Aggregated Behaviors ARE Performance - Chapter 2 - Part 2

0:00Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Mike. And I'm Mark. Today's cast, Aggregated Behaviors are Performance, Chapter 2, Part 2 of 2. As always, our content has been crafted by humans, and we're now certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, what are behaviors? Where does performance and behaviors being separate go wrong? Feedback, reviews, and culture. And then finally, how to fix it. If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Here we go.

0:37London has always attracted the world's best leaders. We're bringing the training to match. Our public conferences in London are quickly approaching and you need to get registered. Three tracks designed for professionals who think globally. We have the Effective Manager Conference, the Effective Communicator Conference, and the Effective Senior Manager Conference. begins November 24th. Register now at manager-tools.com forward slash London. Okay, Mark. So last time we talked about behaviors and what exactly behaviors are, and now we need to talk about where do performance behaviors go wrong, right?

1:20And we talked feedback, views, culture. So let's get into that. Yeah, I think we've kind of done this, but I still wanted to spend a few minutes talking about it. As we said, the present state of the performance and behaviors misunderstanding is the separation of behaviors from performance. Behaviors, in quotes, are seen as only relating to how one interacts with others because of that misunderstanding that there are work product behaviors, including relationships and all the others as well. Quality, quantity, accuracy, timeless documentation. By the way, I left one out because it's not always 100 % applicable, and that is safety.

2:00Safety is also a behavior. But it's generally, it's not in 100 % of situations. Most office environments don't think about safety that much. They probably should, but they don't. So behaviors are seen as only related to how you interact with other people, because people think behaviors are just words you say, how you say them, facial expressions, body language. Performance, on the other hand, is seen as how good you are at producing work products and outputs that benefit your organization. Quality, quantity, timeliness, accuracy, documentation, safety, and the thing people miss, relationships.

2:34And that's where the falsehood comes in. Our performance is nothing more than the total aggregation of all of our behaviors. This ought to be obvious. It's what Matt Bentliff loves about this cast. It is terribly ineffective for us to act on the false idea that performance is somehow separate from our behaviors. We all know that how we behave at work contributes to our performance. There's no question about it. If we relegate behaviors, quote unquote, to how we treat others, we eliminate it from being the fundamental core of the work performance of the organization. One of the components of professional behavior, as we said, is work product, quality, quantity, time, accuracy, documentation, and relationships.

3:20Behaviors are performance. And performance is nothing more than aggregated behavior. Behaviors are performance, both in how we do our work and how we create our outputs and how we treat other people. It's silly to fire someone whose performance is good, quote unquote, but whose, quote, behavior with others, unquote, is bad. They're the same thing, okay? Behavior with others, their relationship with others is behavior. It is performance. That person who is getting great numbers and treating his people poorly, his performance is not acceptable. And numbers are not the totality of your performance.

4:04And people don't seem to get that. In fact, in strategy sessions, everybody wants to turn it into a budget discussion. No, we're going to talk about how we work together and how we're going to change the way we work together and so on. That's part of performance leading to strategy as well. They're the same thing, performance and behaviors, because relationships with others is a work product behavior. And because you can't be effective without relationships with others. Now, there are three easy areas to see where this misunderstanding hurts us. Their feedback, performance reviews and culture.

4:39I'm not saying there aren't more things. I just wanted to tackle three of these now because they just bubble. I mean, I wrote this mic and it just, the next three things came out, feedback, reviews, and culture. And lately I've been having lots of conversations with the culture. I think the more and more we do executive stuff, the more we ended up talking about culture. And in fact, I'm an advisor to a board, to a CEO right now. And he was talking about the culture he wanted. And I said, you probably want Drucker's culture. And he knows Drucker really well. He says, yes, I do. But Mark, I don't remember what is Drucker's culture.

