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easier to persuade people to test alternative and more effective behaviours.
When these new behaviours work, the long-term result is changed atti-
tudes and values. The short-term benefit is that the inappropriate values
are no longer shaping the way that we interact with others. Let me try to
explain why this approach works.

All through our lives we are experiencing and responding to the behav-
iour of others. No attitude, belief or value that we hold can ever be illogi-
cal to us. They result directly from our experience and knowledge of how
the world works combined with our sense of how it ought to work.

n We acquire and build knowledge of how other people and other
things “tick”.

n We use that knowledge to create our attitudes to others.

n We refine those attitudes through our moral sense of what ought to
be to create our values.

n The combination of our attitudes and values dictates our
repertoire of behaviours.

Because attitudes and values are developed through a lifetime of expe-
rience, it is only experience, not admonition that is likely to make us
change them. Attitudes and values are not fixed, but they change slowly in
the face of our experience. (For example, it is a truism of political theory
that many of us become more conservative as we get older.) Behaviour, on
the other hand can be seen as being little more than a repertoire of tactics
that we apply, relatively flexibly, to operate successfully in the real world.
We can be persuaded to try different behaviours. When I am training
people this is where I focus. Other people’s beliefs, attitudes and values are
significant to my understanding, but what I seek is a behavioural change.
If I can show them alternative behaviours, enable them to practise them in
a “safe” environment until they are comfortable with them, then through
peer coaching back on the job I can persuade them to practise them in the
real world. Where they are reinforced by success, they will change what
they need to as a result of their own experience.

n So they change their behaviours toward others.

n Their change of behaviour becomes part of the other’s knowledge
of the world and how it works.

n Their attitudes change a little to accommodate their new
knowledge.

n Their behaviour toward your team is gradually amended as their
attitudes become assimilated.

n As a result, your team discover that their new behaviour reaps
dividends which leads to the slow development of new attitudes
and refined values.

It is not an easy process. Effective application of real psychology rarely
is. We have no snake oil, but better brains than mine have explored causes,

70 Key management questions