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Nothing Changed But the Reward · The Lagging Team

0:00
Jeff Burstein: It could be new rules around how the
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organization puts together its, you know, its PIPs. You know,
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everybody's got a an improvement plan for the year. What are your
0:11
What are your things that you're going to go ahead and deliver
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on? If those aren't related to the initiatives of the company,
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and if teams and the individuals on teams can't track the work
0:22
they're doing on a team to helping them get their bonus.
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Guess what? The team's going to go off the rails.
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Devon Morris: This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is
0:35
a position, not a verdict. Every week, we work to change that
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outcome. P I P, better known as a PIP. If you don't live in that
0:54
world, then you should know that it's a performance improvement
0:59
plan. It's the document that says you are personally on the
1:04
hook to do these particular things over this period of time,
1:08
over the year, right, or whatever it's going to be. It's
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the thing that your ratings come off of, and your ratings are the
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things that get you bonuses and raises, and the truth is, for a
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lot of organizations, it's the step before you get walked out
1:28
the door. Just facts. So listen to that story again, okay? And
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notice who the villain isn't. Nobody in it stopped believing
1:40
in anything. Nobody got lazy. Nobody resisted. Nobody quit on
1:44
the change. Somebody rewrote the actual form, and a team that had
1:51
been working in a new way for the past eight months started
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working the old way, correctly, rationally, and without a single
2:06
meaning about it. See, somewhere this week there's a post mortem
2:13
on a change that didn't hold. It didn't stick. The new process,
2:21
the new tool, the new ways of working. Eight months in, and
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then we go back right back to how it was, and the room lands
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where the room always landed. We didn't really buy in. We rolled
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it out too fast. We didn't bring the right people along. Next
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time, more change management. You gotta be with your. You
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gotta be really fair with yourself because that is a
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thoughtful set of conclusions that most of us have drawn on
3:00
over time, it's humble. It blames the rollout instead of
3:04
the people when the rollout doesn't exist without the
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people. It even sounds like it respects the team, but look at
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what it assumes. It assumes that the team's belief is the
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variable. That if we had gotten them to believe harder, it would
3:25
have held more. Everything that follows is aimed at a belief,
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better communications, better champions, a better story.
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Nobody in the room goes and checks what the team was being
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paid for. See, this is The Lagging Team, and falling behind
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is not a verdict. I am Dr. Devon Morris, and this right here is a
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Sidebar. Every Tuesday, I sit down with somebody, and on
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Thursday, I pluck. I take one thing that they said and go all
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the way in on it. Today's two words every leader uses like
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that same word: commitment and compliance. And here's the
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problem about we did. really buy in. It's the wrong argument. Not
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because buy-in doesn't matter, but because by the time you're
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saying it, you've already decided the answer is inside the
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team, and the thing that moved was outside. See, think about
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what we lost buy-in actually claims. It claims the team's
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beliefs degraded. Something eroded in them. See, belief
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doesn't erode on a schedule. But rewards change on a schedule
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annually, quarterly, weekly, sometimes daily. You know, a new
5:09
vice president has just arrived. The month planning cycle turns
5:15
over something. Rollbacks actually have a date. They kind
5:20
of cluster together. See, Jeff has done this over and over
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again. 30 to 40 organizations is what he what he said. His read
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isn't teams lose faith. That's not his read. Is that something
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in the environment changed and stopped rewarding the new
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behavior, the team adjusted, which is what a functioning team
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actually does. See, here's the bit that should land with you.
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If the behavior stopped the moment the rewards stopped. Then
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what you had was never a commitment. It was actually
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compliance. It was working fine. It just had a dependency that
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nobody wrote down. Okay, and you couldn't have told the
6:24
difference. You couldn't have seen it. You couldn't seen the
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difference between it, right? Between that and the other
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thing, on the dashboard and the status meeting and the demo and
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the commitment and the compliance are identical, right
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until the day they are not. See, Jeff walks into organizations
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where delivery has slowed down, and leadership wants to know,
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man, what happened to the team. Here's the first thing he tells
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them. The
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Jeff Burstein: question is rarely, what is the team doing
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differently?