5:17And I said, well, I'm going to tell you that Drucker's definition of culture is performance. But I also said, I'm going to paraphrase it in a way that will help you feel good about this, because this particular CEO cares deeply about people. He really does. He's driven, He's hardworking, but he's unfailingly polite. He is a kind person and he holds people accountable in the best way. I mean, he's one of my very favorite people I've ever worked with in my life, Charlie Chang. I'm honored to be working with him. And so I said, well, that's easy, Charlie. I can sum up the culture you want in four words.

5:56And he said, really? Because he had a long document that he was working on. And I said, sure. Mission first, people always. And he was like, oh, that's good. I said, what's funny about that, Charlie, is that comes from the side of the building 121 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which is an unofficial motto of the U.S. Army. Mission first, people always. The mission has to come first. We have to accomplish our job. We have to serve our customers. Otherwise, we'll go out of business, and then we have no reason being an organization, and we disband. Okay? But in order to do that, we have to keep a constant eye on how we treat our people.

6:27And to me, that's both performance and behavior lumped into one in a way that, again, gives a lie to this idea that behaviors are one thing and performance is another. Now, this is a good point, actually, for me to talk about Drucker and culture and performance. I've probably said this 20 or 30 times, maybe 20 of those times in the last three or four years since Executive Tools has come out. We're going to talk more about culture in a minute, but since I brought up Drucker, I'll cover this now. Drucker is famous for having said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Okay. Now this became popular after Drucker wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal on the op-ed page.

7:14Another fabulous, one of the greatest things I've ever read. And everything Drucker wrote is in my top 100. You said that. You said that same exact quote about it being your most famous. on almost everything he's ever written. Yeah, everything. And then everything else is second. Including the very best books I've ever read. I've learned more from Peter Drucker. And I've learned more from him by having to work to understand it than any other person, single person in my career. Now, I've learned a great deal from the data from hundreds of thousands of people, certainly. And I think Drucker would have loved to have seen our data.

7:54I wish I'd gotten a chance to meet him. But here's what Drucker said. He said, Drucker said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So what happened after this is CEOs started getting enamored of talking about their culture. And this led to vision and mission and value statements and culture meetings. So that was all an outgrowth of what Peter Drucker had said? That's what kind of started that whole thing? But it went in a direction that Peter Drucker would have never. Well, no, it would never have tolerated. No, yeah. He was glad that people were thinking about culture, but they got confused. What Drucker meant by culture eats strategy for breakfast is that you must have a performance culture.

8:37And the reason why is if you have a great strategy, but your culture is one that lacks accountability, if your culture is one that allows people to be disrespectful and rude and domineering to people, if your culture allows lack of planning or weak budgeting or a lack of willingness to make tough choices about budgets and people and so on, it doesn't matter how great your strategy is. Because strategy is not just the shining city on the hill that you want to get to, but also the behaviors you're going to commit to one another to do. I use the example, I may have used it in a podcast, of Pebble Beach being started and being built up by the very wealthy people in San Francisco, all the railroad people who built the transcontinental railroad.

9:30road. And San Francisco was in a terrible mess because of the earthquake and the fire. It was a horrible place to live, even for the people who were quite wealthy. And so they founded this little playground, Pebble Beach. It was not the golf mecca it is now. It was more just a place to come and have a weekend and stay at the lodge and have a picnic and so on. It has since become, thanks to Morse, who took it over from the railroads, he turned it into a golf mecca, Partially because there's a great amount of sand underneath the grass, which makes for great golf courses. And everybody thinks of, ah, the strategy came up with was they're going to buy Pebble Beach, which they did, and then build a little lot of land there, a little lodge and so on, and go there.

10:16That's not what strategy is. Strategy is both having the picture of the future and building the railroad that gets you there, including every single railroad tie being in the right place. And what Drucker was referring to is the idea of culture is, are you a place that will actually measure out where the railroad ties go, that you'll find the best path for the railroad to go on and then build a safe and effective railroad so that people can get to the shining city on the hill that they want to come to? And they didn't get that. They just took it as, oh, I don't have to spend as much time as strategy.

