Building Winning Teams bySetting Behavioral Expectations

What makes for a winning performance? Talent, experience, knowledge, a track record of executing? Yes, all that and more. Coming in to Super Bowl XLIII, the Steelers and the Cardinals had all of that.
But Monday-morning quarterbacks are saying that the Steelers wanted it more, had more passion, determination, persistence, optimism, confidence. They say in a closely matched game like this one the intangibles can make all the difference. Experts and fans will probably argue for years about this game, about why the Steelers won.
But there’s no argument about what creates winning performance in a work team. Talent, experience, and business knowledge are important. But the winning difference is most often a result of those hard-to-measure human qualities -- passion for serving customers, initiative, persistence, commitment, resilience, dependability, adaptability, empathy, confidence, teamwork, leadership, and many more.
While we can all agree that these qualities are essential for success, we seldom talk about them until we decide an employee isn’t displaying them. "You need to show more initiative," we say. Or "You’re not being a team player." Giving this kind of feedback without agreeing on the behavioral goal first is like asking someone to play basketball on a court without nets or boundary lines, and telling them, when they shoot at an imaginary hoop, "Too bad. You missed."
Employees need to know what the "targets" are before the game starts. Yet in our 30 years experience we’ve met few managers who set clear behavioral targets. "That’s so subjective," managers often say. "How can you set goals about personality characteristics?"
Your challenge as a manager is to have conversations about these "winning" behaviors in a way that everybody understands. The words do seem subjective. Just as "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," the definition of a quality like initiative seems to depend on who is defining it. So when you say "I expect you to show initiative," how do you and your employees know you’re on the same page? Furthermore, when it comes time to review performance and give feedback, how will you and your employee agree on whether or not they actually did show initiative?
The ALTtm skills we have talked about before can help you and your employees "get on the same page" about exactly where these goals and boundary lines are. The key is to identify the behaviors that would be evidence of leadership, or teamwork, or initiative, etc. Think of what a camcorder could capture – what a person does or says, and how they do or say it. If a recorder can’t capture it, you can’t communicate it as an expectation and you can’t measure it. For instance, flexibility can mean doing whatever you’re asked to do, or volunteering to take on new challenges, or just smiling and being pleasant when asked to drop one task and pick up another.