How Leaders Can “Nudge” Change

How do you get people to do what they should, but don’t want to do? More importantly for leaders, how do you get employees to act not only in the best interests of your team, but in their own best interests as well?  There has been a slew of social science in recent years on behaviors and biases, and if I had to select a Facebook status for how humans operate I’d have to say “It’s Complicated”.

I recently saw this interview with David Halpern, leader of the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team – colloquially known as the “Nudge Unit”.   In social science, a nudge is designed to get people to voluntarily comply with a desired behavior through indirect suggestion, and the interview got me to thinking about the importance of nudges in getting people to respond in a given way.

In the interview, he spoke how in the UK offices for employment assistance a typical interview with an unemployed person usually included the question “what did you do in the past week to find work?”. The Nudge unit, comprised of behavioural scientists, knew that it was better to ask people what they were going to do, rather than what they did. After all, asking someone what they’re going to do in the coming week forces them to envision actual tasks and, once they relate their plan to someone else, head into the week with a sense of obligation to meet the objectives that they themselves laid out.

There are many other interesting nudges, such as the fact that while it might be good to give employees the ability to opt-in to something worthwhile – for instance setting aside a portion of pay for retirement – the results will be even better if you give those same employees a choice to opt-out from a savings program that has already been designed. As Halpern related, it’s not that we don’t want to save money – it’s that we hate paperwork.

I’m also a bit of a Freakonomics junkie. I listen to the podcast and occassionally visit the website of the team behind the popular Freakonomics book (and its sequels). On their website some time ago the problem of public urination was covered. They had a photo contest where the symbol of a shrine was visible on a city wall in Asia despite the fact there was no shrine behind the wall. The symbol was there to “nudge” urinators (is that a word?…) to not relieve their bladders there. A nudge might work better than a typical sign would, as the Freakonomics team shows in this picture taken and submited by yours truly from a trip I had taken to Bangalore, India.

Enough about that. The point here is that we tend to over-think how to influence behaviors when simple questions and small “nudges” often do the trick. It’s not that asking an employee the question “what are you going to do this week?” is a novel insight, but like many insights the key is remembering and practicing what we know.

I think a leader who always asks others “what are you going to accomplish this week?” can run the risk of becoming tiresome if the questions lack color and context. When there is a challenging issue with a sales propect, the better question might be “what steps are you going to take this week to advance this deal in our sales process?”, or if the issue is a large presentation that has to be made in a few weeks the question might be “what are you going to do this week to make sure you have a solid outline done by the end of the week?”.

You get the idea. Nudge away, and good luck!