The benefits of curiosity have been acknowledged for a while now.

And, being curious can even lower your stress levels!

But curiosity is a bit like keeping fit – we know it’s good for us – but some of us do it less than others.

So why are some of our leaders not as curious as we want them to be? There are three key reasons:

Showing curiosity can make us anxious

From school age we try and avoid things that might make people think less of us – so-called interpersonal risks. Showing curiosity involves taking these risks. For example, we worry that asking questions might be perceived as a weakness. We fear we’ll be judged incompetent, indecisive, or unintelligent.

And the more experienced and the more of an expert we are, the more risk we face. We believe we’re expected to know more than others. Leaders also tend to believe they’re expected to talk and provide answers, not ask questions.

It’s easier not to be curious

It’s easier on the brain to keep doing things as we’ve always done them. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that our curiosity decreases with each year that we’re in a role. Interestingly, Standard Chartered Bank have refocused their leadership development budget on emerging, new leaders, because they tend to be more curious, more intellectually hungry, and open to change than senior leaders.  

Being curious can take longer

And the final reason we avoid showing curiosity is that it can make it harder to work at pace. We all feel the pressures on our time and the need to deliver results quickly. If we ask more questions, it can slow the decision-making process down. We worry that if we surface too many alternative options, our ability to deliver quickly may be compromised.

So, it’s easier, safer and more efficient to NOT be curious. These barriers to curiosity are completely valid. So how can we help leaders address these barriers and generate the benefits of being a curious leader?

Help them expand their sources of stimulation

Often the only forms of communication our leaders receive from HR are requests for information or instructions to do something. We can play a big role in helping them widen their sources of stimulation by providing a steady stream of interesting articles, videos or podcasts about people leadership. We can go further and create a separate learning area on our main comms platform where we post these resources and then get a conversation going – asking for their opinions.

Help them to ask better questions

When 230 high-level leaders in executive education classes were asked what they would do if confronted with an organizational crisis most said they would take action. Only a few said they would ask questions rather than simply impose their ideas on others.

Leaders can develop curiosity throughout their organizations by being inquisitive themselves.

Many companies are encouraging this by replacing their cumbersome and ineffective performance management systems with a simple focus on asking questions. Like at Atlassian where managers ask these three questions in their weekly one-to-ones:

Similarly, at Ernst & Young, they have implemented the practice of ‘Leading with questions’. They realised that the leaders who were thriving at EY tended to ask better questions that helped generate creativity and fresh thinking.  They also created higher levels of trust through not just listening to fix but listening to learn. HR provided prompts and advice to their leaders to try leading with one question before getting into default conversation mode. If you want to help your leaders ask better questions, check out The Conversations Toolkit – simple tips and conversation starters to help leaders and managers have better 1-2-1s.

Reward their learning, not just their results

And finally, if you’re going to make curiosity a good thing in your organisation, then it has to be rewarded. At Survey Monkey, they conduct town hall meetings at which they celebrate the “question of the week,” chosen from employee surveys. They also have a peer recognition program to reward people who dare to be especially candid. Encouraging curiosity can mean seeing failure through a different lens. If you’re not failing, then you’re probably not innovating enough and so leaders in some companies are consciously celebrating effort, learning and yes, even failures. Like at Dermalogica where the senior team rewards the failure of the month.  

So, help to generate more curiosity by providing leaders with interesting resources, embedding the skill of asking great questions and celebrating what people have learned as well as what they achieved.

The results are in!

Nearly a thousand of you kindly responded to our recent poll where we asked the question ‘What will you be disrupting in HR in 2024?’ This is what you told us:

Leadership Capabilities 37%

HR Skills and Mindsets 24%

Core HR Processes 22%

Digital and AI in HR 12%

Other 5%

Leadership Capabilities

So, regardless of sector or geography, our focus remains on helping to improve our leaders’ people skills. This supports the anecdotal feedback we get from our conversations we have with HR professionals who tell us that the biggest issue they still face is poor line managers. Whilst it’s a bit depressing that, despite our efforts, the experience of many employees isn’t great because of a rubbish boss, there is some good news. Instead of resorting to the ubiquitous leadership development programme, HR is getting savvier when it comes to providing help. You’ve recognised that expensive, one-size-fits-all training programmes for time poor managers is not going to deliver. Instead, we’re seeing more innovative approaches such as peer-to-peer learning, bite-size delivery, nudge-based techniques and user-friendly toolkits that show greater understanding of how people learn and the best way to get leaders to engage.

