Building Shared Organizational Behaviors To Enhance Performance
Leaders today are operating with fewer resources and just as many if not more priorities.
Companies often put frameworks or tools in place to help, but they can just end up increasing the workload if they’re not paired with explicit behavior change.
By building shared organizational behaviors, organizations can drive the alignment, consistency, and efficiency they need to reduce workload and enhance performance.
In this article, I focus on the value of shared organizational behaviors and how to identify and nurture them.
What Is Organizational Behavior (OB)?
Organizational behavior is the study of how people interact within groups across organizations in an attempt to predict their actions and improve overall effectiveness.
While OB draws on disciplines like psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and management to explore various aspects of human behavior at work, the identification and application of a shared set of behaviors across an organization is far from academic.
Why Focusing On Shared Organizational Behaviors Is Important
Identifying and focusing on shared behaviors is crucial to designing effective ways of working together.
They help to establish consistent expectations and a common ground for how people work independently and together.
Having shared behavior expectations:
- Promotes efficiency and productivity, creating a consistent work environment without the need to continually establish and clarify expectations.
- Enhances collaboration and facilitates better teamwork with everyone knowing what to expect from one another, reducing both conflict and stress.
- Increases trust and respect as people know that their teammates will operate reliably and consistently.
- Improves employee productivity and performance by aligning behaviors to organizational goals, allowing people to prioritize work and learning that contribute to those goals.
- Facilitates more effective leadership where managers trust their teams and can confidently delegate.
- Increases innovation and adaptability by helping to create a psychologically safe environment where people are encouraged to experiment and learn from mistakes without fear of retribution.
- Supports HR teams' ability to deliver more targeted learning and development initiatives that apply to broader segments of the organization.
Levels Of Organizational Behavior
There are three different layers through which we can analyze behavior within organizations.
Each level provides insights into specific aspects of behavior and how they interact with one another.
1. Individual level
This level focuses on understanding individual behavior within the organization. It examines factors like personality, attitudes, perceptions, motivation, and decision-making processes.
The goal is to understand how individuals contribute to organizational effectiveness and how they respond to various work-related situations.
2. Group/team level
At this level, the focus shifts from individual behavior to the behavior of groups or teams within the organization. It involves studying group dynamics, communication patterns, leadership styles, power and politics, and conflict resolution.
Behaviors are actually what determines whether a collective of individuals is a group or a team. Understanding group behavior helps improve collaboration, enhance team performance, and manage conflict.
3. Organizational level
This level zooms out to examine the overall organizational structure, culture, policies, and processes that shape the collective behavior of individuals and groups.
It looks at how the organization’s design, culture, and external environment influence employee behavior and organizational effectiveness.
Understanding organizational-level behavior helps with strategic decision-making, managing change, and fostering innovation.
The Key Elements Of Organizational Behaviors
Organizational behaviors are composed of multiple elements. The interplay between these elements shapes the dynamics within an organization and influences how individuals and groups behave.
Here are some questions to consider for some of the most critical elements:
1. Communication
- Transparency: Do we encourage open dialogue? What is our feedback model (frequency, format, formality/informality, etc.)? How do we share information and to what levels in the organization?
- Clarity: How do we ensure that information is easily understood by all? Do we favor conciseness? What communication tools do we expect people to use and how (ex: Slack, email, decks, meetings, intranets)?
- Listening: Do we value listening as much or more than talking? Do we understand how to demonstrate active listening?
2. Teamwork
- Collaboration: How do we work together in teams and cross-functionally? Are people rewarded for working in silos or for working together?
- Trust: What is the level of psychological safety in the organization? Do leaders know how to build trust in their teams?
- Conflict resolution: Is it safe to productively disagree in this organization? How do we constructively resolve conflicts?
3. Leadership
- Prioritization: Do we identify and focus on the work that delivers the most value? How do we continually evaluate and reprioritize work? How do we eliminate low-value tasks and projects?
- Decision-making: What is our decision-making model? How do we ensure that decision-makers are getting the right input and recommendations? Do we get behind a decision and try to ensure a successful outcome?
- People development: How do we proactively support the growth of our teams? Are we regularly coaching and mentoring people?
4. Adaptability
- Change agility: Are we willing to adapt to shifts in the business/organizational structure/processes/technologies? Are we open to stepping out of our comfort zone and experimenting?
- Learning: Do we seek opportunities for continual growth and development? Do we provide learning opportunities and resources? Are people rewarded for continuous learning?
- Continuous improvement: Do we look at work as iterative? Are we continually striving for improvements in processes, products, and services?
5. Accountability
- Ownership: Do we take responsibility for our actions and deliverables? Do we proactively admit our mistakes and try to correct them?
- Follow up: Do we deliver on our commitments as promised? Are we reliable? How do we proactively keep others informed about progress and setbacks?
- Critical thinking: Do we analyze problems objectively? How do we take multiple perspectives? Do we have the self-awareness to understand how we contribute to the problem and/or the solution?
6. Technology
- Internal digital tools: What digital tools do we have in place (ex: email, messaging, project management tools, learning management system, etc.)? What tools do we lack that would help us to collaborate better?
- Automation/AI: What automation/AI have we implemented to take care of routine tasks? Are employees taking advantage of automation or fearful of it?
- Analytics: What are we doing with the data that we collect? How are we using analytics to support innovation and insights?
