My colleague Pierre Khawand at People-OnTheGo has presented his Accomplishing More with Less workshops to teams in the past, and we’ve discussed how this sort of simple tool has a disproportionately positive impact on how a team gets along over time.  People regularly object that “but there are always exceptions!” C’mon, I say, you’re a bunch of smart people, right? (No one ever objects to that!) There’s no reason that a group of smart people can’t come up with a standard way of dealing with exceptions and emergencies. In the linked post, it’s simple:

EMERGENCY? = Use phone

The understanding here is that if you know that people will check email at roughly the stated times, and your need is legitimately more urgent than that, you can use the phone. The implication is that the team leader has instituted, as part of the team culture, the rule that phones are to be used only for emergencies and that they have to be available to receive emergency requests. That’s a rule that others might disagree with, but that’s not the standard.

When asked by people what rules they should have, expecting us to pull out a laminated “rules of the office” list, we always go back to the underlying situation, habits, and culture. The key to this sort of SOP is that it should be organically generated by the team to improve/ensure adoption and compliance.

(NB: no specific reason for two POTG posts today other than that I’m clearing through emails and getting things written that needed writing.)

Today, Seth Godin writes a more colorful post addressing one of the key points — not reacting to bad behavior at all — in the context of a workplace bully.

The basic model that behavior analysts start with is this: ABC.

• A – What was the action that triggered the behavior?
• B – What was the behavior?
• C – What was the consequence of that behavior?

Under a simple example, a child may interpret shouting and scolding as just attention, which might be desired, and not make the connection between positive and negative attention. That’s why Seth’s advice is to walk away (cf. ignore undesirable behavior) when a workplace bully starts ranting. Getting upset — angry, sad, or frightened — is likely to actually reinforce the bully’s behavior and lead to more of the same.

This attention to behavior is one more thing I’ve learned from autism.