I was recently at the gym performing a bench press. “Whoa!” I heard from across the room, as a trainer appeared from nowhere. “That’s not how you’re supposed to do that!”
I told him I knew what I was doing and went on to explain how I was performing the exercise. Having blown out my shoulder out a few years ago, I was taught about correct form during physical therapy.
“Right,” he said. “But that’s not what you’re actually doing.” He showed me and I was amazed. My head knew how I was supposed execute the press, but my muscle memory had been causing me to use improper form.
Muscle memory is a type of procedural memory that kicks in when you repeat tasks over and over. It is supposed to help make you good at something, and improve your reaction, but if you are repeating the wrong things, it can actually be reinforcing very damaging habits. It can actually severely undermine success, and can cause you to—for example—blow out your shoulder again.
The parallels between muscle memory problems at the gym and how companies work (or don’t work, as the case may be) are striking. It can be remarkably challenging to fight corporate muscle memory, especially when it comes to things like recognition and reward programs. Companies have been doing it one way for so long that it has become instinctive. There is an expectation with some executives that what has worked in the past will continue to work. But this isn’t always right. I was recently reading this Lifehacker article by Adam Dachis about muscle memory and how it affects results. Here’s what Dachis says:
Muscle memory doesn’t judge whether you’re doing good or bad … and so if you practice a song poorly for hours on end, you’re going to be really good at making the same mistakes over and over again. This is not only bad, because you’ve wasted your time learning to be bad or mediocre at a task and may see all this work as a failure, but because you didn’t necessarily have to fail at all. When you repeat mistakes again and again, you build a muscle memory with those mistakes. That makes those mistakes even harder to overcome later. This is one reason why the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is often true.
It’s the same way with companies. Executives get used to doing things a certain way and they often have this mental model of recognition that has three characteristics:
- Only recognizes top performers
- No expectation of ROI
- HR driven communications
This is the way they’ve done recognition for thirty years. They aren’t thrilled about it necessarily but in a strange way have become very attached to it and, in some cases, even defensive of it.
Then along come the new HR personal trainers and they say “Whoa! You’ve got it wrong.” They show executives that recognition only really works when we have:
- A huge winners’ circle of 80% or more
- Crowd-sourced feedback about performance and culture
- Organic, viral communication and public recognition
It isn’t easy to retrain muscle memory. But that’s where they need guidance from those of us who know the right way. So our task here is to step in and say “Whoa!” and help to slowly break down those old company habits that are part of the organization’s muscle memory and teach new, positive, productive recognition habits.
It can be an uphill battle to convince executives that their bench press exercises aren’t using the proper form. But if they are willing to try a new way, and retrain their muscles, it will yield better results for them personally and better results for the organizations they lead.
