B is for Behaviour

As HR practitioners, we spend a lot of time focusing on individual and organisational behaviour. We study it, we design frameworks to encourage and discourage it, and we hire for it and fire for it. It would be fair to say we live and breathe it. So a couple of years ago when I was first told by a consultant I was working with that we should not be focusing on behaviour, I was to say the least very confronted (not to mention I didn’t think much of the person that was telling me this). However a few years down the track I now believe they may have been onto something.

While behaviour is very relevant, I now don’t believe it is where the focus should lie. If you set the conditions up for employees to achieve, then behaviour will generally take care of itself. That is to say behaviour – good or bad, organisationally aligned or not is a symptom of something else, not the thing itself.

You see, most people really do want to do a good job. They want to behave and achieve in line with their own and the organisations goals, they want to know where the bar is and how to meet it. They want to know what good looks like, and what even better looks like. And once they know this they want to be given clear outcomes and the authority to be able to do their job and a manager who lets them work out the how for themselves, who puts a value on their relationship and can spare half an hour a week for them on a 1:1 basis.

Most of the time however, the manager has not really ever sat down and thought about what they actually want to see from an employee when the jobs done well (in terms of the actual output) and then are genuinely surprised when the employee failed to read their mind. They may think they’ve provided clarity around roles or individual accountabilities, but often it is a task or component of a task that is assigned rather than what the outcome should be. For example my manager may say: “I want you to develop a plan to increase productivity in your area’. ‘Okay’ I would say ‘that will take me a few hours, is that really what you want? What is the output or final product you would like?’. Maybe if I was asked to increase team productivity in my area by 20% in the next six months, we may be getting closer to achieving some real work that can positively affect the organisation. Especially if this objective was given to other managers across the board.

Another common issue, is that managers also often fail to give employees the corresponding authority to achieve their outcomes, effectively tying their hands to be able to achieve. In the above example I would need the authority to actually influence some change?

So if the above isn’t ever really thought about or applied, then when it all goes wrong and you start to see some less than ideal behavioural or performance outcomes because no clarity has been provided, or blocks are in place in terms of control and authority, we blame the employees for not performing or behaving the way we want. Sometimes it may be the case, but it should not be the first place we look.