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Devon Morris: Rarely, not never, rarely. See, he spent 20 years
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in those rooms. He's saying the question everybody opens with is
7:13
always aimed at the wrong end of the problem. So, all right,
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here's the part I actually want to give you: commitment and
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compliance. We use them as if they're one word. The team's on
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board. Which one is it? The team's committed. The team's
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doing it. See three ways of saying one thing, and it is
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actually two very different things. See, commitment is the
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behavior that keeps going when nobody's actually paying for it,
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when nobody's watching, when nobody's counting it. Nothing is
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in your rating is going to actually depend on it, and you
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still, you still, you still, you still go do it because you think
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it's the right way to actually work. Compliance is behavior
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that keeps going exactly as long as the reward, and I'm just
8:15
gonna venture out and say punishment does. It's gonna last
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to that point. I'm not being cynical, y'all, and it's not
8:26
fake. The person is doing it is genuinely probably likes the new
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way of doing things. They probably do, right? It's just
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the thing that's holding it up is external to them. External,
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an extrinsic motivator, and nobody's really checking on it.
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It's really two different states, same behavior, two
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different states, same behavior, and you cannot tell them apart
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while the reward is still in place. Makes it tough. So let's
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put that researcher hat on for a moment, right? When we measure
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whether a change took, we measure behavior. Are we doing
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the thing? Is the stand-up happening? Is the board being
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actually used? Is reviews going out? Behavior is the one thing
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commitment and compliance they actually have in common. The
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measurement is the blind thing. It it doesn't tell you the
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distinction between the construction of it. It's not a
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bad instrument, y'all. It just really isn't. It is answering a
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different question that we may not have thought about, which
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means that every every change that hasn't taken hold, the
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report in corporate life is the conditions weren't met. You
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know, sometimes it is we got this culture that just is. Not
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gonna change. See the behaviors, and it's an it's an
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uncomfortable place to be, right? But think about how
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uncomfortable it is for the team. See, compliance is what
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organizations are built to produce. You know, ratings,
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bonuses, PIPs, promotion criteria. The whole machine
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exists to make behaviors depend on rewards. Then we're surprised
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when behaviors depend on rewards, and this is the part I
10:32
can't stop thinking about because, I mean, the problem is
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baked into the methods itself. If
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Jeff Burstein: you look at any of the frameworks, the
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processes: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, any of them.
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They'll all tell you, "Hey, make sure you have a not a fixed
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mindset, but a growth-oriented mindset. And what they don't
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tell you is how to go ahead and develop one of those.
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Devon Morris: See, those are five different ways of
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organizing work, and you don't need to know any of them. Here's
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the only thing that really matters: every single one of
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them requires a mindset, and not one of them teaches you how to
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build said mindset. They all open with assume the people
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already have what the mindset. So what gets installed is a
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process, and a process is a reward structure. So you get
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compliance, which works until the day that the reward
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disappears, the punishment disappears. Second pair, it's
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the reason the team ended up in the meeting in the first place,
12:02
where and why? See, when you say we found the problem, listen,
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listen to what we almost always are saying. We found where it
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showed up at. That's what we did, and the team is the last
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link in the chain. It is the place where everything upstream
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finally becomes visible-a policy, a budget, a reorg, a
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rewritten form of VP's new priorities. None of these things
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are visible when they happen. They're visible when a team
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slows down. So the team is where, essentially, always, and
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almost never why. Think about what that does structurally.
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See, every performance conversation is corporate life
13:00
is actually saying they actually are placing a symptom somewhere.
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Not because anyone is being malicious. Nobody's being mean
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here, but that's because it is the only place anything is
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observable. So I can't always blame them because a mindset
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isn't observable. See, just version of this is that leaders
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genuinely sense slowdown; they feel it. Unless you're super
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busy, you feel it too. Now imagine this, right? The sensing
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is accurate. The attribution of those senses is wrong. Those are
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really two different skills. See, notice who can see the
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cause. The people who change the the reward can actually see it.