If you’re planning on disrupting leadership capabilities in 2024 our top tip is to create leadership persona – 3 or 4 types of leaders that work for you – so you can be more targeted in both the types of development you offer them but also the messaging you use to convince them to get involved.

HR Skills and Mindsets

The second biggest focus is on improving ourselves which I think is really positive! We’ve been a bit like cobblers’ children with the worst shoes – always focusing on others and neglecting our own development. As with leadership capabilities, you’re doing things differently. You no longer have to take time out from busy schedules to attend lengthy and frankly, old fashioned training programmes. You’re embracing the range of different learning options and finding cost effective and higher impact ways to develop the team. You’re also changing what you learn as well as how. You’re recognizing that there are a whole new set of skills that the modern HR professional needs, including how to be more agile, how to use data and insights, marketing skills and consultancy.

If you’re planning on disrupting HR skills and mindsets in 2024 our top tip is to focus on two or three key skills that you want to prioritise. We’d suggest focusing on consulting skills, influencing leaders and agile HR.

Core HR Processes

Nearly a quarter of you are planning to disrupt those old-school HR processes that are well past their sell-by date. Performance management remains the most popular for transformation, but talent management, hiring and onboarding are also seeing some radical overhaul. You’re no longer just accepting so-called best practice and you’re recognising that some of these processes just aren’t adequate for a disrupted world. There are some really exciting innovations happening and those tired old processes are finally being replaced with agile, employee-centred options.

If you’re planning on disrupting core HR processes in 2024 then our top tip is to choose one and ask yourself ‘how do we want our people to feel at each stage?’ This will help you be more creative and innovative than simply challenging yourself with changing the process.

Digital and AI in HR

Despite the noise, moving to digital and AI solutions in HR is only the priority for a minority of you. I think that’s understandable. It is a confusing marketplace out there with numerous providers and multiple products. The world of AI is still so new and can seem a bit murky with many of you preferring to keep it in the ‘watching brief’ category for now. I anticipate that this will change over the coming months but for now it’s an also ran.

If you’re planning on disrupting HR with through digital or AI this year, our top tip is to make sure you’re not simply digitising processes that don’t work. Better to transform your approach to, say, performance management first – and then look for a digital product to support rather than assuming a digital solution will do the transformation for you.

So, an exciting and big agenda for you this year. A mix of experimenting with the brand new (AI) and tackling the perennial problems (leadership capabilities). Whatever you’re disrupting this year – it will be worth it! Good luck!

My first job was as a teacher in a college. Being new, I would put heart and soul into coming up with well-structured lesson plans filled with interesting ways of delivering the content. I really enjoyed the lesson planning. The bit I hated was when the actual students arrived in class and “messed up” my beautiful plan by not learning in accordance with it! I quickly realised that teaching was probably not my true vocation and thought I’d learned a valuable lesson myself – that real life has a nasty habit of messing up carefully laid plans.

But clearly, I failed to learn that lesson because, fast forward to my career as an HR Director, and there I am repeating the mistake – this time with succession plans. I was told by HR experts that the succession plan is one of the things I HAD to do. And so I dutifully complied in every organisation I worked in. And not just to tick the governance box for our potential CEO replacements, but often going much further and producing numerous succession plans to cover off our Divisional top teams as well. Once I’d got a couple of names in each succession box, I would feel a lot better. We can sleep easier, I thought, we have our list. But, just as my students messed up my lesson plans, so my identified successors would mess up my succession plans.  They would leave. They wouldn’t be willing to relocate. They would struggle with additional responsibilities. They wouldn’t like the role that had been assigned as “theirs”. I began to realise that the comfort I thought I was getting from a nicely completed succession plan was an illusion.

