The supervisor of a Waste Collection Service noticed that most waste collectors across the region didn’t wear gloves. Instead, many of them carried them around in their pockets, throwing them away at the end of the day. In the past the management team had issued instructions laced with threats of disciplinary action for those people spotted not wearing gloves, which sometimes worked for a week or two, but their behaviour eventually reverted back.

The supervisor decided to try something different and asked one of the collection teams to come into the office for a bacon sandwich before they started their shift one morning. He asked them why it was they didn’t wear gloves and instead carried them around, throwing them into the back of the truck with the rest of the waste at the end of the shift. The waste collectors explained that the gloves they were issued with were poor quality, often tearing easily. They also explained how they made their hands sweat, which often led to skin complaints. The Supervisor thanked them for their information and promised to look into it.

A week later, he asked the same team to come into the office again at the start of the shift, where he had laid out a variety of sample gloves from different suppliers. He asked them each to take a selection away and try a different pair each day, coming back with a preference the following week. They chose a glove that was slightly more expensive but nothing that would break the bank. So he said he would do them a deal. If they wore their gloves and used the same pair for their 4-day shift rotation, only exchanging them if they were damaged, then he would commit to buying the superior gloves. Were they up for it? ‘’Absolutely” was their resounding reply, because what did they have to lose?

A month later and the waste collectors in this team were wearing their gloves every day. Other teams across the region heard about this and wanted to get access to the superior gloves, so he did the same deal with them, gradually rolling this out across the whole workforce. Even though the gloves were more expensive, they were using less gloves overall so he actually made an annual budget saving of over £60,000 across the region.

By changing his approach from telling to asking, removing the barriers in the way of them doing the desirable behaviour and also giving them the power of choice, he got the waste collectors to change their behaviour because they wanted to, not because they had to.

4 min read: Rosie, a new venue manager for a large theatre, was frustrated with the length of time it took for her team to turnaround the space in the main auditorium.

The auditorium is used for a spectrum of events, from slimming club meetings, to major rock concerts. After every event the auditorium is emptied and set up in a different way for the next user, and completing the turnaround took a long time because of the way in which the seating, tables, lighting and other equipment were stored. On average, it was taking the team 7 or 8 hours to do a turnaround, which meant there was very little time left for other work within the theatre, so the list of general maintenance tasks was growing.

Rosie observed the team during several turnarounds and saw them double handling equipment, by moving it from one part of the space to another so that they could get access to seats that were stored at the back, and then moving it all back in again. The equipment store was chaotically organised, with lots of redundant equipment and furniture. For example, there was a broken chair that the team were holding onto, with the intention of getting time to repair it one day. The chair had been there for ten years! In amongst this, there were also six overflowing rubbish bins that were hardly ever emptied, adding to the chaos.

Rather than make assumptions, Rosie spent time with the team to understand why they were doing things the way they did and learned that suggestions to improve the space had been given to previous managers, but nothing had ever happened with them. The team had never received any pinpointed feedback, on how they were currently doing, so they plodded on in the same way they had for nearly two decades.

She initially set about working with the team to shorten the turnaround time but what she didn’t expect was the wider reaching cultural change she would ultimately get.

Firstly, the space needed decluttering but she wanted the team to decide what was to be thrown away. They then either chose to part with some of the broken equipment they had been hoarding, or actually fix it and put it back into operational use.

Next, she asked them how they wanted to organise the space to minimise the double handling and make it more efficient for each turnaround, so they came up with a plan for each piece of equipment to get its own space.

The number of bins were reduced and instead of putting them within the space, Rosie placed the bins close to the exits – the exits the team would use as they popped out occasionally for a smoking break by the rubbish skips at the rear of the building. By fitting a small additional behaviour into an already established habitual pattern, she made it more likely they would empty the bins.

Every team member (including Rosie) was given their own personal to-do list made up of items they were accountable for off the maintenance list, so that as they freed up time on the turnarounds, they could deliver tasks off their personal lists.

