What's Actually Going Wrong With Your Workforce | Dustin Snyder

Most leaders diagnose their people challenges alone, behind a closed door, with a spreadsheet. Dustin Snyder does the opposite. As founder of Wayforward, he goes into companies at major turning points and maps what is actually happening inside the workforce, using a method he created and named Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping or SWIM, for short. He wrote the book on it, Sink or SWIM.

He comes to this work with the scars to back it. Before Wayforward, Dustin served as president of a 600-person manufacturing division that he led back to profitability. Earlier in his career he founded an axe-throwing company that was acquired. Outside of work he competes in strongman, trains muay thai, and is working toward the tallest peak on all seven continents.

• Behavior at scale is a rational outcome. A company that suspects it hired twenty percent bad apples has a math problem rather than a character problem. Widespread behavior is an adaptation to conditions, and it maps and predicts from the variables in the environment.
• People change behavior as the environment changes. Told to change while the conditions hold, their own brain overrides the instruction as a survival risk, because that behavior is what the environment taught them survival requires.
• The map starts at the top. Dustin opens every SWIM engagement with senior leadership to learn the strategy and the pain point, then moves to a representative sample of the organization and traces the behavior back to the root cause.
• Intervention design reduces to one question: how do we make the right thing the easy thing? Change the variables until the behavior you want becomes the rational one.
• Empathy operates as an objective discipline rather than a feeling. Stand in their boots. Learn what the day is actually like and what makes it harder than it needs to be.
• People leave because they fail to feel successful in the conditions around them. Pay is the trench they retreat to when something more important is lacking.
• Blind spots come with the seat rather than with the leader. Executives watch the market, the customers, and the long strategy, which is their job, and that vantage point can only see so far into the field.
• The fixes are usually small. Dustin's clients rarely need a capital budget. They need a clarification that has yet to reach the front line.

This week, notice one behavior showing up across your team rather than in one person.

Then ask yourself Dustin's question: "What if this behavior was rational?"

What if this is an adaptation your people make to the conditions around them? What if you would do the same thing standing in their boots?

If the behavior was rational, what would be driving it?

Ask that, and you start solving the root cause instead of managing the symptom one more time.

Find Dustin on LinkedIn, at Wayforward, and get his book,Sink or SWIM: The Human Systems Theory Approach to Business Performance.

Dustin maps what's going wrong for companies at a turning point. You can start that map yourself this week. Take the free Work Positive Culture Assessment and find out what your culture is telling you.

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