Perhaps the bigger wake up call was the realisation that the flaw in my succession plans wasn’t just the successors, but the incumbents themselves. I was asking senior leaders to identify their successors through a process that was mis-matched to the fast-paced and disrupted world they were identifying them for. My succession planning processes always seemed to have the same problems, such as:

There are of course some innovative approaches that some organisations are using to identify, if not their certain successors, then a group of people who can provide leadership in the future. I’d like to highlight three:

Don’t try and allocate people into roles – just agree your subs bench

Instead of succession planning within silos, get clusters of leaders from different teams to identify the internal talent that’s available? If you add into the mix a couple of external perspectives who can help you think through how the roles and capabilities might need to change, you get a breadth of opinion that might lead to some interesting results.

Build talent communities

I recently met with the Head of Digital for a well-known media brand. He talked about how he had been courted for nearly two years by the CEO of his current company. No hard sell. No vacancy. Just having dinner every now and again. Building relationships with individuals who may or who may never become part of your organisation takes effort but is something all of our leaders should be doing if they’re serious about robust succession. I think the facilitation of this is a key role for HR Directors of the future.

Choose your leaders through their followers

I was very interested to hear about an approach to succession planning that didn’t go top-down, but bottom up. Using Network Analysis tools, the teams, not the incumbents were asked a series of simple questions such as:

“Who do you trust?”

“Who do you go to for connections?”

“Who inspires you?

“Who stretches and develops you?”

This lead to a number of potential successors being identified who had those attributes that meant people would follow them and would perform better. Identifying your future leaders through the people who will be led by them could provide you with some great additional insights.

When I reflect on the results of my succession efforts, I have to acknowledge that they failed to produce what was needed – capabilities for the future, movement and the creation of opportunity, a range of leadership styles and perspectives. Succession plans, like so many of our talent processes try to provide an organisation with certainty. They say “We can be certain that we have the leaders of the future because we have all the boxes filled”. But HR shouldn’t be offering this kind of guarantee. We should be brave enough to tell our organisations that we can’t possibly be certain about who exactly will fit which role, by when. All we can offer them are some future-proofed attributes that, if possessed by enough people, might enable our organisations to survive or thrive. Attributes such as curiosity, connectivity and insight, humility and self-knowledge.

I used to be a big fan of 360 feedback. It seemed like the ideal way to make the performance review discussion more well-rounded and richer. And I believed that it helped people to accept and work on feedback if it came from a wider range of sources than just their line manager. But over the years I have become convinced that 360 feedback is a waste of time.

There are a number of reasons for wanting to get rid of 360 feedback.

It’s bad data

The performance data guru Marcus Buckingham is really interesting on this and it’s worth reading his Harvard Business Review article on 360 feedback from a few years ago. In summary though, he says that no individual is capable of rating another person’s behaviours in a consistent and objective way. By having multiple subjective opinions through a 360 – you actually compound the problem. For this reason alone, we shouldn’t be bothering with them.

A bureaucratic nightmare

The second reason to give up 360 feedback is the bureaucratic nightmare it presents. Once a year, you get a deluge of 360 surveys to complete – and the more senior you are – the more you get. I have filled out tons of these as a leader and I can honestly say that, despite wanting to take each one seriously and give it lots of attention – when you get to the 20th one that week, you rattle through each question at speed – giving it minimal thought. 360 feedback is a pain for leaders – taking up time they haven’t got – to answer lots of questions about someone with whom they rarely come into contact. Even those leaders who are undoubtedly more conscientious than me will be just trying to clear the backlog of 360’s as quickly as they can.

Of course, we then have all the bureaucracy about signing off nominated reviewers, getting all the reviews done and the 360’s published. I once had a Head of L&D who felt he had to help each recipient understand their feedback which led to a massive delay in everyone getting their reports. The whole process can take weeks. Not really appropriate for a fast moving world.

