I think it’s safe to say that most of us want to change at least one thing about ourselves or our job. Hopefully, this want for change is for the better! This weeks lesson was interesting because it gave us some insight into how change works. Albert Bandura (1986) developed a model of social learning that focuses on four steps: attendance, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
Attention is honing in on the behavior you want to take on. For example, if a company wants to increase its communication, a good start would be to identify where the breakdown is and look at examples of companies that have a good communication structure. This could be done by shadowing other companies, but once the desired communication skill has been observed, members of the company need to retain the new information. At its simplest, this is just remembering what the effective model looks like, how it works and how it affects the company at large. Some challenges to this is that if we don’t remember all the information, we may bring only part of the needed information back to our company.
But, let’s say that we bring the whole picture of this communication strategy back to our company. Now, we have to be motivated to replicate the behavior. This is where there leaders of the company need to have buy in from ALL employes. The leaders need to motivate others to try and come up with achievable goals and timelines. If this process fails, then it won’t matter how good the new strategy is, it will fail, because those that need to execute the plan aren’t willing to. After motivating the whole team, the company is ready to reproduce the new model that has been adapted from other companies/observation. It is important that this part not be rushed, because, again, if we don’t have the buy in, implementation will fail.
Work Cited
PSU World Campus, (2017) Social Learning https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1826457/modules/items/21654114