As an instructor in a training environment, have you ever been frustrated
when everyone copied the same actions even if the first repetition resulted in
a failure? Or maybe they even caught copied the actions that wasn't a failure
but it just wasn't the most efficient way to do it or not the way that they
were instructed to try. How about as a leader have you ever been frustrated that
a change has taken much longer to implement than it should and it seems
that the group is just being resistant or just not getting it? Welcome to the
firefighter craftsmanship podcast where we coach you to deal with the stressors
of the job as a first responder as well as how to thrive off-duty. My name is
Kevin Housley, a human performance coach and a firefighter since 2005. I've been
able to coach over a thousand emergency responders on ways to be more resilient,
better prepared for the job and how to be happier and healthier at home. So let's
get to it. Today's topic is the group effect and behavioral matching and
creating quality training and quality cultural evolution is really really
hard. We all know that. As an instructor and even as a participant you
probably have been involved in a training where the first group of people
who went undoubtedly made some mistakes. So this isn't necessarily like crazy
egregious mistakes but maybe they made a couple simple mistakes that was covered
in the initial briefing or the entire reason that the training was happening
in the first place and then they just reverted to old habits. Maybe they made
a mistake and it was discussed as why this wasn't the best option and that we
should all learn and grow from it and then on the very next evolution the next
group did the exact same thing. Well how come? With all my involvement you know as
an instructor and specifically in the fire academy setting we see recruits who
watch the rep before them because we don't have enough time to get everybody
tons of reps and not everything needs to be a big secret where they can't know
quote-unquote the answers to the test before they go. So I really like to
incorporate imagery and visual reps when I teach especially things like
ventilation, ladders, hose work, things like that where it's really really
important that they can get some extra visual reps because they there's just
not enough time or resources to maybe get people enough saw time per se on a
ventilation module. So pretty consistently we see recruits make the exact same
mistake that the rep before them did even after we do an initial debrief and
sometimes I really enjoy having the recruits actually debrief one another
so they kind of take that lead and so it just creates that pedagogy where it's
peer assessment and peer review and it makes those recruits learn a little bit
more because they have to really kind of pay attention to more things that they
might not if they're not actively having them to instruct and give feedback.
So this is something I've kind of always wondered like why did you make the exact
same mistake or the exact same inefficient process maybe to get
equipment from here to there as the group that just went before you where we
even talked about it of hey there's probably a better way to do that and
I've always wondered you know is it the stakes of failure and they're just
really not that scary because they saw like hey this is a teaching environment
learning environment you know and so that company there yeah they didn't maybe
meet the marks of the instructor but at the end of the day maybe the quote-unquote
punishment wasn't so bad and so we'll just do that because we kind of know
what to expect and maybe those stakes are just less terrifying in a Academy's
setting and really any learning environment there it's just go with
what's comfortable versus trying something new and potentially really failing
or having the wheels really really come off. But isn't that the point of
training after all is to create environments where we actually learn
something and we've talked about that previously here on the Firefighter
Crasmanship podcast is how do we create cultures and environments especially in
the learning stages like academies where they're actually learning something
versus trying to just avoid punishment. So I've seen this time and time again and
now I just saw it recently with with some training that I was involved with
with career emergency personnel responders where they were making the
exact same decision even though it wasn't necessarily the right decision for
the training at hand or there might have been a better way to do it but they
were just doing it because the very first company that went did it that way
and then they just created the exact same environment and of course I was like
well there's got to be some research around this and yep there's a whole
bunch and so today we're going to talk about group effect and behavioral
matching and this simple concept might help you become a more effective
instructor and a more effective leader overall. So what is group effect? Well
simply put people are influenced and try to replicate those that they identify
with and they are influenced to match the actions and behaviors of those in
their group much more so than those not in the group and sports is a great
example of this. We see fans that attack each other because they're wearing a
different colored jersey even though they're not even playing on the field
but just because you identify and you wear a different team's jersey well then
you are the enemy even though at the end of the day we're all just cheering for a
baseball team or a football team or whatever. You see this with kids you
know where they're you know arch enemies with the other team even in a youth
sports context and then maybe in a couple months they play a travel team or a
sports team or something like that where they might even have some of those
kids on that other team. So this is just a sociological and a psychological thing
that happens of hey this is our in-group and that's the out-group that's the