The lack of outcomes

But the main reason why we shouldn’t be bothering with 360 feedback is because they don’t lead to changes in behaviour. To illustrate my point, I thought I’d tell you about two people I worked with who, I believe, demonstrated the two classic responses to 360 feedback.

First up – Grant – a very senior colleague. He and I both received our 360 feedback as part of a leadership programme we were on together. He read through his – a fairly mixed bag to be honest  –and shrugged. His attitude was that if they hadn’t bothered to tell him to his face, it wasn’t worth bothering about. I kind of admired his thick skin but what a waste of time for all those reviewers.

The second person worked for me – Diana. Her report was glowing – with the exception of one verbatim comment which was very critical of her. She immediately ignored all of the many positive reviews and got very upset by the one negative review. She became frantic trying to work out which colleague it was who was so damning and openly defending herself against the reviewer’s comments. What a waste of time for her.

Most people tend to react like Diana to 360 reviews. We will skip past the meaningless spider diagrams that rate us against the competencies and which we can’t really make sense of – and jump straight to the comments. Some we recognise from feedback we have already had – in which case – why did we need to read them in a report? And some are new. And if this new feedback is anonymous – isn’t it probably right that we don’t give it too much credence? Now, of course – if all the anonymous, new feedback is from your direct reports and is negative, then this should probably give you the incentive to reflect upon your management style. But if none of your team have felt able to talk to you directly, what are the chances that you are going to read the feedback and react positively and openly? Slim to non-existent I’d have thought!

360 feedback is bad data, is time consuming and doesn’t drive changes to behaviour. It’s time to trash them along with the other big set annual pieces.

It’s not often that you leave a working day full of energy, inspiration, and hope. Well, that’s what happened at our recent One Day Programme in London. We arrived in a room full of dynamic people who want to make change happen in HR. We are so thrilled to be on the journey with them. Every time that we deliver one of our One Day Programmes to such wonderful people, we leave feeling rejuvenated and thankful that we get to work with such incredible people in our industry. So what did we do during our One Day Programme? Read on to find out more! 

Our One Day Programme encompasses various topics from the world of HR. From performance management to retaining talent to leadership development to diversity and inclusion to recruiting the right person and onboarding, we covered so much during our day together. Our aim with the One Day Programme is to train our delegates on how to deliver HR differently – always putting people first and being disruptive in our thinking. We want to help HR professionals build a people strategy with impact, influence and credibility. We want to be insight-led, whilst also people-first in our mindset. We want to treat our people as adults, consumers and human beings. In our programme, we guided our attendees through the latest thinking in HR and how to put these ideas into practice. 

It is with this truly disruptive thinking that our delegates leave our sessions determined to be a force for change in their companies and in the industry. With clear action points such as changing prescriptive policies for principles, using employee persona to help customise what we do, to overhauling our key people processes – it’s clear that there was much food for thought during the session. We find that the HR industry is constantly evolving, and with these sessions, there is always so much for us to listen, learn, and take on board into our job roles. One of our most reflective takeaways from the day was to always start with a curious mindset – whether that be in your professional or personal life.

We are heart-warmed by the popularity of these sessions as well as the feedback that we receive afterwards! It’s great to hear how eye-opening these sessions can be, as well as how motivational and inspirational for delegates. We always strive to make the sessions as personable as possible.

Our favourite feedback from the session –

“I absolutely recommend this programme for HR professionals (of all levels) who value curiosity and agility, and are looking to move the needle on HR’s overall business impact.”

What lovely words – thank you to all our delegates! 

For us, the best part of our One Day Programmes is actually not the day itself. It’s what comes afterwards. All delegates receive a free Disruptive Club membership worth £300. Alongside the training and toolkits, the Club hosts a vibrant chatroom, a forum for the energy, networking and conversations of the One Day Programme to continue.

Join us for our next One Day Programme in London on 6th June 2024. Find out more and book here.

