The 10 Behaviours of Effective Employees
Ten behaviours that make people genuinely good to work with. Named, so you can see them. Learnable, so you can grow. A free field guide.
Free field guide · No. 01 in the seeing series
Be the person things go better around.
Ten behaviours you can see, practise and get better at, in a short field guide you can read in an afternoon. Pick the one that makes you sit up, and start there.
Rob Lambert · twenty years as VP of Engineering and VP of HR · Winchester
Behaviours, not personality
Most of us assume the people who make work go well were born that way: confident, clever, a natural. Look closer and it's what they do, again and again. They keep their word. They ask a question before they say no. They pick up the things that fall between roles. Those are behaviours, and behaviours can be practised.
That makes the ten a mirror for how you show up today, and a map for where to grow next. For a team, they're a shared language for the kind of behaviour worth having more of.
People who practise them tend to get trusted with more: the interesting projects, the bigger roles, the benefit of the doubt. And it isn't about climbing over people or playing the politics. It's about becoming good in ways that travel with you, and that make every place you work a little better for your being there.
Nobody has all ten, and you don't need them all. Here they are.
01
Visibly passionate
They believe the work is worth doing, and it's catching.
02
Open-minded
They meet change and new ideas with a question, not a reflex "no".
03
Bigger than the job title
They pick up what falls between roles, where most trouble hides.
04
Company-smart
They learn how the place really works, and see it as a system.
05
Customer-focused
They keep the person who pays at the end of everything they do.
06
Relentless improvers
They make the system better, understanding it before touching it.
07
They do what they said they'd do
They keep the promise, on the day, and own it when they can't.
08
Good communicators
The wiring under the rest. They listen, and make ideas travel.
09
Skills, and skills, and skills
Deep in one thing, curious about everything, and still learning.
10
Brave
They say the useful thing, kindly and well-timed, even the hard one.
Inside the guide
It's one of the astonishing talents of organisations: they can organise themselves into forgetting the only person keeping the lights on – the customer. And then, realising this has happened, launch a new strategy to be customer centric. – From the book, behaviour No. 005 - Customer Focused
Pages from the free book
Where the ten come from
I'm Rob Lambert. I've spent twenty years inside organisations, as a VP of Engineering, VP of HR and Head of Business Agility, watching what the most effective people actually do. The ten first appeared here around 2016, drawn from years of hiring, managing and coaching people on both the delivery side and the people side of a business.
They've held up since, in teams of one, six and sixteen thousand. The results a business needs and the growth its people deserve turn out to be the same subject.
Take it further
The free guide helps you see the behaviours. These help you build them, on your own or with your team.
For you, or your managers
Coaching & Development Guide
Turn one behaviour at a time into a habit. A structured workbook across all ten, with coaching prompts and reflection exercises to work through a few minutes a day, on your own or with the people you manage.
£14.99one-time
Get the coaching guide →For teams and organisations
The 10 Behaviours Workshop
A hands-on session where your team makes the ten its own, or writes new ones. Together we define what each looks like in your organisation, make things that bring them to life, and plan how they'll show up in everyday work.
Suggesting it to your manager or HR? Everything's in the Trade List →
Don't try to become all ten at once. Pick one.
Get the free guide, read it in an afternoon, and choose the behaviour that would make the biggest difference to your work right now. Then practise it.