Beliefs vs. Behaviors
Most organizations spend significant time and resources building and maintaining an organizational culture, usually centered around a common purpose, a shared mission and vision, and unifying core values. These items are often aspirational in nature, a north star against which the organization can measure its progress and an inspirational guide that helps team members make decisions and take action. These culture pieces are also statements of belief, beliefs about what the organization should look like, how it should operate, how it wants to be perceived by its employees and the outside world.
These belief statements are valuable, as they provide shared language about how individuals within the organization should operate, the assumption being that an organization is the sum of all of the decisions made and actions taken by its employees. But these belief statements need to be translated for everyday use: What do we mean when we say that we are an inclusive organization? What does respect look like and how do we know if we’re being treated respectfully?
Too many organizations make the mistake of stopping with beliefs and not advancing to defining behaviors, a critical misstep ripples out and impacts every part of the organization and can significantly harm an organization’s culture and people engagement strategies.
Before we get into the pitfalls of focusing on beliefs and the benefits of focusing on behaviors, it can be helpful to discuss why we make this mistake and focus on beliefs instead of behaviors. In short, we focus on beliefs because they are at the core of how we engage with ourselves and the world around us – we all have beliefs that we think are correct:
Our beliefs are deeply held and have been instilled in us over the course of our entire lives; they are informed through our lived experiences; our dimensions of diversity (race, gender, age, etc.) and what that means for how we interact with the society in which we live; what we are taught; what we are exposed to; who we spend time with, and what media we consume
We create narratives for our lives in which we are the protagonists – our beliefs shape those narratives and determine how we continue forward
Our beliefs enable us to connect with others – we tend to trust people who have similar beliefs to our own
We bring our beliefs with us everywhere we go, including work, and we engage with our colleagues and the organization overall through the lens of our beliefs
We focus on beliefs without even thinking about it, but that focus on beliefs represents a missed opportunity to drive impact and push the organization and its culture forward:
It undermines diversity, inclusion, and equity – focusing on beliefs posits that there are “correct” and “incorrect” beliefs, leading to a culture of groupthink and exclusion, and it creates an environment in which someone’s personal beliefs, not their abilities and contributions, dictate whether or not they can be successful at the organization, driving up inequity
It’s ineffective – efforts to change a person’s beliefs have a significant chance of failure and usually lead to a person digging in and becoming even more resistant to change
It’s inefficient – efforts to change a person’s belief are a long and involved process, denying limited resources to other activities with higher likelihoods of success and impact
Focusing on behaviors addresses all of the pitfalls of focusing on beliefs. Focusing on behaviors takes the abstract and makes it concrete, and it ensures everyone is on the same page in terms of living up to the organization’s purpose, mission and vision, and core values:
It supports diversity, inclusion, and equity – focusing on behaviors respects each individual’s right to their own beliefs and puts the focus on defining success and the actions that a person needs to take to be successful, regardless of their personal beliefs
It’s effective – focusing on behaviors ensures that everyone understands exactly what is expected of them in terms of how they interact with team members and go about their day-to-day work, and it allows us to accurately evaluate people and provide valuable feedback by focusing on observable actions
It’s efficient – focusing on behaviors puts limited organizational resources towards reaffirming expected behaviors, not towards critiquing beliefs
Focusing on behaviors is not to say that organizations shouldn’t have a state purpose, a mission and vision, or core values – those are important culture pieces that help inspire team members and guide the organization forward, but they are incomplete without clearly defined sets of behavioral expectations.
As you think about your organization’s belief statements – its purpose, mission and vision, and core values – it can be helpful to pause and check our thinking:
Are our culture pieces represented by abstract ideals – do we assume that everyone, including all employees and external partners, have a shared understanding of what each item means and how they should inform day-to-day activities?
OR
Are our culture pieces abstract ideals paired with clear behavioral expectations – do we as an organization define each item and give explicit instructions for what they look in practice?
Focusing on behaviors is difficult – it requires time and energy to go from identifying Inclusion as a core value to defining the behaviors that determine whether or not a person or an activity is, in fact, inclusive.
But focusing on behaviors moves us from the abstract, where we can quickly become paralyzed by competing definitions, to the concrete, where we can respect each person’s individual beliefs while holding each other accountable to specific behaviors.
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