How Social Learning Can Bring Your Team Together

Sometimes teams can fall into a rut of repetitive or unproductive behaviors, and everyone is clueless about their origin. But without being mindful, you can get into the habit of observing, retaining, and reproducing behaviors that can make or break your relationships and productivity. But even the worst habits can be broken with a little contentious action. Using certain tenets of Albert Bandura’s social learning theory, you can really take a good look at how your team leads and follows one another and how to intervene on certain unhelpful behaviors to solidify your team’s synergy.

What is social learning theory?

Social learning theory (SLT) was invented by psychologist and researcher Albert Bandura in the 1970s. While Bandura’s theory was structured around how children learn, it’s now more evident that learning is a lifelong process and personalities are an ever-changing phenomenon. Metaphorically, everyone is a child looking at the world around them for cues on how to act – and humans are social creatures that acclimate to the patterns in their immediate environment.

Bandura’s research showed that in life, people learn how to be by watching the world around them and learning from “models” (another term for someone who can influence the individual). Individuals are more likely to perceive and imitate people they can relate to or see as similar to themselves, such as parents, teachers, or friends. These models then engage in behaviors that children view, which leads to a mediational process of mentally digesting the information. Once this process has occurred several times, the behavior becomes internalized, meaning that an individual does it all on their own without needing a model. 

The four mediational processes

As people assess and consider behaviors from the models in their lives, four different processes contribute to their future behavior.

1. Attention

First and foremost, the individual needs to pay attention to the model’s behavior if they’re going to repeat it in the future. Certain things will grab someone’s attention more than others– relatability to the model is a huge factor in this, as previously mentioned. Additionally, one isn’t just paying attention to the model’s behavior. They also consider the actions and reactions that follow the behavior.

2. Retention

Another important feature of an action is how well it’s remembered and retained. While social learning isn’t immediate, and sometimes it takes a few repetitions of an action to begin replicating the behavior, certain actions just don’t sink in. It’s helpful for one’s retention to have one particular memory associated with a behavior, almost like a fairy tale with a moral ending.

3. Reproduction

Once a behavior has been registered and retained, next, it’s replicated. Sometimes, people directly replicate the behaviors of their models almost verbatim, and the more they execute the behavior, the more they make it their own. Sometimes, though, the individual has limitations on what they’re able to reproduce, such as physical or mental limits – just because you watch someone design a rocket ship doesn’t mean that you can then go and do it yourself.

4. Reinforcement

Lastly, the person reproducing the behavior must feel motivated to execute it. The environment indicates how feasible it is for the individual to reproduce it. If the risks are too hefty or the rewards aren’t great enough, they leave the behavior in the realm of fantasy. After the mediational processes occur, the child then executes an output behavior that is enabled by the environment. Sometimes their mimicry is met with positive reinforcement, and they’re rewarded for their astuteness. And if the individual is met with punishment, Bandura posits that they’re no longer liable to repeat the behavior.

Social learning theory and your team

While children experience social learning through parents, teachers, or peers, or by leveraging opportunities provided by social media, such as virtual educational games, adults can experience it through those who model behaviors around them daily: their teams, bosses, and organizations. And whether you’re learning behaviors you want to change or are eager to model good behaviors for those around you, the best place to start implementing SLT is on your team.

Team leads as models

Even the most laid-back of team leads is still a model of behavior for the rest of their team, and while some behaviors might slide under the rug, others can form team norms if executed with a certain amount of regularity. It’s a team lead or manager’s responsibility to ensure that they’re not modeling certain behaviors that stick in the minds of their teammates. Additionally, if a moment occurs that you realize may solidify into a negative memory (and consequently a negative behavior), take the time to create a powerful and positive new memory that replaces the behavior of the old one.  

Strategic reinforcement

Another way to judge what kinds of behaviors are being learned is by examining how those behaviors are treated once they’re executed. Are teammates rewarded for burning the candle at both ends before deadlines? Is it normal for teammates to have serious discussions over Slack rather than voice or video calls? Do teammates feel like they’re appreciated for the work they do? Even things that seem extremely inconsequential can actually reinforce problematic standards that need to be reconsidered. 

Where did we learn that?

Of all the numerous actions and reactions that occur each day, only a select few seem to break through your mental perimeter and seep into your unconscious. And if you’re starting to replicate behaviors that don’t feel true to yourself, you have to consider who modeled those behaviors for you. By examining why you’re trying to replicate some behaviors, you can understand what you believe those behaviors will yield for you and why you’re doing them. Then, you can find new models who might show you a way of achieving what you seek without compromising your sense of self. 

Active mediation

Lastly, if you’re struggling to remember to replicate certain behaviors that you wish you could execute seamlessly (namely soft skills or small self-improvement tasks), there’s nothing wrong with consciously mediating. Consciously keeping in mind the four facets of the mediational process can cause the information to encode quicker and actions to become more rote.