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Nudging is about putting people first – understanding each individual’s circumstances, functioning and context in order to help them do what they should.
One of the greatest challenges we’re facing today is the constant overflow of information, especially since our only tool for handling all this information is a brain that hasn’t developed to any meaningful extent in the last 50,000 years.
Back then, 50,000 years ago, we lived in small tribes with very limited information to process, and so each little change that occurred made us stop and take note. Reacting to sudden changes was a critical survival skill. A rustling bush might have warned of a lion nearby. An unfamiliar mushroom could be poisonous. A shift in weather could signal that a storm was coming.
Modern life couldn’t be more different. Every waking minute we’re bombarded with stimuli. E-mails streaming in. Co-workers asking questions. A flashing billboard saying “Try this new drink! It’s special and it will make you happy!” Newspaper headlines about how someone’s been shot and how there are wars raging in distant countries. Meanwhile, our brains are busy trying to process our own lives – past, present and future. Impressions, thoughts, emotions and events are constantly bouncing around in our heads, making it harder for us to sort and filter what matters and what doesn’t.
As all of this is going on, we want to come in and train managers, giving them new knowledge and skills that they will need in their leadership role. Here are two research-based nudging tips that will make the managers you train more likely to actually apply their newfound insights in our chaotic modern world.
Habits are established right away when we start something new, whether we have the intention of doing so or not.
Whenever people are faced with new situations they will try to handle them by drawing on whatever knowledge and experiences they have. It’s usually best to base the solution on previous experience, but then again, most situations aren’t actually entirely new.
People who have never been in a leadership position, including management roles on any level in any organization, won’t know how to manage things in their new role. They have no prior experience to go on. The method they end up choosing will therefore often be the wrong one, which in turn establishes bad habits.Bad habits are not easily broken, so it’s important to get things right from the get-go.
What if they were to simply learn the right management strategies later? Well, it would in some sense already be too late, because the ineffective strategies they started out using will have already left their mark. Even when they’ve learned something new, traces of the old method will still remain and could accidentally cause them to stumble in situations where they don’t have the time or opportunity to remember what they actually should do.
This means that anyone assigned a new leadership role should start their managment training immediately. An extremely common mistake is to wait until there’s a whole group of new leaders, with the reasoning that they all need to learn the same things anyway. The upshot is that some managers then have to wait months before they get their first management training. Those months are not some vacuum where managers don’t learn anything. On the contrary, they’re really some of the most critical months of all, as it’s when people establish either good or bad behaviors – behaviors that then tend to stick.
Not enough resources to train managers as soon as they’re assigned? Make an automated traing program. An individual learning experience where the manager learns the right behaviors from the start is always preferable to a delayed experience together with others in a physical environment. The synchronous training can also always be added as a complementary element later, but we only get one chance to establish the right habits during that critical period when managers are adapting to their new role.
Lär dig enkla men kraftfulla sätt att applicera nudging i dina lärprojekt, så att beteendeförändringen faktiskt blir av.
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It’s impossible to remember everything.
We only store the knowledge we use – in other words, “use it or lose it”. As early as the 1880s, the German psychology researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus performed experiments showing that we quickly forget most of the things we learn. That lesson is every bit as relevant today as it was then.
If you don’t account for this fact in your management training programs, and try to make managers cram in all the knowledge and information they need in a very short period of time, you will produce poor leaders. They will have been exposed to the right knowledge, but down the line, when they encounter situations where that knowledge would actually be needed, they won’t remember it. Instead, they’ll be forced to make up their own solution then and there, which rarely turns out particularly well.
Undervisar du chefen i början av året i vad den ska göra och hur den ska tänka på medarbetarsamtalet som är i oktober, eller förbereder chefen för budgetplanering ett halvår innan det är dags att börja sätta nästa budget, kommer den inte ha någon nytta av den informationen när den väl behövs. För den är glömd. När medarbetarsamtalet ska genomföras eller budgeten planeras, kommer chefen istället behöva söka upp informationen om hur det ska gå till, vilket innebär att tiden som lades under ledarskapsutbildningen var bortslösad.
If you start off the year teaching the manager how to approach the employee meetings in October, or prepping them for budget-planning six months before it’s time to actually do it, they won’t have any use out of the information once they actually need it. Because they’ve had time to forget it. When that employee meeting or budget planning session finally rolls around, the manager will have to look up what to do anyway, meaning that the time spent during the training program was effectively wasted. Instead, make sure the manager gets the information and skills they need shortly before the situation where they’ll use them. If you’re teaching managers how to handle employee meetings the week before they’re set to take place, you will have an effective leader who can make life better for everyone.
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