Performance vs. Behavior

When to be patient and when not...

I am a sucker for a good heuristic. A heuristic is a rule-of-thumb, strategy, or mental shortcut that reduces the cognitive burden and complexity of decision-making. I heard one from Frank Slootman a few weeks ago on the Farnam Street podcast. Slootman is the recently departed CEO of Snowflake, a cloud based data warehousing company. His take has really stuck with me and I’ve found myself mentioning it frequently to our leadership teams.

"Performance is something that we will give more time; behavior we won’t. And that’s because behavior is a choice, not a skill set."

Be patient with performance because it involves developing a skill which takes time.

Be impatient with behavior because someone can choose to change at any moment.

A theoretical (just barely) example from my world:

We hire 2 bartenders. One of whom arrives early or on time for every shift, drink recipe flashcards in hand, and is constantly smiling and engaging guests at the bar. She is VERY slow making drinks, to the point that managers are having to apologize to guests in the dining for the long waits for cocktails. The second new bartender is a machine in service bar, putting up drinks in 2-3 minutes seemingly regardless of how busy we are. He tends to be on his phone a good bit, conveniently avoids the bulk of citrus juicing and batching of drinks, and doesn’t run much food.

She needs to develop skills. She needs practice to develop speed and muscle memory. Patient coaching and thoughtful scheduling is what she’ll need to improve.

He needs to change behaviors. Clear and direct communication of expectations is what’s called for in this case.

It wouldn’t be much of a mental shortcut if it required more explanation than that!