competition we're gonna go after them and get them and some of that has to do
with competitiveness but a lot of it also just has to do with sociological
behavior and this certainly happens within emergency services we see that
within specific companies where we identify maybe with the the company
that we're assigned to or the partner that we have compared to another crew or
something that maybe we don't identify with or we don't think that they do as
great of a job as they should. We also see this within battalions and shifts and
organizations and there's a lot to be said by having pride and ownership in
your job and with with what you do and saying hey yeah we're gonna go out there
and we're gonna work really really hard and and sometimes we say yeah we're
better than you and hopefully that's still in good-hearted fun and we really
really want to push our organizational cultures to be like yeah I take pride in
in the place that I'm assigned so in the fire service the apparatus that I'm
assigned and the shift that I'm assigned and the people that I'm assigned with we
take great pride in how we want to be perceived and how we want to behave and
those things are very very important to us and then we try to lead up through our
battalion and through our shift and then ultimately through our organization but
at the same time I know that not everybody on my specific job agrees or
approaches the job the same way as I do and ultimately that's up to them to
decide how they approach that thing but if they come work with us on our
specific company these are the things that we expect and we communicate those
very very well and those expectations are actually made by the company itself
not just me as the officer we also see the impact a group effect on resources
just like this the firefighter craftsmanship podcast maybe you are
coming here and you're trying to gain some knowledge and some inspiration and
motivation based on the things that we're talking about that would be a group
of us here with the firefighter craftsmanship podcast that are kind of
into the psychological and the training the mental side of emergency response
and so we have a tribe of people that are kind of on the same page as us and we
can ebb and flow and learn together and push one another to be better you see
this within Facebook groups for sure you know if you have a great Facebook group
out there as truck floor training they have a lot of really really good
resources another one is engine company resurrection lots of really really good
stuff that's you know dedicated to engine company culture and and lots of
studies and things like that and you'll see pretty quickly that there are a lot
of like-minded individuals there but I can go and I can learn from really really
influential people across the country just through the Facebook group and
interacting with them there and I will never ever ever run a single 911 call
with them so that's why these things are so effective is creating those tribes of
people where we can learn from and grow from that obviously can be a very
negative thing as well and we see that with the political divide that continues
to happen where especially now with the integration of AI where it's feeding us
content based on what it thinks we want to see and those things can kind of
spiral out of control pretty quickly so I think all of us are pretty familiar with
what group effect is and how it can be used for good and for bad so what's the
impact of group effect on behavioral matching and we'll get into what behavioral
matching means but first you know this week's podcast is based on the article
titled not all outgroups are equal group type may influence group effect on
matching behavior authors Heidi blocker and Daniel Macintosh and those this
resource will be linked in the show notes as well for you to access so
behavior matching is typically measured in a matter of seconds or even minutes
but we certainly can see this over much longer periods of time especially around
the training environment and a really really easy example that we've probably
all been involved in here is you know major training that might be a little
bit stressful or the perceived stakes are pretty high and we want to make sure
that we go out there and we perform really really well so in the firehouse
we might have a major training coming up or burns or something like that
department-wide training and you'll hear the chatter across shifts that shift
change like hey what was that training all about hey what did you guys do
strategy and tactics wise like what were some of the gotchas you'll hear some
people really kind of trying to do their homework and all in all that's a positive
thing right they're kind of trying to take some of the stress out of that
training evolution they are trying to get some of the answers to the test but
at the end of the day right they're having those conversations and mentality
however if that company that went first didn't really necessarily perform
optimally well then we might just behavior match meaning I might perform
the exact same actions that they did or in another connotation if I don't really
have a lot of respect for that company and I hear what they did I might
intentionally not do it that way so you see some of the same methods and
implementations from subsequent crews when you are an instructor of this even
on items that they shouldn't have known we're gonna come so maybe there was a
variable in there that they didn't know wasn't in the training plan like hey
here's a little bit of a not a gotcha but just something that they're gonna
maybe have to work through and they come in there and they were very obviously
very well prepared for that they actually knew exactly where that thing was
gonna happen and and they were really really aware of that and prepared for
it and so that would be an example of behavior matching of hey I learned from
them and now I'm gonna go ahead and implement using the exact same strategy