The result was they saved thousands of pounds in staff time over the course of a year, the space was significantly tidier posing less of a health and safety risk, the team were less frustrated and they carried out more maintenance tasks with the same number of people.

However, the most impressive result was the wider cultural change. Rosie not only changed an inefficient working pattern that had been followed for almost 20 years but also got the team to problem solve, come up with their own ideas and be proactive.

She made it more likely by working with the team to bring about the change, creating an environment full of positive reinforcement. She made sure that every improvement they made, no matter how small, was recognised and compliments given. Every time the team made a decision without prompting, she gave more praise. She wouldn’t allow any negativity either, so when people described all the reasons an idea wouldn’t work, she was relentless in asking them what would work instead. Every week they had a 15 minute ‘huddle’ which was an additional opportunity to recognise all the achievements they had made the previous week.

When I asked her about how she had approached this, she said “I try to kill them with kindness and pestering while joining in, so they can’t moan!”

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3 min read: We moved house and my 4-year-old dog Eddie developed a very annoying habit. He started to eat the mail. I would return from work to find that he had shredded the mail into lots of pieces. He had never done this in our old house and I was puzzled as to why the new house would have prompted this new and annoying behaviour.

On the first few occurrences, I responded by yelling at him when I returned from work, waving the shredded paper about and sending him to his bed. This made no difference.

Next, I invested in a mail cage to go on the back of the letter box to stop him reaching the mail. However, being a super intelligent cocker spaniel, he worked out how to open the catch and reach the mail!! So, I then wired the catch shut with garden wire and he chewed through the wire each day on a mission to get his coveted prize.

I decided to tackle this behaviour during my week off and went down the route of using punishment. I waited patiently by the door for the postman and when Eddie ran to the mail cage I yelled out “Bad boy!” at the top of my voice. He jumped in shock and ran to hide. I did the same routine each day and eventually when the letter box rattled, he just looked at me and walked away to climb into his basket.

“I’ve cracked it!” I thought, as I smugly set off for work the following week. So imagine my disappointment when I came home later that day to find the mail shredded into even smaller pieces than he had ever shredded it before!

It was at that point I realised I was the problem, not the dog. Eddie was bored. He was finding the different puzzles I was giving him each day stimulating and the rattle of the letter box was the prompt that signalled the fun was about to begin, with the prize of making confetti out of the mail.

The solution? I changed his routine. Instead of a short walk in the morning and a long one at lunch time, I took Eddie on a long walk each morning to tire him out. I also sneaked a chew bone in the mail cage. This meant he was often sleeping when the postman arrived and didn’t hear the letter box, but if he did wake, he found a chew bone in the cage and ate that, which he obviously found much tastier than the mail.

Using punishment to stop behaviour is a flawed approach as it only works when the punisher is present in the environment (me being in the house on my days off), with the behaviour resuming when the punisher is absent (me going out to work). The use of punishment often leads to revenge behaviour, which in this case was even tinier pieces of shredded mail.

Instead, providing reinforcement for an incompatible behaviour (chewing a dog treat instead of chewing the mail) replaced an undesirable behaviour with a desirable one.

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If you are interested in learning more about changing animal behaviour, we recommend the book “Don’t Shoot the Dog” by Karen Pryor.

3 min read: During a team building workshop I was running with a small organisation, I sensed some tension in the room between two managers. One of the managers was Beth, who had been with the organisation for about 15 years, and the other was a new project manager Phillipa, who had been seconded into the team from a partner organisation 3 months earlier.

The tension became apparent during a discussion about how the team liked to work when Beth made a number of pointed remarks about Phillipa not behaving as part of the team.

After the third comment I stopped the discussion and asked Beth to pinpoint what she meant by “not behaving as part of the team” by listing the behaviours she would like to see Phillipa start doing or stop doing.

