People Don’t Behave in a Vacuum
Before we ask people to change their behaviour, we need to understand what their environment is teaching them.
My career began in organisational development and change, and later expanded into transformation. I then spent several years focused specifically on inclusion, before returning to broader enterprise transformation. Across those different areas of work, I have kept coming back to the relationship between people and the environments around them, and how easily we underestimate it when trying to understand why something is happening in an organisation.
It’s common to start with the person. If someone doesn’t speak up, we wonder whether they lack confidence. If someone isn’t performing, we question their capability or motivation. If a team isn’t collaborating, we look at personalities. If people aren’t adopting a new way of working, we decide they are resistant to change.
Sometimes those explanations will be right. People bring their own histories, personalities, capabilities and preferences into every environment they enter. But they are also responding to what happens around them, including things that may be much less visible to the person assessing their behaviour.
Most of us have experienced this ourselves. We can be confident in one room and hesitant in another. We can contribute freely in one team and barely speak in another. We might be comfortable challenging an idea with one leader, while spending the entire conversation with another deciding whether saying what we actually think is worth the trouble it could create.
We haven’t necessarily become a different person between those situations. We have learned something about the people and circumstances around us, and we are taking that into account.
Perhaps one leader listens before responding, while another becomes defensive. Perhaps we have watched someone be embarrassed for asking a question, or seen a colleague raise a legitimate concern only to have it quietly held against them afterwards. Perhaps everyone else appears to agree, and we are trying to work out whether we have missed something or whether nobody else wants to be the first to disagree either.
When we look only at the individual, we can miss all of that.
We might recommend confidence coaching to someone who has already worked out, quite accurately, that speaking openly carries a cost.
What inclusion helped me examine more closely
During my work on the 8-Inclusion Needs, I spent considerable time exploring what people actually need to experience to participate fully. That distinction mattered because inclusion can become quite abstract. An organisation can say it values inclusion, its leaders can sincerely believe they are inclusive, and its workforce can include people with many different backgrounds and experiences. Those things still don’t tell us enough about what it is like for a particular person trying to participate there.
I wanted to understand the conditions around that participation. Do people have access to what they need? Can they express what they think, and are they heard when they do? Can they influence decisions that affect them? Are differences in circumstances recognised, or are people expected to find their own way around arrangements that were designed with someone else in mind?
Feeling that we belong is part of that experience, but it cannot tell us everything.
We might feel accepted by our colleagues while being unable to access an opportunity, contribute to a decision or raise something that matters to us. We might also know that our acceptance depends on avoiding certain subjects or keeping parts of ourselves out of view.
That work gave me a more detailed understanding of how differently people can experience the same organisation. Returning to enterprise transformation, those questions remain relevant to how I examine processes, systems, leadership and the everyday experience of getting work done.
What are we teaching people to do?
I often see organisations respond to a problem by trying to change people’s behaviour before examining what might be encouraging it.
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A team has a problem with accountability, so we talk about taking greater ownership. Employees aren’t speaking up, so we run psychological safety training. Leaders aren’t collaborating, so we put them through a leadership program. People aren’t following a process, so we retrain them.
Any of those interventions might be useful. There are absolutely times when someone needs new knowledge, different skills or support to change their behaviour. But I also want to understand what happens when they try to do what we are asking.
If we tell people to take ownership but require three levels of approval before they can make a decision, waiting for permission becomes understandable. If we ask leaders to collaborate but measure their success almost entirely through their own function’s performance, we have given them competing expectations. And if we train people to follow a process while allowing senior leaders to bypass it whenever it becomes inconvenient, people will draw their own conclusions about how seriously to take it.
This is where we can become unfairly frustrated with people. We see what they are doing, but don’t give the same attention to the arrangements, consequences and examples that make their behaviour sensible.
People learn how an organisation works by experiencing it. They notice when a policy says one thing and their manager expects another. They notice when everyone talks about wellbeing but the person who works until midnight is praised for their commitment. They notice when challenging the status quo is encouraged, until the status quo happens to belong to somebody powerful.
Over time, those experiences influence what people are prepared to do.
We learn what produces a reward, what creates friction, what carries risk and what other people appear to be getting away with. Some responses become so familiar that we barely think about them anymore.
For me, that is one of the more useful ways to examine culture. I want to understand what happens in meetings, who gets listened to, how disagreements are handled and what happens when a deadline comes into conflict with a stated organisational value. I am interested in which problems get resolved quickly and which remain in place for years, despite everyone apparently knowing about them.
Those everyday experiences tell us a great deal about what people have learned to expect.
Understanding the environment still leaves room for responsibility
None of this means people have no agency, or that every behaviour can be explained away by the system. People make choices, and some of those choices need to be challenged. Leaders are responsible for how they treat others. Capability gaps need to be addressed. Harmful conduct does not become acceptable because we understand something about the circumstances around it.
Understanding context helps us make a better judgement about what needs to change and who can change it.
If ten different people enter the same environment and eventually begin behaving in remarkably similar ways, I become very interested in the environment. If capable people repeatedly make decisions that produce poor outcomes, I want to understand the conditions in which those decisions make sense. If we keep replacing people and encountering the same problems, I want to know what each new person is being asked to work within.
That means looking closely at what happens before and after the behaviour that concerns us. What information was available? What authority did the person have? What other expectations were they trying to meet? What did they believe would happen if they took a different approach?
We may still conclude that the individual needs to change. We may also discover that we have made the behaviour we want unnecessarily difficult, while making another behaviour easier, safer or more rewarding.
Looking across my career, I see these questions running through the different parts of my work. Organisational development, change, inclusion and enterprise transformation each give me ways to examine how people experience the organisations they are part of, and what enables or gets in the way of their contribution.
So when I see behaviour that doesn’t seem to make sense, I try to resist settling too quickly on an explanation about the person. I want to understand what they are responding to, including what we may have unintentionally taught them.
People don’t behave in a vacuum. If we want them to behave differently, we need to be willing to examine the environment we are asking them to do it in.
Adapted from an article originally published at thedrliz.com.