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The people who change the punishment can actually see it,
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and nobody else can because to them, it wasn't a change to the
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team. It was a change to the HR cycle, a budget decision, a
14:23
scorecard-it never occurred to them about literally where that
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thing is gonna actually land. Don't think about that. So the
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one group that could explain the slowdown is the one group that
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isn't in the room when the slowdown is discussed and
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decisions are made about the slowdown that has a downstream
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effect. All right, last pair, and it's the one Tuesday's
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episode was really named after, and that's done and holding, two
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very different things. We say a change is done, and we say it is
15:05
in place. Like those are the two same reports. Done means you
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stopped. Holding means somebody is still attending to it. See
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just position, and I had to hear it, is that nothing sticks? You
15:24
hit a statement. Is that nothing actually sticks? Not because
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people are weak, but because the environment keeps moving, and a
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thing that isn't being tended doesn't stay put; it just stays
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put for a little while. So we finish the transformation. We
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finish the transformation, and we stop paying attention to the
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transformation. Describes the same calendar event. The
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declaration is the moment, but attending actually ends, which
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gives you the ugly version of the timeline. The rollback
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usually starts the week you declared victory. You say we're
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done. We won, not because of the declaration, but because when
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the only thing holding it up was just reassigned and flipped it,
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because this is the usual direction. If nothing holds it
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on its own, then nothing that slid back is a verdict on that
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team. It's a report on what stopped being tended. Those are
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very different conversations to have with a team and a walk-in
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having a conversation about on Monday. And here's three things
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I want you to bring into Monday. None of them cost you money.
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None of them cost you anything. You shouldn't really need
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permission for them. First, build a timeline. You know, two
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columns right. Left column when your team's delivery actually
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changed. The month of things got slower, flakier, more ambiguous
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than the right column. When anything changed in what the
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team is measured, rated on, paid on, new policy, new metric, new
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scorecard, a reorg of some kind, rewritten objectives, changing
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requirements, new bosses, new priority, those kind of things,
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right? Take a 20 minutes, right? See how things line up. If it
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lines up, you have your answer, and it isn't the team.
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It isn't the team. Two. Read one person's objectives against the
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thing you've been asking them to do. Just one person, one
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document, one actual file, not from your actual memory. Right?
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Then trace a line, a line, from what the document rewards to the
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new ways of actually working that you're actually asking
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for-that whoever's asking for may not be you. If you can't
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draw a line, you are asking for commitment and paying for
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compliance, and the person is not confused. I think they're
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reading the document correctly. Okay, you need to check who is
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confused. All right. So third thing, name one thing you
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declared done. A change you announce as complete. Stopped
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attending, stopped asking about, took off the agenda. Go look at
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it, not to restart it. That's just a different project, or
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that's a different thing to actually go about doing. Just
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find out two things about it: is it still holding up? And if it
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is still holding up, who's holding it? There's usually one
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person doing it on their own time, and nobody has ever said
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thank you to them. Now, here's what would make me reconsider
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this: where I would actually be wrong, and I want you to check
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me on it. I want you to bring, come to the comments, talk to me
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about it, tell me I was wrong, right? And I'll admit to it. Do
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the move, the move we talked about. Build a timeline. Right,
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three things can come back. Right, a change, and it lines
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up. Cool. Fix the reward, not the people. Okay, you just saved
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yourself an entire quarter of change management. That would
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have been aimed at the wrong thing, a change, but the
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timing's wrong. The slowdown came first. The dates are months
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apart. Then this isn't your explanation. Good. Don't worry
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about what we're talking about here whatsoever. It only took
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you 20 minutes. Nothing changed at all? No policy, no metric, no
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bonus, no reorg, no no new rules or anything like that. That
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right there, that one, that will actually make me wrong at that
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point, and it's the answer I most want to hear about because
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then it may genuinely be commitment that went, and the
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real question, because it was attached to and who left. The
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point isn't that reward or even punishment explains the
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rollback. Is that the first place to look? It's cost. It
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costs you like 20 minutes to do it. Shouldn't take you any time.
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Okay, falling behind is a position, not a verdict, and a lot
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of teams are sitting in that position right now, being
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described upstairs as the ones who have lost the plot. When
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what actually happened is that somebody changed something about
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what they were paid for, and never connected the two things.
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Commitment keeps going when nobody pays for it. Compliance
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keeps going exactly as long as the reward sticks around, and
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you cannot tell which one you have based on the behavior,
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because the behavior is the one thing that they actually share.
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So before you run another postmortem on buy-in or go build
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some timeline, if the dates line up, your team didn't fail the
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transformation. Your team read the room correctly, faster than
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all the rest of you all. Look, here's the deal. If you want to
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talk about what this looks like on your team, go to
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thelaggingteam.com/start. That is thelaggingteam.com/start.
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That's the Sidebar. Now you know where to look. Thank you for
22:29
joining us. Where every Tuesday and Thursday we work toward
22:35
bridging the gap for teams that are behind.