Beth described how when the team were all catching up in the morning about the workload for the day ahead, Phillipa didn’t join in the discussion and instead worked away at her computer. Beth was also frustrated by the fact that when Phillipa went out on her visits for the day she would email everyone in the team with a list of places she was visiting rather than have a conversation with them, particularly as they were sitting right next to her.

Beth had observed these behaviours and leapt to the conclusion that Phillipa wasn’t interested in building relationships with the members of the team she had been seconded into.

When I asked Phillipa to comment, she explained that she didn’t know she was expected to get involved in the morning huddle and so quietly worked away so as not to disturb the discussion. She explained how at times there were things she could have contributed to from what she overheard, but felt it wasn’t her place to interrupt, particularly as she was new.

Phillipa let the team know her whereabouts each day by email as part of the safeguarding processes in her organisation. She worked alone each day visiting customers in their homes and so her organisation had put in place a process to make sure there was a written record of where she would be and at what time, so that anyone in the team could find her or raise the alarm if she didn’t arrive when she said she would.

Phillipa was genuinely surprised at Beth’s remarks and didn’t appreciate the downstream impact her behaviour was having on others. Beth and Phillipa both apologised to one another for their misguided assumptions and agreed to try some changes in how they worked together.

After the workshop I discussed the issue with the Team Leader, who acknowledged the following list of things that he should have done differently to get the relationships off to a flying start:

1. Planned in time at the start of the secondment to get everyone together for 30 mins for the existing team to explain how they worked and what their expectations were of the new project manager.
2. At this meeting, the new project manager could explain the expectations her organisation had in terms of her role and how it would impact on them.
3. Set aside 30mins at the start and end of every week for the team to highlight what was going well and what needed tweaking.

Many people I coach complain about the behaviour of a person they work with and assume the worst about why the person is behaving that way. When I ask them “So have you spoken to them about it?” the answer is usually “No” as they want to avoid the potential for confrontation. Instead resentment builds and relationships either never establish themselves or flounder and die. Tolerating the short term discomfort of asking the question and the potential confrontation that follows, is much healthier than holding your tongue and letting it fester.

The manager could have helped the team by taking the lead with the small steps above at the start of the secondment, then everyone would have been clear about the behaviours expected. They would have avoided resorting to toxic assumptions and the use of thought transfer or sarcasm to give their feedback and made it more likely the team worked in harmony from the outset.

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4 min read: I am currently learning how to ride a motorbike and at 5 ft 2in riding a bike that weighs a quarter of a tonne is not as easy as it looks. Especially for the Module 1 test where you need to do slow manoeuvre exercises around a series of obstacles without touching anything.

One of the exercises is the U-turn, which is where you need to turn around your bike from one yellow line to another, as if you were turning it from one side of the road to the other to travel in the opposite direction.

I had a real issue with this exercise as it requires you to look back over your shoulder, whilst leaning the bike with enough speed and pressure to turn it without touching the opposite yellow line and without putting your foot down. If you put your foot down it’s an instant fail and the test is over, no matter how well you’ve done with the other exercises.

My instructor Tom is an advanced rider who leads tours all over the world and I’ve definitely tested his coaching skills, and patience, as a student! He started this part of the training by demonstrating how it is done on his own bike. I tried to copy his technique, but I was scared the bike would tip so didn’t turn it sharply enough and I ended up riding over the line.

Next he suggested I look over my shoulder and away into the distance without looking at the yellow line, because on a bike, wherever you look is where your machine will go. However, it was such a negative fixation for me that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the yellow line I was trying to avoid, and you guessed it, I crossed over it.

Then one day Tom tried something different. Instead of telling me that we were practicing the U-turn, he said we were going to practice stopping my bike in a box of blue cones (like the ones in the photo). This is also an exercise on the test and one I was good at. He set up two boxes, side by side but 6 metres apart and asked me to stop in one box, ride the bike around and stop in the box on the other side, and so on. Off I set, turning my bike and stopping in the blue box, then turning my bike again and stopping in the opposite blue box.

