Whether at work or play how you behave drives your effectiveness.  Getting things done on your own, with others or through others can be efficient or effective or sloppy and slow.  Or anywhere in between.

The behavior impact

The factors that influence outcomes are broad and deep with multitudes of integration points.  Predicting the best approach with absolute certainty is impossible but focusing on and controlling key factors which will have the greatest impact on the end result is a good way to lay the foundation for success.

Your behavior is usually always a large contributor to the result and a discussion of behavior principles is the focus of the rest of this post

Balance

Extreme actions, for example like shouting, swearing at one end or hibernating and allowing yourself to be dragged along at the other can be effective behavioral approaches depending on the context of the situation, however, I personally find this to be the case very rarely.

Balancing extremes and tailoring your direct actions and responses to the other participant,s or if alone to the situation itself, is most likely to give you the best control.   Control lets you adapt and modify what you are doing as you are actually doing it.  This is really continuous improvement in the moment.

To practice the skill of balancing your behavior for optimum results requires a very high level of self awareness.  You need to be able to absorb, analyses and  determine the best response in an instance and constant awareness of whats going on is a prerequisite to this.

Remember as well what you do can change the behavior of others and this is a great tool to help achieve the objective although it needs to be used with caution.

To clarify, getting angry could be an example of using your behavior to changes others.  Don’t be surprised if your getting angry doesn’t cause others to get angry (unless they are practicing strong behavior control themselves you can count on it.)

The key thought here for the best use of personal behavior to drive to your goals is balance.  Use the right actions at the right time.