10:52I would argue, actually, that the advent of strategy offices, where the CEO kind of outsourced strategy to, was also associated with Drucker saying culture eats strategy from record. Like, well, I'm going to be the chief culture guy now. I'm not going to be a CEO. I'm going to be a CCO. And I'm going to make sure the culture is right. And we talk about, you know, they would go down and they'd talk about how they feel and how do we feel to work here. And I think the engagement survey community, which is a total scam, by the way, I think they probably relate it to culture a great deal and so on.

11:24But again, culture is nothing more than behavior. The sum total of all the behaviors in your organization, that's your culture at that moment. Right there. That's it. It doesn't matter about vision, mission, values. It doesn't matter about what you say on the website. That's it. Yeah. So your little white paper on culture, unless you change behaviors. Yeah. You're not getting anywhere. You don't change behaviors. Your culture hasn't changed. So let's talk about how to fix it. And we'll talk about feedback. Look, hopefully if you're listening and you've been listening for a while, you know that all effective feedback can only be about behaviors.

12:04And again, those behaviors are the ones we listed earlier. Now, you might ask, and we get asked this all the time. time, why is feedback only about behavior? Because at a high level, because feedback is about performance and performance comes from behaviors. The first reason though, is because feedback must be about professional performance and performance is nothing but behaviors. It's not ideas. It's not intent. It's not attitude. It's not motivation. It's what we do and not what you want to do, but what you're paid to do, what your job says you're supposed to do. Now, when I say feedback must be about professional performance and performance is nothing but behaviors.

12:45That's a tautology, right? But we say it because of the false belief that somehow we have come to believe that behaviors are something different, only how we treat people, rather than the root of our work performance. They're the same thing, behavior and work performance. Admittedly, a lot of behaviors add up to work performance, not just one, okay? We also only give feedback about behaviors because giving feedback on anything else is ineffective. We know. We've tried it, folks. We have data, okay? The primary we know this is experience and the data that supports it, okay? When we first started teaching feedback, God, it's 30 years ago, before manager tools leading up to our feedback model, we didn't know this.

13:30We paid attention to what everybody else was talking about, and you can give feedback about people's intention and their motivation and their attitude and all this stuff, okay we taught it was okay to give feedback about those things but in every single case where we tried to give we tried to teach managers to give feedback on things other than behavior the feedback fails miserably why you could ask well why there's and there's tons of reasons because directs know that you don't truly know their motivation or their attitude right you're making it up. You can't observe it, right? Yeah. In fact, this is another problem with managers.

14:09And guys, folks, if you're listening, I love you. And I'm going to point out your flaws because I love you, okay? If we didn't love you, this podcast wouldn't be free, okay? I should write that down somewhere. If we didn't love managers, this podcast wouldn't be free. But we love you, and we love you enough to tell you exactly why, okay? The easy example of this is to tell someone that they have a bad attitude. Use the feedback model if you want. Watch them. Actually, no, don't do that because it'll mess up the feedback model. The great thing about that is that you can, with 99 % accuracy, determine what the answer is going to be, right?

14:45Right. You're going to say, hey, I don't, you know, when you have an attitude like that, it affects the team. Can you work on your attitude? They'll say, I don't have a bad attitude. Yeah, every time, every time. Yeah, every time. Now think about that for a minute. Now we're arguing about what they did and how they were perceived in the past. how is that going to get you to a positive discussion about their future behavior or their future attitude if they're arguing with you about the attitude? This is the ultimate brush off. And managers say all the time, I just can't get through. In fact, they can't get through to my people in terms of their performance.

15:17And we realized that the way they give feedback, not using our model, let's put it this way, the way they give performance communications is they talk about things like intent and attitude and how you treat people. And they don't cite specific behaviors. If you tell somebody you're going to have to treat people differently, you're not given a chance to understand what it was they did, so they won't do that again. That's why when one of your directs gives an outstanding briefing, because it was short and complete and accurate, this is another example from our effective manager conference, okay, they give a short, complete, and accurate briefing.