7. Structure
- Hierarchy: Do the levels in our hierarchy support or hinder productivity? How are our communication channels and decision-making methods defined through the levels of the organization?
- Role clarity: Have we clearly defined the scope of responsibility for each role? How do people know how their roles and responsibilities fit into their team, the cross-functional team, and the organization?
- Cultural alignment: How does our org structure support (or not) our mission and values? Do we shift our structure as needed in order to encourage the behaviors that we want employees to display?
How To Determine And Nurture Organizational Behaviors
Determining and nurturing shared organizational behaviors needn’t be overly complex.
These practical steps will help you to identify your desired behaviors, specifically communicate them, and codify them into your organization's ways of working.
1. Identifying the key behaviors
Identifying the key behaviors involves gathering and analyzing multiple aspects of the organization, both formal and informal.
Review the organization’s mission, vision, and values
The language used in these statements often highlights the behaviors that are most important to the organization (ex: teamwork, creativity, impact, future focus).
Consider behaviors that are required to deliver on these competencies. Ex: A mission that includes creating the best user experience could require behaviors such as curiosity, iteration, and empathy.
Review the goals of the organization and/or team
Break the goals down into the activities required to achieve the goals, and then consider the behaviors that support each activity. Ex: The goal of shortening product to marketing time may require behaviors such as decisiveness, adaptability, and prioritization.
Observe existing workplace norms
These are the behaviors that are already consistently demonstrated by employees. It includes things like how decisions are made, how people communicate with one another, or how people manage change.
Gather feedback
Ask employees at all levels about the behaviors they see that add value and the ones that get in the way.
2. Specify what it looks like to effectively display the behaviors
Once you have identified the key behaviors, create specific descriptions of what it looks like to demonstrate them in the context of the organization.
These ‘behavior statements’ should include concrete examples of how the behavior should be demonstrated using plain, relatable language.
For example, Amazon has outlined their expected behaviors in a list of Leadership Principles, one of which is “Earn Trust”.
Their behavior statement for Earn Trust is: “Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.”
You can also provide role-specific examples. For regularly providing and seeking feedback, that could look like:
- Managers hold weekly one-on-one meetings with each team member to provide support and guidance, offer positive and constructive in-the-moment feedback during working sessions, and formally request feedback from direct reports and peers twice a year.
- Individual contributors proactively seek feedback from leaders and colleagues to improve performance, formally request feedback once a year as part of the end-of-year process, and regularly provide timely positive and constructive feedback to leaders, teammates, and cross-functional partners.
You can also develop training resources including exercises that allow employees to learn about and practice key behaviors in a safe environment and self-assessment tools for people to compare their behaviors against the standard.
3. Integrate the behaviors into people tools and processes
For behaviors to truly take hold, integrate the expectations and accountability into the way that you acquire, assess, and reward employees with workplace incentive programs.
- Incorporate behavioral expectations into job descriptions and the questions you ask during the interviewing process.
- Onboard people to the behaviors as part of your new-hire orientation.
- Include behavioral goals as part of your goal-setting document.
- Providing training resources and support to build, reinforce, and scale the behaviors.
- Regularly provide feedback on how well people are displaying behaviors in their work.
- Use behaviors as the basis for formal and informal employee recognition and rewards.
Organizational Behaviors Case Study: Focusing A Product Team
Recently, I was working with a product team that needed to change some long-ingrained behaviors.
They created a broad assortment of products that they sold in quantities too small to appreciably contribute to the bottom line.
It was taking the same amount of manpower hours to create a product that contributed 2% to overall sales as a product that contributed 20%!
At the same time, every step in the development process was going off track with people revisiting decisions that had already been made.
While the team had already identified that it was necessary to streamline their product offering and work more efficiently, the company went through a significant reorg which reduced overall headcount. As a result, it became even more imperative that the team worked differently.
The team leaders collaborated to:
- Clearly outline the From/To state. For example, they moved from providing opinion-based product feedback to data-based product feedback.
- Identify behaviors aligned with company values and clarify behavioral statements for each. For example, the overall behavior “keep it simple” looks like “Ask ourselves if this work will meaningfully contribute to achieving our goals” and “Spend time on the things that deliver the most value and take shortcuts elsewhere”.
- Run a full-day session with the extended leadership team to introduce the behaviors, discuss how they would demonstrate them through an upcoming milestone in the product creation process, and agree on how they would hold themselves, their teams, and one another accountable.
- Regroup after the milestone to discuss what went well, where they had challenges, and what they would adjust for the next milestone.
Happily, both the team and their cross-functional partners reported appreciable improvements at the milestone including a tighter product assortment and less discussion of low-value products.
The leaders plan to replicate the process prior to each upcoming milestone until the behaviors become second nature for the team.
Actionable Takeaways
We’ve covered quite a bit (thanks for staying!), so here are three actionable takeaways to keep front of mind when thinking about organizational behavior in your org:
- Establish and define key behaviors: Identify behaviors that align with organizational values, goals, and workplace norms. Then create clear behavior statements that provide concrete examples of how these behaviors should manifest in day-to-day operations.
- Integrate behaviors into HR processes: Embed the desired behaviors into key HR tools and processes like job descriptions, performance evaluations, training, and recognition programs. This approach promotes accountability and aligns employees' actions with organizational goals.
- Promote a growth mindset: Encourage open dialogue, regular feedback, and continuous learning to help employees adjust their behaviors, promote psychological safety, and foster adaptability and innovation across teams.
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