Behaviors

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Behaviors

Preface

These notes are relevant for people interested in making changes on working units’ behavior from one is accountable for the results achieved from that group.

My experience is purely done on a Digital Native company, running units with its P&L, different sizes, different objectives, various deliverables, another tech, and diverse cultural backgrounds. Includes my interactions with clients that were either Product/Service Digital / Non-Digital Companies.

Executive Summary

From the perspective of an Ops person in a digital company, in the last years, I found that teaching good practices and generating efficiency on workmates; besides the training, example, and exposition/opportunity, there is another way modeling behaviors.

These paragraphs and thoughts represent my observations and conclusions on a digital organization.

All the actions I describe in this text ought to place them respecting the coworker. Respect is the bedrock of any person and no doubt on Managers.

What I found

Several processes and components need to run in compose to generate an optimal or at least respectful outcome. Following that path, there are multiple levels of complexity and are commonly human. The fact is that besides a top-notch tech environment may look like the challenges are on the silicon progress, people operate everything, and if the people don’t work in unison, failure appears.

Regarding the different levels of complexity that may appear starting on the base, people’s interactions generate friction and inconvenience on the execution.

Companies may staff people from different sources: — Internships — Hiring — Hunting — Acquisitions.

Internships

Here is the best scenario, you don’t have people with vice and pitch*; in my other work, we did it differently* because it is their first job, hence no poisoning. You have the perfect environment to train and cultivate behavior representing the values of your manager and its aims. Those values transformed into activities that lead to best practices, therefore, the desired behavior.

The risks you may face are that the people are not fit for those roles/technologies/jobs, and yet they use the company as a sandbox or training field to jump to another place where they can afford more money. They are young, and money makes relevance on how good the weekend may be.

Hiring

You can hire young people and seasoned people. Younger people may not be the first job but are eager to learn and start building their careers, whereas it gives us the best place to generate good practices and behaviors. More seasoned people can be in a dual situation, adapt or die. There aren’t middle points there, the people who adapt, learn, and adopt behaviors, people who die, leave the company for good. Not a fit.

By the act of providing leadership, exposure, and opportunities, you nourish their self-esteem.

Hunting

It becomes challenging because you hunt someone to generate change on the behaviors you have in the company; nonetheless, it is not as easy as it sounds, as the company has its DNA, and sometimes that is stronger than any will.

Changing a company’s mentality is, without a doubt, one of the most challenging tasks to achieve.

The scenario where the company’s DNA wills to change the mindset and learn from the hunted person is ideal for generating new best practices.

When the will to change behavior clashes with the DNA, friction arises everywhere, between people and between teams. Finger-pointing appears, and it generates an infinite loop of miss-wasting energy, draining productivity at levels never faced before. The typical scenario of what did I do today with my time appears repeatedly.

Acquisition

The acquisition scenario has a variety of people. The ones who are happy to be acquired, the ones who hate the buying company, want to do the earn-out, cash it out and leave, or the ones who found the opportunity to become more prominent on the chain food at a bigger scale company (the buyer).

Blending

Behaviors are more accessible to change for the people that report to you than for the people that you report. This statement sounds simple, but generating upper management changes may lead to frustration and possible reorgs and attrition.

Reports

There are three main instances that, from the operation side, are critical to disrupting behaviors.

Intervention

Let’s say that you are now part of a new group, regardless of its size, and you need to run it from a finance, delivery, and tech point of view.

The main reason you need to do an intervention is to overview the outcomes from that group and see the poor quality or misalignment with the objectives you have as a Manager. In other words, when you visit a working group, and your primary thought is nothing works here.

The need to make an impact with the changes is immediate, and there are a few steps that I have scripted to do when I intervene in a unit.

