially going to make decisions, consciously and unconsciously that are not what we actually want for ourselves in life.

How Can I Clarify My Personal Values

I recommend writing a list of your top 10 values in no particular order. Then re-organise the list in order of importance to you, from most important to least important. Identify your top 3 from this ordered list of 10 and ask yourself: “If I lived in an alternative universe, and I could only take these top 3 with me, would they definitely be the ones I would take (knowing I have to leave the other 7 behind)?”. If you are happy that they are the top 3 values that are most important to you, ask yourself: “Am I truly living to these top 3 values, in how I spend my time, and the decisions I make in life and work?”. You might be surprised!

Coming back to what personal values have got to do with work; Gleeson (2017) and Branson(2008) argue that the failure to align staff and organisational values removes the bedrock, the very foundation upon which all truly successful organisational operate and on which organisational change depends. This can cause a wide range of staff disengagement behaviours, most noticeably when there is a failure of the necessary two-way relationship between employee and employer. So, let’s look at this in more detail next time!

When It Comes To Leadership, Your Development Can Accelerate Through Curiosity

Updated August 2nd 2023

How Curious are you about things?

A conversation I often find myself having in my work with people and teams, is around questions and general curiosity. Have you ever noticed how you make assumptions about other people and about yourself and that you make statements when people come to you with problems, rather than asking questions?

When we were children we asked open-ended questions all the time. For example; ‘Why?’, ‘What’s that?’, ‘When are we going?’ As adults, we largely lose the ability to ask questions and to be truly curious. I used to wonder if this was because of the experiences the world provided us with, including the impact of being embedded in formal education! I also wondered if we used our curiosity less, because it is too important for our survival in the workplace and other areas to appear like we know more than we do.

I have since learned that there is more than meets the eye with curiosity!

When we consider how the brain works there is a very good reason why, as adults, we become less curious.

The area of the brain (prefrontal cortex: PFC), that is the most recent to evolve and is the area that is jutting out in our skull at our forehead, is the region of the brain that filters our actions. Cognitive processes – including reasoning, problem-solving, planning, carrying out new and goal-directed patterns of behaviour, inhibitory control, sustained attention and decision-making – takes place here. And it is the area of the brain that allows us to read and react to social cues in everyday interactions, to use language fluently and to regulate, or manage, our emotions (Siddiqui et al., 2008).

The PFC occupies one-third of the entire human cerebral cortex and is one of the final cortical regions to undergo full myelination (The myelin sheath is a protective membrane that wraps around part of certain nerve cells, and affects how fast signals travel through those nerve cells) during adolescence and young adulthood in the human (Fuster, 1997; Anderson, et al., 2001). The PFC also interacts with our limbic system. The limbic system is where our emotions and memories are housed. During adolescence significant changes occur in the limbic system, which may impact self-control, decision making, emotions, and risk-taking behaviours.

For those of us who were risk-takers when we were younger, or who currently have teenage children who are taking risks and making decisions that we don’t understand, the above piece of science will not be a surprise.

If the area of the brain that enables us to perform diverse cognitive processes, for example, to inhibit our behaviours is only fully developed late into adolescence/early adulthood, then it makes sense that we stop asking so many questions and being curious in adulthood compared to when we are children, because we are in ways more “rational” as adults and expected to be more “rational”.

But that doesn’t mean that it serves us well to be less curious as adults. Just because our brain is fully formed, does not mean that all the assumptions that we make about situations and people are useful, or that the decisions we make are the best ones for ourselves or others. The processing of the interaction between the PFC and the limbic system is happening unconsciously, and therefore we are not aware of how our memories and our emotions are ruling the assumptions we make, and how we make decisions and how we are problem-solving in situations and with other people.

As there is so much information coming towards us every second of the day, a brain must make shortcuts, and so it relies on what it already knows instead of expending energy and attempting to look at things in a different way. Our entire nervous system is focused on keeping us safe and so it will do whatever it needs to do to fulfil that job; to keep us safe is a better bet for the brain and body, than to be actively curious, which means taking risks.

