What behaviors are impacting your organization?

Was it performance that caused companies like Enron, Satyam, Countrywide Mortgage, and the many of world’s banks to go out of business? Absolutely not! It was the behavior manifested by the leaders of these organizations that caused their demise.

We believe most organizations have put check and balances in place to flush out corrupted behaviors but they have not begun to measure some of the day to day behaviors that could be deadly to the organization’s people strategy and over time to the organization itself.

With less graduates entering the workforce and according to a recent Manpower Survey, 10,000 Baby Boomers in the U.S. alone retiring daily they are in for a rude awaking as the employer market shifts to an employee market and their people run out the door. As an early warning indicator, we developed 12 questions (symptoms) you can ask yourself and your employees.

Do employee stay in office until just after the manager leaves and then scurry out the door?
Is there a lack of trust among people?
Is remediation more prevalent than recognition?
Are leaders unwilling to share information with everyone?
Is information hoarded between teams?
When people ask for time off are they questioned about what they will be doing before they are given approval?
Are there factions (groupism) among employees?
Is productivity down or going down?
Do you have leaders and/or employees who vie for power to gain position and control within a group?
Are meetings a one-way monologue vs. participatory?
Are people corrected in meetings and other public forums?
Have managers been known to yell at their employees?
Do you implement employment rewards in a monthly basis?

For any of the questions where you have answered, YES, your organization needs to explore how they can focus on teaching, observing and measuring the right behaviors to reduce the symptom. If the answer is “Yes” to more than half of the questions then a new people strategy is essential for the future of your organization.

Most companies primarily focus on performance and only monitor behavior when they find themselves in trouble for one reason or another. How leaders, and for that matter, how all employees behave is critical to the success of the organization and must take its rightful place as an equal partner with performance.

It is not about performance or behavior. It about PERFORMANCE AND BEHAVIOR. Start from today. Tomorrow may be too late.