The Secret to Understanding Humans Every Business Leader Must Know

If your team isn't performing, it's not their fault, it's your leadership. I'm Adam Sand, CEO of the roofing business partner and today Jonathan Wissman, the author of the best selling book the sales boss and CEO of who Hire will reveal the five human behavior truths that transform teams. Trust me, this changes everything.

We're going to talk about a section of my book today and it's the five truths about human behavior. And if you master these five truths, it's a very foundational place from which to think. Think about your organization. The first one is that things are only good or bad by comparison. What do I mean by that? When somebody decides how they feel about something or how they think about something, it is always in comparison to something they've experienced in the past. I always loved renting a car because it didn't matter if it was a Geo Metro, it was better than my personal car. But now, as I've had some success in business, I hate renting cars because it's never equivalent to what I drive every day. So when you're looking at your team, recognize that the way they decide what is good income, what is quality of work, all of that, their standard of what great is, comes from something they've experienced in the past. So your role as a leader in your organization is not to understand how your team defines great. It's how does Charlie or James or Laura or how do they individually define great? So the key here is, is one, understanding how each of your team members defines great. But secondly, understand how did you get your definition of great? How do you define what success is in business? And so rule one, hire people whose standard of great is as closely matched to the standard you have for grade. That shortens your training, shortens all the frustration, and it makes them happy because they come into an organization where the standard of grade is there. Number two, people are already giving 100% of what they believe they're capable of or they have a reason they believe is valid for not doing so. If you are a business owner and you're saying my people are lazy, they don't work hard, they don't have a standard, any of that negativity you have towards your people, this is a you problem. Your job as a leader is to figure out which of those two things is it? Are they giving a hundred percent and they just don't have the skill yet to do that thing that you need them to do. And that's why you're judging them as being a poor performer or have you misdesigned your organization. And do you lack the leadership team that takes away the reason that would allow them to believe that they shouldn't give 100%. Now, what would those be? People might say they don't notice top performance anyway. They don't pay me enough. And it doesn't matter if it's true or not. What matters is that they believe it's valid. So how many of you have a standard in your business for something? A standard unmet and unmentioned, is no longer a standard. Do you have a standard for how your technician dress when they go out into the field? Of course you do. You want them to look a certain way, you want their boots to be polished, you want their grooming to be a certain way. The team gather at your office or they come through the door and they're not up to standard and you don't mention it. Now that's infectious. And they go, well, they don't really notice anyway. People are already giving 100% of what they believe they're capable of, or they have a reason they believe is valid for not doing so. If you understand this truth about people, you will be able to change performance. Number three, people love autopilot. Think about if you've ever driven somewhere before. Have you ever been on a road, maybe one you've traveled many times before? And when you reach your destination, you realize, I can't remember any of the trip. I can't remember pulling out into traffic or the red lights that I stopped at. But somehow you've gotten to where you're going successfully. Why is that? It's because we can do this very complex thing on autopilot, and our mind can be thinking about every other sort of thing that's going on. Now, I want you to think about that same trip, but this time, as you pull into traffic, you see something like this in your side mirror. In this case, as good a driver as you think you are, now, somebody in a position of authority is there judging just how good a driver that you are. And you come off of autopilot and you remember that trip. What does this have to do with designing an organization? Well, you get to apply design thinking to your organization to say, when do I want my team on autopilot? Because it's more effective, and when do I want them off of autopilot? Off of autopilot, on autopilot. So apply design thinking to that. If you have your meeting all of the time inside of one conference room, inside your office, guess what? People come in, they're on autopilot. You want a meeting that stands out. This one, you have something important, and you really need it to sink in, change the environment. Number four, people need to belong. What word is not on that slide? A lot of them. It doesn't say people want to belong. People need to belong. People will adjust their behavior to belong, to fit in. If people don't know how they fit in your organization, they will always be a misfit. It's your role to show people how do they belong in your organization. People will dramatically change their behavior. Let me give you an example. The stadium bathroom is filthy, right? You wash your hands. You take the paper towel out, shoot the paper towel, because you don't want to touch anything. And if you miss, what happens? Not you leave it there. Why you wouldn't do that at your home. It's not because you believe in messy bathrooms. You fit in. You adjust your behavior to what everyone else there is doing. The next evening, you go out to a really nice steakhouse. You walk into the bathroom that's on the right. You know, there's stacked towels there. You wash your hands. Do you even think about, like, shooting the towel? You don't. You might even wipe the mirror off. It's because in one setting, it matters. In the other setting, it doesn't matter. And you adjust your behavior to fit into what's going around you. I'm going to give you a couple of ways. We've talked about one of them. Sacred rhythm. Second thing is having an insider language. What does an insider language mean? If you're going to have names of your meeting, don't call it your weekly meeting. Call it your liftoff launchpad. If you have conference room and you have a physical location, name your conference room. People say, hey, why is this the Smitty Room? Well, oh, that was named after one of our founders, Ant Smitty. And he got his love of working in the community. Once you know the story, you're an insider. So design your business structure to force people to have to learn how to be an insider. And then you're going to find that your tenured employees get pride in bringing a newcomer in and telling them and revealing the insider language to them. It's not your job. They'll do it. And when they do it, they will feel as though they belong. Rituals, Rituals cause people to belong. Give you an example. I had a software company, this is back 15 years ago, and we decided that we were going to do something that we called fractivity. It was a Friday activity and on Friday, we would shut down the office at 2 o' clock and we would do an activity. And when we first started it, people were like, why are we stopping work early? I like to get this done before I go home to my family. I don't want to sit around and play board games with these people I worked with all week. And what happened after the third month of fractivity? All of a sudden, marketing got involved, not because leadership team told them to. And they started doing full size movie posters designed for the Friday activity. And then different departments started vying for who could have the best fractivity. We started doing egg drops from the seventh story to see who could do it. And people started looking forward to that shut down on Friday. And they started to realize that instead of going home to their family stress, they could leave all of the stress of the office there at the game table with the people they had worked side by side with all week. And they could leave feeling good about their team for activity. It was a ritual. Interestingly, I sold that company and five of the employees have went to three separate companies altogether. One person goes, starts working for the new company, then the other four go. One leaves, they go to another company, the other four go, they develop such a bond. And the thing they brought to every company after that is fractivity. If you go to Kansas City, there's at least 10 companies there that do fractivity. That all got seeded from that one thing we did, but they all thought it was weird when we started. So what is your ritual? All right, number four, way people belong, having a common enemy. Look at the political environment. It is far easier to get people to be against something than for something. Republicans are against Democrats, Democrats are against Republicans. So what are you against as a company? What do you stand against? And most people, when they write their mission statement, it's we're for something. And I'm not suggesting you write your mission statement to be against something, but I am suggesting that in your organization you have a very clear thing that everyone knows that you are against. And the only way you can fit in and belong to this organization is if you are also against that thing people need to belong. Do you have sacred rhythms? Have you designed insider language? Do you have rituals? And do you have a common enemy? Number five, the only reason that matters are their reasons for the humans that show up and work for you inside your organization. They don't care that you have a revenue goal. They don't care what you plan to do in your future. The only thing that matters is their reason. So it's your job to figure out what is their reason? Why did they come to work for you? And when you can get that, that's when you know that you have mastered human behavior.