Designing sticky, meaningful, and coherent leadership models makes it easier for leaders to adopt ... [+] and practice them.

If theres one lesson business leaders can draw from the COVID-19 pandemic, its that behavior change is hard.

In countries all around the world, government leaders have spent the last few weeks pleading with their citizens to stop gathering in public and stay home. Yet in the United States, Italy, and elsewhere, thousands of people ignored these injunctions, choosing instead to crowd together in parks, casinos, and beaches as if nothing had changed. If presidents, governors, and mayors cant convince their citizens to observe social distancing protocols that will literally save their lives, then what hope is there for organizations to change their cultures?

But whether the stakes are life-and-death, like slowing the spread of a deadly virus, or aspirational and human like transforming an organizations culture to empower leaders to perform at their best evidence shows that real behavior change is possible. Its all a matter of how you approach it.

For organizations, changing behavior usually involves defining a leadership model a set of phrases intended to guide leaders behaviors across an organization. But research by the NeuroLeadership Institute has found that most leadership models tend to be long, convoluted, and difficult to remember, often consisting of dozens of complex and contradictory behaviors. Since they are not clear or memorable, they fail to successfully guide behavior in critical leadership situations.

So how do you build a leadership model that actually works one designed with the brain in mind to successfully guide leaders behavior?

I sat down with Andrea Derler, NLIs Director of Industry Research, and Kamila Sip, NLIs Director of Neuroscience Research, to talk about how to design leadership models that are not just relevant, but actually useful for guiding leaders behaviors and decisions.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

NLI: How do you define leadership models?

Kamila Sip: Leadership models are sets of phrases that guide leadership behavior across an organization. They answer the question, What do leaders need to be reminded about most frequently?

Leadership models should focus on behavior rather than lofty values or mission statements. As we've learned in our new research, leadership models are useful only if leaders actually apply them in their daily work.

Andrea Derler: The reason we need leadership models is that most organizations expect their leaders to act in a certain way. Leadership models are descriptions of what leaders should prioritize as they manage teams and businesses, how they should lead employees to execute the strategy, or how theyre expected to build a certain culture and follow the organizations mission and purpose.

NLI: Tell me about your research. What did you set out to study and how did you do it?

Andrea Derler: We conducted this research to learn about the current state of leadership models in organizations. We wanted to understand the design process, as well as the qualities of typical models and, most importantly, how leaders the ones who are expected to demonstrate the behaviors listed in the models perceive and use leadership models.

We conducted structured interviews with 20 HR and talent leaders, as well as a survey of 568 business and HR leaders across various organizations and industries.

With the HR leaders, we looked at the leadership model design process, what models typically look like, how they're rolled out, and what obstacles leaders face in designing leadership models that work.

The business leaders, managers, and individuals in our survey were asked about their perception of their organizations leadership models, and if, how, and when they apply the content of their models in everyday leadership situations.

NLI: So what are organizations getting wrong in designing these models?

Andrea Derler: We were struck by how few leaders are actually using their organizations leadership models. Considering the amount of time, resources, and energy organizations put into designing them, its striking how many leadership models end up getting shelved. Our research shows that only 38% of individuals take action on their models once or twice a week. I'm sure organizations would prefer that number to be higher.

Getting back to your question, What typically goes wrong when models are designed? We learned that there are many things organizations get wrong in the design process.

First, instead of focusing on what their business actually needs, they allow themselves to be influenced by dozens of external models, theories, and frameworks. Or they engage in lengthy processes with just the top leadership teams, creating long exhaustive models nobody can remember, let alone roll out. The result is that the model then never gets implemented in the learning strategy. Thats because leadership models are often designed in a vacuum, without the end user in mind.

Along these lines, we found that 44% of companies have models with more than 20 behaviors! This may explain why only 17% of leaders find their models easy to remember. Leaders are so overwhelmed by the sheer number of behaviors and by the complexity of expectations and descriptions that in the end, they cant even remember them, let alone apply them in their work.

Kamila Sip: Exactly. The second issue is that only 27% of individuals consider their leadership model meaningful! This suggests a bigger problem. If we expect people to demonstrate leadership behaviors in their everyday work, they need to be designed with peoples actual work, objectives, teams, and challenges in mind.

Our research showed that only 31% of design teams involved the business in designing leadership models. Thats a problem.

Although we learned in our research that design teams are often not diverse enough to come up with the right phrases, we believe that leadership models that reflect a diverse pool of stakeholders, from various parts of the business, capture the voice of the business better than can those designed by the top 1% of the company.

Why? Because the few on the top may focus on the wrong things, assuming they're representative of what good leadership looks like in everyday business situations. For example, conducted focus groups with a multi-national insurance company, consisting of 100 people from across the globe and including almost every sector of their business.

Finally, we learned that very few leaders use their leadership models in everyday situations. Three qualities predict whether leaders use their leadership models more often; being sticky, meaningful, and coherent. Our data suggest that when models are perceived as sticky, meaningful, and coherent with theother objectives of the business, leaders use them more often.

Lets unpack what this means in practice. It means organizations that want their people to change their behavior should design leadership models with three questions in mind. Can I remember this? Do I care about this? And does this fit with what I'm asked to do?

NLI: So why is it that leadership models need to be sticky, meaningful, and coherent?

Kamila Sip: From a scientific perspective, we know that for a leadership model to be "sticky", it cant be complicated, wordy, and hard to remember. Thats because the brain has limited cognitive capacity at any point in time, a limitation that impacts how efficiently we can process information. Information thats easy to recall eats up less brainpower, which makes us more able to act in accordance with the message.

However, being sticky is not enough. To motivate leaders to act on them, models also need to be meaningful. If leaders actually feel they can succeed in applying the models to their daily behavior and the outcomes are meaningful to them, theyre then more motivated to actually think and act in accordance with the model.

Third, leadership models need to be coherent with the companys other expectations. For example, if members of a sales team are stack-ranked against each other that is, rewarded for individual success and for ranking higher than their colleagues then a leadership model emphasizing collaboration and teamwork could be perceived as incoherent.

When organizations create decoherence through conflicting objectives, employees experience cognitive dissonance a mental discomfort when beliefs, expectations, values, or actions dont fit together.

NLI: What are the next steps in your research?

Andrea Derler: Understanding the reality of behavior change will remain NLIs theme this year and beyond. This research on brain-based leadership models is one step in a larger sequence of research. Next, well address why design teams experience the pitfalls we described, and provide more detailed benchmarks for the design process itself providing insights about who should be part of design teams and the duration and nature of rollouts.

But the behavior guidelines that leadership models provide are just one component in NLI's brain-friendly framework for behavior change. In the coming months, well also be studying the importance of habits and the role of systems. Our ultimate goal is to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how insights from neuroscience and other cognitive sciences can inform our understanding of the complexity of culture and behavior change.

Andrea Derler, Ph.D., NLIs Director of Industry Research, collaborates with scientists, consultants, and HR and business leaders to produce science-based, practical insights about people in organizations.

Kamila Sip, Ph.D., NLIs Director of Neuroscience Research, is a neuroscientist with expertise in decision making, unconscious bias, and change management that she implements into simple solutions to further effective behavior change at scale.

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Designing Leadership Models That Actually Work With Andrea Derler And Kamila Sip: The NLI Interview - Forbes