Announce it: Make everyone from the group know that you are intervening in the unit and changes will come. It is not a nice message, but you get the attention that you need.
Kill All the Assumptions: Don’t leave anything for granted. Your knowledge plays a trick here because your inner self thinks while reviewing the scenarios: of course, they are handling this communication this way, and of course, they weren’t.
1:1 Meetings: Get all people reporting to you, do a one on one meeting and gather as much info as you can, group the common issues, list them, and prioritize. The key for these meetings is to kill all the assumptions. Again, the worst enemy is to give things for granted. An excellent way to start these meetings and set the tone is by asking: what do you own.
Set up your team: You will be successful if your team is booming as well. Fire people quickly, empower the remaining and search for replacements that are up to the task.
Rules of Engagement: Define the rules on how you will operate. What are the objectives, how are we doing as far, how are we going to control, track and communicate either wins or deviations. How will you engage with groups, and what level of information would be relevant for the whole group? Caveats for the rules of engagement: You may want to do more robust control initially, and you want to be more flexible when the behaviors are there. — Make the control sessions relevant and valuable, explicit agenda and what you need to check. Don’t use the surprise effect as people would be burning hours preparing the meeting to please you. — When you control, you do control, is the moment to raise issues and expect a different behavior for the next control session. That is what molds behavior
Empowerment: The ultimate team that you will run, empower it refreshing that they are your leverage and without their success, none will succeed.
Mentorship: Sponsor your team and bring feedback is the best thing to do. My policy was like this: I choose you to run part of this group, I won’t disrupt nor micromanage your people/processes, but I will share what I see if I smell an issue, and if you acknowledge, you need to act. It gave me great results provide freedom to run things and back them up when they made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, and it is good to have a manager that has your back. If you chose those people, you believe in them, you know that they are A-Class and will make mistakes, but the gain will be there. This concept is key.
Reward: Recognition emphasizes behavior. Reward the good actions and recognize reasonable attempts. Two minutes chat with a person can make a change in life.
Let’s see what happens otherwise: You don’t trust the people, they make a mistake, and then you don’t back them up. Next time they doubt, they will ask you before operating; hence, they become dependent on you. It may happen at the beginning of the intervention when they don’t know you, when you listen to their question, request a solution thought by them, and let them talk.
All these tasks help you to take the group to the following stage, which is the On-Going.

On-Going

You can heritage a functional group, and there aren’t issues that require a possible intervention (rarely), or you can evolve from intervention to a going stage.

When you are at this stage, you want to see the group mature and make it predictable. To get to the predictable situation, you need time and solid execution from the team.

To become a more mature structure, you need to measure everything. You won’t come with a proper list of metrics the first day; it depends massively on the type of group/development you are driving, but metrics are the key to making data-driven decisions.

The metrics you take have to be visible for your team, refreshed and looking for a reaction on them. Analyzing the data, you understand erratic patterns that allow you to see those behaviors that can improve.

I got in a moment where I spend a big chunk of hours thinking about measuring to make the organization more mature and even predictable.

Mature and Predictable

When it is a while that the unit is performing, the people you sponsored now rock and showed you that you were ok trusting them; it is time to give a career path and let them go (grow).

Before that happens, two key activities need to happen: — You need to find a successor. — Each report you have in your team needs to look for a successor.

It will happen that your team reports excellent, but then one of them is off on PTO, and the OOO person has no clue on what is going on. Yet, it is never late to state that the OOO person reports to you (or the person off).

The exercise of the OOO and challenging the replacement person is interesting. All you have trained the people to do now is do it with their reports to make the cycle go on.

All the team has to understand that if no succession plan is in place, no chance that growth is reachable.

Your Management Team

Now we enter a bumpy road, full of obstacles and risk. There are two tracks here, and they are accessible to aboard.

People who want to learn from their team: We present a case, where the benefit is, and how we address it. If your manager feels comfortable executing, they will do it and will even listen more to you. If your manager does not execute, it is worth asking if the case you presented is worthless or wrongly stated.
People who do not want to learn from their team: Quit or change area. Your career, time, and knowledge are more valuable than anyone’s ego.

Conclusion

Two main verticals can affect the status of the behaviors:

The people and where do they come from Internship/Hiring/Hunting/Acquisition.
The stage of the unit: Intervention/On Going/Mature and Predictable.

My entry point would be first, and I’d chosen it every time, the unit’s stage; because it is different what you need to do, but with people, you need to manage them at any stage.

People are grateful and cheerful when they follow a leader that shows a path, cleans it, paves it, and teaches how to walk on it. Your behaviors and respectful acts with people allow you to provide an incredible flow to the unit. Mind what you say, mind what you do, mind how you act.