Good Behaviour, Bad Behaviour

I have had some conversations this week around good vs bad behaviour in the workplace. Outside of commonly agreed bad behaviour or illegal/unethical behaviour, determining “bad behaviour” can be quite subjective – determined by formal and informal workplace culture. When a manager asks me to work with a staff member to make sure that they “behave well” in the workplace, I know that all of us are in for a challenge!

At the deepest level, “behaving well” is intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated. External motivation is based on what you do rather than who you are. For example, people highly motivated by recognition, strong or capable leadership and management, stability in their career, are externally motivated. People that are more internally motivated

Good Reads

There have been some interesting reads on the internet this week. Here are a couple worth your time.

Culture Change

• Have you ever wondered how much more productive it is to engage people in the change process? About 5 times, according to research mentioned in this article.
  The article contains 3 great questions that fed information to one CEO:

Embarking on a Culture Change Initiative? 3 Keys to Success

Culture can be defined as the set of beliefs and behaviours of an organisation’s workforce. It is created from the messages that are received about how people are expected to behave. Cultures bind people together through shared goals, beliefs, approaches, routines, needs and values. Peer pressure helps behavioural norms develop over time, and these are influenced by the type of work performed, organisational history, successes and failures, physical conditions, the workplace environment and the demands of external entities such as customers, stakeholders, economic conditions etc. But the strongest influence on cultural norms are the senior leaders and managers within an organisation. It is the messages and the behaviours of this group that is most influential in shaping the culture of an organisation.

What we have been reading

There have been some interesting reads on the internet this month. Here are a couple worth your time.

Managing Clever People

• A short reminder that creative, clever people can be fun to work with and inspirational. However, managers often see them as their greatest challenge, wanting them to conform to the “normal’ workplace culture.

Solving Organisational Problems: Identifying those causes

In our previous post about Solving Organisational Problems , we mentioned the difference between symptoms, the pain that is being experienced at the moment, and the causes of the problem, the underlying reason or trigger for the current symptoms.

Symptoms are the sign that a problem exists. Like symptoms of sickness, they may not be strong indicators of the actual problem. They are just the flag that an issue exists.

The confusing thing about causes is that they may be multi-layered.

What appears at first glance to be a cause may in fact be a different symptom on our journey to uncover the underlying cause.

The Chain of Cause and Effect

In fact what we often find is a chain of cause and effect relationships as we move ever deeper in our quest to find the initial causal trigger for the problem.

Solving Organisational Problems

I came across these definitions of problem recently, and I loved them so much they brought a smile to my face. The definitions are succinct and accurate, and also are worthy of some contemplation.

• Having a problem is by nature a state of affairs plagued with some difficulty or undesired status.

• A problem represents a challenge that encourages solving to establish more desirable circumstances.

[These are from Root Cause Analysis, by Bjorn Andersen]

When we talk about problems in an organisational context, the discussion ultimately

Great Companies, Humble Leaders, One Pointed Business Determination

It is interesting to be re-reading an article on Level 5 Leadership by Jim Collins, summarising the results of a five year project on companies that went from good to great and then sustained that greatness. He wrote a best selling book about this work — you have probably read it.

I have seen companies develop and mature, but it is that sustainability that is critical. Companies not capable of sustaining greatness falter and then flip-flop through periods of ordinary performance, good performance and occasional great performance.

Although Jim wrote this article some years ago, his summary findings continue to resonate today. At the beginning of his research