You’ve just came up with a great idea to make things better. It’s super clear in your mind, and it’s obvious that it’s an important change. You put together the details, you roll it out to everyone in your team…only to have them do something completely different, or, nothing at all. How frustrating! Before you propose to your manager that everyone go to “you should care more training”, let’s look into the principle of “change the environment, not the people.”

The principle comes from intent-based leadership as championed by David Marquet. When people around us don’t behave the way we want them to or the way we expect them to, the principle asks us to consider if there is something in the environment that is influencing their behavior. The same person who has a propensity to be helpful or supportive in one environment may not have the same propensity to be helpful in another environment.

Stonewalled

One engineer that I coach relayed a story about how someone he needed help from in another department was stonewalling him. It was as if his co-worker never heard the (several times repeated) request. What was wrong with this guy? Why wouldn’t he help? I suggested that he find a way to ask his co-worker if there were any impediments, concerns, or roadblocks that were in the way of him helping. He did indeed find a way to approach his co-worker and found out that he was actually willing to help, but his manager told him not to. The co-worker’s manager had prioritized other work and told him he was not to help other departments.

Imagine if we could influence that environment, namely the other manager’s priorities. If that manager created an environment where his team was able to help other teams, we can guess the help needed would be readily available.

Testing the Theory

In the last post on empowerment I shared a story about how our team changed the environment around testing software issues that had been addressed by the developers. A small tweak in the environment gave team members the power to choose and organize the work in a way that would be most efficient. The change was easy to make and involved adding a “user” in an issue tracking tool to hold the issues that needed to be tested. The test team would get an email when there was a new issue to test. You might wonder if some issues would be left in the queue, maybe because they were difficult to test or outside the expertise of the testers. But that did not turn out to be the case! The test team owned the testing and made sure everything got tested – even the hard stuff.

A Barista at the Four Seasons

Simon Sinek is well known for his book and TED talk on “Start with Why”. I recently heard an interview with him where he talked about a barista he met at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas. Sinek told how Noah, the barista, was very engaging and how Sinek spent far more time chatting with him than he intended, because he was enjoying his company. Sinek asked Noah if he liked his job and Noah replied that he loved his job. He went on to say that managers – from all parts of the hotel – would walk by and ask if there was anything they could do to make him more successful. Noah felt he could be himself.

Contrast this with the environment Noah talked about next. He said he works at another hotel coffee lounge. There the managers come by to try to “catch us when we do something wrong,” and to remind them to make the numbers. There Noah keeps his head down in order to keep his job.

Same barista, two different environments. The propensity for Noah to be engaging and friendly is much higher in the environment where the leaders are encouraging and serving their teams. In the environment where it’s all about the numbers and not about the people, his propensity to be engaging and friendly is much lower.

Where would you rather get coffee?

Photo by Alvin Engler on Unsplash

tl;dr

When people surprise us with behavior that doesn’t support our initiatives, or values, instead of thinking of how to change the people, consider first what in the environment is contributing to that behavior. The propensity for a person to be helpful or supportive can vary based on the environment. Change the environment, not the people, is a principle from David Marquet’s intent-based leadership paradigm.

engineer your life