Ask Your Team Better Questions to Reinforce Better Behaviors
Your staff and volunteer culture may be the most crucial aspect of your organization.
That’s what Peter Drucker believed. When he said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he believed that your values, beliefs, and norms drive behaviors. As strategy, model, systems, and methods are behavioral, your culture ultimately determines if your model is followed.
I’ve seen this play out in my leadership journey time and again.
One of two things happen in organizations:
1. Values Remain: Well-defined values that are consistently reinforced keep desired behaviors in place. How people work and act remains consistent with the values.
2. Values Drift: The other option is the inverse. At a minimum, every organization has values written on the wall, on their website, or printed in a brochure. But if these values aren’t consistently reinforced, the associated behaviors give way to personal and natural behaviors. Worse, these new and potentially undesirable behaviors begin an inversed process, creating new (and unwritten) values, beliefs, and norms.
It’s simple, really.
Values create beliefs that drive behaviors. Since behaviors are more tangible, the values remain in place when they are reinforced. When behaviors are not reinforced, new behaviors form and eventually establish new beliefs and values.
Reinforcing desired behaviors is the secret to keeping your desired culture in place.
In this NEW POST, I give you a simple exercise you can do in your organization to test the values to behaviors connection.
