One of the greatest challenges in management today is to persuade people to change their level of productivity. As humans we are a product of our normal behavior. Our habitual behavior is pretty much fixed and permanent change is very difficult to achieve.

Try thinking about this from the point of view as either a manager or a supervisor and you want to increase the productivity of your team. Before you even try this, learn a bit about why people do things the way they do. After all, if you increase productivity there has to be a change. Managing and leading change is not always easy. However, the more you understand about why people have difficulty changing, the better you are able to lead the change.

Look at yourself, you go to the same shops, you go to the same gas station, watch the same TV programs and probably get dressed in the same order every day. It’s almost like we need this pattern of behavior to give us a routine, some sort of stability, a way of doing things which does not require any thought.

When we translate that behavior to the workplace, or we run into problems because some people do things that we don’t want them to do. This is where we need to use techniques that involve influence and persuasion. Then we are faced with another problem. People will agree that they need to do things differently but find great difficulty in changing themselves.

The difficulty is caused by the way our brains operate. All our previous behavior creates behavioral patterns and our brain is wired to do exactly what we have done in the past. So much so, that if we know the way a person has behaved in the past we can almost guarantee that we can predict future behavior. It is that strong.

The latest research indicates that it takes around about five days to form a new habit provided it is repeated daily. These studies have considerable implications in the workplace. It means there is a possibility that workplace behavior can be changed through coaching and repetition in a short time. Originally, it was thought that the new habit takes 21 days to change.

Creating a new habit does not mean that the old habit has been cancelled. What it means that this choice is part of your everyday decision-making and it is tempting to shift back to old ways. Our old, strong, neural pathways are a powerful magnet for us to return to our old behavior.

To overcome the attraction of the old neural pathways we must consciously and intentionally repeat new behavior time after time and day after day until it can compete. This is why coaching on-the-job is so successful. For a manager or a supervisor, the key to successful change is the ability to coach your team daily to reinforce new habits of behavior.

To make a change in behavior requires an enormous initial effort because first of all we have to create new neural pathways in the brain and then fight off the temptation to return to old patterns of behavior. Once we have created the new neural pathways we have to strengthen them through regular usage and continual reinforcement.

To increase productivity requires change. It is strongly advised that you plan the change before you try and install it and develop your coaching skills.

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