Nothing Changed But the Reward

Jeff Burstein: It could be new rules around how the organization puts together its, you know, its PIPs. You know, everybody's got a an improvement plan for the year. What are your What are your things that you're going to go ahead and deliver on? If those aren't related to the initiatives of the company, and if teams and the individuals on teams can't track the work they're doing on a team to helping them get their bonus. Guess what? The team's going to go off the rails. Devon Morris: This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. Every week, we work to change that outcome. P I P, better known as a PIP. If you don't live in that world, then you should know that it's a performance improvement plan. It's the document that says you are personally on the hook to do these particular things over this period of time, over the year, right, or whatever it's going to be. It's the thing that your ratings come off of, and your ratings are the things that get you bonuses and raises, and the truth is, for a lot of organizations, it's the step before you get walked out the door. Just facts. So listen to that story again, okay? And notice who the villain isn't. Nobody in it stopped believing in anything. Nobody got lazy. Nobody resisted. Nobody quit on the change. Somebody rewrote the actual form, and a team that had been working in a new way for the past eight months started working the old way, correctly, rationally, and without a single meaning about it. See, somewhere this week there's a post mortem on a change that didn't hold. It didn't stick. The new process, the new tool, the new ways of working. Eight months in, and then we go back right back to how it was, and the room lands where the room always landed. We didn't really buy in. We rolled it out too fast. We didn't bring the right people along. Next time, more change management. You gotta be with your. You gotta be really fair with yourself because that is a thoughtful set of conclusions that most of us have drawn on over time, it's humble. It blames the rollout instead of the people when the rollout doesn't exist without the people. It even sounds like it respects the team, but look at what it assumes. It assumes that the team's belief is the variable. That if we had gotten them to believe harder, it would have held more. Everything that follows is aimed at a belief, better communications, better champions, a better story. Nobody in the room goes and checks what the team was being paid for. See, this is The Lagging Team, and falling behind is not a verdict. I am Dr. Devon Morris, and this right here is a Sidebar. Every Tuesday, I sit down with somebody, and on Thursday, I pluck. I take one thing that they said and go all the way in on it. Today's two words every leader uses like that same word: commitment and compliance. And here's the problem about we did. really buy in. It's the wrong argument. Not because buy-in doesn't matter, but because by the time you're saying it, you've already decided the answer is inside the team, and the thing that moved was outside. See, think about what we lost buy-in actually claims. It claims the team's beliefs degraded. Something eroded in them. See, belief doesn't erode on a schedule. But rewards change on a schedule annually, quarterly, weekly, sometimes daily. You know, a new vice president has just arrived. The month planning cycle turns over something. Rollbacks actually have a date. They kind of cluster together. See, Jeff has done this over and over again. 30 to 40 organizations is what he what he said. His read isn't teams lose faith. That's not his read. Is that something in the environment changed and stopped rewarding the new behavior, the team adjusted, which is what a functioning team actually does. See, here's the bit that should land with you. If the behavior stopped the moment the rewards stopped. Then what you had was never a commitment. It was actually compliance. It was working fine. It just had a dependency that nobody wrote down. Okay, and you couldn't have told the difference. You couldn't have seen it. You couldn't seen the difference between it, right? Between that and the other thing, on the dashboard and the status meeting and the demo and the commitment and the compliance are identical, right until the day they are not. See, Jeff walks into organizations where delivery has slowed down, and leadership wants to know, man, what happened to the team. Here's the first thing he tells them. The Jeff Burstein: question is rarely, what is the team doing differently? Devon Morris: Rarely, not never, rarely. See, he spent 20 years in those rooms. He's saying the question everybody opens with is always aimed at the wrong end of the problem. So, all right, here's the part I actually want to give you: commitment and compliance. We use them as if they're one word. The team's on board. Which one is it? The team's committed. The team's doing it. See three ways of saying one thing, and it is actually two very different things. See, commitment is the behavior that keeps going when nobody's actually paying for it, when nobody's watching, when nobody's counting it. Nothing is in your rating is going to actually depend on it, and you still, you still, you still, you still go do it because you think it's the right way to actually work. Compliance is behavior that keeps going exactly as long as the reward, and I'm just gonna venture out and say punishment does. It's gonna last to that point. I'm not being cynical, y'all, and it's not fake. The person is doing it is genuinely probably likes the new way of doing things. They probably do, right? It's just the thing that's holding it up is external to them. External, an extrinsic motivator, and nobody's really checking on it. It's really two different states, same behavior, two different states, same behavior, and you cannot tell them apart while the reward is still in place. Makes it tough. So let's put that researcher hat on for a moment, right? When we measure whether a change took, we measure behavior. Are we doing the thing? Is the stand-up happening? Is the board being actually used? Is reviews going out? Behavior is the one thing commitment and compliance they actually have in common. The measurement is the blind thing. It it doesn't tell you the distinction between the construction of it. It's not a bad instrument, y'all. It just really isn't. It is answering a different question that we may not have thought about, which means that every every change that hasn't taken hold, the report in corporate life is the conditions weren't met. You know, sometimes it is we got this culture that just is. Not gonna change. See the behaviors, and it's an it's an uncomfortable place to be, right? But think about how uncomfortable it is for the team. See, compliance is what organizations are built to produce. You know, ratings, bonuses, PIPs, promotion criteria. The whole machine exists to make behaviors depend on rewards. Then we're surprised when behaviors depend on rewards, and this is the part I can't stop thinking about because, I mean, the problem is baked into the methods itself. If Jeff Burstein: you look at any of the frameworks, the processes: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, any of them. They'll all tell you, "Hey, make sure you have a not a fixed mindset, but a growth-oriented mindset. And what they don't tell you is how to go ahead and develop one of those. Devon Morris: See, those are five different ways of organizing work, and you don't