Managing Leadership^®

That’s what habits do – at least, old ones. Why is that?

Jenny and Erin, who write about the adventures and thoughts encountered in their quest for understanding, ask about habits: how important are they, how do they form, and how do you shape them?

These are very good questions. Many of us associate habits with physical actions, things we tend to do at certain times or in certain ways. These are distinct from rituals, which we typically do consciously, or tics, which stem from a condition that, while often unconsciously executed, has a different psychological basis than does habit.

Learning to drive a car, especially one with a manual transmission, may be a good example of the development of this sort of a habit. There are a number of important activities associated with the successful, not to mention safe, operation of a vehicle that required intense concentration when we first undertook them, but that we now hardly give a thought to. These are functional habits that help us survive, and to engage in our daily activities with greater efficiency and safety; because the routine parts have become habit, we can devote our conscious attention to more important events or developments.

But the importance of habits goes deeper than that. Priscilla Palmer makes this point unmistakably when she says that “habits are the essence of who we are.”

They are indeed. They are the embodiment of our system of triaging life’s events. We decide what requires conscious attention, what is important but can be converted to habit, and what can be dropped altogether. What is more telling about how you look at the world than the aggregate of the decisions of this sort you have made?

In this sense, they are, literally, our way of looking at the world. When an event appears on our radar screen, do we focus on it consciously, or drop it down one of our rabbit holes of habitual thinking – a kind of automatic screening device that matches and rematches it against the templates we’ve developed for viewing and dealing with events just such as these, rolling it along to drop through the next filter or, finally, to be (habitually) dealt with?

Such habits are vital aids to our individual, and even organizational survival. It is precisely because they are such successful survival tools that they are so enduring, so difficult to carelessly dispense with.

But the problem is that the circumstances that led to their development may not be the circumstances that obtain now – either generally or in a specific instance. Accordingly, it is helpful to review your thinking patterns periodically, try to identify your habits, and assess their continuing value. After all, they’re yours – you can modify them to fit new circumstances, or create entirely new ones.

Moreover, you might want to be sure you incorporate new stages in your chain of habitual logical assessment/treatment of events to help you avoid misidentifying a non-routine event as one that can be treated with unconscious, habitual thinking and action. You can do this, too. After all, just because you no longer think about driving your manual transmission car doesn’t mean you don’t know that you are, in fact, doing that, and that you will want to be able to automatically emerge from habitual actions to deal alertly with extraordinary occasions.

And those of you who are managers in organizations will undoubtedly recognize the applicability of this to your work, also. Groups have habits, too, and they die hard also. As a manager, it’s your job to make sure you know what they are, and what they’re doing for – or to – your organizational goals and, even, survival.

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Today’s tip: In line with today’s general topic, please take a moment to visit Wally Bock’s excellent article on Magical Thinking.

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