You can change a behavior, not a character

I've always worked a lot, and not out of discipline. I like it. A thing to do that becomes a thing done, a product that runs, that holds, that moves fast where before it jammed: in there I find a meaning I struggle to explain to anyone who doesn't feel it. For me, if there's something to do, it needs doing. Not a virtue. Just how I'm made.

For years I took for granted that it was like that for everyone, or that it should be. I didn't understand people who worked without that push to close, to solve, to see the thing finished and working. I didn't get angry about the effort, that never weighed on me. I got angry at its opposite, at the lack of care: planning done badly and urgency invented out of nothing. The "I needed it yesterday" said today. That, I still can't stand. But about the rest I was wrong, and it took me time to admit it.

I understood, later than I'd like, that we don't all relate to work the same way, and that's fine. Someone who doesn't have my way of sitting with a problem isn't less serious than me, they just have a different center of gravity. That part I learned, and I genuinely respect it.

There's one thing, though, I never managed to do, and this essay is about that one. Not about people who work differently from me, whom I've learned to accept, but about people who won't be corrected. In more than one case I tried every way I knew, and I failed. I came out of it with an uncomfortable conviction: that you can change a behavior but not a character, and that the hard part of the job isn't explaining the rule, it's noticing in time where that line runs.

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What the rules were for

To understand why those rules mattered, you need a piece of context that usually escapes anyone who hasn't worked inside it. In many organizations, consulting first of all but also the IT functions of companies in other sectors that adopted its logic, people are employed and have a salary, and yet their time is never treated as just a fixed cost. It's time that has to find coverage.

It works like this. There are activities, internal projects or client work, and each has a budget. Against that budget you allocate people, and the hours they work get logged, that is, recorded and charged to that activity. The underlying rule is simple and inflexible: you can't allocate more people than that budget can sustain, and each one, month after month, has to have financial coverage that justifies their time. Someone without that coverage isn't an abstract accounting problem. It's a person who, at the next reckoning, risks being moved to where the budget is and the people aren't.

My rules came from here, and only their appearance was anything less than noble. They said, in essence: first the activities our group is engaged and covered on, and only then, with the right engagement, support for others.

And here I want to be precise, because this is the part that's easily misread. I wasn't, and I'm not, against collaboration between groups. The opposite. When there was a real need I lent people to others while still covering them on my own budget, and I gave up budget when I had it to spare and could afford to. For that matter, different groups often answer to the same boss, who was also mine, and working in synergy, even in friendship, is not a bad thing at all: it's how an organization holds together. It was never the story of a patch of turf to defend. It was a question of order. A manager's job is to guarantee the commitments already made first, on budget, on activities, on planning; once those are honored, or knowing you'll manage to honor them anyway, anything goes, and a hand lent becomes a healthy extra instead of a hole that someone else pays for at year's end.

Most people took them for what they were. Some simply agreed with them. Others not entirely, but followed them anyway, and that was fine by me: I wasn't asking for buy-in, I was asking that the machine run. A rule followed without enthusiasm is still a rule followed, and it protects the one who follows it exactly as it protects the one who believes in it.

The people every rule slid off

Then there were one or two people every rule slid off. There was no malice in it, and no laziness either. In some cases it was even the opposite: they erred out of generosity, they said yes to anyone who asked for a hand without stopping to look at whether that help had an engagement behind it or not, and they couldn't see that exactly that constant yes, given outside any budget, left them exposed when the accounts were settled. I was trying to protect them from a mechanism they didn't see, and they wouldn't let me protect them. In others it was more simply a way of being at work that resisted being put in order. In all of them, though, it was something rooted, that didn't sit in the behavior but lower down, in the way they were made, and that came back intact every time, as if we'd never talked about it.

I tried every way I knew. The gentle way, explaining the reasons one time too many, hoping that understanding the motives would be enough to move something. The hard way, when patience ran out. The appeal to hierarchy, which is the poorest way but sometimes the only one left in your hand. And I used trust in two opposite directions: the trust that in the end they would understand, and the trust that at least they would respect the role. Both gave way, and I failed with them.

The part I understood late is how much of that relentlessness was mine, not theirs. To me those rules were obvious because I live work a certain way, and I took for granted that showing it would be enough to make it obvious to others too. I just couldn't imagine a person who, placed in front of a thing made to protect them, would still choose not to do it. I kept banging my head against it for months partly for this reason, because it didn't fit my model of how people work. I was treating as a problem to solve what was, simply, a way of being different from mine.

Where the line runs

At some point I stopped. Not out of surrender, even if for a while it looked like that, but because I had begun to see the line I mentioned at the start. There's a threshold beyond which what you're trying to change is no longer something the person does, it's something the person is. Below that threshold, insisting makes sense. Above it, every extra push corrects nothing and consumes everything: your time, the energy of the group watching you fight a lost battle, and the little that was left of the relationship.

I don't want to close this better than it went. There were improvements, real ones, and at some moments I believed I'd pulled it off. But the problem, at the root, I never solved. It stayed there, in a milder form, and it would probably be there even if I tried again today, with a few more years of the trade behind me.

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The result didn't change. What changed is where I put my effort. Now I try to recognize that line earlier, and not to spend the group's goodwill moving what won't be moved. I've gotten used to asking myself, in front of someone who won't follow, whether I'm correcting a behavior or asking someone to stop being themselves. From the outside the two look alike. They cost in completely different ways.

You can change a behavior. A character, at most, you accompany. Expecting to change it is the surest way to wear yourself out on a single person, forgetting all the others who were following in the meantime.