Learning triggers neuronal changes in the brain that contribute to information acquisition and memory formation, including the activity and strength of existing synapses, the formation of new synapses, and possibly the birth of new neurons. Being curious, for example, asking ourselves and others questions gives us a moment of reflection time that enables learning.

What if we could start asking questions and getting curious again more regularly, like we did when we were children?

If we focus on asking a colleague more open-ended questions rather than providing them with the solution, we open the opportunity for them to reflect. While reflecting they will use more areas of their brain and they are more likely to have insight. In turn their brain becomes more focused and motivated to solve the problem, or to carry through on their own insight to the problem. By asking more open-ended questions we help that person’s brain to create more connections between neurons, and therefore we are influencing their learning just very simply through asking the question rather than providing the solution,

In becoming more curious and asking more open-ended questions, we engage the people we work with in a way that is conducive to high performance. They will likely come up with a better solution to the challenge than we had thought of. Through genuine curiosity, which is supported in our communication through open-ended questions, we can together become more creative in our approaches and make more effective decisions.

I don’t like to prescribe open-ended questions, as every situation and person is different. Just focus on questions that begin with words such as ‘What…?’, ‘How…?’, ‘Which…?, ‘When…?

Here are a few examples:

‘What do we already know about this?’
‘How does… affect…?’
‘What alternative ways of looking at this are there?’
‘Who benefits from this?’
‘What could we assume?’
‘How did you choose those assumptions?’
‘What do you think causes…?’
‘Which implications are important to consider…?’

In my experience with individuals, teams and organisations, one of the hallmarks of a true leader, is having the COURAGE to be CURIOUS! It takes practice for most of us. I have seen the fruits of it over and over again. See if you can ask more open-ended questions this week, and see where it takes you?

Changing Your Habits? Focus On The Gains, Visualise The Outcomes.

Updated August 2nd 2023

It’s difficult to change old ingrained habits, isn’t it? To create a hunger for change, we need to be clear on what the benefits of changing our behaviour will be.

Kahneman and Tversky, two of the most famous of modern psychologists are well known for the theory of “loss aversion”. This refers to people’s strong preference for minimising losses over acquiring gains. People in fact prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. For example, it’s better to not lose 5 euro than to find 5 euro. We feel almost twice the emotion over a loss as opposed to a gain.

Changing how we do things in life and work can be challenging in three ways; firstly, the loss of the familiar is immediate and significant (this is usually experienced as a negative effect); secondly, the gain is distant in both time and in relation to self; and thirdly the so-called gain is really more abstract than real, meaning that incentive to pursue the change is not optimum.

This dynamic plays out in all changes we attempt to make and at all levels in a business setting. (e.g. reducing a behaviour that saves the business money in the long-term) because doing things a different way can often be associated with loss.

This means that to help us make change, we often need to be supported in thinking bigger or differently for ourselves. And as we know, in our busy lives, there isn’t always time to think about this.

Imagined outcomes are really important. It’s been shown that the brain makes connections between things that happen in real time and predictions of possible outcomes. The neural wiring blends together what is currently happening with the imagined predictions. In this way, the brain weaves its own explanation, or interpretation, of reality and this can be used as the basis of new habit and skills formation. Fundamentally, belief in the outcome significantly raises the likely hood of that outcome or behaviour associated occurring, be that outcome/behaviour positive or negative.

What are you afraid of losing? Could you practice visualising the outcomes you desire to get your brain focused on the wins? Hopefully just being more conscious of our brain and body’s strong preference for minimising losses over acquiring gains can help you to get back on the change train!

The Importance Of Sleep For Staff Development & Healthy Aging.

Updated August 2nd 2023

Many of us are bringing our work home with us, whether actively working at home or just thinking about it.

As mentioned in our piece last week, Norman Doidge’s book ‘The brain that changes itself’ (2007) is a truly inspiring collection of studies, real life examples and conclusions on the mould-ability of the brain.

It turns the traditional thinking that the capacity of the brain is fixed on its head and shows how the brain can reorganize itself and make new neural connections throughout life. Rather than being hardwired and wearing out with age, the brain is at your disposal to use and grow to YOUR benefit, and to promote mental longevity.

