Thinking small can help you drive change faster

The pace and magnitude of change coming your way might feel overwhelming. We find that focusing on small, easy-to-action steps makes the change more manageable and helps achieve the desired outcome faster; especially when coupled with deliberate practice.

The concept of ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ posits that if you keep making small improvements on a continuous basis, they will add up to a significant improvement over time. This improvement is not linear but compounds – the kind of improvement that makes a difference between good and great.

Let’s say you identified that your team needs to work on communication skills. After observing your team in action, you see that they’re not communicating effectively when they’re handing work tasks between each other. The impact of this is that there’s often rework and, sometimes, mistakes are made that could have been avoided.

Pointing this out to your team would create some awareness of the problem. Discussing the impact this is having on their performance could motivate them to do things differently. But to truly make a behavioural shift in your team easy and immediately actionable, you need to go one step further: you need to identify the micro-behaviour they could put in place.

Micro-behaviours are what they sound like: small, discrete behaviours – but more importantly – they have 4 key characteristics. They are:

Observable: can be seen or heard and easily assessed. Repeatable: are not a one-off action but can be practiced and repeated. 100% in the control of the individual: able to be immediately actioned. Predictive: indicative of the result you want to see

Now imagine you’re in your team members’ shoes. Instead of hearing: ‘you need to communicate more effectively’, you hear ‘as a team this week, we’re going to work on asking more open-ended questions, to help us gather more information on what’s expected, so there’s less rework down the track.’

It’s clear, isn’t it? It’s also completely within your team’s control. And if they all did it – you would expect it would make a big difference to the communication issue you’re trying to solve.

But a micro-behavioural approach doesn’t end there. To really get the micro-behaviour embedded, and to know whether it’s working, you’ve got to get your team practicing it on the job. And when we say ‘practice’, we mean practising it deliberately, i.e. not just doing the same thing over and over but with the intent to improve a little bit every time.

For your team members to know whether they’re improving, they’ll need two things: what ‘great’ looks like (what can I compare to or assess against so I know where my capability is?) and feedback – what are others or my leader observing about what I’m doing well and where are the areas of improvement they see? This is the essence of deliberate practice.

Here’s a tip: if there’s an opportunity for team members to record what they’re doing and listen to it back, this is by far the fastest way to get them to self-analyse whether they’re implementing the micro-behaviour they’re working on well. It will also help them to pick up on other micro-behaviours they want to improve.

It might be a customer conversation they listen back over, or a meeting or coaching session. Reassure your team that this kind of self-assessment is awkward at first (listening to your own voice can be a challenge!) but this is also the fastest way to improve. It also helps your team member to look at their demonstrated behaviours more objectively – making feedback much easier to palate.

You can apply a micro-behavioural approach to anything your team needs to upskill in. Get your team involved in what this could look like. Stay small, keep practising, and you’ll soon see big results.