After completing 20 successful attempts, I noticed Tom chuckling as he watched from the fence and it dawned on me. He had spaced the boxes the same distance apart as the yellow lines of the U-turn, but because I was positively fixating on getting into the box, rather than avoiding the yellow lines, I stopped obsessing about the lines and riding over them.

The U-turns I performed, were in fact 1 metre tighter than what was required in the test exercise and if you had told me that morning I was going to achieve that by the end of the day I would have laughed.

On the day of the test, all I had to do was imagine that Tom’s blue cones were there, about a metre in from the line and aim for them.

The moral of this story is…… ​

1. When we are trying to shape any behaviour by coaching, no one approach fits all. People are individuals and learn differently, so as coaches we need to use different techniques until we find the one that works for them.
2. Getting cross or frustrated with someone when they are really trying hard to achieve something is not going to be an environment conducive to success. They are probably already beating themselves up each time they miss their target, without you weighing in.
3. Just showing somebody how to do a behaviour is a flawed strategy because one way of achieving a result that comes natural to one person, may not be right for another.
4. And finally, telling them all of the things they are doing wrong is likely to give them a negative fixation, which will make them focus solely on their errors.

In summary, a better coaching approach is to give the person you are coaching a positive fixation on the next small progressive step that feels achievable for them, with the skills they have at that present time, giving them lots of encouragement about what they are doing right. Creating an environment where they experience lots of success in tiny increasing steps, whilst fixating positively on their ultimate goal, is much more likely to raise their game.

Finally, if their progress stalls at any point, you’ve given them a step too far, so drop it down a gear.

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3 min read: I once worked for a boss who was a micromanager. Lots of his behaviours were frustrating, but one that drove me to distraction was his obsession with correcting my written work.

Every month, I would prepare at least 10 reports for different committees. These reports could range from updating members of the committee on a particular project, to asking for approval for additional funding. I would submit my draft reports to the Director for approval two weeks before the deadline and then the fun would begin. The report would come back the next day with page after page covered in red ink with suggested changes.

So, I would dutifully make the changes and resubmit, and it would boomerang back again with even more changes, some of which changed the text back to the original submission – grrrrrr!

I knew it was irrational as it was something really petty, but every month when I sat down to begin each report, I did so with such resentment, that it impacted on the words I chose, and it was putting a strain on my relationship with him.

In an effort to check that I wasn’t blowing things out of all proportion, I decided to analyse his behaviour, by collecting the data on the previous three months changes he had made.

These were the results:

• 1080 corrections in total
• 57% were due to changes made to my style of writing
• 28% were due to incorrect policy direction
• 12% were corrections to my grammar
• 2% were spelling corrections
• 1% were corrections to the figures

These statistics told me that I obviously needed a conversation with the Director.

He was surprised by the data I shared with him, as he genuinely didn’t realise the impact he was having on me and the team. The data gave us a comfortable way to have what could have been an emotional discussion, because we could focus on the facts. During the discussion we explored whether or not some of the style changes were critical to the success of the report at committee or not. For times when the style wasn’t critical, he agreed he would give me the space to develop my own voice.

The fact that 28% of the changes were made because I had headed off in the wrong policy direction told us that we urgently needed to set up a 30-minute planning discussion each month so that we could agree the outline of the report and save hours of abortive writing.

The following month there was a 75% reduction in the number of amendments made, and most of these were minor. The behavioural problem was fixed, with our relationship intact.

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2 min read: Jim, a Retirement Officer at a Housing Association, was a lone worker who managed a retirement complex away from Head Office, with nobody to check on his wellbeing.

A new manager, Derek, started working with him and realised that there was no system in place to ensure each day that he had safely started at his work and also then safely left for the day. Derek still exercised his duty of care by calling around to track him down, but this was not only becoming time consuming, Derek also felt like he was nagging Jim.

Derek had originally asked Jim to make a call each day at the start of his work and as he was leaving, but this wasn’t happening. Derek assumed it was because Jim didn’t like being checked up on, however a conversation with Jim showed that there was much more to the situation than that.

