One line would have been worth the price of admission, if the speech hadn’t been free. Referring to bad behaviors we find ourselves tempted to do, Dr. Dan Ariely said: “The biggest lesson from psychology from the last 50 years is that personality matters very little.” Self-control is the exception, he added, but that “only explains 30% of the variance” between one person’s poor choices and another’s better ones.
Ariely is the author of the bestsellers Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, and holds an endowed professorship of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke Univ. The theme of his talk was that bad behavior is more a product of current environment than of personality or past environment. “It is disappointing,” he said, that individuals do not bear as much responsibility for their behaviors as we would like.
But I see it all the time in my work. Bad behaviors by team members follow certain patterns that are clearly influenced by the team’s structure, corporate culture, and leader decisions. Tell me enough about that environment, and I can predict many of the team’s performance problems without speaking to anyone on the team. Thus it follows that changing the environment will change many of the behaviors. Unfortunately, another pattern is that team leaders tend to model their behaviors on their managers’, even when they didn’t like those methods or the team is struggling. When I asked Ariely how to help people do what they rationally knew they should do, with the irritating honesty of a scientist he basically said he did not know. “We haven’t figured out how to teach self-control completely,” he said.
Ariely spoke of a classic study in which very young children were presented with a cookie. They were told someone would come around in 10 minutes and give them two cookies if they did not eat that one. The group was videotaped, and was tracked to the end of the kids’ college years. Those who had eaten the cookie tended to have worse rates of dropping out of school, addiction, and crime. But what Ariely said was most fascinating was watching how the resistors managed the temptation. “No kid can look at the cookie and not care,” he pointed out. So the resisters looked everywhere else in the room, literally sat on their hands, and so forth. These are skills, he pointed out, that can be taught.
“The real issue is not the intention; the issue is execution,” Ariely said. We have this image of a future where we will be better people, but there’s a problem. “We never get to live in that future; we always live in the present, and in that present we succumb to temptation,” he mused. It’s easy to say you’re going to enforce your team’s meeting rules consistently, but when the fires break out we tend to react instead of intentionally act.
Ariely provided other information about why you face an uphill battle getting team members—or yourself—to change behaviors. His own story was at once instructive and moving. He was badly burned, and during his years in recovery a blood transfusion gave him Hepatitis C. He was invited to join an experiment trying what then was a new use for the drug interferon. This required him to give himself a shot three times a week that made him sick for 15 hours each time… and do so for a year and a half.
The question was, could he make himself “do something that is so critically important for the potential of not getting liver cirrhosis 30 years from now?” If that were the only reward, he knew the answer was “no.” When considering the value of a reward, he said, the subconscious question we ask is, “What’s the strength of the incentive and how long is it delayed?” Humans will respond to small rewards if they are immediate, but are not highly motivated by rewards too far in the future, no matter how great. So he tricked himself. On the day he was to have a shot, he rented three movies he really wanted to see. He turned a dreaded “shot day” into a pleasurable “movie night.” The doctor said he was the only patient in the study who took all the shots as directed, and they worked.
Ariely called his trick “reward substitution,” replacing a far-off reward with something closer in time. It’s why I blogged a couple of weeks ago that bonuses tied to short-term measurable goals are more effective than an annual raise based on general performance. He gave another reason. “If you start measuring something, all of the sudden people start caring about it.” Ariely gave the example of people flying odd routes to pick up extra frequent flyer miles. I have gotten project members excited about hitting schedule targets merely by sharing daily progress as a percentage of work accomplished compared to the percentage of schedule passed.
As that illustrates, people will respond to intangible rewards. Ariely said, “They like compliments, even if they know they aren’t sincere.” A smartphone app he tested that spit out random compliments raised people’s moods. Imagine what specific, sincere thanks would do for your team’s morale.
Punishment can be a strong motivator for one-time events, Ariely said, but rewards are much better for instilling habits. If you tend to give orders and threaten consequences, you may get the results you want, but don’t be surprised if you have to keep issuing those commands over and over.
To prevent bad habits, you have to eliminate the temptations and provide alternatives. Obviously the easiest way to avoid eating cookies is to not bring them home. Ariely described experiments showing that some birds and rats given a way to eliminate temptation learned to take that step to get better rewards in the future. To get the behaviors you want from your teammates and prevent those you don’t, you have to change the team's environment. Otherwise, where temptation arises, the typical human is going to follow.
Action Item: Think about what might be tempting people on your team to act in ways you don’t want. Come up with a method to remove that temptation and take the first step in the next week. You could, for example: create substantial, immediate rewards including praise; use group decision-making methods that reduce the role of emotion; or create a team charter that will bring positive peer pressure to bear on each individual.
Source: Ariely, D. (2011), “Predictably Irrational,” Speech for Marketing Mondays, Durham, N.C., 11/14/11.
