Last week we explored the relationship between the above-the-line world of external actions, behaviors, and choices, and the below-the-line world of internal assumptions, beliefs, and values.
The former, we suggested, invariably flow from the latter. Our actions are necessarily driven by our mental models and emotions. Our choices are shaped by the ideals and paradigms we hold.
The concept is relatively straightforward, even self-evident. It’s implications, however, are almost invariably overlooked in the workplace.
Leadership training provides one conspicuous example. Training of this kind typically focuses only on teaching new skills and techniques, with little attempt to surface, explore, and reframe the below-the-line factors driving current behaviors. The result is leaders who can pass a pen-and-paper test on the material of the training, yet fail to operationalize it in any sustainable way.
Think of your own history. How many trainings have you attended in your career? How many orientations to new systems, procedures and approaches have you (in the words of one of our clients) been “subjected to”? And how many have had enough resonance and relevance that they still affected your choices six, eight, twelve months later?
The reason many such initiatives fail to achieve sustainable change is simple: training approached as an exclusively above-the-line exercise is largely superficial. We, as participants, might be exposed to a new set of skills or body of expectations. But barring any deeper examination of the reasons why we do what we do, the influence of our existing below-the-line foundations pull our actions, like a spring, back to what they have always been.
In short, trying to change behaviors without undertaking an honest exploration of the below-the-line attitudes and assumptions that support them is a losing proposition.
Now leaders can use their organizational authority to compel employees to comply with systems they don’t understand and procedures they don’t support. They can get an organization to look like change has taken place. But that appearance, based on the application of force, is illusory, and the moment pressure is removed, behavior begins reverting to previous patterns and routines.
So long as employee’s below-the-line orientation remains unchanged, therefore, lasting transformation will remain out of reach. But it’s important to understand that leaders are every bit as subject to these dynamic as employees.
Our daily choices and actions, as leaders, are driven by beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions just as much as those of our employees. We, too, are creatures of the inner world.
And only to the extent that we are willing to reflect on and investigate the drivers of our own behavior– the unexamined assumptions, the hidden biases, the unarticulated hopes and fears – are we able to grow as leaders and as people.