You Won't Realize Your Leadership Potential Without These Five Nudges

Nudging is one of those life-changing techniques that is elegant in its simplicity. But that doesn't mean it's easy to execute.

The core idea is simple: if you're going to learn something new, make certain you have the kind of follow on that will make the behavior stick. Otherwise, you can never hope to experience transformative change. From a company's perspective, investing a fraction of your training budget into nudges ensures all of your training becomes more valuable.

Two Yale professors of economics, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, have studied nudges more than just about anyone. They define a nudge as, "an indirect suggestion or subtle reminder intended to influence your behavior."

Sounds simple enough. Indeed, nudges tend to be so good at influencing our behavior that they work even when we barely notice them. Like these nudges that, despite the fact that they alter our behavior, slide under the radar as “part of everyday life.”

• “Would you like fries with that?”
• A text reminder about your upcoming dental appointment.
• A sign at a construction site says, “107 days without an accident.”
• A Facebook ad today highlighting something you searched for yesterday on Google.

Because nudges pair so naturally with how we think and act, they’re one of the best ways to turn a leader’s knowledge of something important into lasting habits that create real change. When it comes to improving your leadership skills, there are five types of nudges that tend to have the greatest impact.

1. Personality Based Nudges

Most leaders go through personality training at some point in their career. Popular examples include MBTI, Hogan, DISC, and CliftonStrengths (previously StrengthsFinder).

As time passes, most leaders remember the big picture, like their “type” and maybe a few behavioral tendencies of their type. But, the details fade with time and leaders don’t capitalize on their results to the degree they could. Nudges help leaders understand their personality more deeply and enable them to use their personality to their advantage via specific recommended actions.

In the example below, Jenny is the leader of a team receiving nudges based on the CliftonStrengths assessment. Her strengths generate a nudge based on her “Positivity,” a quality she will capitalize on to lead more effectively. Jenny also gets nudges based on her direct reports’ personalities. Her employee Safiya, for example, is an Activator, and a nudge reminds Jenny of how she can best leverage Safiya’s strength. Over time, her ability to activate her and her team's strengths becomes a habit.

2. Competency-Based Nudges

One of the most common and effective ways to train leaders is to train them in the competencies or values that your organization has identified as essential to success—i.e., Accountability, Resilience, Trust, and Customer Focus.

Nudges around competencies can help solidify and deepen knowledge of those competencies. They can also help bring the competencies out of the theoretical realm and into a more practical one—What do these competencies look like in action as a manager?

If Jenny from the example above is being nudged around the competency “Drives Engagement,” her nudge would be a specific strategy to apply. It might say:

“Jenny, Improve your team’s engagement by giving recognition. Today, catch three people doing things right!”

Instead of working toward a vague goal like “drive engagement,” Jenny has a specific plan of action that she can follow to improve.

3. Curriculum Nudges

Nudges can also be used to keep people on track with your existing curriculum. Sometimes we need nudges to remember to read or listen to something that we're supposed to learn from. A nudge might be:

Today's activity is listen to Rob Maber discuss courage and confidence on the “Leading at Kellogg’s” podcast. Tap to begin.

Curriculum nudges are an easy way to remind someone of the work they need to get done without being naggy. As long as the request comes in small doses that don't take long to follow through on, the compliance with these nudges is high.

4. Employee Engagement Nudges

Engagement surveys are a great way to track change and improvement and to spark conversations between employees and managers. Building nudges around engagement can elevate the value of engagement surveys by turning the results into actionable strategies.

A nudge around the cycle of feedback, behavior, and effect might look like this and include an image of the concept:

Jenny, improve your employee engagement results by giving immediate feedback this week. If you see something, say something.

5. Hot Topic Nudges

Nudges can turn a program around a hot topic (like Crucial Conversations or Emotional Intelligence) into something a leader will internalize and apply throughout their career. Key takeaways from these programs become drivers for behavioral change long-term. For someone who scores low on Self-Awareness on an emotional intelligence assessment, a nudge could offer a specific strategy for improvement:

EQ Tip! To increase your Self-Awareness, catch yourself criticizing others—whether verbally or mentally—and think about why you felt the need to criticize, rather than being constructive.

Bringing It All Together

As leadership development continues to grow in budget, support, and quality, the best leadership development programs are going to be the ones that work smart—with both time and money. They will not only build high-quality leadership programs, but they’ll also take the time to build a system of support and implementation to make those skills stick. Nudges are a core piece of that support system.?

Which types of nudges are you going to start using to improve your leadership skills? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Travis Bradberry is the Chief People Scientist at LEADx. LEADx is a revolutionary new leadership behavior change app that combines nudges, artificial intelligence and micro-learning to make new behaviors stick. LEADx incorporates your organization's leadership competencies and preferred training methods (such as StrengthsFinder, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Situational Leadership, Hogan, and DISC) into an integrated teaching solution that sends targeted reminders to leaders so that they will bridge the learning-doing gap.?

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