June 6th Delivering HR Differently:  How to make change happen
This workshop is all about how to change HR. How to build a people strategy with impact, how to build influence and credibility and how to make the changes you want to see happen

We hope to see you there!

HR has believed what we’ve been told about performance management for decades. We have believed the accepted wisdom that if we want managers to take care of people performance, then they have to:

Yet despite telling managers that this will lead to higher performance and despite trying numerous wheezes to get them to do it well (like automating it, putting it all on one page or providing a guided distribution of ratings that they have to comply with), we are still left with the awful truth that
traditional performance reviews don’t work. They simply don’t drive better performance or higher motivation.

So, traditional performance management is costly. It takes up lots of our time. And over 80% of us don’t believe it helps with our performance nor find it motivating. And yet we still do it. Every single year. The annual performance review.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that 87% of HR leaders are considering making changes to this tired old process. But where do you start? What are the options for making changes? And how do you take your leaders and employees with you? The team at Disruptive HR have put together this comprehensive guide to help you answer these questions. It will take you through the key trends in performance management and choosing the approach that’s right for you. More importantly, perhaps, it will give you insights into how you can convince leaders that the time for change has come and provide tools and tips to build manager and employee confidence and capabilities. Finally, it will explore some of the worries we may have about swapping our old system for something new – and provide you with ways of
addressing them.

Download your FREE Complete Guide to Changing Performance Management here.

To mark the start of 2024, here are some New Year’s resolutions you might want to think about!

  1. I’m going to get rid of our ‘probation period’ to prevent loads of new hires worrying themselves sick for three months just to ‘get’ the one person who didn’t work out.
  2. I’m going to abolish performance ratings so that no-one has to suffer the indignity of getting ‘meets expectations’ for yet another year.
  3. I will rip up our 9 box grids and resign myself to the fact that no-one has understood how to fill them in – EVER! 
  4. I will replace our 3,782 employment policies with a funky welcome guide.
  5. I will stop telling everyone they have to be in the office three days a week and try to remember how we found we could actually trust people to work how they wanted during Covid.
  6. I will not sit in on any more interviews. Taking the notes and supervising managers is not a great use of my time…
  7. I will push back on any manager who thinks ‘it’s better if HR has a chat with them’. It’s not ‘better’, it’s avoidance.
  8. I am going to remind myself every day that I came into HR because I was interested in people – not process!

Happy New Year from Disruptive HR!!

It’s costly and takes a huge amount of time and over 80% of us don’t believe it helps with our performance or find it motivating. And yet we still do it. Every single year. The annual performance review. In HR we have been told for years that if you want managers to take care of performance, then they have to:

Yet despite us telling managers that this will lead to higher performance and despite us trying numerous wheezes to get them to do it well; like automating it, putting it all on one page or providing a guided distribution of ratings that they have to comply with – we are still left with the awful truth that traditional performance reviews don’t work. They simply don’t drive better performance or higher motivation.

So why doesn’t traditional performance management work? Here, in our view, are the top four reasons:

Annual objectives can’t keep pace with the disrupted world we live in

The idea that a target we set in January will be still relevant by December is risky at best. In addition, the idea that every person’s objectives can be neatly aligned with the senior team’s is just not rational. Objectives that do work tend to be team based and refreshed by the team on a regular basis.

Feedback that is only given in a huge lump once a year is pretty pointless

We wouldn’t do this with our kids would we? Imagine if our child was doing something that deserved our approval or censure … would we make a note of it and raise it with them three months later? Of course not! Feedback that works is given at the time when the behaviour is fresh in the person’s mind. The way we give feedback too is not conducive to changing someone’s performance. We sit people down and give them feedback in an incredibly parental way – which of course immediately puts someone on the defensive. Think about an appraisal that you have had in your life. Think about all of the appraisals you’ve had ….. and the amount of discomfort you felt. This is because your brain is sensing threats – lots of them. You can’t help it. It’s a totally natural response. The Neuro-leadership Institute has shown that the words “I’m going to give you some feedback” has the exact same effect on the brain as a reaction to walking down a dark alley at midnight and hearing someone running up behind you – or the threat of physical pain. This means that all of our brain resources are rushing to avoid or resist the threat. Conversely, the part of our brain that encourages engagement, openness, curiosity and problem solving – all the reactions you want from an employee in an appraisal –  shuts down. The best forms of feedback are through frequent check-ins and ideally owned and driven by the employee themselves.