and tactics and there's three main factors that influence behavior matching
and learning and understanding these basic factors can significantly increase
your effectiveness as a leader and for sure as an instructor and the three
main factors that influence behavior matching are affiliation attention and
emotion and all three of these interconnected and as usually the case
with factors like this they all influence one another throughout the
process and as a leader and as an instructor you can capitalize on this
and make your delivery even more effective when you realize the
interoperability of these factors and can identify the area where maybe you
and your delivery are lacking so maybe you're lacking in the emotional category
and so now I can really start to use that as a positive of instruction and
leadership overall so let's break into these things affiliation attention and
emotion and figure out what they are and how we can use them to be more
effective so as Seth Godin says people like us do things like this and I've
linked a great download from Seth that has a unique look at this specific quote
in the show notes it's absolutely worth the time to check out and if you're not
familiar with Seth Godin he is basically a marketing guru he essentially
created email marketing and really really interesting thought-provoking
leader in the business world but also just in how we build cohesive teams and
effective cultures really really good stuff so check out that link in the show
notes or jump on our firefighter craftsmanship email list and you will
never missed a really really cool resource like this because that's included
in a weekly email this week you can go to firefightercraftsmanship.com
backslash podcast and get signed up for that weekly email right there so this
concept really applies when we look at the group effect affiliation that is and
behavior matching specifically and again this can be positive and negative and
matching increases drive to affiliate so when we look at this in a training and
delivering quality training scenario we need to understand that there are
positive and negative forces at play the biggest one right off the bat is if you
are the instructor what happens if the students or the athletes or whoever you're
working with the client doesn't actually like you well that's gonna have a very
very big thing on affiliation if they don't like you and they maybe don't
think that you're competent or they don't like your delivery and they don't
want anything to do with you well then it's gonna be really really hard to
implement some of that positive change even if the things that you're trying to
teach them or the culture that's trying to change is in a positive manner if you
don't have a positive relationship with the student they're probably not gonna
want to be affiliated with you and therefore their behavior isn't gonna
match what you're trying to teach them to do they're actually gonna be
resistant of that so it's very important you know if we are in charge of training
divisions or we're working on training things like that is to not only select
the appropriate people to deliver the training but then to also ensure that
groups of people are specifically chosen to work together so how many of us when
we're designing training specifically put numbers of companies so whether
that's officers you know like hey I'm gonna work on this shift and I'm gonna
make sure that Jones Smith and whoever are all together because they might even
have varying differing opinions or we have Jones and Smith that are super
dialed and I know that they're gonna perform really really well and we're
trying to get this other person John Doe here up to speed and so we're gonna
use Jones and Smith and we're not even really gonna necessarily coach them on
the thing we just know that they're gonna perform in a way that I want Doe to
perform at and so now just by being affiliated with those two high
performers it's gonna bring that lower link up to a higher standard so pre
existing rapport is very influential and the students will actually experience
greater synchrony if they like you and that's what we really want is you know
with these high performing organizations is we want to have synchronous
teams that are going out there and they're actually employing these
strategies and tactics and basic skills that we're teaching them at a very very
high level together without a lot of verbal communication and so that's why
if you have great pre-existing rapport especially if you're on a training staff
and you work really really hard to be well received to listen to the troops to
make sure that they have a voice to give them what they continue to ask for in
the training environment that pre-existing rapport is gonna go a long
way when you're trying to teach them a new skill or challenge them to be better
based on lessons learned on actual emergency responses it's really really
important so this isn't necessarily a popularity contest but it is very very
important to continue to hone and develop and work on relationships and if
you're a leader of an organization doesn't even have to be an emergency
services and you come in there and you rule with an iron fist and you never
listen to your people it's going to be really really hard at the end of the day
for you to establish the things that you want to get done and to have a cohesive
team below you that's actually going to put out and do really really good
quality work for you on your behalf so pre-existing rapport and building
relationships that never gets old never goes away so the second factor that
that goes into behavioral matching is attention and really are they paying
attention are you creating environments in the training world where they're
paying attention to you that they're paying attention to one another are you
killing them by death by PowerPoint every single time are you only using
target solutions virtual training to disseminate information are they even
listening that thing or they push and play and walk in out of the room really
