Behavior Can “Make or Break” Professional Relationships and Business Success

Behaving badly has a cost

Consider an organization with target revenue of $100 million. If management and direct reports routinely display dysfunctional behavior and create ineffective relationships, the organization is set up to lose $28 million.

as much as 39 percent of the variability in corporate performance is directly related to the level of employee engagement. 69 percent of the variability in employee engagement and work fulfillment is attributable to the capability of the immediate leader.

The extent to which organization members can rationally and emotionally connect behavior with the organization’s mission and vision fuels higher levels of engagement that drives performance by any measureable criteria on the organization’s dashboard.

What does it take to be on your best behavior?

• Build and maintain a core foundation linked to behavior-based expectations. If you lack the clarity of knowing what you believe, you will lack consistency in behavior that drives peak performance.
• Accept responsibility and take initiative for performance. The simple adage to drive this behavior is doing the right thing the right way for the right reasons. Don’t make excuses, don’t shift blame to someone else, and don’t allow yourself to become a victim to avoid accepting personal responsibility and taking initiative to get technical things done on the one hand and managing your behavior performance on the other.
• Hold yourself accountable. Accountability is a moral skill aligning values to behavior. Influential leaders and their highly functional teams are able to hold themselves and others accountable in a culture of mutual respect to drive performance.
• Pursue effective communication. Effective communication, as a highly influential trust behavior, requires caring first and then seeking to understand before demanding to be understood.

Creating a culture of accountability

Integrated teams, functioning in a culture of accountability, are the performance driver of choice in today’s high-performing organizations. There is one obvious exception to this rule: when a team is conflicted or dispirited, decision making takes a dramatic turn for the worse. The key to peak performance is maintaining mission focus—fulfilling the purpose for why the organization exists. improving the performance of an organization requires improving the behavioral performance of its people. An organization cannot become what its people are not in their behavior. A commitment to a culture of accountability requires:

1. Effective communication

2. Cooperative attitudes

3. Integrated teamwork

4. Mutual respect.

The real power of a culture of accountability is the capacity to bring people together to create something of greater value than any one person could have created alone.

Sustaining effective relationships

Our ability to build and maintain healthy relationships is the single most important factor in how we succeed in every area of life.

The power of apology

The ability to confront and apologize for behavior missteps is a critical component in engendering the support of peers and subordinates and keeping them engaged in their work. The unwillingness to express a legitimate and sincere apology creates more harm to relationships and contributes to more unproductive response in performance than any other interpersonal flaw.

How to Make an Effective Apology

• Make it genuine. A genuine apology is aimed solely at taking responsibility and overcoming a disturbance.
• Don’t justify your actions. Brief explanation may help understanding, while a justification may just fuel the disturbance. Never use the word “but” in an apology. The word means you are not apologizing, only justifying your behavior.
• Make a commitment to change. If you can’t confirm that you mean to improve, then you aren’t committed to an apology.
• Phrase your apology carefully. Make sure the other person knows why you are apologizing.
• Be prepared for an awkward conclusion. Some people will behave indifferently or coldly, and some will react in a downright hostile way. This is out of your control. If you have made the step to apologize in a productive way, it is the best you can do.

Behaving well and knowing when to say you’re sorry

Sustaining productive relationships at work creates cohesion, collaboration, and connection— the ingredients necessary to fuel engagement and drive performance. Adding an ability to apologize when necessary links people to organizational values and behaviors. Behaving well and learning how and when to express an effective apology make us better people and better able to sustain effective relationships in all contexts.