What If the Behaviour Isn't the Problem?
When the cause sits in the role, workload, team or change around someone, test changing the situation first. Why generic interventions miss.
Nobody looked at the projects
Imagine a project manager whose projects have started finishing late. Her director sends her on a planning course. It's a good course.
Months later, the projects are still late. No one looked at how her projects were set up.
The behaviour was where everyone looked. Nobody checked where the cause sat. This article is about what to do when the cause is the situation around the person.
The short version: behaviour is what you can see. The cause can sit in the role, the workload, the team, the manager relationship or organisational change. When it does, changing the person leaves the cause in place. Change the situation, then watch whether the behaviour follows.
The behaviour is where you look. The cause may be elsewhere.
In Performance Is a Signal. Not a Diagnosis., we cover how to read a signal and open the conversation. This article starts after that conversation, when what you've heard points beyond the person.
Our guide to Behaviour Intelligence puts it plainly: behaviour is visible, and the cause isn't. We explain behaviour through the person and underestimate the situation. So the response arrives aimed at the person too.
If the cause sits elsewhere, that response misses the cause.
Five places a cause can sit
The table below shows how each can look in behaviour, and what changing the situation means. The examples are invented, and none is a rule.
| Where the cause sits | How it can look | A response that changes the situation |
|---|---|---|
| Role | Handoffs get dropped. Decisions wait for approval. A person hesitates on work that used to be theirs. A new tool changed who approves what, and the old approvals still arrive. | Clarify who owns what. Remove or reassign duties that no longer fit. Write it down. |
| Workload | Work arrives later. Replies get shorter. Extra effort goes to the most urgent item, not the most important. | Agree what stops. Reset priorities, or add capacity. Don't add a new priority on top. |
| Team | Meetings run long and decisions get reopened. A person stops proposing options. | Agree how the team decides, and who has the final say. Write the agreement down. |
| Manager relationship | A person avoids decisions, checks everything, or stops raising problems. Expectations were never made explicit. | Reset expectations together. Agree how often you talk. Ask what you could do differently. |
| Organisational change | Output dips after a new system, new targets or a restructure. People seem slower to adapt. | Sequence the change. Explain what it means for each role. Allow time for the transition. |
Two things stand out. One behaviour can come from several places, and one place can produce several behaviours. So the table gives possibilities, not matches.
The manager relationship row includes the manager, and often you. That isn't a criticism. It's the part of the situation you can most easily change.
Why generic interventions miss
A training, a survey and a workshop are all reasonable tools. Each carries an assumption about cause.
Training assumes a skills gap. If the gap is real, it can help. If the cause is a priority list that changed twice or a new reporting line, the person returns to the same conditions with new skills.
A survey assumes the answer sits in what many people say. In our view, a situational cause is local to one role, one team or one relationship, and an average can smooth it away.
A workshop assumes a shared mindset or team skill needs work. If the cause is a decision made above the team, the workshop talks about a symptom.
None of these is wrong in itself. They go wrong when they're chosen before the cause is understood.
Even where training is right, the workplace deserves a look. Blume, Ford, Baldwin and Huang combined 89 studies on the transfer of training. They found that transfer was positively related to several predictors, including a supportive work environment. The link with work environment was stronger when training aimed at open skills such as leadership development than at closed skills such as software (Blume et al., 2010).
That is a pattern across studies, and it shows association, not cause. It doesn't tell you that a given course will succeed or fail. It does suggest that the workplace a person returns to is part of the answer.
When it is the person
Sometimes the cause is a skills gap, or a real change in motivation. We don't want to swing to the opposite error and blame the situation by default.
The aim is to check before choosing. As we said in Performance Is a Signal, skills and motivation are checked last because they're the easiest to assume, not because they're unlikely. Suppose you've looked at the role, the workload, the team, the relationship and the change. If none of them explains it, a person-focused response now has something to stand on.
Questions that find the situation
Try these before choosing a response.
- What has changed in this person's role, workload or team in the last six months, and when?
- What have we asked them to start, and what have we stopped asking them to do?
- Who and what do they depend on, and has any of it moved?
- What would they say is getting in the way?
- If the cause were the situation, what would we change?
The fourth question is a conversation, not a search of records. The fifth is a check on your own reasoning. If the answer is "nothing, because there's nothing to change", ask whether you've understood the situation yet.
Treat the change as a test
A change to the situation is also a hypothesis. You think the cause is the workload, so you move the workload. Now watch.
Look at the pattern over time, not a single week. Does the behaviour shift after the change? Does it shift in the way you expected? If not, you've learned something, and you can go back to the list.
This keeps the decision honest. You're not announcing a fix. You're finding out whether your understanding was right.
Opptimise helps people leaders look at the situation around a person before they choose a response.
The behaviour isn't always the problem. Better understanding comes before better action.
Sources
- Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T. & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065-1105. doi:10.1177/0149206309352880. Abstract reviewed.
- Opptimise, Behaviour Intelligence: Understanding Behaviour Before Deciding What to Do.
- Opptimise, Performance Is a Signal. Not a Diagnosis.