Make of this what you will:
James Clear‘s best-seller, “Atomic Habits,” has helped so many people because it seems do-able. That is, you can have powerful results just by making small, daily changes.
What if you did that with your workforce?
A famous Victorian educator argued as such:
The formation of habits is education, and education is the formation of habits.
Charlotte Mason
How does that thought about schooling apply to companies?
Every business needs to be what Peter Senge calls a “learning organization.” That is, we are teams who want to get better as a group. We want to grow.
And every organization needs its employees, individually, to grow. It’s more than just onboarding and training. It is continuous improvement after that.
All that is to say: To fulfill your organization’s mission, you must help your team members get consistent about the actions that most effectively fulfill that mission.
To start, you will need to get organized in what you know about your organization and its most effective habits.
You must help your team members get consistent about the actions that most effectively fulfill your mission.
Here are some suggestions on how to do that:
Start with your why. (What is the cathedral you are building?)
Clarify and define the values that make your organization or team unique. (You’ve got the why. Now you need the how.)
Learn the stories that illustrate the why and the how. These will often illustrate the habits you want to see: how team members do what you do.
Use a training process that takes people from organized in their knowledge to confident– and then, influential with the people you serve.
In case you’re wondering, these aren’t just ancient ideas from classical education: Modern research continues to justify how well these efforts work.
One final thing: Work on your mindset as the leader. Culture is what you allow.