Using the Principles of Neuroscience to Sustain Long-Term Transformational Change

Have you heard anyone refer to a transformational initiative as the "fad of the week" or possibly respond to it by saying, "just ignore it long enough and it will go away." These are all too common responses to most change efforts. As such, they capture the essence of one of the biggest challenges for transformational leadership. Specifically, a leader must not only get people motivated in the short-term, the leader must find ways to sustain motivation in the face of contrary daily pressures.

How can a leader, even one with transformational skills, sustain a change without intense labor? Recent advances in neuroscience, as well as information from the positive deviants, provides a means of achieving sustainability with minimal, but critical, leadership involvement.

Look to Your Positive Deviants

Since the positive deviants already have most of the relevant learning experiences and have assimilated the information required to become experts, they can provide insight into the type and length of practice required to completely learn a new attitude, thought pattern or behavior. All you need to do is ask the positive deviants about the optimum experiences others should have to develop and sustain the desired new capabilities. They will identify the practice experiences that are most effective at optimizing long-term learning. Practice of the positive deviant wisdom, particularly thinking about the social good and how to achieve it, creates transformation with only one leadership requirement. The leader must insist that people actually practice.

More specifically, the leader must overtly require that people practice the new capabilities, monitor progress and intervene with consequences if the results are not satisfactory. This is particularly important at approximately 6 weeks into a transformation. At the 6-week mark, it is common to hear many complaints about the change. People will say things like: "This is too hard," "I am too busy keeping the business running" or "I don't see the value." The resistance to change is quite overt.

Lasting Change Requires Persistence

Neuroscience has shown that at this time, the new neural structures are not yet dominant and are in conflict with the old structures. This conflict creates a feeling a physical discomfort that is manifested in these types of complaints. Research has also shown that these complaints are actually false signals from the brain that, if ignored, go away within a few weeks.

Here is the most important test of management commitment. If the leaders' accept these complaints and reduce the pressure on the organization, the change will not occur. Conversely, if the leader has the courage and commitment to ignore this common organizational resistance, then the likelihood that a significant change will occur increases dramatically. It doesn't take significant fortitude to get through the 6-week barrier, but it definitely takes some commitment beyond just a laissez-faire approach.

Once through the 6-week barrier, management must continue to demonstrate commitment by monitoring progress, rewarding people who commit to and follow-through with the change. Again, this isn't a particularly severe requirement, but it is absolute. We have found that the change will stop almost immediately if the leader cues that he or she is either no longer committed or interested. Leaders must be consistent in their commitment and the approach discussed here will take care of the transformation.

This article is from our collection of Executive Operations Articles about using the latest science to integrate human support and persuasive technology to produce extraordinary performance. Our focus is to provide information to quickly and efficiently create a high performance corporate culture.