Habitual change or changing habits

Habits are strange things. They are automatic ways of dealing with events, and they help us avoid the cognitive overload of having to make decisions about everything we do. Habits keep us ticking along so that we can focus on the important stuff.

But habits are not always helpful or optimal.

For example, when I first grew a beard and needed to keep it clean, I mentally classified it as part of my face. Consequently, I washed the beard with soap. I was soon suffering from beard dandruff but assumed that this must be natural. And once my washing habit was formed, I continued it.

Then, a good many years later, I had a brainwave while washing my hair. A beard was made of hair, so why not treat it as such and shampoo it? Within a couple of weeks, the dandruff was gone. Changing the assumption associated with my habit yielded immediate dividends. Which brings me to change.

In our novelty-driven culture, change is valorised. Yet, as you get older, your enjoyment of having change foisted upon you decreases in tandem with hair and testosterone levels.

This is because, for older people, change often means giving up habitual methods of operating that they have been honing for many years. It also means having to learn something new at precisely a time when the ability to learn new stuff is diminishing.

It is therefore interesting to see how people behave when they achieve the level of power that enables them to impose change on others.

You can spot an ego-driven leader within a month of their arrival, because they will already be trumpeting largescale changes to systems and structures. This not only shows that they lack the patience or interest to understand the context of their new job, but it also means that they don’t understand how thoroughly confronting these changes will be for their staff.

You can spot an ego-driven leader within a month of their arrival, because they will already be trumpeting largescale changes to systems and structures.

Leaders and managers of this type are so focused on indulging their own creativity and power that they fail to understand the effect their actions have on others.

Someone once described such people as ‘seagull managers’ – people who fly in, make a lot of noise, crap on everything and then fly away again – and this is accurate. These people rarely stick around long enough to see the fallout from their actions, because they are simply using whatever job they are in as a rung on a career ladder.

Conversely, the leaders and managers I have most appreciated over the years did very little for the first six to eight months after arrival other than talk to people and find out how everything operated. Targeted changes only began to happen once they fully understood the context and the people.

And these managers were more likely to understand the difficulties people experienced around change, and to facilitate changes that were suggested by their staff rather than just imposing their own will.

In my own middle-management roles, I had to deal with constant pressure to change things.

This pressure came both from below and above. When it was a staff member proposing a change, I found it helped to distinguish the novelty-driven from the quality-driven – but testing this took time.

Initially the person with the idea needed to demonstrate that they were genuinely committed to it and were prepared to fight for it if necessary (which they wouldn’t do for a whim). Then the staff group, as a whole, needed to be supportive.

Finally, I wanted to ensure that, in the course of implementation, no babies would get thrown out with the bathwater, and that the change offered real potential for improvement. If it ticked all those boxes, then I was convinced.

For my colleagues, understanding that I was not an advocate of change for change’s sake allowed them to know that there would be reasonable continuity, and that any proposed changes had been thoroughly considered. This, I believe, created a degree of security.

For my colleagues, understanding that I was not an advocate of change for change’s sake allowed them to know that there would be reasonable continuity ...

However, the landscape of education was constantly changing, and many initiatives were being foisted on us from above. These were non-negotiable and had to be responded to.

To deal with them, I found that, where at all possible, it paid to implement these changes in small, unheralded increments. Ideally, these needed to be spread over several years.

Doing this meant that, at any one time, the degree of change being asked of people was manageable – enough to convince the high-ups that something was happening, but not enough to be triggering for the staff. Over time, people’s work and habits adapted without them ever hitting the level of change-induced stress that would occur if the change was too abrupt.

This approach (of being a somewhat reluctant implementer) meant I didn’t get much credit from the leadership, but it was worth it if it meant facilitating a seamless transition for the staff from one set of habits to another.