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We’ve all had the experience of attending an All-Hands where a leader emphatically asks us to embrace a new way of working or tackle a new challenge… and we have absolutely no idea what they’re going on about.
“Agile!” “Omnichannel!” “New operating model!” “Digital transformation!”
Those words might be convenient shorthands for someone, but not for the majority of folks in attendance. What is meant to be a moment of alignment instead becomes a splintering of meaning and direction across the firm. Or worse: people pretend they understand and just go back to business as usual.
When it’s your turn to communicate change, you know you can do better. But it’s not just about choosing your words more carefully, avoiding buzzwords and corporate jargon: you have to define your change in terms of observable behaviors (behaviors you and others can see folks doing). What are the observable behaviors you want to see that you believe will produce this change?
Why and How to Define Observable Behaviors
The benefits of communicating change in terms of observable behaviors include:
- Clarity: Observable behaviors are concrete and specific, making them easier to explain, and far less open to interpretation.
- Measurability: Observable behaviors can be objectively assessed in both individuals and teams, making it easier to report on progress.
- Accountability: Observable behaviors make it easier to hold individuals and teams accountable since it’s clear whether someone is meeting the expected standards.
- Consistency: Observable behaviors applied across the organization support a unified approach to change, which is critical for its success.
- Focused training and development: Observable behaviors provide a concrete foundation for training and development programs. Training can focus on specific skills and actions, versus broad mindset-based learning and development.
- Reinforcement: Observable behaviors are easier to identify and reward in individuals, reinforcing positive behaviors and gradually embedding them into the organizational culture.
What Communicating Change through Behaviors Looks Like in Practice
To make it easy, we use ‘ABCD’ to help define observable behaviors:
- Actor: Who, in particular, needs to perform this behavior? If your answer is “everyone,” try to get more specific and pinpoint the people or group that’s most important to start with.
- Behavior: Describe the observable act you are identifying. Remember to keep it a behavior and not a mindset (i.e., something people would do with their hands, not inside their own heads).
- Context: When the behavior (an environmental condition, trigger, rhythm, etc.) should be performed.
- Desired impact: Describe the outcome you want the behavior to help produce.
Instead of “teamwork,” for instance, demand that product managers (actors) should hold a day-long session to align their roadmaps and highlight critical dependencies (behavior), at the beginning of their quarterly planning process (context), so that teams and the organization at-large have fewer internal disruptions and surprises (desired impact).
And instead of “transparency,” you set expectations that senior leaders (actors) should voice their disagreements in the open (behavior) during senior leadership meetings, so that the rest of the organization isn’t arrested by their conflicts (desired impact).
What to Watch Out For
If you’re worried that this could be a slippery slope to micromanagement, you’re not wrong. That’s why it’s important to identify a handful of “keystone” or essential behavior changes you want to see that ladder up to your change, but not fill in every action or overload teams with direction from above.
You can (and likely should) also source the ideas for the new behaviors directly from those teams and middle managers as a way to get their buy-in and understand their current capabilities. Remember, the goal of defining change as observable behaviors rather than slogans is to provide clarity and ensure accountability for the change.
Moreover, don’t forget that change often requires not only adding new behaviors, but extinguishing old behaviors that no longer serve the organization’s strategy. We worked with an organization that was pursuing a product operating model, and one of the most essential behavior changes we captured was that senior leaders should no longer step in and put their thumb on the scale of which features to implement in their digital products. That’s a tough behavior to extinguish in any organization, but naming it provided a lightning bolt of clarity and also made it obvious what needed to also be true for that behavior change to take place.
