Podcast | The Secret To Successful Behaviour Change | Will Murray

Behaviour change is driven by everyday action, continuous feedback and incremental improvements over time…

The trouble is, most of the ways we approach it are flawed! Whether it’s the personality tests with no practical application or the lack of clear success behaviours and measurement of those.

Will Murray created Packtypes to change all that, and he joins us today to explain how you can do it too.
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Watch the Episode

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Listen to the Podcast

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Four key lessons on behaviour change

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1. The problem with personality tests for behaviour change.

The benefit doesn’t come from what you learn, but applying what you learn!

And sadly, personality tests aren’t designed for application.

“It creates a fixed mindset. We have this idea that we are a person, we have attributes, character, and personality, and then the smart thing to do is work out who we are and play to those strengths.

“It gets people to think, this is me. This is what I do. Well I'm going to stick to that and not do anything else. And if it's not part of those strengths, then I'm going to avoid it at all costs.”

Will also explained that it subconsciously gets people to prioritise their own strengths and add greater value to them.

But no good ever comes from thinking that the things you do are important, and the things other people do aren’t.
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2. Behaviour change needs practical application

“I don't think you can teach people about themselves through reports. We are too complex for that. So the type of report you'd need to do you justice would be so detailed, so complicated, and requires so much interpretation that it'd be overwhelming.”

This is a huge driver of why Will developed Packtypes: an exercise using a pack of cards that helps you collect immediate, everyday feedback about your behaviours.

So, rather than a one-off intervention or report, you are baking insights about your behaviours into your everyday life.

“This concept of everyday feedback is the key. I don't think we can learn about ourselves in big chunks. 

“We sometimes refer to it as Kaizen for people because it is about continuous improvement, step by step, you think about it, you try it, you ask for feedback, you go again. Now, if you can imagine repeating that process multiple times in a short period, you get growth.”
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3. Success behaviours and how we measure them.

“What we're looking at is actual behaviour and desired behaviour, and we can see alignment. We can actually measure how aligned a team’s behaviour is against what it says it wants to do - and that's what we call a KBI (Key Behaviour Indicator).

“When you measure behaviour, what you're actually assessing is future progress because the way you behave today will determine what happens tomorrow and the day after.”

Imagine you’re a salesperson, and they’re only measuring the number of sales you made…

But a lot of that is out of your control because many things influence whether a deal gets closed.

“But if you start to measure the behaviours that create sales, you can get a sense of the long-term future regardless of short-term fluctuations. 

“So that's obvious things such as how many calls you're making -  those are things that are in your control.”
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4. Use Continuous Human Improvement to drive incremental growth

Imagine everything you and your team already do, but better.

This was how Will framed this part of his mission, the part where he’s driving Continuous Human Improvement through small improvements over time.

He likened it to Kaizen for people. The idea that you’re incrementally improving and getting those incremental gains on your processes - making improvements constantly.

“The concept is about doing everything you do better. So how do you apply that in real life?

“If you look at virtually every interaction of people in the business, it might be reviewing processes and one of the most obvious ones is recruitment.

“So this is an extremely powerful recruitment tool. We're working with new companies, a global software business, and we're starting with the senior leadership team.

“They’re very modern in their thinking and… [together] we would describe success behaviours. They want to infiltrate those, inculcate those throughout the whole organisation. So they've recognised that to do that credibly, they have to demonstrate them.”

And demonstrating behaviours is about everyday actions, the type that drive small improvements over time.