Switch - Chip Heath [88]
• Motivate the Elephant. 1. Grow your people. Macho men don’t like to wear dorky safety glasses. Maybe Poppe could find glasses that look more like Bono’s and less like a junior-high-school shop teacher’s. That might make the change less of an identity threat.
• Shape the Path. 1. Rally the herd. By requiring everyone in the plant to wear the safety gear at all times, Poppe is flipping the social norm in favor of compliance. When you look around and everyone is wearing safety glasses, you are more likely to wear them yourself. 2. Build habits. Poppe added one final, inspired touch: She painted a large blue line around the plant and made the new safety policy effective anywhere inside the line. Also, at the entry points, she posted blue wooden men who are wearing the appropriate gear. By installing the blue line and the blue men, Poppe was basically introducing an action trigger. She was training the workers to think, When I cross this line, that’s my cue to put on my gear. The action trigger helped make the behavior habitual.
[What happened: As a result of Poppe’s innovations, injuries at the plant dropped 21 percent from previous levels (which were already among the best of manufacturers doing similar work).]
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Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s why they’re such a critical tool for leaders. Leaders who can instill habits that reinforce their teams’ goals are essentially making progress for free. They’ve changed behavior in a way that doesn’t draw down the Rider’s reserves of self-control.
Habits will form inevitably, whether they’re formed intentionally or not. You’ve probably created lots of team habits unwittingly. If your staff meetings always start out with genial small talk, then you’ve created a habit. You’ve designed your meeting autopilot to yield a few minutes of warm-up small talk. The hard question for a leader is not how to form habits but which habits to encourage.
General William “Gus” Pagonis led the logistics operation for the Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush. Pagonis was responsible for moving 550,000 troops halfway around the world, along with all of their equipment. His team made the arrangements to serve 122 million meals, pump 1.3 billion gallons of fuel, and deliver 32,000 tons of mail. Even a Wal-Mart executive would get spooked thinking about this.
Needless to say, clear and efficient communication was essential. Every morning, General Pagonis held a meeting that started at 8 a.m. and ended at 8:30. No great innovation there, but Pagonis made two changes to the routine. First, he allowed anyone to attend (and he required that at least one representative from each functional group be present). That way, he could ensure a free and open exchange of information across the organization. Second, he required everyone to stand up during the whole meeting.
Here’s Pagonis on the benefits of the stand-up meeting:
Early on, I discovered that making people stand up keeps the ball moving at a quicker pace. People speak their piece and then quickly yield the floor to the next person. On the rare occasion that someone starts to get long-winded or wax philosophic, an unmistakable kind of body language begins to sweep through the crowd. People shift from foot to foot, fidget, look at their watches—and pretty quickly, the conversation comes back into focus…. I can’t recall the last time I had to crack the whip. The peer group has great power.
Pagonis was consciously creating a habit. Any meeting format he chose would have quickly become habitual. It would have been just as easy for him to enshrine a two-hour, seated blabfest. What’s exciting here is not the existence of the habit, but rather the insight that the habit should serve the mission. When you’ve got 550,000 troops to relocate, you need focus and clarity and efficiency. A stand-up meeting won’t guarantee any of that, but it will help, and it’s “free”—it’s not any harder to create than the