Creating Habits That Deliver Goals

Part 3 of a 3 part series on improving key business priorities through creative performance management

In Part 1 of this series we looked at an overview of the process of goal setting. This included the importance of managers leading people through the goal setting process, explaining the key business priorities and discussing goals and resources with each team member that would contribute to them.

It also emphasised the importance of the manager and team member committing to a regular process of discussion, support and coaching during the goal delivery process.

Part 2 was about how to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound (SMART) goals. Unless goals are tightly specified in this way the chances of achieving them are slim.

Part 3 is about behaviours and processes that drive the achievement of those goals. Delivering goals is a critical part of improving business performance but it competes for time and resources with everyday business tasks. The right behaviours and processes keeps a focus on the delivery of goals and prevents them being overtaken and submerged by everyday tasks.

To achieve goals we need to develop habits

A habit is a behaviour or routine that is built by aggregating small improvements. Through regular repetition it eventually becomes automatic. The key to habit formation is the number of repetitions, not the length of time over which it is performed. When repeated often enough the habit will become automatic and you will no longer have to think about each step. Building systems and processes that create habits builds a compounding system of improvement for delivering results and learning.

In his excellent book Atomic Habits James Clear provides a clear method and examples, based on proven behavioural research, for developing habits that can be locked into the way we go about achieving results on an ongoing basis. We have drawn heavily from this book and added other research material to it.

Habits are created by making regular small improvements on a daily basis

Regular small improvements over time make a huge difference. They are much more significant than single massive actions or major moments. Improving by 1% each day may be so small that it is hardly noticeable but if done each day over a year you end up almost 38 times better than when you started: 1.01³⁶⁵ =37.78

In the days when I was consulting in the Total Quality Management space, the best continuous improvement plan I ever saw started, after a two hour team meeting on the first day, with a minuted action to move a filing cabinet from one side of the office to the other.

SIMPLE STEPS TO BUILDING HABITS THAT DELIVER GOALS

All habits are made up of a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response and reward. In Atomic Habits these have been combined into a framework which provides a set of working rules for creating good habits. By using these rules we can develop a set of practical actions for building habits.

THE FIRST LAW OF BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

MAKE IT OBVIOUS

Every habit is triggered by a cue and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out. Make your cue to act obvious, regular and accessible. The habits most likely to be repeated are those that happen at the same time each day, follow the same existing behaviour or where there are multiple triggers in the environment.

Prepare an implementation intention

This is about setting up your cue to act.

It is simply a written plan about how you intend to implement your habit. The two most common cues are time and location. Your implementation intention says

• what you are going to do
• when you are going to do it
• where you are going to do it

Many studies have shown that making a specific written plan for where and when you will perform a new habit improves the chances of you doing it. Implementation plans take the general written format of:

“I will {BEHAVIOUR} at {TIME} in {LOCATION}”

“I will spend 15 minutes reviewing my goals and planning my next steps at 9am each day at my office desk”

Make sure you schedule your implementation intention in your calendar. What doesn’t get scheduled doesn’t happen.

Visualise how you will achieve your goals

This is about building the desire and obtaining the rewards. Think through and visualise:

• the steps you will take
• the people you will need to work with
• the obstacles you are likely to encounter
• how you will overcome those obstacles and
• what success will look and feel like.

Form a mental picture of the process you will go through on the way to achieving your goal. Be prepared to break the steps down to smaller, more manageable steps if they appear too big, too difficult or too long. Remember, what keeps you going is the reward part of the feedback loop. If the step is too difficult or it takes too long, the reward does not come or is delayed, reducing the chances of your habit being repeated.

Find a support person

Find a like-minded support person, who has similar levels of goals to you, that you can schedule regular discussions with on progress, obstacles – and your streak record. Share updates and request and give feedback to each other. Sharing experiences is really helpful because it provides new eyes, ears and a brain to help and encouragement to stick with it.

Schedule regular catch up sessions with your manager

Remember the commitment you both signed up to when agreeing your goals? Schedule a 10-15 minute catchup to share ideas, problems coaching and -suggestions. These work best if you schedule them for the same day and time each week. You might like to agree a punishment with both your support person and your manager that the person responsible for missing the catch up will receive if the catch up doesn’t happen. This can be a fun agreement but it does have the very positive benefit of flagging the miss and therefore increasing the chances that misses will not happen in the future.

Behaviour Stacking

This is a different form of an implementation intention.

Many people decide what to do next based on what they have just finished doing. For example, getting into your car leads to you fastening your seatbelt before turning on the car. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next action. You can use this connectedness of behaviour by identifying an existing habit you already do every day and stacking your new behaviour on top of it.

This is called habit stacking and it is just a different form of an implementation intention. Instead of pairing your new habit with a time and place you pair it with an existing habit. The habit stacking formula is:

“After {CURRENT HABIT] I will [NEW HABIT]”

“After I open my laptop when I start work each day I will work on my goals for a minimum of 15 minutes”

The key is to link your new habit to something you already do each day. You can use it to insert new behaviours into existing routines or to guide your future behaviour when a situation arises:

“After I have completed checking my emails I will spend a minimum of 15 minutes working on my goals before starting any other work”

“Before I finish work on Thursdays I will complete my goal progress update and prepare for my catchup with my manager at 3pm on Fridays”

THE SECOND LAW OF BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE

The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit forming. The attractiveness creates an anticipation of a reward. It triggers a rise in dopamine in the brain which increases the motivation to act. It is the anticipation of the reward, not the receipt of it, that generates action. So how can we use this to increase the chances of us taking action?

