By Eliska S. Padilla
March 5, 2021
Fostering value-based behaviors for team success
We’ve all grown up or been a part of a family in some form or another, and all families have values. There are certain behaviors at home and at work that are encouraged and discouraged. Think of those rules of the road that you might tell a new hire during orientation, tips for how they will get along, and spend their time best with this particular team.
As the head of a team, one of the toughest jobs of a leader is to observe individual team members’ behaviors, and keep everyone aligned with their shared values and purpose. Along with the presence of positive and constructive behaviors, negative and destructive agendas can emerge that undermine the ability of individual teams to function and perform successfully.
When a teammates’ behaviors are positive, providing private and public encouragement is critical and akin to nourishing a plant so it blooms in the spring. And likewise, when the behaviors are negative, good leaders encourage the team to recognize and handle the behavior within the team environment, and won’t hesitate to take action to weed out the bad behavior.
Simply telling someone to change their attitude won’t work.
Leaders need to play an active role in prompting the change, recognizing and rewarding effort when it shows. We can all agree that providing encouragement and accountability is crucial to ensuring the team stays on track, but how does a leader do so effectively? Here’s some insights from our experience.
Describe value-based behaviors
Having good conversations is really the core of being an effective leader. Helping individuals and your entire team understand the behaviors that align with the organization or team’s values is key. For example, let’s look at some behaviors aligned with values.
Respect – Showing respect in your organization may look like being professional, listening, forgiving, spending time with one another, and not holding grudges, interrupting, being bossy, and gossiping.
Commitment – If being committed to a common goal is paramount, then you’ll see teammates having direct, crucial conversations, providing constructive criticism when performance doesn’t help forward the goal, and squashing “Debby Downer’s” complaining and complacency.
Accountability – Accountability is about accepting responsibility and owning your mistakes, and helping others and yourself to remember to do what you said you will do. When teammates aren’t following through with commitments, shrugging off responsibilities or even passing off work to one another, this behavior must be called out and turned around.
Collaboration – In a highly collaborative environment, teammates are encouraged to “paint on one another’s canvas.” You’ll brainstorm, share the load, and offer help. Behaviors that fly in the face of collaboration, are isolating oneself, and disconnecting oneself from the team, being a lone wolf who doesn’t want to accept team support.
Empathy – At the core of being a good teammate and providing excellent customer service is caring for others which is best shown by seeking to understand their wants, fears, needs, and hopes. This requires seeing others as like us, taking the time to know them, and not standing back and making false assumptions or altogether ignoring their humanness. .
Results – If results are a value that drives your team, then you’ll see behaviors like measuring milestones, setting objectives, communicating updates, people going the extra mile to overcome a hurdle or ensure success. Look for activity without purpose to see the antithesis of results.
Once you’ve described the behaviors associated with organizational values, reinforcing them with encouragement and redirection is essential.
Coaching value-based behaviors
Teammates may exhibit negative and destructive behaviors for a variety of reasons, from personal agendas, resistance to change, immaturity, lack of motivation or poor team leadership. Whatever the reason, it is the leader’s job to serve as coach, and redirect the behavior to align with the desired, positive and constructive behaviors. Here’s some specific coaching tips:
- Give teammates regular feedback. Start by asking at your one-on-one and team meetings, “How do you think you’re doing at demonstrating our values to one another and our customers?” Then, share how you think they are doing, with specific examples. Dig deeper for team mutual accountability and ask if another teammate provided encouragement or push back on acceptable or negative behaviors.
- Ask a rating question that prompts the teammate to be introspective. Such as, “On a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being very positive, and 1 being not very positive at all, how would someone describe your behavior during this situation?” Next, don’t agree with their answer, prompt them to further dialog by asking what they would be willing to do to move toward a five.
- Create a culture of team feedback by incorporating values-based behavioral questions in post-mortem project or event reviews.
- Keep values-based behaviors a topic of every team meeting. Asking questions like, “How can we be more respectful, committed, empathetic to one another?”
- Encourage teammates to continuously learn on the behavior that most challenges them. Learning can be gained by education, example and experience.
- Education. Ask teammates to share articles on your team’s values and prized behaviors, expressing one or two things they learned from the article.
- Example. Have a teammate observe another colleague who exhibits the desired attitude and behavior, and share with you what they observed over a period of time.
- Experience. Assign a teammate a challenge and provide them feedback personally, recognizing and rewarding them when they’ve shown signs of improvement.
What’s the old saying? What gets measured, gets done. Make values-based behaviors a constant topic of conversation individually, and as a team. Your team will begin to understand what is expected of them and it will guide their daily behaviors.
Finally, it can’t go without being said. Be a leader who models the way. If you expect respect, give it. If you expect commitment and accountability, show the behaviors associated with those values. And the moment you identify negative and destructive behaviors, call them out quickly, and praise teammates who likewise address negative behaviors in the moment.