important that they're paying attention to you to the subject and to one another
and how about on lessons learned are we doing after-action reviews and are we
actually giving good good good review and detached assessment of how those
important calls went and are we learning from those things that maybe we messed up
in the real-world environment and so how are we creating environments that
engage the group and what sort of pedagogies are we using to engage the
group to make sure that learning is taking place we're using multiple
different types of learning or are we just blasting them with information and
because I'm the one that's teaching it to you well then you should just have it
and you should just know it it's not a great strategy by any means so there's
a thing called the perception action link which means mere perception of an
action by another increases the likelihood that another were performed
the same action now this is really what I witnessed recently in this training
that I was involved in is we had people that were continuing to choose the exact
same tactic even though wasn't necessarily the best tactic and was
spoken about in a micro teach before the training even started because the very
first crew that went performed that action and so it was just easier for
them to just copy that exact same thing that I didn't have to think about that
that answer was already created for them and now they just followed suit even
though it wasn't necessarily the best tactic for the situation so it really
ties back to why we see groups continue to make the same mistake and if there's
a problem maybe specifically instruct the next group that goes to perform an
action that fixes the problem or disallows that specific technique to be
used and so in all of our businesses there's lots of ways to skin the cat and
we can do lots of different things where we say hey here is like this big
scenario go ahead and do that and maybe there is some specific thing that we
want to try to coach people out of or coach people into and so after that
first rep if that company doesn't do it and you really want to see that part
integrated into the training maybe give that next up person or that next up
group hey I really want you to do this let's go ahead and create a growth
mindset environment live failure is okay let's define failure and let's go ahead
and try that and see how it works and as an instructor you're gonna learn a lot
too when you get to see people trying to perform these actions on hey was my
instruction appropriate or do we need to spend even more time on development of
a class like this and so you know this is something that I try really really
hard to integrate into academy teaching and specifically I can a ventilation
module where we work really really hard on the ground game for ladders during a
ladders module and then it all incorporates into a ventilation module
especially if we're doing vertical ventilation and so I like to start
everything from zero so essentially at the rig and so hey you got to get all
this equipment from here to there to the training prop and this is what the
evolution is gonna be and sometimes we have firefighters that are new and
they're learning they're gonna go ahead and they're gonna try one technique
let's say it might be stacking ladders per se we have two person ventilation
operation they stack an access letter a roof ladder chainsaws sounding tool and
they carry it all over there and then have to unstack it okay well so when I
see that on the very very first evolution I don't personally think that's the
most efficient way for us to get the ladder compliment that we carry to the
building or to the training building and so can we share the load instead and so
if the very first group goes and they stack the ladder I know right away that
that next group is probably gonna do the exact same thing even though it is not
the most efficient way to do it and so in a scenario like that where I don't
want them to use it I'm okay that they tried it out but then I want them to
see other ways to do it I'm gonna have them not you're not allowed to stack
ladders but you still have to get all of this from here to there you have 30
seconds to figure out how that's gonna go talk amongst yourselves all right go
and I've also used advice versa where they had a really really high
performing rep their very very first chance based on maybe basic skill sets
that somebody comes into the academy with and then I will forbid that specific
technique because I want them to see how different techniques work and don't
work along the way it's really really important for a learning environment to
kind of assess all of our options and that really helps to create cultures
where people are willing to say hey why do we do it that way and then if they
say I don't know that's just the way we've always done it which is not an
answer that allows them to go out and try and challenge and figure out better
ways to do those sorts of things whether it's basic skills or specific tools and
equipment the final factor in behavioral matching is emotion and this is
certainly something that we're all very familiar with emergency services there's
a lot of emotion around things and I guess just as a cultural tenant of all
of us now there's a lot of emotionally charged discussions happening all over
the world and emotion really plays highly into how we match or emulate
different types of behavior so think about emergency services if you have a
screamer on the radio somebody that shows up and they're on scene and they
just start screaming regardless of how intense or dramatic the incident actually
is does that help or hurt the rest of the responders that are coming into the
scene versus a common cool and collected person does that help or hurt
responders coming into the scene now even if you're common cool and collected
but you have no idea what you're talking about and you're not very well
respected well again that's gonna have an impact on behavioral matching because