15:54By the way, short and complete both Both are really hard in the modern organization today. And it was accurate too, which shows they were well-prepared, okay? But you cannot just say to a direct, when you give a great briefing, it makes the meeting go really well because they don't know what they did that made it great. Why is that important? Obviously, you're going to say, wait, I want them to hear that it was a great briefing. Yes. So what you say is, when you're short and complete and accurate, that makes for a great briefing and that means the team wins. Thank you. And you're going to get more presentations like that that are short and complete and accurate, which is what you want.

16:32But the reason you're going to get that is because you told them what made it great, the behaviors that made it great. They kept it short. They had it complete. They covered all the points you asked them to cover, and it was accurate. They can do short and complete and accurate again. They can't do great again. Yeah, otherwise they walk away going like, oh, it must have been my red tie. That probably projected power and knowledge. Wow. I didn't even rehearse. Great. So I don't need to rehearse ever again. And when I become president, I'm going to continue to wear that red tie. That's what I'm going to do.

17:03Yeah. We have to be specific about behavior because if you're asking someone to change their behavior, they need to know what they should not do the next time. Because remember, all feedback is by definition about the future. Why do we know it's by definition about the future? Because an incident occurred, good or bad, it's now a couple hours later and you're going to talk to them. There's nothing you can do now about what they did back then. So the only logical, sane, reasonable reason to talk to them is to influence the future. If it's negative feedback, you're asking them to change. If it's positive feedback, you're asking for the same behavior in the future.

17:41That's it. But the only way they can know what it is, is actual behavior. If you say, hey, when you have an attitude like that, it's wonderful. How do you know what their attitude was. Well, you inferred it from a bunch of behaviors. So I just go back one step and tell them what the behaviors are that led you to believe that they had a particular attitude. Yeah. You crossed your arms, you leaned back, you frowned, right? And you looked away and made a comment under your breath. Those are all behaviors. Exactly. Let's go back to a time we were consulting for Eldon way back in the day. We were talking to the VP of marketing and they're talking about this person they're getting ready to fire as product manager for an important project and the one who's very smart the vp of of uh marketing i believe said uh yeah he just he's just he's he's not communicative he's not aggressive he's not just a bunch of characterizations and said okay well what would he be doing if he were those things and she named a couple and she immediately goes like, all right, I get your point.

18:47Okay. Yeah. So talk to him about that. And he ended up not getting fired. He ended up getting an award. It's just amazing. By the way, that person is now Eldon's boss. That's how good she is. She's pretty sharp. He's a CEO and she's a holding company CEO. Yeah, that's awesome. One more thought about behaviors and results versus motivation, intent, attitudes, and belief. Try this thought experiment, folks. Imagine everyone in your firm stopped engaging in any behaviors at all. They did not work. In fact, when I say they didn't work after saying they stopped engaging in behaviors, you're not going to give a second thought to that.

19:27You were like, yeah, if everybody stops engaging in behaviors, no work is getting done. Behaviors are work. Behaviors are performance. But continue the thought. No customer calls. No turning on and off for machines. No quality checks. No trucks driven. no store doors open in the morning, no code written. How long before results suffered? Immediately, right? I mean, yeah, let's change the equation. Everybody's super motivated, great attitude, super excited, but they don't engage in any behaviors. How effective are you going to be? You're not. It's all behavior. We give feedback only about behaviors because they're the only thing we can see and hear and experience so that we don't get arguments from the direct.

20:10and because they are the building block of corporate performance. An effective behavior, whether it's about work product or how one treats someone else, is one that delivers good work results, either a better or a good relationship or a maintained solid relationship or a better outcome in quality, quantity, accuracy, timeliness, documentation, safety, or relationships. An ineffective behavior is one that doesn't produce good outcomes. And keep this in mind. How do we even know what someone's motivation, intent, or attitude are? Mike's already said it. The behaviors they engage in. One of the real problems with managers, and I do it too as well in my personal life a lot, is I read into what people do because I only see and hear what they do and say.

