As leaders, one of your core responsibilities is shaping the behaviour of your teams and organisations to drive performance. However, too often we try to force compliance through rules, policies, and top-down mandates. While ensuring clear expectations is important, the science shows there's a more powerful way: strategically designing the performance context.
This is the core insight from the "Context Drives behaviour" principle in the Human & Organisational Performance (HOP) discipline. It recognizes that worker behaviour is predominantly shaped by the surrounding organisational system - the processes, tools, resources, measurement practices, and cultural norms. Change the system, and you change the behaviour.
One potent way to redesign the performance context is through skilful goal setting and activation. As highlighted in Anthony M. Grant's paper "An Integrated Model of Goal-Focused Coaching," (2012) goals serve as fundamental drivers of human behaviour and motivation. The types of goals we set, and how we frame them, can powerfully influence psychological dynamics and workplace actions.
Grant outlines how goals exist in a nuanced hierarchy, with higher-level abstract goals and values cascading down into more concrete, actionable targets. Effective leaders map out and connect these goal levels, using them to systematically focus effort in aligned directions across teams and business functions.
For example, a high-level organisational goal may be "Fostering innovation and growth." This gets translated into divisional objectives like "Launching 3 new product lines in 18 months." Which then shapes departmental goals "Rapidly prototyping 20 new concepts per quarter". Ultimately this will flow down to individual roles "As an engineer, I will apply design thinking methods to rapidly build minimum viable products".
By carefully mapping out this goal hierarchy and connecting each employee's efforts to larger organisational imperatives, leaders create a cohesive system that naturally drives behaviour in the right direction. Each worker sees how their day-to-day actions ladder up to shared visions and values they find compelling.
Moreover, leaders can strategically leverage different "goal types" (e.g. learning goals, approach goals) that Grant highlights to optimise motivation and capability development. For instance, emphasising innovation learning goals over pure output metrics can promote more creative problem-solving.
The goal hierarchy becomes the central operating system that aligns contexts and shapes behaviours across all levels. When skillfully designed and implemented as part of a systemic approach, goals stop being viewed as hollow slogans and start being felt as behaviour-driving instruments of change.
Of course, goals alone are not a panacea. This must be part of a broader organisational strategy to design holistic performance environments, covering factors like resources, processes, measurement, incentives, and more. But goals are a critical part of the equation for leaders looking to truly drive change in their organisations - moving beyond verbal commitments to systematically shaping the contexts that shape behaviour.
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