Share this with:

• Your executive peers - to ask yourselves how deep of a leadership team you are

• Your coach - to explore your own beliefs that might be self-limiting

What motivates great results?

This week, I want to share a very real and very actionable trend with you that is much more surprising (and worse) than I expected when I started CORE.

Last week, we talked a little bit about causality. Causality is all about discovering which inputs cause outcomes to occur, and how powerful different inputs are in driving outcomes…

In the business world, outcomes like action, engagement, execution quality, innovation, cooperation, decision quality and speed, and more…all matter to us. And the most eye-opening finding since I started CORE is just how shallow people believe the causes of these good outcomes are.

People genuinely believe that the outcomes that great businesses get will come from creating process, incentives, job descriptions, and setting goals.

And sadly, they are misinformed.

Why? It’s only because they aren’t looking deep enough. So that’s what we’re going to do today.

In this chart, we see what real depth looks like, and I’m going to walk through how the greats get all the way to the bottom to use all three bottom layers to ignite peak performance through all of the operational layers above. To the uninformed, these deeper actions are largely invisible, which is why so many people misattribute success to operational factors we can see instead of the human factors working beneath the surface.

It seems to me that only 10-20% of companies (and managers) understand that human beings and teams need more than shallow, operational ideas to do good work. Famous and clear examples of companies who “get it” would be the Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton, REI, Disney Parks, and Houston’s (the restaurant).

These places fully understand that human beings need deeper, human-level stuff to achieve standards of service, collaboration, and excellence in execution. And each has a clear competitor that tries to recreate these results with surface-level operational inputs (and fall short), further illustrating the point.

What Wrong Looks Like

Organizations and managers who are pre-epiphany really, really want operational inputs to work. They believe it in their bones. Trouble is, their bones don’t know how to manage or lead. So, these managers say things like:

• Do your JOB

• You need to hit this GOAL (or else you will lose your JOB)

• I’ll give you this INCENTIVE if you hit your GOAL or do your JOB

• Here is a PROCESS to make you do your JOB the way I want you to

Whether these managers know it or not, every operational statement like the ones above creates a reaction in someone’s brain. And it isn’t the simple reaction people want in their bones:

It’s pretty clear that there is zero causality between saying, “Do your job,” and people subsequently doing their jobs. Yet, millions of people will try it today, ignoring the fact that it has never once worked, for them, or for anyone, ever.

Despite all of human history, this is exactly the reaction that the shallow manager expects. Instead, the reactions they should expect are…

These are the actual reactions that real human brains have. Regardless of what you want to have happen, this is what does happen. If you zoom in on those responses, you’ll probably see a few that you don’t like hearing. And that’s where managers get caught in an infinite loop of insanity, doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result.

If saying, “Do your job,” is causal of people reacting with, “You don’t want to know why this happened?” do we really think that saying, “Do your job,” a second time will cause the reaction we do want?

No. It won’t. So we need a different plan if we want questions and objections like these to go away and get replaced with the action, execution, engagement, and cooperation we are looking for. Because this phrase is not causal of those outcomes, no matter how much someone wants them to be.

Managers struggle when they are looking at their business as an OPERATION, instead of as a group of HUMAN BEINGS. And when they get stuck with this premise in their heads, they fail to see the direction of the GGATCH!

(The Great Green Arrow That Causes Health, of course):

Instead, these managers fully believe that the GGATCH points LEFT.

They believe that job descriptions, goals, incentives, and process causes human minds to be at their best, causes the correct beliefs to be held, and causes ideal behaviors.

That is pure insanity.

That is what wrong looks like. And no matter how much someone wants to punch me in the face right now if they think I’m crazy, this is the truth…and it’s a lesson people can either learn right now, or learn later, the hard way.

What Right Looks Like

If you’re willing to try a few new ideas, let’s dive into how you can get the GGATCH working for you.

First, we are going to look at how the blue layers relate to each other: how the Brain, Beliefs, and Behaviors work…

• Why people choose the behaviors they do

• Why people revert to old habits and why operational tools are usually temporary

• How we form our beliefs

Then, we’re going to dive into a few short, medium, and long-term strategies that can transform the Human Health of your organization. We have plenty of time to revisit these and dive deeper in the future, but I want to leave you with something actionable.

Let’s go…

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