The only thing is, many of us are living lives that cause our brains to age quickly. For example, many people boast that they don’t need much sleep and many other people I know do not prioritize it because many work late into the evenings and therefore find it difficult to get the brain to shut off once they get into bed. Of course, having young children and many other things can get in the way of sleep, and often cannot be avoided. But long-term it’s imperative you don’t let the brief hours of sleep continue.

During sleep we discharge toxins from the brain include flushing out amyloid proteins in the brain (bad sleep increases levels of some proteins, such as amyloid that have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease). During sleep, we also regulate hormones that are responsible for satiety and hunger. Anyone who’s ever had a flu or a bad cold, knows how sleep helps recover our immune system, and this recovery is taking place either way, daily as our system is met with so many germs. Sleep also consolidates our memories and enhances our creativity. Are you getting enough sleep?

If you are not sleeping enough each night, which includes relaxing the brain well before you actually get into bed, then you are going to be less alert the next day, impacting your productivity, your relationships and your long-term health.

Are you getting enough sleep?

Over the coming weeks, we are releasing little snippets and tips from our upcoming Habit Change book and sending them out to you. We would love to hear your thoughts on these, if any of them resonate with you or make you think differently about your current actions, we would love to hear from you about it.

Want To Keep Your Brain Young?

Updated August 2nd 2023

Want to keep your Brain young?

In the book “The Brain That Changes Itself” Norman Doidge (2007) states that the way to stave off memory loss into old age and to keep your brain young, is to keep learning new things “learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and materials.”

This is partly because the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is involved with memory, grows if it is being challenged. It also grows if you exercise regularly. Exercise is one of the items encouraged by Neuroscientists to stave off certain types of dementia.

As adults, learning and growing requires us to actively make an effort to do so. It means finding new things to learn and then focusing on these. As well as making life more fun and stimulating, it will help to hold off old-age memory loss. Worth a go, don’t you think?

NEW Virtual Reality Product Announcement At Adaptas

Updated August 2nd 2023

“When you are taught about something, it feels distant. By experiencing it in Virtual Reality it suddenly feels real”

NEW PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT

Over the last couple of years, a special branch of virtual reality content creation has developed, known as Cinematic VR. It is typically based on 360-degree video and offers an affordable alternative to 2D video. It can form the foundation of eLearning that will transport learners into compelling, immersive stories and environments.

Adaptas have just completed a first person perspective virtual reality experience to be used in training for one of our clients. With the immersive potential of this new medium, trainees and low performers are able to ‘sit in the perspective’ of an expert customer sales representative and get a sense of what they need to develop in their own behaviour, in order to be successful in their role. This is a confidence building piece that is a new tool as part of the progressive Learning & Development training suite for this financial services sector client.

Research has shown to date that pieces like this drive actual behavioural changes far more effectively than previous media sources. Stanford Professor, Jeremy Bailenson has discovered that users retain 33% more from VR than standard video. This is at least in part to the finding that VR has 27% higher emotional engagement and people stay 34% longer than in a 2D (video) environment. Another study has shown that fear of public speaking can be reduced by almost 20% with VR and another that almost 9 in 10 participants reduced their fear of heights with VR.

Have you seen the film ‘Being John Malkovich’, where the character literally sees and hears the world from John Malkovich’s perspective? For the purposes of a work environment, experiencing the scenario from the viewpoint of the expert has not been possible before with any other medium. The Adaptas team responsible for designing this innovative VR experience believe it will prove to enhance an employee’s success.

This client project consists of a stereoscopic 360 interactive video where the viewer can ‘be in the perspective’ of the sales star in a busy call centre environment. The piece was filmed on-site at the clients office, working with a genuine sales call and staff to ensure authenticity. It will be used to on-board new employees as part of their 3 week induction training. Our client is delighted with the progress of this project so far. We will keep you posted on further developments with this.

If you are interested in this idea or interested in discussing how this might look for your organisation, please do get in touch, give us a call and we can brainstorm some scripting and role-playing ideas. Every organisation is different, and we pride ourselves on our ability to tailor each project specifically for the objective at hand.

Embedding Learning When Change and Adaptation Is More Important Than Ever!