How To Get Your Team to Change Behaviors
Four common ways to get people to behave the way you need
As an Engineering Manager, I deal with a lot of other humans (and a couple of AI agents)
Quite often, something somebody does that throws me off. Like a senior engineer not helping the intern or a junior engineer not asking for help. Those are tiny day to day behaviors I take notice of.
I’ve let some behaviors slide and they ended up becoming slightly bigger problems later. I’ve always felt guilty of not addressing those sooner. I do understand the value in “fixing” habits and behaviors in the team, but telling another skilled and competent adult to behave is easier said than done.
So last week I was thinking about a few different ways to go about it. Giving feedback is one of them, but there are three more.
1. Setting Rules
The simplest way to address a behavior is to establish some rules. They’re effective for behaviors that could lead to critical failures or violations of trust. Basically when the stakes are high, and there’s no room for ambiguity.
Example: A few months ago, my team was asked to own a new internal tool. My engineer who was involved in the hand-off was making great progress. One morning, he prevented a major issue but there wasn’t much info on what he did. I wanted to spread the knowledge across the team. So I established a rule:
Going forward every time you resolve an issue on CoolTool, write an accompanying “diagnostics” document with the issue details, steps to debug and the resolution.
This is not my favorite way to change behaviors, so I use it sparsely. If there are certain things I feel strongly about or if the situation needs me to step in and make changes swiftly, I rely on it.
Rules are great for surface level behavior change, but they don’t encourage ownership or deeper understanding. Sure, there could be some negotiation involved but rules are still directive. You also risk coming off as a very rigid and controlling.
2. Giving Advice
Advice is a step up from rules. Here you offer a recommendation for the course of action based on your experience or knowledge. This is the one most beginner (and busy?) managers use.
If you notice yourself saying phrases like “What do you think about …?” or “I recommend …” you’re giving advice.
Recently, a team member shared with me that he was struggling with interruptions. So the advice-giver in me quickly replied “Did you try blocking some time on the calendar?”
Advice allows you to guide without really dictating. However, it’s still directive, so overusing it can create dependency on your input. And again, you may never learn more about the problem if you just dish out advice.
3. Providing Feedback
Feedback goes beyond rules and advice. Instead of telling someone what to do, you explain the consequences of their actions, leaving them to figure out how to adjust.
Seasoned managers are really good at providing feedback. Great feedback is also timely. Meaning, if you immediately tell someone after a heated debate they’re not calmed down to listen to you. But if you wait 2 weeks, they wouldn’t have a good memory of the sequence of events. So a good time would be between a few hours and a few days after the occurrence.
A popular framework to use here is SBI (Situation, Behavior, Impact). E.g. “Hey! I noticed that when you reached out to the infra team last 2 times, you tagged our whole team in Slack for FYI. Do you realize this interrupts our team’s flow and distracts fellow members?”
Feedback is powerful because it encourages reflection and personal growth. When delivered correctly, you encourage people to take ownership of their actions and come up with their own solutions. However, it requires trust and a culture where feedback is seen as constructive, not punitive.
4. Coaching
Coaching is the most hands-off and empowering approach. Instead of providing answers, you ask thoughtful questions to help the individual uncover their own insights and solutions. Not just answers, in fact you should let them describe the problem in their own words.
You’d ask something like “I noticed that you were shaking your head and rolling your eyes during the release planning meeting today. Tell me what was going on in your head.” Then from there the conversation should be focused on understanding the problem and gently leading them to the solution.
I’m actively building the skill to be more coach-like. Lately I’ve been learning and talking about this topic a lot. But I’m still applying this very selectively because not everyone is prepared to dig deeper. Without that ability to recognize your own behaviors and consequences, it can be a futile and frustrating experience.
Sometimes I’m not prepared myself to spend so much time. My natural instinct is to give advice. I know it’s short-term thinking but as a recovering engineer, it’s hard to not be solution-oriented.
Coaching needs mastery but it can be transformative as the other person feels more committed for coming with the solutions and ideas.
Not every behavior is an individual problem
It’s possible there are some systemic problems like bad culture. If team members are not incentivized to do the right thing, you’d be playing whack-a-mole trying to address “bad” behaviors.
The problem could also be you! Are you doing something that’s causing the team members to behave in unexpected ways? Notice for patterns during your 1:1s. Is it something you have seen just one person doing or are there others as well? Does it happen when you’re more or less involved?
If you’re new to the team, aligning on expectations and what “good” looks like is the place to start. As a team, agree on what is good and bad behavior. Align with company guidelines and expectations. Document those working agreements and start from there.
Final Thoughts
I focused on behaviors because those are tangible and changeable things about humans. They’re something you can see and describe objectively. Just make sure to not use adjectives. Then you can decide what method you want to tackle the behavior in question.
As everything in management, there’s no single best solution. It’s based on several factors like how quickly you need the change, how mature is the other person, how skilled you are, and so on.
By constantly identifying suboptimal habits and behaviors of your team, you’re not just optimizing your team but you’re building a stronger, more resilient culture.
Great post Suresh. I'm reading this from the lens of an IC and these make sense. Feedback and management is definitely an art.
I like for the feedback example, SBI is a framework that helps structure the feedback. My company also emphasizes on this framework during peer reviews.
As an IC that could potentially receive the example feedback, I felt that the SBI example has room for improvement. The current wording while understandable could potentially disincentivize engineers to tag other people in comms where others should be kept in the loop. I think a wording like this could still convey the message (or deliver it using the coaching style tip from the article):
"Hey. I noticed in your last 2 posts with the infra team, the whole team was tagged as fyi onto the message. I understand that you would like to keep others in the loop as fyi and boost visibility of your message. However, it comes at a tradeoff of taking bandwidth away from other team members that may not need to be looped in. In the future, feel free to tag me in FYI communications and relevant teammates that should be kept in the loop"
I know some teams might not like the idea to set some rules, but they're necessary. They provide clarity, remove ambiguity and help to make quicker decisions.
In addition, having some Rules of Engagement is also a good practice, so provides clarity to others in how to engage with the team, improving collaboration and cross-team work.
Great post, Suresh!