From Knowing to Doing — How to Transform Knowledge into Action.

In my experience, there is rarely a lack of big visions and strategies. The actors are also aware of the specific, measurable goals associated with this. There is much more lack of clarity about which behaviours go hand in hand with a specific strategic goal.

A few examples of strategic goals that many companies have certainly announced recently:

👉🏻 We need to be more agile!

👉🏻 We need to transform stronger and faster!

👉🏻 We must press ahead with digitization more intensively!

👉🏻 We must change the corporate culture!

However, these demands were made far too general: What does it mean to become more agile? How can you transform even faster and what exactly should be transformed? To what extent should corporate culture be changed and how?

So not just “where to go”, but “how to go” in a very specific and detailed way.

All questions without a specific answer from management. In particular, the “mandatory sentences” overwhelm employees, as they are presented with a mindset that they have little to do with. We must first understand how people convert demands into behavior.

Our behavior is subject to the influence of our feelings, values, and needs.

Our behavior can not only be understood as what we show or perceive to the outside world, but it is also influenced unconsciously by our values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings and thoughts. Vice versa, we can also modify our attitudes, attitudes and values through our active behavior. It is important that both components harmonize with each other.

If you transfer this insight to the goal of optimizing your corporate culture, simple objectives are not enough unless they are internalized in the company values. In order for these to be internalized, the needs of employees, as well as their values and feelings, must also be in line with the goals set.

Generalist demands should be broken down into concrete forms of conduct.

In order to be able to approach set goals behaviorally, it is important that strategic challenges are translated into specific target behavior. In companies, every higher-level, quantifiable goal is currently subdivided into sub-goals and presented purely based on figures. These figures are only achieved through targeted behavior. Because every added value in a company is created by the actions of people who generate revenue by manufacturing and selling products or services.

In the past, it was much easier to translate goals into concrete behavior because the working world was less complex. At that time, as a sales employee, you were still making customer visits to the customer's home. It simply meant: increase sales by visiting more customers at home or by doing more cross-selling. Nowadays, it is definitely more difficult to determine how to acquire more customers, which also results in debt due to increasing digitalization and an oversupply on the market.

We are aware of the problems, but we are not taking action.

As Pfeffer and Sutton found in their study “The Know-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action,” there is a discrepancy between existing knowledge and the implementation of this knowledge into action. The sole awareness is no longer sufficient to bring about an active change in behavior, for example when a change in corporate culture is sought. The big problem therefore lies not in defining guidelines for what the corporate culture should be, but in determining exactly how they should be lived, aka what behavior should be shown. Rules, documents, or phrases alone don't change the big picture.

A company can be understood as an independent social continuum in which different personalities interact and communicate. And it is precisely this social reality that shapes the corporate culture we live in (Sackmann, 2017). This means that the culture won't change if employees don't change their behavior.

People are creatures of habit and only break down routines that are difficult to get stuck in. Older managers in particular have difficulty understanding the need to change their behavior, but it is precisely this change in behavior that significantly improves the culture.

An example scenario: The change in corporate culture.

Overall goal: Change corporate culture and make it more human. The focus should be on people.

Problem: Managers often share the view that employees do not perform many tasks correctly. As a result, micromanagement or lack of delegation of tasks is more common.

Solution: It helps train managers. They should actively delegate tasks and trust employees. The change in manager behavior has an effect on employees that they will probably be happier. The manager will adapt her basic assumption and notice that employees can be trusted. As a result, the corporate culture in practice is also changing. This new culture could then even lead to increased commitment and thus to higher ROI due to increased employee satisfaction.

All learning concepts and behavioral analyses confirm the hypothesis that only a change in behavior leads to learning effects, assumptions can be changed and thus have effects on the surrounding social environment. I am also firmly convinced that a change in behavior will lead to sustainable change in the company in the long term.

The journey is the destination

Just as a small snowflake doesn't trigger an avalanche, real change cannot be brought about by one decision, but rather comes from the interplay of many small decisions. The focus is not on the goal, but on the way to get there. Constant action of change can have a lasting impact on managerial attitudes, job satisfaction and a people-centred corporate culture.

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