The Question Is … HOW Do You Break The Habit?

Everything we are discussing here is true!! I admit it, I know it.

I am on board with “the new world of work,” with vision, with engaging talent, with the need to obliterate past ways of working, with a customer experience beyond compare. I think everyone contributing to this blog site is, too. So … why isn’t it a done deal yet??? Not the believing it to be true—but the DOING it??

Here are some reflections from my perspective (ex-corporate, team worker, mum, wife, woman in the workplace, forty-something …)

What we are trying to do in our world of work is to change human habit. How hard is that?? (An ideal thing to reflect on at the end of January, the month of resolutions, et al. Have you kept yours? If so, why, how? If not, why not?)

As I reflect on this, and I apply it to the work aspects of my life, all becomes clear. The way we work, the way business is run, all is based in habits from a bygone (Industrial/Command and Control) era. Globalisation, Technology, etc., removed the need for all those operating systems. Yet as humans in the workplace, we haven’t managed to break our long-learned habits yet. And the pace of business means we are always more likely to respond as we always have, rather than in a new and (to us) unfamiliar way.

Old habits die hard: I once moved my waste bin from one place in my office to another, yet it took me a full month to stop habitually walking to the old position with my rubbish … and how simple is that? Our workplaces are far more complex. We can’t often allow ourselves 30 days of getting it wrong in action—though the brain has the desire—before our action finally matches the intent!

So in addition to “getting” the new world of work with its terminology, technology, and new fundamental operating system, we must “get” the core drivers of human behaviour—our own first, and then, those of everyone around us.

Do the leaders in your organisation “get” human behaviour?

Helen Green posted this on January 29, 2007, in Leadership.
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