Performance ratings are ‘bad data

Our ability to rate another human being consistently and objectively is fundamentally flawed – not because we are bad managers – but because we are human. It’s worth checking out the work of Marcus Buckingham on this – he’s got a great 12-minute video on why performance ratings are not reliable data. For example, our ratings tend to be based on what we can remember from the last few weeks – so called ‘recency syndrome’ – rather than a whole year.

Traditional performance management doesn’t improve performance!

But more than anything, the problem with ratings is that they don’t drive better performance! If the conversation is going to result in a grade, we want to show ourselves at our best, to cover up any failings that might downgrade us. But if we want performance improvement, then we need the employee to be open and curious and driving a conversation about how they can improve and what they’ve learned from things that haven’t quite worked. Ratings and grades just get in the way of better performance.

Annual objectives, once a year feedback and a rating. These traditional performance management tools belong to another era. They are based around the fact that we don’t trust managers to manage.  And it’s time for something different; employee-owned discussions, frequent check-ins and absolutely no ratings!

If you’d like to find out how to change your approach to performance management – check out our FREE Complete Guide to Changing Performance Management.

When you’re in an operational HR role, creating the head space to re-think your approach can be really hard. I remember having back-to-back meetings, then getting to the end of the day and thinking – ‘right, now I need to have some BIG thoughts about the future’ – but choosing to go home and watch The West Wing instead! And yet, if we are going to equip our organisation, our leaders and our employees for a disrupted world, then we have to find a way of adding different stimuli and challenging our thinking.

Based on conversations with progressive HR professionals and what has worked for me – Here are some tips on how we can change our thinking in HR.

Focus on the human – not the process

I think we limit our thinking by setting very narrow parameters for what we’re trying to achieve. We want to innovate, but we often set our goal as being the reform of an existing process. This immediately restricts our creativity and results in small, incremental changes rather than the fundamental change we need. So, for example, we often get asked to help clients change their performance management system. There are two key assumptions that are immediately built into the activity – that performance can be ‘managed’ and that they need a system to do it. Not much innovation is going to result. Instead, you can try to broaden the challenge you’re undertaking – by focusing on the human – not the process – problem that you want to solve. So instead of changing the performance management system – ask yourselves ‘how can we enable people to improve their performance?’ Or ‘how can we enable people to be even better at their jobs?’

Widen your sources of stimulation

So, a small confession – when we created Disruptive HR we imagined that all we would need to do is to steal all the innovative ideas from our HR connections with Silicon Valley tech firms! Sadly, when it came down to it – there weren’t many genuinely fresh approaches to steal! So, we had to start from scratch. We found that the best ideas came – not from HR conferences, books and articles – but from adapting ideas from other disciplines. So, we went to conferences on behavioural science, we read books on psychology, we spoke to experts in marketing and advertising, we learned from agile product design. We widened our sources of stimulation. If we just listen to people like us or borrow from so-called best practice, we again limit our ability to be truly innovative. How could you widen your sources of stimulation? Could you invite your marketing colleagues to help you think through your employee experience? Could you learn from your digital colleagues how to move at pace through application of approaches such MVP or sprint planning? Could you broaden the subject matter of the books and articles you read? Could you attend conferences on topics other than HR? Chances are that these efforts will stimulate your thinking in ways that traditional L&D for HR can’t match. 

Identify your red flags

Looking back to my time as an HR Director, I had a number of beliefs that prevented me from being braver and more innovative. My assumptions about the leaders, the employees, my team and even the way HR ‘should be done’ would result in me repeating traditional approaches. We all have these assumptions and beliefs but if we can see them as ‘red flags’ – signs that we are about to make the same mistakes, we can start to challenge them.