need to know any of them. Here's the only thing that really matters: every single one of them requires a mindset, and not one of them teaches you how to build said mindset. They all open with assume the people already have what the mindset. So what gets installed is a process, and a process is a reward structure. So you get compliance, which works until the day that the reward disappears, the punishment disappears. Second pair, it's the reason the team ended up in the meeting in the first place, where and why? See, when you say we found the problem, listen, listen to what we almost always are saying. We found where it showed up at. That's what we did, and the team is the last link in the chain. It is the place where everything upstream finally becomes visible-a policy, a budget, a reorg, a rewritten form of VP's new priorities. None of these things are visible when they happen. They're visible when a team slows down. So the team is where, essentially, always, and almost never why. Think about what that does structurally. See, every performance conversation is corporate life is actually saying they actually are placing a symptom somewhere. Not because anyone is being malicious. Nobody's being mean here, but that's because it is the only place anything is observable. So I can't always blame them because a mindset isn't observable. See, just version of this is that leaders genuinely sense slowdown; they feel it. Unless you're super busy, you feel it too. Now imagine this, right? The sensing is accurate. The attribution of those senses is wrong. Those are really two different skills. See, notice who can see the cause. The people who change the the reward can actually see it. The people who change the punishment can actually see it, and nobody else can because to them, it wasn't a change to the team. It was a change to the HR cycle, a budget decision, a scorecard-it never occurred to them about literally where that thing is gonna actually land. Don't think about that. So the one group that could explain the slowdown is the one group that isn't in the room when the slowdown is discussed and decisions are made about the slowdown that has a downstream effect. All right, last pair, and it's the one Tuesday's episode was really named after, and that's done and holding, two very different things. We say a change is done, and we say it is in place. Like those are the two same reports. Done means you stopped. Holding means somebody is still attending to it. See just position, and I had to hear it, is that nothing sticks? You hit a statement. Is that nothing actually sticks? Not because people are weak, but because the environment keeps moving, and a thing that isn't being tended doesn't stay put; it just stays put for a little while. So we finish the transformation. We finish the transformation, and we stop paying attention to the transformation. Describes the same calendar event. The declaration is the moment, but attending actually ends, which gives you the ugly version of the timeline. The rollback usually starts the week you declared victory. You say we're done. We won, not because of the declaration, but because when the only thing holding it up was just reassigned and flipped it, because this is the usual direction. If nothing holds it on its own, then nothing that slid back is a verdict on that team. It's a report on what stopped being tended. Those are very different conversations to have with a team and a walk-in having a conversation about on Monday. And here's three things I want you to bring into Monday. None of them cost you money. None of them cost you anything. You shouldn't really need permission for them. First, build a timeline. You know, two columns right. Left column when your team's delivery actually changed. The month of things got slower, flakier, more ambiguous than the right column. When anything changed in what the team is measured, rated on, paid on, new policy, new metric, new scorecard, a reorg of some kind, rewritten objectives, changing requirements, new bosses, new priority, those kind of things, right? Take a 20 minutes, right? See how things line up. If it lines up, you have your answer, and it isn't the team. It isn't the team. Two. Read one person's objectives against the thing you've been asking them to do. Just one person, one document, one actual file, not from your actual memory. Right? Then trace a line, a line, from what the document rewards to the new ways of actually working that you're actually asking for-that whoever's asking for may not be you. If you can't draw a line, you are asking for commitment and paying for compliance, and the person is not confused. I think they're reading the document correctly. Okay, you need to check who is confused. All right. So third thing, name one thing you declared done. A change you announce as complete. Stopped attending, stopped asking about, took off the agenda. Go look at it, not to restart it. That's just a different project, or that's a different thing to actually go about doing. Just find out two things about it: is it still holding up? And if it is still holding up, who's holding it? There's usually one person doing it on their own time, and nobody has ever said thank you to them. Now, here's what would make me reconsider this: where I would actually be wrong, and I want you to check me on it. I want you to bring, come to the comments, talk to me about it, tell me I was wrong, right? And I'll admit to it. Do the move, the move we talked about. Build a timeline. Right, three things can come back. Right, a change, and it lines up. Cool. Fix the reward, not the people. Okay, you just saved yourself an entire quarter of change management. That would have been aimed at the wrong thing, a change, but the timing's wrong. The slowdown came first. The dates are months apart. Then this isn't your explanation. Good. Don't worry about what we're talking about here whatsoever. It only took you 20 minutes. Nothing changed at all? No policy, no metric, no bonus, no reorg, no no new rules or anything like that. That right there, that one, that will actually make me wrong at that point, and it's the answer I most want to hear about because then it may genuinely be commitment that went, and the real question, because it was attached to and who left. The point isn't that reward or even punishment explains the rollback. Is that the first place to look? It's cost. It costs you like 20 minutes to do it. Shouldn't take you any time. Okay, falling behind is a position, not a verdict, and a lot of teams are sitting in that position right now, being described upstairs as the ones who have lost the plot. When what actually happened is that somebody changed something about what they were paid for, and never connected the two things. Commitment keeps going when nobody pays for it. Compliance keeps going exactly as long as the reward sticks around, and you cannot tell which one you have based on the behavior, because the behavior is the one thing that they actually share. So before you run another postmortem on buy-in or go build some timeline, if the dates line up, your team didn't fail the transformation. Your team read the room correctly, faster than all the rest of you all. Look, here's the deal. If you want to talk about what this looks like on your team, go to thelaggingteam.com/start. That is thelaggingteam. com/start. That's the Sidebar. Now you know where to look. Thank you for joining us. Where every Tuesday and Thursday we work toward bridging the gap for teams that are behind.