What's your habit?

The key to reaching your goals is not to visualize the end, but to turn these goals into actionable habits.  ~Senia Maymin & Margaret Greenberg

We probably all have them; goals that cause us to visualize a different future.  These goals come in many shapes and sizes: financial goals, home location goals, travel goals, accomplishment goals, etc.  While visualizing the end can be an enjoyable journey on its own, we don't start to actually realize those goals until we begin to change or create some actionable habits.

To put this in the perspective of organizations, many organizations create a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, coined by Jim Collins), or a vision statement for the future.  What happens next is the key indicator as to whether or not they have a chance at reaching their BHAG.  Does the leadership team get excited, psyched, and hyped up; and then everyone retreats back to their offices and returns to work as usual?  Or, do they plunge into identifying actionable habits that they will each need to commit to as well as hold one another accountable to in order to move toward their goal?

This past week while driving, I started listening to the book Crucial Conversations.  Following is a quote that really caught my attention.  I see organizations frequently trying to tweak systems, revise processes and come up with a new structure, believing this will allow them to achieve their goals.  The authors argue that more times than not, the real problem is behavior (i.e., actionable habits).

Most leaders get it wrong.  They think that organizational productivity and performance are simply about policies, processes, structures, or systems.  So when their software product doesn't ship on time, they benchmark others' development processes.  Or when productivity flags, they tweak their performance management system.  When teams aren't cooperating, they restructure. 

Our research shows that these types of nonhuman changes fail more often than they succeed.  That's because the real problem never was in the process, system, or structure—it was in employee behavior.  The key to real change lies not in implementing a new process, but in getting people to hold one another accountable to the process.

Human behavior is a significant part of organizations that is all too frequently overlooked.  Or worse yet, we think that it's the fluffy, touchy-feely things that have little impact on productivity and financial outcomes.  However, at the end of the day, I think we'd all be hard-pressed to come up with something other than "actionable habits" that will move us closer to our goals.  And, actionable habits = human behavior with accountability.

But don't take my word for it; try it for yourself.  Dust off that BHAG or vision, and identify a few actionable habits (behaviors) that will move you in the direction of your goal and commit to those habits for a few months and see what happens.  Or, get your entire leadership team to join in the effort and hold one another accountable to those new habits.  Position it as a team building exercise, something that will not only help the organization but will also contribute to leadership development.