Maybe you hold beliefs that prevent you from changing the way you think – for example:

So, if we widen our sources of stimulation, focus on the human challenge – not the process one and challenge our personal red flags, then we have a chance to genuinely build fresh thinking in HR.

We’ve all been there. You approach a leader hoping to persuade them to adopt a new HR approach that, in your view, is a complete no-brainer – and you get hit with the line ‘show me the data’. I wonder how many hours we have wasted trying to provide enough proof, to find the research, to give the data that will convince them. I say ‘wasted’ because when it comes to providing hard people data as proof – we can’t, and we shouldn’t. I realise this maybe sounds a bit provocative and against the trend towards HR having a better arsenal of data to work with. But hopefully I can make the case that sometimes data is not what we need to make our case for change.

It’s hard to find data that ‘proves’ anything

In HR, we deal with people’s behaviours, emotions, and relationships, which are of course, subjective and, unlike perhaps Finance, involve different viewpoints and interpretations This in turn makes it hard to find objective proof for things like employee performance, attitudes, or whether someone is the right culture fit. This is especially true in a knowledge economy where so many of our people produce outputs that are hard to quantify and evaluate objectively.

People’s behaviour is influenced by many factors like their beliefs, their upbringing, their physical and mental health, and social dynamics. It’s tough to prove that what we do in HR will cause changes in employee behaviour or performance because there are so many other influences at play.

The data we do provide tends to be too aggregated to be meaningful, such as our engagement scores, lacks context, as with churn rates and D&I stats, or it’s based on a manager’s judgement and therefore subject to rater bias.

Data is not going to make our case for change

And yet, we still feel pressurised to try to give our leaders what they say they need to be convinced. We load them up with benchmarking ratios, research and competitor case studies. But should we? When we’re asked by clients to help them convince their stakeholders with research and data, we will often tell them not to bother! Because even the most compelling data is unlikely to provide enough evidence to change their minds and behaviour.

There are two key reasons for this; the first is that in my experience, they don’t really want or need data. They are actually having an emotional reaction to the changes we’re proposing not an intellectual one. Facts and figures aren’t addressing their real and underlying concerns with the changes, such as ‘why should I change the leadership habits that I have been doing for years and with which I am comfortable, for something new?’ or ‘there’s a risk that I can’t do this new approach and I might look foolish’ or ‘I don’t really want to get more engaged with my team, it’s just easier to do the current annual process’. Data won’t help with these fears. Data won’t build confidence. Data won’t make a poor people manager into a good one. When we give them the data they are asking for, we are not tackling the real barrier to change.

Secondly, they are unlikely to believe the data anyway! If we don’t address their fears or lack of confidence – or recognise that they don’t actually want to be better at the people stuff, they will simply disregard the evidence. How many times have you got into a debate with a leader about where the data comes from, how big is the sample size, etc? They nit-pick about the validity of the figures and totally ignore the fact that what we’re doing today in areas such as performance management or D&I are not working. Confirmation bias is something we need to accept and accommodate.

So, we have to answer a different question. It’s not so much ‘how can I prove it to them?’ but ‘why should they WANT to change? Why would they want to change their habits, try something new that might be a bit uncomfortable at first or challenge the way they have always thought? If we can’t answer these questions, we will be on a relentless pursuit of data that isn’t going to change their minds and, given that it’s not that robust anyway, probably shouldn’t!

Once we can get under the skin of our resistors, we can start to provide insights, support and challenge in a meaningful way. Once we truly understand what is stopping them from changing – be it fear, lack of interest or time pressures, we can work to persuade them. We can use a couple of interesting, stand out pieces of data that might make them sit up and be curious. We can use insights and qualitative data more often to help create a story that engages them on a more emotional level. We can craft the messaging for each type of resistance to reassure them and build their confidence, to tap into what matters to them. We can coax them to try one small aspect to get them going in a way that doesn’t eat into their busy schedule. It’s all about persuasion not finding proof.