The TIGERS 6 Principles™ Behavior-Based Organizational Architecture
Transform leadership and culture into measurable workplace behavior.
Organizations invest heavily in leadership development, workplace culture, employee engagement, manager effectiveness, and organizational change. Yet many initiatives struggle to produce lasting results because people have never agreed on the everyday behaviors that turn strategy and good intentions into consistent action.
The TIGERS 6 Principles™ Behavior-Based Organizational Architecture applies whenever two or more people combine their efforts for a shared purpose. Whether that purpose is building a business, educating students, strengthening a nonprofit, leading organizational change, or improving a community, sustainable success depends on people consistently practicing behaviors that strengthen trust, collaboration, healthy conflict resolution, and shared success.
The framework helps organizations strengthen their leadership, culture, mission, vision, values, and strategy by translating them into observable, measurable workplace behavior.
Why Traditional Leadership and Culture Initiatives Often Fall Short
Most organizations already have a mission, values, strategic priorities, and capable people. What they often lack is a shared behavioral foundation that provides consistency in how those aspirations are expressed through everyday decisions, relationships, communication, and accountability.
When behaviors are left open to interpretation, consistency disappears. Managers develop different expectations. Teams establish different informal norms. Trust becomes inconsistent, collaboration depends on individual personalities, and accountability is experienced differently across the organization. Over time, even well-designed initiatives lose momentum because people are no longer working from the same shared behavioral expectations.
Lasting organizational improvement requires more than a compelling vision, good intentions, or another leadership initiative. It requires a shared behavioral foundation that helps people work together consistently.
The challenge is rarely commitment.
The challenge is creating consistency.
The Missing Link Is Shared Behavior
Organizations succeed or struggle because of what people consistently do—not simply because of what they intend to do.
Mission explains why an organization exists. Vision describes where it is going. Values express what it believes. Strategy identifies how it intends to achieve meaningful goals.
Shared behavior determines whether people can consistently accomplish those aspirations together.
Shared behavior is the bridge between organizational aspirations and organizational results.
When people intentionally develop shared behavioral expectations, principles become practices. Strategy becomes coordinated action. Trust becomes observable. Collaboration becomes more consistent. Healthy conflict becomes productive. Accountability becomes a natural outcome of shared commitments rather than a management mandate.
The TIGERS 6 Principles™ provide six universal behavioral principles rather than prescribing identical behaviors for every organization. Those principles remain constant because they describe the behavioral conditions required whenever two or more people combine their efforts for a shared purpose.
Each organization develops behavioral practices that reflect its unique mission, responsibilities, operating environment, and goals. An emergency response team, school district, healthcare organization, nonprofit, manufacturer, government agency, or technology company may express those practices differently, yet each builds upon the same universal behavioral foundation.
The TIGERS 6 Principles™ Framework
Organizations define a mission to explain why they exist. They establish a vision to describe where they are going. They identify values to express what they believe. They develop strategies to achieve meaningful goals.
The TIGERS 6 Principles™ do not replace these essential elements. They help organizations bring them to life.
Behavior is what makes goals achievable, roles successful, relationships mutually beneficial, and organizational performance sustainable.
The TIGERS 6 Principles™ Framework provides the universal behavioral foundation that helps organizations align everyday behavior with their mission, vision, values, and strategy so goals become more achievable, roles more successful, relationships more mutually beneficial, and organizational performance more sustainable.
The Six Universal Behavioral Principles
Trust
Creates the confidence and follow-through that build dependable outcomes.
Interdependence
Helps people accomplish more together than they can independently.
Genuineness
Creates the honest communication needed for better decisions and planning.
Empathy
Improves understanding so people can reason through differences more effectively.
Risk Resolution
Helps people identify barriers, address concerns early, and solve problems before they become costly.
Success
Creates meaningful results that strengthen both organizational performance and the people who make it possible.
These six principles remain universal. The behavioral practices developed from them are customized by each organization to reflect its mission, responsibilities, operating environment, and workforce.
From Principles to Practice
Universal principles provide a shared foundation for how people work together. They establish the conditions that enable trust, collaboration, honest communication, healthy conflict resolution, and shared success to flourish across every type of organization.
Principles alone, however, do not change organizations.
Organizations improve when people intentionally translate universal principles into behavioral practices that reflect their mission, responsibilities, operating environment, and goals.
Those behavioral practices establish shared behavioral expectations—clear agreements about how people will communicate, make decisions, resolve differences, fulfill responsibilities, and work together.
As those expectations become everyday behavior, organizations develop stronger Organizational Development capabilities. Trust becomes more dependable. Collaboration becomes more effective. Decision making improves. Problems are addressed earlier. People become increasingly successful working together.
Because every organization is unique, the behavioral practices differ. The principles do not.
An emergency response team, manufacturing company, healthcare system, school district, nonprofit organization, engineering firm, or government agency may express Trust differently, yet each depends upon trustworthy behavior to accomplish its mission successfully.
The principles remain universal. The behavioral practices become uniquely your own.
Turning Behavior into Measurable Improvement
Organizations cannot improve behaviors they cannot clearly observe, discuss, reinforce, and measure.
When behavioral expectations remain vague, progress is difficult to recognize. Teams rely on assumptions. Leaders interpret success differently. Improvement becomes dependent upon individual effort rather than shared organizational learning.
The TIGERS 6 Principles™ help organizations make workplace behavior visible. Once behavioral expectations are clearly defined, leaders and teams can reinforce what is working, identify opportunities for improvement, and monitor progress over time.
This transforms organizational development from a series of isolated initiatives into a continuous learning process where behavior, performance, and organizational capability improve together.
The TIGERS Workforce Behavioral Profile™ and organizational diagnostics support this process by helping organizations understand current behavioral patterns, identify strengths, uncover opportunities for growth, and measure improvement over time.
When behavior becomes measurable, continuous improvement becomes possible.
Built Through Research, Application, and Continuous Learning
The TIGERS 6 Principles™ did not begin with six predetermined principles or another leadership model.
They began with a simple question:
What conditions are required for people to work together ethically, productively, collaboratively, and successfully whenever they share a common purpose?
The search for that answer led across business, education, and the behavioral sciences. Rather than finding a single theory or management approach that fully explained organizational success, recurring patterns emerged across decades of research, practical application, and continuous learning.
One discovery became increasingly clear.
Shared behavior was the common thread.
Organizations differed in their missions, industries, structures, and goals, yet the conditions that consistently supported successful collaboration remained remarkably similar. Those recurring patterns became the foundation for the six universal behavioral principles that today form the TIGERS 6 Principles™ Behavior-Based Organizational Architecture.
The framework continues to evolve through research, practical application, organizational feedback, and ongoing validation while remaining grounded in the same six universal behavioral principles.
Discover Your Organization's Starting Point
Understanding how organizations improve naturally leads to another question.
How do these behavioral conditions show up in our organization today?
Every organization has strengths. Every organization also has opportunities to strengthen the behaviors that influence leadership effectiveness, collaboration, communication, accountability, and organizational performance.
The first step toward meaningful improvement is understanding your organization’s current behavioral conditions. Before organizations can strengthen trust, improve collaboration, increase accountability, or build healthier workplace relationships, they first need a clear picture of the behaviors that already support—or limit—their success.
Our complimentary diagnostic helps leaders identify behavioral strengths, uncover opportunities for improvement, and establish a practical baseline for continuous organizational improvement.
Better organizational decisions begin with a clearer understanding of current conditions.
Download the complimentary diagnostic and discover where your greatest opportunities for improvement may exist.
Every meaningful organizational improvement begins with understanding today’s behavioral reality.