{"id":1083,"date":"2020-05-12T09:04:07","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T09:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1083"},"modified":"2020-05-12T09:04:08","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T09:04:08","slug":"dont-let-your-habits-define-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/12\/dont-let-your-habits-define-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t let your habits define you"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This week, I had a meeting with the leadership team of a company that has asked me for help to accelerate their growth. We\u2019ve been reconvening regularly and going through the process of defining who we are and what our purpose is as a business, identified the key avenues to accelerate growth, created a plan to execute on and operating mechanisms to follow up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The weird thing is that we\u2019ve been consistently running behind the \nplan in terms of execution and when I pointed this out to them, I got \nthe usual excuses of internal dependencies, external factors outside the\n control of the team and so on. However, at the core, something else was\n going on. The team has been working together for more than a decade, \nduring which the company went through some difficult times that resulted\n in their having become extremely careful and risk avoidant. Over the \nyears, they\u2019ve developed a set of habits that ensure wide safety \nmargins. For instance, any new hiring only takes place after the revenue\n from customers for the new hire has been guaranteed for a long time to \ncome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The surprising thing is that these habits might have been useful at \nsome point in the past, but at this stage where the company has raised a\n good chunk of funding, there\u2019s no reason to be avoiding financial and \nbusiness risk. Instead, with the whole COVID-19 situation, now is the \ntime to invest and expand the team with great talent that\u2019s now \navailable because of many companies scaling back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only are the current set of habits counterproductive for what \nwe\u2019re looking to achieve. The team even fully recognizes and admits that\n this is the case. And yet, as individuals and as a team, they struggle \nto let go of their habits and old ways of working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This example is an instance of normal human behavior. Even though we \ntend to think of ourselves as rational beings that are occasionally \nbothered by these pesky emotions, the reality is that we\u2019re irrational \nbeings that are, according to some research, for more than 95 percent of\n the time driven by habits and that have a tendency to post-rationalize \nour entirely irrational behavior. The brain is a fantastic \nstory-generating machine and most of the time, it\u2019s generating stories \nexplaining to ourselves why we did something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many of the companies and teams I work with, I\u2019ve observed the \nsame situation and it\u2019s the leadership team that tends to be at the \nheart of it. For all the explanations and excuses of why we are in the \nsituation we find ourselves in, basically, it almost always is the \nleadership team that\u2019s hampering the company\u2019s development and growth. \nAnd in the few cases where there really are external factors at play, it\n still behooves you as a leader to take responsibility anyway as it \ncauses you to shift your mindset from a victim to the protagonist of \nyour own story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t mean to say that leadership teams of companies that aren\u2019t \ndoing so well need to be universally kicked out and replaced. Instead, \nI\u2019m asking you, dear reader, to spend more time reflecting on what you \ndo, how you behave, why you believe you do these things and to what \nextent it might be that you\u2019re post-rationalizing non-constructive \nbehavior. The only way to break out of these situations is by \ncontinuously holding up a mirror to yourself and carefully analyzing \nwhether what you\u2019re doing is actually the best course of action under \nthe circumstances. To me, that\u2019s the most effective, or even the only \nway, to continuously learn, improve and reinvent yourself and your \norganization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Lao Tzu famously said: \u201cWatch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.\u201d And I believe that we should all aim for the highest destiny we can accomplish in our lifetimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>) or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, I had a meeting with the leadership team of a company that has asked me for help to accelerate their growth. We\u2019ve been reconvening regularly and going through the process of defining who we are and what our purpose is as a business, identified the key avenues to accelerate growth, created a plan … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1085,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions\/1085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}