The Importance of Behavior

Why all this talk about behavior?

A few days ago as I was out for the evening, I overheard a conversation at another table.  A small group was having a discussion about another member of their team or club.  The problem was that several members had complained that they were put off by the bossiness of this individual, and the group was discussing how to remedy the situation. 

Finally one of them bravely volunteered to address the problem. She said, “I will take her aside and tell her that several of us have a problem with her attitude, and that she should make a change or stop volunteering on the project.”

I wanted to jump up and yell, “No! It has nothing to do with attitude; the problem is behavior.”  You never tell someone to change their attitude. Attitude is something between the person and herself; it’s inside her head. What counts, in this case, is the assertive, bordering on aggressive behavior.

So you take the person aside and say instead, “We seem to have a problem. You have behaved in a way that makes some of the people you are working with uncomfortable and here are some examples.” The examples are very important. It focuses the conversation on something concrete, like words and actions.  (A good friend of mine who was well versed in this feedback process would say “DQ”, short for direct quote, and repeat exactly what the person said.  It left little room for argument.)

After the person hears the examples, admits they are valid and expresses an understanding of how that behavior could have a negative impact on the situation, it’s OK to name it – “overly assertive,” or something like that.  (The categorization becomes a shortcut in case further conversations are needed.) 

This can work. Talking about attitude is doomed to fail as the discussion shifts from a problematic behavior to an argument over who has a bad attitude. It puts opinions in place of observations.

This also works within families (parenting), in work situations and, as I am showing here, with a society where the majority has been telling pollsters for at least the last two decades that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

I have spent over seven years, laying out more than 700 examples – categorized by dimension to tie many similar behaviors together. 

The conclusions at this point are obvious. First, we must admit that most of the problems in America are generated by poor individual choices that pile up to become trends (some encouraged by the press and pop-culture). Second, we must solve them not by pointing to attitudes and characteristics but by talking about the behavior.  There are certainly a very few truly evil people in this country, but the prevailing opinion seems to be that about half the country is evil or stupid based on who they voted for, but who anyone voted for is not what is important.  It’s not going to fix the obesity epidemic or the retirement insecurity crisis or the stress based on economic misunderstanding or the poor buying decisions driven by obviously deceptive advertising or money wasted on junk-science cures and magical thinking or the inability to separate wants from needs or the sense of victimhood that paralyses Americans from trying to fix any problems.  

Not all my examples may be defensible, but when a dispute comes up, at least the conversation will be about examples of behavior and not about who is an idiot or a devil.