Learning to overcome learned helplessness

It's irritating. It's frustrating. Your company is investing in culture change, you've empowered people to take action, but nothing's happening. People are still moaning about everything that's wrong and not taking action to put it right.

"What's wrong with them?", we cry. "They're free to act!"

Welcome to learned helplessness. The term was coined by Martin Seligman and Steven Maier in the late 1960s. They conducted cruel experiments on dogs to demonstrate it, so let me explain it in a (slightly) less cruel way using elephants. How do humans train an elephant when the elephant is so much bigger and more powerful?

It starts when the elephant is very young and relatively small. It's tied to a stake with a strong chain. It hasn't yet developed the strength to pull the stake out of the ground, so it learns that attempting to escape is futile. As it grows and becomes immensely powerful, it still believes it can't break free, so it doesn't even try. It's learned that it has no control over its situation.

This is how corporate behaviours become ingrained. In a strong blame culture, where the culprit is sought before doing anything to solve the problem, people learn to leave it to others to make decisions. In a highly bureaucratic business with layers of authority, people learn that everything takes ages, creativity is pointless, and they sink into apathy. You get the picture.

Sustained experience of powerlessness influences our behaviour and limits our perceived capabilities, even when circumstances change. Nothing will change if a business announces a new culture in a blaze of glory, then continues to behave in exactly the same way. Change has to be encouraged and rewarded over the long term, not for a few weeks or months before everything goes back to the way it was before.

So this is all very depressing. Might as well not bother, eh?

No! That's learned helplessness! (Gotcha!) Here's how you can overcome it in your business:

• Remind yourself and everyone else that takes courage and determination to break old behaviours and establish new ones.
• Be clear about the new behaviours you want to see and the old behaviours you don't. Have a safe word that people can use when they see the old behaviours being tolerated or rewarded.
• Thank people for telling you when you're demonstrating old behaviours, or when they see you tolerating or rewarding old behaviours. Don't explain why you need to make an exception on this occasion, or disagree with the feedback. Be delighted that someone had the courage to give you the feedback.
• Reinforce new behaviours lavishly. Reward them, celebrate them, and tell stories about the difference they're making to the business.

What are your experiences of overcoming learned helplessness? I'd love to hear them!

This week's most popular Inclusion Coach content:

On LinkedIn:

• Why I use 'Global Majority' rather than 'People of Colour' or other terms to describe racialised difference
• Three allyship actions that might make us feel like a bit of an idiot, but need doing anyway
• Three call-in questions for aspiring allies, and why they work

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This week's tales of carerpreneurship on Medium:

• Oh, how we laughed
• (In)fancy that!
• Spray in your lane - lessons from a swimming pool

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That's it for this week - see you next time!