Leaders: Got Misbehaving Employees?
7 “team norms” to bring to the table for maximum results
As a leader, how do you expect your employees to behave on a daily basis?
Leaders often feel frustrated by team member’s behaviours that don’t align with their expectations.
The problem is that these expectations are often only implied, and therefore not explicit to employees.
Consequently, you’re probably not seeing the behaviours you seek. In fact, you may be seeing the exact opposite.
Timeliness is not a virtue (well, not to everyone)
For example, let’s say you hold a regular team meeting at 9 a.m. every Wednesday.
Your expectation is that the meeting starts at 9 a.m.—that is, everyone should be seated and ready to get down to business. But what time do people actually arrive? If you’re like a lot of leaders, you see employees only beginning to trickle in at 9 a.m. By the time they’re all present, it’s probably 9:10 a.m.
You may think that, because timeliness is a virtue, everyone should inherently know they need to be on time, and behave accordingly.
But that’s not a realistic expectation—because not everybody thinks the way you do.
And so, in this case, the team norm becomes less about “being in the board room at 9 a.m.” and more about “arrive as close to 9 a.m. as you can...nobody is going to call you on it.”
Create team norms
To prompt everyone to behave according to your expectations, you need to do two things:
- Stop expecting employees to be mind readers; and
- Create an explicit list of helpful team norms that everyone can agree and reasonably act upon.