I don't necessarily want to be affiliated with you even though you're
common cool and collected you have no idea what to do strategy and tactic wise
or how to solve the problem well that's gonna be a hard thing for me to
behave your match because I don't want to be affiliated with you but we can
really really see the impact of emotion when somebody gets super amped on the
radio of the impact for those companies coming in so chatter in the cab or in
the station around the event or the training has a big impact as well so if
your leaders in your organizations what sort of cultures are you creating at the
crew level and are you saying you know maybe you have a newer person on your
your rig or your company or in your car and you're like all this training is
gonna be nonsense and blah blah blah blah blah are you helping or hurting that
person's career and their approach to emergency services overall and so the
interesting thing about you know some of this emotion is you know not all of us
are gonna have the same emotion so if I'm really really frustrated by something
and I think that this is just complete nonsense and there's no reason for us
to be going to this training well you might actually be feeling another
emotion like I might be super excited I think this is really really fun I don't
agree with you at all or maybe you're a little bit nervous so if we think about
like emergency response if you have a new person on your your crew it could be
an older person with a bunch of hypervigilant stuff as well you know and
you're angry but they're kind of fearful about what we're going to well those
two things don't really correlate very well they're not going to change from
being fearful into being angry it's actually going to exacerbate their
fearful fearful feelings through my anger and so it creates even more
fearful emotion because I'm angry so if you are the one that's anger maybe you're
also feel fearful but you are just putting it out as anger and so we
definitely have people in emergency services that their strategy is I'm
gonna just anger this fire out or I'm gonna anger this issue out and because
I'm mad and you know that everybody's gonna respect that and so that's just
gonna go the way that I want it to go and we all know that that's not actually
true and so be very very cognizant about you know if you're an instructor
specifically or you're a leader in an organization that you're trying to get
some good cultural buy-in like you might be really really frustrated and you
might be angry but anger specifically when you're putting that out there well
people are either gonna match that anger and they're gonna also be angry now
we're just all angry together and we're not actually doing anything about it or
it's gonna exacerbate other emotions like fear and probably make the problem
worse overall so that's kind of an interesting factor in behavioral
matching is emotion so if I come in there and I got a good positive attitude
I'm happy hey let's create a fun environment here let's go learn some
lessons we might take some licks along the way but we're gonna learn from them
we're gonna get better we're gonna be excited about that we're gonna be
transparent right right there I have a good positive attitude I'm bringing some
fun and some joy into this thing even for really really hard stuff versus like
oh this is complete nonsense and right away we're starting to have a losing
battle so just a real quick recap of behavioral matching the three factors of
behavioral matching are affiliation attention and emotion and just to realize
that these things are very very interconnected and they play off of one
of another and so if you have a specific reputation that people may want to be
affiliated with that's a very very positive thing if you have a reputation
where people don't want to be affiliated with that the fact of the matter is it's
gonna be a lot harder for you to go out there and create cultural change or have
positive impact on things like basic skills or you want people to match the
behavior and match those skill sets that you're trying to teach them very
important when we go all the way back to Academy settings are you ruling again
with an iron fist you're gonna do it this way and I'm gonna scream and yell and
make you do burpees when you mess up because you didn't do it the right way
or the exact way that I wanted you to do it well you're gonna have a harder time
to actually create learning environments and actually churn out new employees new
emergency responders new cops new firefighters new EMS providers that are
out there doing good for the public if you have that sort of mentality so we
need to really really stop and assess what kind of culture do we have at the
very lowest level of this organization and then how are we carrying that thing
through and are we putting new new employees and new customer servants in
the right spots that's setting them up for success regardless of where the open
spaces are really really important stuff so thank you for spending your valuable
time with us here at the firefighter craftsmanship podcast please rate your
view and follow the show on your favorite podcast player we really appreciate
all of the support so far send some questions in we'd love to unpack some
of these questions this was a question that we received of you know essentially
it was why why are we doing the same thing over and over kind of a lemming
effect and then I started to pay attention a little bit more to that and
found some good research that I just shared with you all some good references
in the show notes here so go check those out including this article that we used
as kind of the foundational reference for this here as well as Seth Godin's blog
and a cool downloadable about people like us do things like this from Seth
Godin so smash on that follow button in your favorite app that way you never
miss one of these weekly episodes released every single Wednesday hit us up at
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