Teamership: Behaviour is a function of the person and their environment
Aline Holzwarth, Principal of the wonderfully named Centre for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, published an article on Behavioraleconomics.com that presented three laws of human behaviour.
You may want to think of them as principles rather than laws, but either way, they are very helpful to keep in mind when working with humans. They are based on Newton’s laws of motion that you might remember from high school physics and I have written about them collectively previously.
In this post, I want to focus on the second law:
Behaviour is a function of the person and their environment.
It is worth noting that while behavioural economics feels like a very 21st-century endeavour, my friend, Juan shared research that shows this ‘Law’ can be traced back at least as far as the work of the psychologist Kurt Lewin in the early 20th century. That can give some confidence that applying this principle isn’t too faddish. That takes us to consider how we can apply the principle.
My observation is that we typically overemphasise the person and underemphasise the environment.
When people are not performing in the way that we would like them to, we often assume it is because of something that they are responsible for, such as their lack of skill, motivation, discipline, or organisation. The second law of human behaviour doesn’t exclude personal influences as a factor but does ask us to consider what influence their environment has on their performance.
The same occurs in the inverse scenario. When we are seeing a performance that is above our expectations, we can often overemphasise the role of the individual in the performance. We often assume that it is due to their intelligence, efforts and resilience, which can lead us to underestimate the role of the environment – their resources, organisational support or other team members.
The second law helps remind us that Teamership is more likely to occur in an environment that supports, promotes, rewards and encourages those behaviours that allow us to bring out our best and bring out the best in others. If you are interested in assessing your team’s performance environment, I am about to commence the pilot phase of my Team Performance System report (because who doesn’t love a TPS report!?!). More details on my TPS Report are at the bottom of this note.
Some questions for you to consider this week:
Are you creating an environment where everyone can make their best contribution?
What are elements of an environment (physical and social) that support your best performance?
Would you like to be a pilot tester of my Team Performance Diagnostic?