What does it take to master a new skill? The answer lies in what happens in the brain when a new behavior pattern establishes itself. It’s important to understand this insight, because it explains why even a highly rated, enthusiastically received developmental program can fail to achieve lasting changes in workplace performance.

Scientists have been telling us for over a decade that learning involves physical changes in the brain. Eric R. Kandel received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000 for his pioneering work in this area. Kandel and Hawkins (1992) reported that “stimuli that produce long-term memory for sensitization and classical conditioning lead to an increase in the number of pre-synaptic terminals.” They found that when the release of neurotransmitters between nerve cells goes up, eventually additional dendrites grow, multiplying contacts with neighboring cells. Their conclusion: “Our brains are constantly changing anatomically as we learn.” Scientists continue to replicate and support these findings, and learning professionals have integrated them into mainstream educational texts (Sousa, 2000).

There’s a huge difference between conceptual learning and mastering a new skill. It’s the difference between knowing how to do something and being able to do it routinely and comfortably on the job. In a busy workplace, people can’t reinvent their behavior every time they need to get something done. They have to rely on ingrained behavior patterns. The challenge is to replace well-established problem behavior patterns with more effective ones.

To appreciate how hard it is to accomplish this, you need to understand the following about how the brain establishes new behavior patterns:

1. A skill is a set of behaviors executed automatically and consistently. What enables a skill is a specific network of brain cells. The function of these physically interconnected neurons is to efficiently trigger the chain of perception, analysis and decision-making needed for a specific pattern of cognitive, verbal and physical behavior.
   
   
2. During the past decade, brain scientists have discovered what happens in the brain when a person learns and how these neural networks establish themselves. They found that repeating a specific behavior pattern over and over stimulates the involved brain cells to grow extensions (dendrites) to connect with each other. With enough repetition, all the related brain cells eventually connect, and the new behavior becomes an ingrained pattern.  What felt awkward in the beginning eventually feels comfortable and natural.
   
   
3. It takes a fair amount of time for this brain cell growth-and-connection process to complete itself, which explains why it takes so much practical application and reinforcement to master a skill. While it doesn’t take long for the brain to store an image, a fact or a concept, laying the groundwork for a behavior pattern can take many months of diligent repetition.
   
   
4. Interpersonal skills—which form the core of leadership, teamwork, sales and service performance—are especially complex. This makes them more difficult to ingrain, and an even longer period of repetition and reinforcement is needed.
   
   
5. The challenge of establishing a new behavior pattern is made more difficult by having to replace existing problem work habits that are already ingrained—the result of decades of reinforcement. When participants return to the workplace, at first their new skills feel awkward, and initial efforts don’t yield the desired results. After repeated frustration and without a supportive environment, most people give in to the pressures of work and fall back on their old, comfortable habits.

These are the realities of changing behavior, developing skills and improving individual performance. With this perspective, it is no mystery why so many first-rate training courses have failed to produce behavioral change.

The implication for training and development is sobering: if you want to improve an employee’s performance, you have to “rewire” the neural network that enables the old behavior pattern. As we’ve said, even in the best case this means the desired behavior may have to be repeated and reinforced for many months.

Do you play golf or tennis? Are you a good swimmer? Have you ever worked with a coach to improve your technique? How long did you practice what your instructor was telling you before you could do it correctly without thinking about it?

If you’re one of the millions of fans who follow the career of golfer Tiger Woods, you may remember that 2004 wasn’t one of his best years. Even though he had already achieved greatness at an early age, at the beginning of the season Tiger made a number of changes in his swing. The changes were designed to make the world’s best golf swing even better. But then Tiger struggled all year, winning only one tournament and finishing fourth in total winnings.

However, at the end of that year his game came together for him, and he won two post-season tournaments back-to-back. In 2005 he won his fourth Masters. He placed second in the U.S. Open and won the British Open, leading the field from start to finish. He finished the year with six victories, ranked first in the world with about $10 million in winnings.

The point is that excellent instruction is only the beginning. Tiger Woods hits golf balls all day long nearly every day. And yet, he had to invest an entire year of persistent effort before he ingrained the new patterns that improved his game. Another point is that Tiger could not have made this effort without a strong internal motivation to change. His desire to have the best possible swing, to compete, to win the major championships and to be the best golfer in the world are what kept him at the practice tee. And he had great coaching. It’s common knowledge that he has invested as much as a million dollars a year for a swing coach who will keep him on track.

Remember, interpersonal skills are more complex than sport skills, so they take longer to ingrain. A well designed three-day or even a weeklong course may do a good job of introducing new skills—that is, create knowledge and familiarity. But given what needs to happen in the brain, these courses are simply incapable of establishing new behavior patterns.

Clearly, the development process needs to continue well beyond the classroom. What’s needed is an extension of these programs into the workplace: a structured, supervised framework for applying and reinforcing desired skills over time. What’s needed is for performance improvement to become a routine aspect of work itself.

Making ongoing reinforcement a permanent feature of learning and performance improvement programs is an achievable goal, and it will be worth the effort. An ingrained skill is like walking, running or riding a bicycle. Once the brain cells are physically connected, the only thing that can disconnect them is the atrophy of old age, injury or death. Like building an Interstate highway next to an old country road, new patterns can replace old ones. If you do the work to replace an old behavior with a more effective one, the newly ingrained pattern will be virtually permanent.

For an immediate answer to any question about Train-to-Ingrain, email Meredith Bell, president of Performance Support Systems, or call: Toll-free: 1-800-488-6463, ext. 201 Toll phone: 757-873-3700, ext. 201 Fax: 757-873-3288