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Train to Ingrain
The Scientific Explanation
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If you understand what it takes to change behavior, you can create a process that will make it happen. But first you need to understand and accept four scientific facts:
1. Skill learning happens in the brain. The first thing you need to know is that all behavior is triggered by thought processes, which happen in the brain. Not in the skin. Not in the muscles. Not in the bones. In the brain.
Also, we’re not talking about short-term memory. When we talk about learning new behaviors, we’re talking about patterns that are established on a more-or-less permanent basis.
2. Behavior patterns are complex. When it comes to on-the-job performance, we’re talking about work habits—how people go about doing the important aspects of their jobs. So we’re not talking about learning a visual image, a fact, or even a concept. We’re talking about something much more complex: a pattern of behavior—a skill—a global pattern that links all kinds of patterns: perceptual, emotional, intuitive, conceptual, factual and ultimately behavioral.
To establish a new skill, which can be performed naturally and automatically without thinking about it, an extensive network of neurons (brain cells) must be interconnected. This physical linking process takes place gradually in the brain. In the case of every ingrained behavior pattern, the dendrites of specific brain cells grow until they connect to other brain cells, forming synaptic connections. So physically speaking, a skill is a behavior pattern that is driven by a network of interconnected brain cells. A leadership skill, for example, is a complex network of neurons that coordinates perception, analysis and decision-making, triggering verbal and physical behavior.
This is the physical reality of behavior patterns. No neural network, no skill. Or put a different way, if you want to improve a leadership skill, the developmental program must stimulate the brain to grow the dendrites until they make new neural connections, forming a more effective pathway.
3. Ingraining an interpersonal skill takes time. What stimulates the dendrites to grow and connect? Repeated behavior—lots of repeated behavior. Practice, practice and more practice. Anyone who has learned a complex physical skill knows this is true. It takes an amazing amount of practice to learn how to hit a golf ball with a sand wedge, or to serve a tennis ball for a winner, and so on. Hit a thousand golf balls. Hit a thousand tennis balls. And these skills are not as complex as leadership skills.
Before a skill is ingrained, and even while the skill is in the process of being ingrained, the brain has to make the behavior pattern happen without the neural network. So even with a difficult effort of concentration, performing the skill will feel awkward and frustrating. With persistence, after the connections are finally in place the effort will seem like second nature—easy, comfortable and automatic. And best of all, once the brain cells are connected, the person “owns” the skill. The neural network that drives the skill is physically interconnected, and for all practical purposes the skill may now be considered permanent.
If you’re one of the millions of fans who follow the career of Tiger Woods, you probably know that 2004 wasn’t one of his best years. At the beginning of the season Tiger made a number of changes in his swing. The changes were designed to make the world’s best golf swing even better, but Tiger struggled all year, winning only one tournament and finishing fourth in total winnings. But at the end of 2004, his game started to come together for him, and he won two post-season tournaments back-to-back. In 2005 he won his third Masters. Here’s the point: Tiger Woods is one of the all-time great professional golfers, and he practices hitting balls several hours every day, but even Tiger had to invest an entire year of persistent effort to ingrain the improvements to his game.
So excellent instruction isn’t enough. Even after the best training sessions money can buy, at first a golf skill or a leadership skill will feel uncomfortable and difficult, and initially you won’t be able to do it well. The brain hasn’t had the time to grow and connect the neural pathways that enable you to carry out this behavior in a comfortable, routine way. And when doing something feels awkward and doesn’t produce the desired results, you’re likely to fall back on old, comfortable habits.
This is why an extended period of practice, practice and more practice is needed to ingrain the new behaviors introduced in training. Because leadership skills are more complex than golf skills, the period of reinforcement is typically many months.
4. Changing behavior is harder than learning a behavior for the first time. To compound this challenge of ingraining a new behavior, leaders in training programs aren’t learning brand new behavior patterns. More precisely, they're making changes in interpersonal behavior patterns, which they learned initially while growing up and reinforced consistently throughout the decades of their lives. So learning new patterns means working against comfortable, well-established patterns.
This represents a significant problem for everyone involved in leadership development. Because it takes months of consistent, persistent repetition of new behaviors to connect the neurons, the old patterns are always there to fall back on when frustration occurs or when there is a lack of reinforcement in the environment. This is why so many participants eventually revert to their old way of doing things a few months after even the most outstanding training programs.
In summary, this is the physiological reason why it takes more than assessment, more than training, even more than the combination of the two to consistently make changes in on-the-job behavior. However, if you start with behavior-based assessment and behavior-based training, and follow this with an extended period of reinforcement of the behaviors on the job, you can ingrain a skill.
And the beauty of it is, once a skill is ingrained, the neurons are physically connected. An ingrained skill is like swimming or riding a bicycle. The only way to get rid of the behavior pattern is to replace it with another, more satisfying ingrained behavior pattern. The only thing that can disconnect the neurons of a behavior pattern is the atrophy of old age, and death. The skill is virtually permanent.
So what's the solution? Train to Ingrain: A Reality-Based Solution. How would you structure a training and development program that accomplishes all that?
Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., CEO, Performance Support Systems, creator of 20/20 Insight GOLD