Temptation bundling

It is well established science that you are more likely to find a behaviour attractive if you make an action you want to do dependant on completing an action you need to do. Even if you really don’t want to work on your goals you will do it if it means you can do something you really want to do:

After {HABIT I NEED} I will {HABIT I WANT}

You can combine habit stacking with temptation bundling to provide a more comprehensive set of rules:

1. After {CURRENT HABIT} I will {HABIT I NEED}
2. After {HABIT I NEED} I will {HABIT I WANT}

For Example:

1. After “After I open my laptop when I start work each day I will work on my goals for a minimum 15 minutes”
2. After working on my goals for a minimum of 15 minutes I will complete today’s Wordle

THE THIRD LAW OF BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

MAKE IT EASY

It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that, when deciding between two similar options people will naturally gravitate towards the one which requires the least amount of effort. We are motivated to choose the easy option.

That is why it is important to break more difficult goals down to easier, more achievable steps and to set minimal daily goals for the hard days when you would otherwise want to give up.

The two minute rule

In Atomic Habits James Clear has a two minute rule:

“When you start a new habit it should take less than two minutes to do”

The reason for this is that our ability to follow through on our best intentions, is poor, even when the benefits of doing so are well understood. Setting big goals at the beginning makes the process of getting started too hard. The goals are too big, the time and energy required is too great, motivation is not always there because the effort seems greater than the anticipated reward and there are so many other things to do! Despite our best intentions, when other pressures are greater, the Law of Least Effort kicks in and the big goal is just a step too far.

A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The idea is to make it as easy as possible to start, regardless of the obstacles. You can do anything for two minutes. Once you have got started it is much easier to continue doing it. It is about mastering the habit of getting started. This will then increase the chance that you will carry on with the task.

A great example is Christine Carter in this TED talk video. She tells the story about how she became a runner by starting to run for only 1 minute each day.

Decisive moments

Every day there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. The moment when you decide between starting work on your goals or checking your email. These decisive moments decide which path you will take. As we know, checking your email can lead you down a variety of different paths that mean you never get back to your goals.

How to deal with bad habits

The Third Law of Behaviour Change says make it easy to develop good habits. The inverse of this is to make bad habits difficult to do

Mariner7’s cloud based performance development tool is all about making performance easy

The whole idea behind the Mariner7 performance development platform is to make everything to do with the achievement of goals easy. It is a tool designed to make it possible to carry out what we know works. Goal setting, catch up conversations, coaching, progress tracking, feedback, capability, formal reviews and personal development are all on one platform, accessible from anywhere. It even has the capability for reminders and information on what others are doing to help keep people on track.

Organise your environment and schedule

Organising your environment and schedule to make life as easy as possible, including having the right tools that make the job easier, can be the difference between sticking with your habit or giving up.

THE FOURTH LAW OF BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

MAKE IT SATISFYING

The first three laws of behaviour change – make it obvious, make it attractive and make it easy are about increasing the chances that a behaviour will be performed.

The fourth law - make it satisfying - is about increasing the chances that a behaviour will be repeated next time.

Satisfaction is the reward. If an experience is satisfying it is likely to be repeated. If it is not satisfying, there is little reason to repeat it and it is unlikely to recur. This is classical operant psychology which was first published by BF Skinner in the 1930’s. Skinner also found that the chances that a behaviour is repeated is greatest if the reward (satisfaction) is given immediately. If the reward is delayed, the likelihood of it being repeated is reduced.

The Cardinal Rule of Behaviour Change

“What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided”.

To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful after completing the behaviour.

Track Your Habits and keep your streak record

In his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Greg McKeown states “Research has shown that of all forms of human motivation the most effective one is progress”. The best way to measure your progress is to track your habits daily with a habit tracker. James Clear provides a free downloadable one at atomichabits.com or you can make your own. It provides evidence of your progress which provides the motivation to keep you going.

It also enables you to keep a streak record which helps you repeat the act of starting each day. As the Wordle fanatics out there know well, streaks are the consecutive days without a miss that you’ve been actively solving the puzzle. Each day you complete the habit, your streak count increases. However, if you miss a day, your streak resets back to zero.

Streaks have a powerful hold over our behaviour because of the power of repetition which eventually makes the behaviour automatic . They create an emotional response and an implicit system of reward and punishment. By achieving success and getting the emotional reward it provides the chances of repeating the behaviour are reinforced. The longer the streak goes on, the greater the reinforcement and the perceived gain of maintaining it (and the greater the perceived loss of breaking it)¹.

Keep a streak record of your implementation intention by recording it in the entry in your calendar or your habit tracker. You can insert habit tracking into your habit stack as follows:

After {CURRENT HABIT} I will {TRACK MY HABIT]

1. “After I open my laptop when I start work each day I will work on my goals for a minimum of 15 minutes"
2. ”After I have worked on my goals for a minimum of 15 minutes I will record this in my habit tracker"
3. "After working on my goals for a minimum of 15 minutes and recording this in my habit tracker I will complete today’s Wordle"

Principal of Social proof

We pick up habits from people around us. The most productive environment for building habits is one where your desired behaviour is the norm. New habits seem more achievable when you see others doing them every day, particularly if their behaviour is seen as being highly effective. Many of our daily habits are imitations of people we admire. It is the role of the manager to role model this behaviour and lead by example. Doing so rubs off on their people and increases the likelihood the culture across the group will become a high achieving one.

And finally…..

The most important theme of this blog is achieving goals through making a commitment to small, sustainable improvements and repeating desired behaviours over and over. By repeating behaviours regularly and often they eventually become automatic and you don’t have to think about doing them – they just happen.

Success is achieved by continuous improvement of your achievement system. If you want some final inspiration look at what is possible in this TED Talk by Stephen Duneier titled How to achieve your most ambitious goals.

To chat about this article or try Mariner7 for free, contact 

Brian.shaw@mariner7.com

Phone 64 21 406 408