Business Skills 360, the podcast that looks at the other side of business English.
Hello, and welcome back to the Skills 360 podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Simmons, and today we're going to look at how you can help others to develop good habits at work.
Making and breaking your own habits is hard enough, but as a manager or leader, how can you make or break habits in other people?
I mean, how can you make sure your employees have good habits?
Well, here's the sad truth.
You can't make people change.
But you can create the conditions that foster good habits and disincentivize bad habits.
One thing to be mindful of from the outset is the difference between habits and simple compliance.
I mean, do you want people to do something only if and when their boss is watching?
Or do you want that behavior to be automatic?
Something that the employee does because that's just how things work in your company.
In other words, how things work in your culture, which includes people's shared habits.
So, part of this is about what kind of culture you want to cultivate.
If you want a culture that supports innovation, then you want people to have healthy disagreement habits and all sorts of learning habits like taking the time to reflect after a project and seeking feedback from others.
You want these behaviors to be widespread, normalized, and easy.
To build whatever culture it is you want, you have to foster the environment and systems to support that.
You want people to reflect after finishing a project?
Establish project debrief meetings or post-mortems where people can build those muscles of reflection.
You want people to be able to disagree with each other?
Then ask your team for dissenting opinions during meetings.
By focusing on the conditions for the habits you want, you can focus less on trying to motivate people or convincing them to do something new.
And, as a leader, a part of your role is modeling those habits and behaviors you want to see in others.
If you say that people shouldn't be sending emails after 6 pm, but you send emails after 6 pm all the time well, what do you expect?
Of course, there are times when you're going to have to coach on an individual basis.
It could be trying to manage a person with truly bad habits or support an earnest employee who wants to improve.
Either way, the important thing is to focus on behaviors, not personalities.
For example, imagine someone tends to explain too much and go on and on in meetings to avoid criticism.
You could say, you lack self-confidence or you are too talkative. but that feels too personal.
Asking the person to change those things is a tall order.
It's basically saying, be a different person.
Instead, try things like, see if you can summarize your activities very briefly.
And if the person tends to get immediately defensive when questioned, try saying challenge yourself to take a deep breath and count to five before responding.
In this way, you're focusing on observable behavior, not character.
But remember, behavior is part of a bigger equation.
In our last lesson we talked about cues, actions and rewards.
As you create the conditions for good habits, think carefully about those cues and rewards around the desired action.
Notice what is happening before someone demonstrates a bad habit and pay attention to what happens after certain behaviors.
Are people being rewarded for doing things the way you want them to?
Even when you set up good cues and rewards, there's only so much you can expect at one time.
One of the mistakes many leaders make is to push for too many habit changes at once.
We say that people are creatures of habit, to mean that habits are very deeply ingrained.
Doing things differently is no small feat.
So don't expect your employees to transform their ways of working overnight.
Remember, your job as a leader is not just to tell people what to do and what not to do.
It's to build a culture of good habits by focusing on systems, processes, and supports.
It's also focusing not on personality but on behaviors, because nobody likes to feel they are fundamentally flawed, even if it's true.
As a habit leader, you should be modeling what you want to see in others and embracing the quiet power of shaping how things get done.
So long, and see you again soon.
