Human beings are creatures of habit. That’s good news for leaders.
Have you ever tried to break a habit? If so, you know how true it is that habits are hard to break. While this can be bad news, it can also be good. Human beings are creatures of habit. Lead your associates to form habits that facilitate the flow of work with greater speed and quality and the team will have greater success in achieving their goals and outcomes. In Technology, it is common to change behaviors through methodologies like Waterfall, Agile, DevOps, and ITIL. These methodologies provide a structured approach to changing how people perform their work. Lean and Six Sigma are methodologies that broadly apply and perform the same function. Exceptional leaders continually change how their teams accomplish their work, leveraging modern approaches to remove friction, improve outcomes, and drive efficiency. They are early adopters of new practices and technologies, unconstrained by prior decisions they made based on previous best practices. Compelling the team to adopt new habits is difficult. But once they adopt them, they stick with them. Consider which habits are most important to your team’s work. Ask them why they perform their work the way they do, what if the practices were to change, and how might they change. Ask what would have to be true to ensure the team is as effective and efficient as possible. From their responses, codify changes, establishing a new set of habits and empower them and require them to regularly review those habits to continually improve.
Share your thoughts below.
Have you changed your team’s habits to improve performance? What techniques did you use?
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