20:56And then I swim upstream and try to guess what motivation caused that. And there are too many managers, probably 40 % to 50 % of managers in the world, literally believe that they are a genius psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, psychiatrist, and they can say, oh, because that person did this, I know how they're feeling, what their motivation is, what their intent is. Yeah. Because if I were them, this is what I'd be thinking. Right? Yes, exactly. It's completely, utterly wrong. So that's enough about feedback. Let's talk about performance reviews. What do we talk about in performance reviews generally?

21:30Work behaviors and the results they create, good or bad. What if you were given a new direct whom you were told had a great attitude and motivation, but whose behaviors while working for you were clearly ineffective and produced unsatisfactory results. Would you give them a great review because somebody told you they had a great attitude? No, you would not. You might mention that they were motivated, though you would have no reason to believe that other than you were told that despite their performance, but you'd have to give them an unsatisfactory rating or as it would, as is likely to occur in most organizations, you would just give them average because nobody wants to actually give unsatisfactory reviews.

22:09We don't separate behaviors from performance in a performance review because we all intuitively understand that performance is nothing more than aggregated behaviors. Is it possible there's someone who works for you, delivers great results, but also treats others poorly? Sure it is. It happens all the time. And high Ds, we're thinking of you. You kill it. You get great numbers and people don't like you. But that does not mean you should give them a good review for performance and a bad review for behavior because the ineffective interpersonal behaviors they engage in are no different and in fact are a part of their work performance.

22:46Everyone is responsible as a work behavior for their relationships. You would mention both, but you would talk about both based on their behaviors, their work product behaviors and their interpersonal behaviors. Okay. How would you know they treat others poorly if not for the behaviors you see, hear, and read? Come on. It's all behaviors. Okay. Finally, let's talk about culture. I've already talked through a lot of this, but I'm just going to cover the high points here. Culture is nothing more than behavior, guys. It's just aggregated behavior. Culture is not what organizations say it is, what we put on our websites to market to candidates.

23:30The culture of your team and your organization is nothing more than the behaviors of your team members and your associates. Good cultures derive from good, effective behaviors. And by the way, we don't mean good in a moralistic way. We mean good in terms of against the standard, which is effectiveness here. And bad cultures are created by the opposite behaviors. Nothing more than that. To say that a company or a team has a good culture because they produce good work results but treat others poorly, again, this is the wrong definition of behavior, that gets it exactly wrong. A good culture is built on effective behaviors, which are both work product results and how they treat other people behaviorally, their relationships.

24:11Performance cannot be good while treating others poorly because work performance and how we treat others are both the same thing. Behavior. Every time we talk about relationships as part of a work product, it just gets me going. Because I think that is missed so often. But you start thinking about relationships and behavior. Now you have a framework which you can talk to people about their performance in a meaningful way that's going to affect the future. And if you don't want work relationships to be part of your culture, just have a company of one. You'll never be big. Yeah, but I don't like myself, so that's not going to be good.

24:50Yeah, okay, different story. Yeah. Managing managers requires a completely different skill set than managing individual contributors. and almost no one prepares you for the shift. The instincts that made you a great frontline manager can actively work against you here. The effective senior manager conference teaches skip levels, nine box, talent management, team one alignment, and the communication rhythms that keep you genuinely connected at scale for directors and senior managers. For more information, visit manager-tools.com forward slash ESMC. All right, let me summarize. We talked in our introduction, folks, about professionals who deliver, quote, good performance, but also, quote, treat other people's others poorly, unquote.

25:44This is a lie. It causes too many managers to separate work from relationships and communication. They are, in fact, one and the same behaviors. Performance is not separate from behavior, it is behavior. Effective managers focus on behavior when giving feedback, when writing reviews, and when creating the culture they want. By the way, feedback is a very powerful culture adjustment tool. I can sum it up real easily. It's all about behavior. So let's stop calling how we treat others as behavior, quote unquote, leaving out that work performance is behavior too. Right on. Thank you. That was awesome.

26:29I'm glad we've covered this. It's been a while since we've covered it. Yeah. Ten years, I think. All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next time. So long.

26:54Thank you.