The Power of Habit for Business and Scaling
A few years ago, I read “The Power of Habit” by Charles DuHigg. It was fantastic and it really made me think about certain things, like my eating habits for one.
It wasn’t until I implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System and co-founded Whale that I realized the power of repeatable habits and processes as a means for scaling and success. Ultimately this is why I co-founded Whale; to build a habit tool for scaling teams.
Today I want to take a moment to illustrate how habits work in organizations and more importantly, how to make them work for you.
Understanding the Path of Least Resistance
To commence, DuHigg cites various cases of patients with brain injuries, and experiments at MIT with rats highlight the importance of specific regions of the brain for habit formation. With researchers having the ability to see brain activity change as habits are formed, they were able to see that habits are formed as an evolutionary way of saving effort.
Habits are nature’s way of conserving effort and energy for more important things. Makes sense if you think about it.
If something is a habit, the mind doesn’t have to think about it and the brain conserves energy. It’s the path of least resistance and it can work for or against you.
Just think about when you were small and had to remember to brush your teeth. These days, you probably brush your teeth without even thinking about it.
Imagine what might happen if you began to make the hard things in business a habit so that you and your teams didn’t need to think about it.
How much energy would that free up for more important and enjoyable activities?
Habit loops
Habits, like most things, have a beginning that triggers a response that ultimately leads to a cause. DuHigg describes these as a habit loop; a mind and emotional link that keeps the habit ‘in flow’.
Habits comprise of a;
- Cue — a signal to trigger the habit
- Routine — a specific action or set of actions
- Reward — the desired outcome
The absence of any one part of the loop will prevent the habit from forming.
In the book, DuHigg relates this to his weight gain, which upon further investigation was a result of eating a giant cookie every afternoon. He took a more curious approach to why he was doing this.
“As an example, let’s say you have a bad habit like I did when I started researching this book, of going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie every afternoon. Let’s say this habit has caused you to gain a few pounds. In fact, let’s say this habit has caused you to gain exactly 8 pounds, and that your wife has made a few pointed comments. You’ve tried to force yourself to stop — you even went so far as to put a post-it on your computer that reads “NO MORE COOKIES”.
But every afternoon you manage to ignore that note, get up, wander towards the cafeteria, buy a cookie and, while chatting with colleagues around the cash register, eat it. It feels good, and then it feels bad. Tomorrow, you promise yourself, you’ll muster the willpower to resist. Tomorrow will be different.
But tomorrow, the habit takes hold again…”
Ultimately DuHigg had to decipher his own habit loop by understanding what he was really looking for.
Read how he solved the challenge here.
What does this have to do with your business success?
Everything!
You may not realize it but you have certain habits within your business that are either helping you scale or actually preventing it. To add to this, your teams also have certain habits that are helping you grow, or not.
The irony is you probably know what these are! Just like you know eating cookies aren’t great for your waistline, and wasting time in business isn’t good for your bottom line!
In the business I ran prior to running Whale my negative habits like trying to continuously put out fires, repeatedly answering the same questions, and not sharing the most helpful information with my team, meant that we couldn’t scale as fast as we wanted.
I felt continuously frustrated as did my team!
But it was this that lead me to co-found Whale and to take a closer look at the habits that help businesses scale.
Off the top of your head, can you think of some of the habits that stifle your growth?
So now how to change?
The Golden Rule of Habit Change — Why Transformation Occurs
When was the last time you met someone who changed their habits out of force? It just doesn’t work. “Bad” habits are very difficult to eradicate. Instead, it’s about changing them or should I say overwriting them with a new routine. The cue stays the same, the reward stays the same, craving stays the same, but the routine linking the cue to the reward is changed.
If we link this to business, the cue is probably some sort of pain. Someone in your team or even a customer needs help with a question. So your routine is to answer it. Your reward is feeling useful and knowing that you’ve solved a problem.
But do this 100 times over in a day and you’ve got yourself a really BIG problem; lack of time!
In the case study from The Power of Habit, Alcoa, a huge US aluminum producer appointed Paul O’Neill as its CEO.
Against tradition, O’Neill set out worker safety as the number 1 priority. Stakeholders and shareholders initially wobbled and didn’t like this approach at all. But one year on and revenue, profits, and staff engagement had rocketed.
“You can’t order people to change, that’s not how the brain works,” said O’Neill. “But I knew Alcoa had to transform. So I decided to start by focusing on just one thing. If I could disrupt habits around one thing, it would spread through the entire company.”
What if you could solve your lack of time and make your and your team’s lives easier? THIS is why I started Whale.
I knew that people on my team would always need help (the cue) and I knew they wanted to be able to be productive and help customers (the reward). I also knew I wanted to feel good about helping them and customers (also the reward). What needed to change was our routine.
So I set an experiment to see what would happen if I created company documentation that the relevant team member could access instead of simply answering a question?
A LOT happened!
We grew. A LOT.
As we grew I became obsessive about this process of documentation in the business. I appointed experts within my team instead of trying to do it all myself.
And so started to develop a habit and culture of scaling and success.
Starbucks and the Habit of Success — When willpower becomes automatic
In The Power of Habit, Duhigg mentions the power of cornerstone habits. We have habits everywhere in our lives, but certain routines — cornerstone habits — lead to a cascade of other positive actions because of them.
Think about how you might feel if you started your day with exercise or a walk? Would you be more productive? It’s more likely that other positive habits would follow.
So think about how you and your teams might be more productive if you started just one habit?
Starbucks is one of the world’s most successful brands, often cited in many a business success case study.
The cornerstone habit in Starbucks ‘ approach to training is willpower. Many studies apparently identify willpower or self-discipline as the single most important keystone habit for individual success.
Longitudinal studies observing childrens’ willpower, then tracking their lives consistently over time find a high correlation between those who have a high level of willpower and those who attained selection for sought-after schools and obtained higher SATs. Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than IQ.
Does this mean that those of us who don’t have willpower have to suffer lower levels of success? Not at all!
It turns out however that willpower is learnable.
Starbucks gives employees routines to habitual around difficult situations, but the training manuals also have lots of blank pages. Each employee is asked to think ahead and figure out for themselves what they will do when the cue occurs. And then they’re asked to populate their own training manual.
- What might happen in your business if you made habits easy?
- What if you set up knowledge experts within your team instead of trying to do everything yourself?
- What routines do you need to create, or recreate in your business to win back more time?
Think about it.
