What It Takes to Change Behavior

A few weeks in an elementary school, and what it taught me about leading anywhere.

I've spent the last few weeks sitting with a principal, an assistant principal, and a group of teachers at an elementary school, helping them build a behavior system for their building. Together we worked out who does what, when, on which form, and what happens the next time a student does the thing everyone's been talking about.

On the other days I'm coaching executives. Different buildings, different stakes, and I keep hearing the same lesson in both rooms. I want to walk through it with you, because I suspect you'll recognize it from somewhere in your own life.

Changing behavior in an organization is one of the hardest things a leader will ever try to do. It's harder than strategy. It's harder than a reorg. Behavior gets decided a hundred times a day, in small moments, by people who are tired, busy, and quietly watching to see if the new expectation is real. Strategy lives in a document. Behavior lives in a hallway at 2:40 on a Tuesday.

I've gotten this wrong more than I've gotten it right. I've launched things I was sure would stick and watched them fade by Thanksgiving. So take what follows as notes from someone still figuring it out, mostly by listening to and working alongside people who are doing it well.

Why leading behavior change is so hard

Three things keep showing up, and all three have more to do with how people are wired than with anyone being difficult.

Behavior is a habit before it's a decision. A kid runs in the hallway because that's what he did yesterday and nothing happened. A manager sits on a problem because that's what he did last quarter and it worked out. Most of what we do each day, we do without deciding to. When you ask people to change, you're asking them to override what their own experience has patiently taught them. That takes repetition. Persuasion alone rarely gets there.

The old behavior is being rewarded right now. Somewhere in your organization, the thing you want to stop is quietly paying off. The interrupter gets the floor. The late escalator gets sympathy, because by then the problem is real. People are paying closer attention to this than any of us realize. Until the payoff changes, the behavior stays.

People are watching the leader more than the message. Every adult in that school and every director on a leadership team is running the same quiet test: does the boss actually do this when it's inconvenient? We are, all of us, students of the people above us. We learn what they tolerate long before we learn what they say. The first time a leader lets it slide for a top performer or a friend, the whole building learns the new standard is optional.

That third one is where I've stumbled the most. I used to think the hard part was designing the thing. The hard part turned out to be a question of character: can I be the same person on day forty as on day one?

What the teachers taught me

Before we built a single slide, the working group spent a full session on questions I would have skipped if I'd been building this alone:

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A kid gets hurt at recess. Who documents it, and on what form?

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Does a phone call go home, or a note? Who makes the call?

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A student has an individualized plan. What does the case manager do that the classroom teacher doesn't?

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What can an adult offer as a reward? What's off the table?

I came in thinking the real work was the framework and the training. The teachers showed me the real work was here, in the specifics, because these are the questions that get asked at 2:40 on a Tuesday when a kid is crying and three adults are looking at each other. That's where a system either holds or falls apart, and they knew it from living it. When we finished, every adult in the building could answer "what happens next time" the same way. The expectations stayed exactly where they were. What changed is that the response stopped depending on which adult happened to be closest.

"The expectations don't change.
The care does."

A teacher, on the school's behavior working group

One teacher said something I've been carrying around since, talking about the kids with individualized plans: "The expectations don't change. The care does." That one sentence does more work than a training day. It tells every adult what to hold firm on and where to flex, and it holds two things together that we usually treat as opposites: high standards and real tenderness. It came from her years in the classroom. I get to pass it along.

What I keep hearing from leaders

A VP tells me her team doesn't hold each other accountable. I ask what happened the last time someone missed a commitment in her staff meeting.

"Nothing, really. I talked to him after, one-on-one."

Did the team see that? No. So the team has learned the real standard: miss a commitment, maybe get a quiet conversation, and nothing the room can see. She was being kind, and I understood it immediately because I've done the exact same thing more times than I'd like to admit. Most of the ways we fall short as leaders come from our virtues, slightly misplaced. What I've learned is that kindness the room can't see reads as tolerance, and tolerance teaches.

A site leader tells me his managers escalate problems too late. I ask what happened the last time a manager escalated something early that turned out to be nothing.

He laughs. "I probably gave him a hard time."

He's a strong leader, and this is one of the hardest things for any of us to see: the reaction we had on a Tuesday is connected to the behavior we're frustrated about in September. The behavior you're getting is the behavior your reactions have been training, and it's nearly impossible to see that in yourself without someone else in the conversation. We are mysteries to ourselves in exactly the places where we're obvious to everyone else.

What it seems to take

Here's what I've pieced together so far, and I'd hold it loosely. It's simple to describe and relentless to live.

1

Pick one behavior and describe it so a stranger could spot it.

"Interrupting before someone finishes." "Arriving after the meeting has started." Words like "respect" and "accountability" matter, and they're also hard to see in a hallway. If you can picture the behavior, you can work on it.

2

Decide what happens next time, and write it down.

Who responds. What the response is the first time, the second time, the third time. Where it gets recorded, so the third time gets treated as the third time. Small and predictable beats big and occasional. Consistency does more than severity ever will.

3

Go first.

Say your part out loud before you ask for anyone else's. "When I see this, here's what I'll do." Your commitment is what makes it safe for everyone else to make theirs.

4

Get a yes from the room.

Everyone who has to live with it says so, out loud. That's what turns your rule into their agreement, and it's why the teachers' system will outlast any binder I could have handed them. People defend what they helped build.

5

Hold it when it's inconvenient.

This is the whole thing. The top performer. The friend. The day you're exhausted. The moment you'd rather let it go. That's when the organization decides whether the standard is real, and it's the step I still have to work at every week. Consistency is a moral practice before it's a management one.

6

Retest in two weeks.

Ask five people what happens next time. One answer means it's working. Five answers means you found the gap before the next incident instead of after, which is exactly when you want to find it.

What I'm taking with me

Behavior change comes from a leader doing the same thing, the same way, on the fortieth day as on the first. The teachers in that working group understood it. So do the best executives I get to sit with. They know the system only holds if they hold it, and they've made a kind of peace with how unglamorous that is.

Good leadership is consistent leadership. Quiet, steady, and there every single time. That's what changes behavior, and it's also what makes it hard, because there's no shortcut through it and nobody applauds you for the fortieth day. I'm still learning to be the person who shows up the same way tomorrow. If you're working on the same thing, I'd love to hear what you're learning too.