Actions Tell the Rest of the Story

As a kid growing up, or even as an adult, how many times have you said this to someone (or heard it said); “Action speaks louder than words!”? Anytime I hear that in my head, it’s in the voice of Margaret from the original “Dennis the Menace” series or Judy Hensler from “Leave it to Beaver”, and packed with sarcasm! But regardless of how snarky either of those characters may have ever been in chirping that at Dennis or Beaver, the phrase itself holds true. As we lead our teams and work to help them identify their individual purpose, listening to what they’re telling us and learning to observe the behaviors that follow provides a solid foundation. All too often though, we’ll see significant discounts between those two things. In complete transparency, I have an ongoing internal battle to not immediately write these folks off as dishonest. As easy as it would be for me to do that, I’d be dead wrong in many cases.

Consider this: how often have you been part of a group that held a strong shared belief? Regardless of what that belief may have been, when enough influential members of that group speak strongly about it, there’s a natural tendency for others in the group to migrate in the same direction. I could go so many directions with examples of this - philosophy, religion, politicks, etc. - but let’s stick with something we’ve all likely experienced in the workplace; the standard approach to career progression. In What’s KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!), I shared how I had frequently poked at my friend Phil about applying for supervisory and management roles. He had been one of the best assembly line leads in the facility for years, that would have been the next normal step, right? That’s exactly what I had seen a ton of other folks do, folks who had similar technical skill sets but had earned far less influence and respect from the teams they worked with. I’m sure there was a time or two where I even made the case that I thought he “deserved” to be a supervisor more than some of the ones who followed that path. Thankfully, for a lot of reasons I won’t go into now since I covered them in that chapter on “The Cost of a Poor Promotion”, Phil was strong enough to push back against what anyone else thought was best for him and back his beliefs (and words) with action. But how many times have we seen others apply for and accept roles because that’s the next step in the journey someone else painted on the back of their cereal box? And how often have we seen some of those same folks struggle mightily in leading the teams they took responsibility for, all while being completely miserable?

Now that you’re nodding your head, and probably picturing some folks you’ve seen do exactly what I just described, I want you to consider how much more often this happens with someone saying they’re interested in or motivated by something simply because they feel like that’s what they’re expected to say, then take action leading in a completely different direction… I’ll share once more that I’ve historically been really quick to consider this kind of variance between words and actions to be a character flaw; I saw it as dishonesty. While I’m sure you and I can each list our fair share of people who are prone to telling what Huck Finn referred to as “stretchers,” I now understand that many people do this in an attempt to avoid even the slightest bit of confrontation; they’re find a level of peace and harmony in maintaining the status-quo.

As leaders, recognizing the differences between what a team member shares through their words and tells us with their actions, and understanding what could be causing the variation, can be a huge piece of helping them latch onto a true definiteness of purpose - and we’ll look at how we can begin to do that next.