First of all, Derek explained to Jim what he wanted and why, being very clear that this was about concern for his safety rather than lack of trust. They had a good relationship, so this was an easy conversation and Jim explained that he used to check-in with his previous manager, but the manager stopped acknowledging the check-ins and Jim’s behaviour faded away.

They agreed to try an experiment. Derek put Outlook reminders in their diaries and a physical sign on the door of the office saying, “Check In!” as a prompt to get the behaviour started. They agreed that the best method of checking in was by text message or phone call, rather than email, as Jim wasn’t always at his desk to log on.

To help reinforce the behaviour, Derek set a deadline of 15 minutes from when the shift started and ended and also responded with a “Thank you!” when Jim checked in.

Even though Derek had assumed that Jim would be put out by this new request, he wasn’t. In fact, Jim really appreciated that Derek had shown concern for his wellbeing.

So, the behaviour started and was happening each day, but Derek didn’t want it to suffer from extinction as it had in the past (where the behaviour faded away without reinforcement) so he decided to introduce a new but simple reinforcer for Jim.

Derek had received “A Book of Dad Jokes” at Christmas and he knew that Jim loved telling jokes. So now, instead of responding with “Thank you” to each check-in, Derek sends Jim a joke every day as his acknowledgement text message.

Derek could have insisted that Jim comply with his requests by enforcing compliance to the Health and Safety rules, or by taking disciplinary action, but instead he found a way to create a new habit which was fun and strengthened their relationship.

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3 min read: I often coach people who are having an emotional reaction to a particular situation, either at home or at work, and they are struggling to work through a resolution.

The first thing that I ask them to do, before we get close to exploring solutions, is to measure the behaviour that is occurring. There is often resistance to doing this because they are itching to fix things, but I insist it will be worth their while.

The reason I ask for data is to see just exactly what behaviour is occurring and to assess whether or not they are clouded by their confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias, is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses”.

This can lead to them attempting to fix something that isn’t necessarily a problem or overreacting to a situation, putting a strain on themselves and potentially their relationships with others.

Here are two recent examples.

One person I’m coaching was trying an experiment at home to see if he could remove the frustration he was feeling about his teenage son. He declared that “He never uses the laundry basket! There are clothes all over the bedroom and it’s a stinking mess! I’m sick of having to go in and pick up after him to fill the laundry basket”.

So, I asked him first to observe his behaviour to see if there were particular times of the day or days of the week when it occurred more often and if there were any particular patterns to him using the laundry basket or not.

A couple of weeks later he came back with a smile on his face. “It’s nowhere near as bad as I thought it was”, he said. “I measured it for two weeks and the data shows that he used the laundry basket more times than he didn’t, which was a real surprise to me”.

In fact, as our discussion unfolded, it turned out that the times when his son didn’t use the basket were actually the days of the week when my client was most stressed with work and so the irritation that the behaviour caused was magnified, making him think that it occurred more often than it did.

A similar situation has arisen with another client I am working with who has just carried out an employee opinion survey. The organisation is going through major change and the Management Team have spent a lot of energy in their communications trying to bust some of the urban myths that exist in the workplace.

They were therefore really frustrated with some of the responses that they've read in the survey comments, which appeared to repeat the urban myths they had been trying to bust.

One Director said “the past 3 months of talking face to face with as many people as possible has been a complete waste of time if they still believe some of these urban myths exist”.

So I took a look at the data. Of the hundreds of comments they had received, only six people restated the urban myth. Just six.

However, because the comment landed so hard emotionally, it was magnified tenfold for the management team.

So when you're frustrated with a situation and not sure if you are overreacting, then data is the key. If you're in doubt about what is going on, then measure it...... and if you’re not in doubt, measure it anyway!. You may just be surprised.

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4 min read: A manager wanted her team to regularly post on social media to promote their exhibitions, in order to increase the number of visitors to their venue.

