By Dan Coughlin
T
Two Essential Categories of
Individual Behavior
Of all your behaviors, there are two
categories of primary importance: your
strengths and your toxic habits. Your
strengths are the things you do better
than anything else and your toxic habits
are the things you do that ruin your
performance and/or the performance
of a group. This is true not only for you,
but also for every individual in your
organization.
Take out a sheet of paper and on
one side write down what you believe
to be your strengths. On the other side
write down what you believe to be your
toxic habits. This is purely a starting
point. As time goes on, stay on the
alert to gain a better sense of what you
do well and what
you do that hurts
performance.
In my work
as an executive
coach, the very first thing I do is to ask
the person I’m coaching what he or
she sees as his or her strengths and
toxic habits. I then ask for the names
of 20 people who know him or her
very well in work situations. I then
ask three simple questions of those 20
people, What makes this person effective in his/her role? What makes this
person ineffective or gets in the way
of his/her ability to be effective? What
could this person do to become more
effective? With this information as a
starting point, I begin the real executive
coaching work.
However, we can’t all get someone
to go out and conduct 20 interviews
about us.
Consequently, that is why I
encourage you to be cognizant and
continually gain a better understanding
of your strengths and your toxic habits.
Your strengths don’t have to be
world-class. They might be as simple as:
• A really good listener.
• Can capture the essence of another
Continued on page 28
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THE
here are two ways to look at
organizational performance.
You can start with a strategy
and work your way toward
a plan with tactics, then to a
schedule of activities, then to
execution of those activities
and finally to the behaviors of individuals within your organization. The
other perspective is to focus on the
behavior of the individuals in the organization, then the activities they select
to do and how those activities
can work together in a focused
manner to improve results for
the organization.
The truth is all those components
are important. The question is what do
you emphasize first and foremost, the
organization’s strategy or the individual’s behaviors?
In the past, I have stepped back to
look at the content of my work, which
involves keynote speaking, seminars,
executive coaching, writing books and
articles. What I found is that my focus
is primarily on impacting individual
behaviors. My belief is an organization
can achieve great long-term success
if each individual behaves in effective ways. Of course, they have to be
working on activities that together will
produce value customers will pay for
at a profitable margin, but I believe
success begins with individual behaviors as opposed to beginning with a
great strategic insight.
My experience shows that really
good organizations develop effective
strategies that evolve from the people
in the group rather than announcing a
strategy and then going out and finding
the people to support that strategy. It’s
one of the reasons why it’s very difficult
to generate long-term success purely
through mergers and acquisitions.
Oftentimes after a merger or acquisition, the strategy gets developed by
people in a boardroom who are not
only removed from the people in the
field, but who also don’t know what
behaviors are effective in the field.