The equation for better business outcomes may surprise you

BEHAVIOUR

-——————— = OUTCOME

FRICTION

Why might this surprise you?

Well, I'm an accountant - so often the following quotes will be used: "the numbers man", "you look after the numbers", "you're only interested in the numbers..."

And yes the numbers are important. However, the numbers are a result, a result of something happening or not happening in the business. More often than not that is to do with people, peoples actions and behaviours that drive the business results.

There's a lot of talk about culture, culture programmes, defining values and value statements. But all these are only as good as the actual day-to-day behaviours that evident in a business. You go to an office or factory where quality is a stated key-value only to see messy offices, machine tools left lying around - ‘Quality’ is a behaviour and is either lived or not. You may be clear what behaviours you want or expect from yourself, your leadership team or your business teams.

However, when you don't see the results you expect you need to question whether you’ve actually looked to see if the behaviours you need are actually disabled in your business?

For example:

- The incentive scheme that creates unintended negative behaviours - The processes or systems that create friction so people don't use them - Managers who tolerate poor behaviours which undermines the efforts of their team

- The absence of formal or informal recognition of people who exemplify the right behaviours

- Communications that are inconsistent with actions and follow-through

Wherever we look we can often see friction which either reduces the impact of positive behaviours or worse still creates the environment for the exactly the behaviours you don’t want e.g. the sales commission plan that rewards solo performance when you want to implement team selling. You can add friction to reduce less effective behaviours. However, a much better plan is to reduce the friction that will enable positive behaviours.
 We train people and hope that they will come back transformed into high performing individuals or teams - we do this without recognising that behaviour change needs to be designed. The behaviour changes need to be aligned with how we work and how we are wired to change or view change. We need to look at why people don't do things.

And then we need to enable people to do what they want to do and to feel successful about doing those things.

Why don't we do things?

- Too big

- Too hard

- Too scary

- Too abstract

- Too perfect

We need to design for people's abilities and to ensure that they are able to do what is needed.

Often what's noted as 'poor behaviour' is often a reaction to one of the above.

So check do your people have the right abilities:

- Physical (includes skills)

- Mental (includes knowledge)

- Time (includes capacity and headroom)

It is not always the 'big stuff' in a change programme that drives the results. It’s more often the 'small stuff'. The cumulative impact of the ‘small stuff’ can be either hugely damaging or hugely rewarding.

We often ignore or tolerate the small stuff - the inaccuracy on the sales invoice that delayed customer payment by a week, the phone call not returned to the customer which lost the order, the meetings held with no agenda or structure, the colleagues consistently late to meetings or delivering work late, the leadership team that don't follow through on the staff survey as the latest crisis takes their time and attention.

Maybe because these are small, maybe because they happen frequently, maybe we are too good at post rationalising why we do them...maybe there are lots of reasons why the small stuff is not dealt with.

And this is all friction, the small day to day irritants. As friction, this will reduce performance, reduce morale, increase frustration. But because they are 'small' the impact is slow and gradual. Why tolerate? Why not eliminate the friction? Start small and build - this is likely to have a more sustained improvement on the business outcomes than a big bang project - remember too big and too hard limits people's ability to perform and be successful.

Things to consider when designing for behaviour driven outcomes?

- What behaviours are you formally or informally rewarding and recognising?

- What behaviours led you to exit employees in the past?

- What are the behaviours that new hires exhibit after 3-6 months?

- Are the words used consistent with the actions taken?

- Do you and your team have the skills to design behaviours, habits and routines?

- What’s the one thing you can do better today than you did yesterday?

So if you want better results...

- Know your numbers

- Ensure your team know the numbers

- Design for behaviours, habits and routines that work for your business

- Remove the friction and enable the right behaviours

- Make the numbers visible to track progress

After all the numbers are a result of what people do or don’t do