The Numbers are a result of the Behaviors
As leaders, we are asked to challenge and inspire our staff to bring their best selves to work every day. We read books, we have off-sites, we attend leadership seminars, we read blog posts. In those moments it all sounds so easy, but what really happens when the rubber meets the road. It is very easy to start excusing the lack of performance due to “uncontrollable circumstances” or “the other guy was better today.”
Sure, you can hide these loses if your company is able to ride the coattails of a few rockstar employees. Given access to the appropriate data, a business analyst can see this evidenced in a performance heatmap. Upper management will then demand that all business teams bring their performance up to the rockstar level because in their mind if that manager can do it, why can’t every other manager. Managers are just told to be better, be more like John.
That kind of vague “direction” just doesn’t work. Business results don’t improve. Frustration creeps in. Frustration breeds pressure. Pressure breeds contempt. Contempt breed excuses. And the numbers go down.
What follows over the next few blog posts is a story of how I was John and how I worked with a team of leaders to build leadership training. Along the way, we created something even better than training, an easy to implement and teachable management philosophy.
In January of 2015, the company I was working for had its 2nd layoff event in just 2 years. Coming out of that experience a group was formed to look at how the company could evolve and avoid a repeat of this cycle. The group got together and tried to envision how things could be better, Moar Better to be specific. The leader of this effort, Tom, was a peer of mine and was always known for having a great gut for business and people operations, but at the time lacked some of the experience to translate his intuition into application.
After a few weeks of ideation, and a bit of wheel spinning, I was brought in to the group because of my professional experience and my ability to talk through concepts with those in the room. In addition to my professional experience, I also had cultivated a repertoire for creating a great team atmosphere and above average business results. The group knew that they needed to distil out the successes of Tom & I in order to ensure that the layoff cycle would be broken.
At the first meeting I attended, I listened for fifteen minutes about what Moar Better was and what Moar Better was trying to achieve. I was confused. I felt like I knew what the goal should be, but it didn’t sound like that was what was trying to be achieved. Tom could see the confusion in my eyes and we agreed to attempt another approach. So Tom asked me to start talking about myself and my approach to team leadership.
Always being one who likes to write on whiteboards while discussing topics I grabbed a pen and wrote on the wall:
“The Numbers are a result of the Behaviors”
The reaction of the room was overwhelmingly duh, except Tom who just said:
“Exactly”
What followed over the next few weeks was a series of meetings where we fleshed out this concept and married my experience with Tom’s gut. One of the outputs of those meetings was a better, more coachable, Moar Better version of my statement that would go on to define the leadership style of me and my peers, AEP.
AEP stands for Alignment Engagement Productivity and the key to AEP is that they are always in that order. The number 1 job of a leader is to Align their people, after that they work to create an environment with Engaging work and if you nail the those your output will be Productivity. Sounds easy, right?
Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be diving in depth into AEP and sharing out the leadership philosophy that has made me successful over my career.
Thanks,
This is part 1 in a series on leadership philosophy, if you would like to continue please go read “Clarity of purpose and clarity of place in the pursuit of a common goal.”