In 1961 Dr Stanley Milgram performed his famous shocking experiment. Using nothing more coercive than a person wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard he got people to administer electric shocks to another person for getting each of several questions wrong. The shocks started at 15 volts and with each wrong answer went up by 15 volts stopping at a potentially lethal 450 volts.
Of course, the shocks were not real, but the teacher did not know that. Milgram reported. “No subject stopped prior to administering … 300 volts. Of the 40 subjects, 26 gave the full 450 volts to the learner.”
Dr. Milgram concluded, “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” (Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority; an Experimental View, (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974)
Milgram’s experiment was one of many that have demonstrated two things. First, our behavior is not determined by our personal values; and second, far more influential on our behavior is what people around us are doing. Just think about how almost everyone breaks the law every day, driving faster than the speed limit. If everyone else was driving at the speed limit, so would you.
The idea that values drive behavior is a comforting idea. It is one that many companies have bought in to. They apply it as a formula: you define your corporate values; then hire people who share those values; as a result you’ll get behaviors consistent with those values. It’s a nice idea. But it fails in the face of 50 years of psychological research. No matter how well written, communicated and framed for hanging by the front door, values do little to drive behavior. But… BEHAVIOR IS ALL YOU GET!
You pay for behavior whether it's productive, pointless, or pernicious. However, behaviors are completely manageable. The five of us at THNK have put together a set of simple (but not simplistic) tools based on 150 years of combined experience and guided by hundred of psychological studies to enable you to manage your employee and leadership behaviors. We then overlay another interesting discovery around motivation. Avoid motivators that lend themselves to scorekeeping. You can never get ahead with those motivators. Instead, we focus on two very potent and deeply ingrained motivators to put the power behind the behaviors we get. The results are the most engaged workforce you could ever hope for. An that drives productivity, profitability, and growth.
The CEO is always the owner of the culture of a company. Since culture can only manifest itself in the behaviors of the workforce, managing behavior is managing the culture, but much more precisely. Start by changing your own behavior and taking action. Start by contacting the experts at THNK.
THNK’s methodology is based solidly in science. It’s effectiveness allows us to guarantee every session that we conduct at your company. If you don’t get the value you expected from the session, you don’t pay for it
For more information about THNK, visit us at
www.thnk2grow.com OR https://www.builtinchicago.org/company/thnk
You can learn more about what THNK does by accessing this YouTube video: [video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Wb7GdL20k]
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