Last time I promised a step by step way to assess new hires quickly rather than wait for the end of a probation period.

🌟And here is the guide for the first 4 weeks of your new hire

One thing the guide talks about is behaviours. So you have a choice of where to start.

Behaviours are about more than just onboarding, they are a powerful way to install values, engage and reward your best people, give feedback and make hard decisions.

Those hard decisions include, but are not limited to, passing probation.

The problem

There are ways of telling people what we want from them. On a broad level we have values, we define these for the business. One of them is always “human”. They are meant to define what is important so you attract and keep the right people.

The other is feedback.

In fact there are 2 things that every progressive business is doing right now

  1. Telling themselves to be “Human”
  2. Trying to implement a feedback culture with the help of a book.

Both of these tactics have issues which behaviours can solve.

Values are vague

Not just the human one or the hilarious but self-owning ‘don’t be a dick’. The point of these is that they resonate with people, outlining a concept and letting people apply their own interpretation.

Their own interpretation is the problem. We need a single interpretation

Feedback needs a trigger.

One of the problems with feedback is knowing when to give it. The book saysall the time. But that’s not how the world works.

Knowing your behaviours means you have specific examples of when to give feedback and you have something to point at when you have the (sometimes less than comfortable) feedback chat.

And this is for good and bad feedback remember!

Behaviours

But when it comes to the crunch and you need to give feedback or justify a decision you’ll need to be specific.

To achieve that we need to define the specific behaviours you do and don’t want to see. This will help you spot them and will give you something to refer to when giving feedback.

These can be added to over time and can also be used to outline to existing staff what your values look like in action. Useful!

You can/should open this up to your team. What behaviours do they value and what gets them riled? This is proactive radical candour. Everyone loves clarity over what will be rewarded and what will be frowned upon.

And your best people will want to contribute creating a virtuous loop that both lets you know what your team wants to see and creates more ownership.

Run this exercise:

Then tidy up the behaviours so you have something that can be shared. The format of “We value __ instead of __” works, but whatever you like.

This should have moved you from:

  • We value proactive people

to

  • We value people who seek feedback on work-in-progress rather than working in a silo

Now the next time someone fails to let the team in on WIP you can point to this behaviour rather than just saying they weren’t proactive.

Because proactive means different things to different people. Charging forward without asking for help could be seen as proactive. Behaviours define what it means to be valuable to your team and they define the standard to not slip below

It’s a gift

You’ll thank yourself for defining these. It’s a gift to the you of the future who needs to explain the standards required for excellence.