Overcoming the Behavior Decay Cycle

by John Austin in Behavior change, Leadership, Reinforcement

Organizations frequently rely on two primary tools to drive change: training and procedures.

Training helps people understand what they should do.

Procedures document how the work should occur.

Both are valuable.

But neither directly controls daily behavior.

Behavior is shaped much more strongly by immediate consequences.

• What gets attention (or ignored)
• What gets reinforced, whether it be by another person or by the nature of the work itself
• What makes the workday easier or harder

Over time those signals become the true operating system of the organization.

Employees rarely read the entire procedure manual before deciding how to perform their work.

Instead they watch the environment.

They observe what leaders notice.

They pay attention to which behaviors are recognized and which are overlooked.

They learn what helps them succeed in their work environment.

And their every day choices adjust accordingly.

This is why organizations often experience a gap between written expectations and actual performance.

The written expectations live in documents.

The real expectations live in reinforcement patterns that are created every day.

If leaders want initiatives to sustain themselves, they need to design the reinforcement environment intentionally.

That means ensuring that the desired behaviors are:

• Clearly described so that everyone is on the same page
• Reasonable to complete in the work environment, and not at odds with other expectations
• Observable and pinpointed, not unclear labels
• Reinforced and recognized regularly

When behaviors that matter are noticed and recognized, they become a part of the culture. 

When that recognition and reinforcement disappears, performance drifts back to where it used to be.

Not because people don’t care.

But because the environment stopped supporting that behavior.