No matter how or who she asked, she could not get them to do this and assumed that the team just couldn’t be bothered or were avoiding social media. The Manager was getting frustrated at always having to make the posts herself, which was just one more task on a very long list of things to do.

She asked the team member most likely to give her feedback, just why it was that the team were reluctant to post, expecting to hear that they were too busy or what was the point, etc. However, she was really surprised with the feedback she got.

It turns out that there were so many barriers in the way of actually making a post that most people who had tried, promptly gave up and didn’t bother again. They also knew that she would step in to post

at the last minute anyway, so this just reinforced the situation.

Firstly, there was a problem connecting their tablets to the work Wi-Fi. when trying to post on Facebook. The Wi-Fi at their venue was child friendly and so blocked the connection to any social media sites, but none of the team knew that.

Secondly, staff were concerned about what was appropriate to post in a work environment and worried about what might happen if they got that wrong. They were also concerned about whether posts would even be interesting to the general public and so were often stuck with what to write about.

The Manager realised that she needed to make it as easy as possible for these creative and talented people to express themselves and share the good work they had been doing.

She set about removing all of the technical barriers, by discussing the issue with their IT provider, they found an alternative way to securely connect to social media without impacting on the general Wi-Fi access. She set up a Pages Manager account so that the staff could remain anonymous on social media as individuals and created one-time sign in’s for Instagram and Twitter, so that it made posting easy.

Next, she got the team together to brainstorm content that they could include, looking ahead into the calendar of events that they had coming up for the year.

The team made a commitment to start writing posts and she crossed her fingers.

At first the posts came as the odd one or two, and she made sure that she liked them and shared them with others. This turned into a trickle and she pulled together a graph showing the data for the weekly community reach and interactions, something very important to her staff, and displayed it each week.

Then the unexpected happened. The number of posts started to increase as the staff started to get dozens of likes and hundreds of followers. Not only did the number of posts grow, but the amount of creative thought and fun that they put into each post also increased as they looked for more and more opportunities to reach their community to show off their work.

An activity which was originally seen as just something difficult and painful, had become self-reinforcing and there were celebrations all round when their followers reached 600, just 8 weeks after they had started posting in earnest.

The lesson the Manager learned was not to make assumptions about the reasons why people don’t do what you want them to do and instead ask the question. Many barriers to getting behaviour started can be small, but the tiny amount of extra effort required to overcome them can seem like a mountain to climb. Remove the barriers one by one and see what happens.

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2 min read: Samantha was getting more and more frustrated with her husband and two children constantly leaving their clothes lying in every room in the house. In fact, wherever they took off an item of clothing, that would be the place that it was discarded.

She was forever tripping up over the clothes and as a busy working mum, was getting increasingly frustrated. No amount of nagging them to “put your clothes in the laundry hamper” worked, and she felt like a broken record.

She wanted to fix it in a way that would have a positive rather than negative impact on her relationship with the family and so devised a cunning plan. She knew just how competitive they all were as a family and decided that the way forward was to turn this into a healthy competition, which she called Hamper Wars!

For every item of clothing left on the floor, the individual would score a point, but in this case, points did not mean prizes. The person at the end of the two weeks with the least points would be the winner and be treated to sweets of their choice. She spoke to them all about this idea, which they loved and couldn’t wait to get started, so she made the chart above, pinned it on the fridge and the game began.

At the beginning everyone was vigilant, determined not to get any penalty points on the chart, but as the weeks wore on, the children would sometimes forget. Samantha would just need to say the words “Hamper Wars” and this was enough of a prompt to spur them into action to pick discarded clothing up and put it in the laundry hamper, before any points were added to the chart.

At the end of two weeks, the only person who had any penalty points was Dad, which everyone found hilarious. The children were delighted to have a clean sheet (and the sweets!) and are continuing to use the hamper.

Embarrassed about his performance, Dad sulkily asked Samantha “That’s not fair, why did I not get any prompts the way the kids did?” to which Samantha replied, “Because you’re an adult darling!”

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