Organizational Habits
Train-thoughts: what is the goal of leadership?
It is Sunday evening and I know I should be preparing myself to go to bed. That routine starts around 90 minutes before I have to turn the lights off. It involves taking a quick look in the kitchen and make sure I don't wake up to a mess that will upset me, preparing for any sort of morning exercise (laying out the clothes to wear and any other equipment needed), brushing my teeth and finally laying down to read until I turn the lights off. Over the years I have learned that reading roughly 45-60min before I need to turn off the lights gives me the best possible sleep. I have experimented and tracked this both quantitively and qualitatively. In short, I know what I need to do. Albeit, despite knowing what to do, how to do it, the positive effects it has on me, I occasionally struggle. As was the case this Sunday. The allure of screen time on the mobile phone instead of reading was too great. I was not able to overcome the short-term reward of dopamine and spent one hour staring at a screen instead of reading. The effects for myself are well-known and I woke up less rested than I could have been with slightly less energy and enthusiasm. That was how I started my Monday.
Even though I failed this time, we are the architects of our own behaviour, and thus, of our own success. We are ourselves responsible to create the right circumstances so that beneficial behaviours are more likely to happen.
The same is true for organizations. Which is where my starting question comes into the picture - what is the goal of leadership? Well, maybe not THE goal, but a very important one out of several. That is to set the right boundary conditions.
Roughly speaking, the business outcome is the sum of the collective results produced by groups of people within the organization, the collective results from those groups come from the joint efforts of the same groups, those joint efforts are made up of individual behaviours enacted by people, and finally, people’s behaviours are the result of their personality and the environment they are in. More so the latter. The environment people are in are much more likely to impact the resulting, observable behaviour (for the academic out there I can mention the fundamental attribution error). This is where the goal of leadership comes in, to make sure the right environment is in place, that the boundary conditions are set. The environment is also something that can and must be managed. People on the other hand, especially when we need to maximize creativity and innovation, must not be managed, but rather be let loose within the right environment.
Perhaps a slightly philosophical statement but nonetheless important. If we take the line of reasoning above, that the business outcomes in the end are the results of peoples’ individual behaviours, know that whatever behaviours people enact are the ONLY behaviours that can occur within the current environment. Or in other words, the current environment we as leaders have created and evolved over time has been optimizing the behaviours creating the results we are seeing.
Simple fact, humans are inherently lazy. Not in a bad way, in an evolutionary way. We like to be on autopilot, to behave habitually. We take the path of least resistance, and our habits to a large degree define who we are. Re-reading Atomic Habits by James Clear has also reminded me about the importance of organizational habits and that it is not a matter of how long time something will take us to learn, but rather how many repetitions. To establish new habits, new ways of behaving, we can benefit a lot from the four laws of behaviour change.
Make it obvious
Make it attractive
Make it easy
Make it satisfying
We can, and should, look to these for inspiration when understanding the current boundary conditions we have in our organization. It is our mission as leaders to acknowledge that people are behaving in a way that is optimized according to the current environment.
Your organizational habits will decide your outcome over time. If you are not happy with the organizational outcomes you need to slowly nudge behaviour in a different direction. Identify current and future behaviours that are making us successful, modify the environment to make those behaviours easier to practice by removing obstacles and creating incentives. This is a large portion of the day-to-day work for leadership, establishing organizational habits.
The good thing is that you don't have to read all the research you can find regarding attitude & behavioral change, it is an excellent starting to just lean on the four points above and to dig deeper I suggest you read through Atomic Habits.