Your Behaviors are Your Personal Processes

I just read an article from Harvard Business Review on the dangers of overly focusing on performance, and the author isn’t a fan of overly indexing on technical performance. I encourage you to also think about individual and collective behavioral performance, which is where this article focuses (without using that language).

This is a big and important shift…our behaviors are our personal processes and drive our technical results. Someone can get lucky and have a good technical result without good personal processes, though those results will probably be inconsistent.

By shifting the focus to HOW people work (behaviors, personal processes) we create a much stronger way of being in the workplace. Our ability to consistently create both technical results and healthy relationships will grow, and we’ll feel better about it.

Michael Phelps is a good example. He isn’t the greatest swimmer of our time because he’s tall, strong, and has giant flexy flippers for feet. He owns his growth, looks to improve, is willing to experiment, and listens to coaches when they provide observations on his technique.

Phelps’ behaviors define his regular technical output seen every four years!!

Photo by Alex Guillaume