When I first started my business, I set a goal to write a blog post every week. For six years, I did just that. When I was tired, when I was busy, I did it anyway because I had set the goal and knew it was important to be consistent to get the results I wanted. It became a part of the rhythm of my week and eventually, a habit. A good one, as far as I was concerned, so I kept at it.
Until I didn’t.
When six years turned into seven, when things started to get busy, when I was reevaluating some things, one week I thought, ‘I’m not doing it. I just don’t have it in me. And what difference does one week make in the grand scheme of things? It’s just one week and then I’ll get right back to it.’
And I did. The following week, I got back to it.
But not the week after that.
I had gotten a taste of the extra time and figured, since nothing catastrophic happened, it would be fine to miss another one too. Then, before I knew it, a month went by, and I hadn’t written anything at all. Six years of consistency gone just like that. The positive habit went away so quickly.
There is conflicting research about how long it takes to establish a good habit. A persistent, though erroneous, number that pops up a lot is 21 days. Another common number is 66 days which was the average amount of time it took people to develop a habit during an experiment. It is important to note here that that 66 days was an average. For some people, it took 18 days and for others as many as 254. Suffice it to say, like with most things, it depends.
However long it may take you to establish a good habit, it is important to remember that it does not end there. There is no magic number after which it all becomes easy. You still need to do the work to sustain that good habit. After that initial momentum and excitement wear off, it takes real commitment and discipline to keep at it.
When you are new to a position or a skill, you often receive some level of training and support. This beginning can be exciting as you are doing something new and receiving encouragement along the way. But after the beginning, the support and the excitement tend to wane. What was once so important often gets replaced by the next important thing and growth stops or even regresses.
As a manager it is essential that you recognize this and lead in a way that you remain committed to your good habits both for your own growth and for the growth of your team.
Think back to when you first started in your role as a supervisor. You may have taken trainings, read books, talked to other managers, gotten coaching, watched YouTube videos, or any other number of methods to learn how to be effective. Since you started, how often are you still doing that? How consistently are you doing it? What good habits did you have in the beginning that have since gone by the wayside?
Now think about everything you do when you hire and welcome a new staff member. How often do you meet with them? Give them feedback? Ask them for their feedback? Introduce them to other people at your organization? Providing training for them? Recognize them? Check in on them? How long are you able to sustain it?
For many of us, we want to stick with these good habits, but then things get busy. Or we get complacent. Or we assume that they are not necessary anymore. That weekly check-in moves to bi-weekly. Or it gets scheduled over. We mean to reschedule it, but it gets complicated, and we figure we will just wait until the next one. Before we know it, we are barely meeting at all.
This holds true for so many of these initial good habits. We mean to be intentional about giving and receiving feedback but after a while, we just…don’t. Same for coaching, opportunities for growth, praise, building relationships and connecting people to people they might not know in the organization, reviewing policies, and simply checking in.
To be a successful supervisor, it is important that you remember these good habits long after someone is new. You may need to alter what this looks like from someone’s first day to their 90th to their 407th, but you should not let go of these good habits. Once you start to drift away from them, it becomes all too easy to lose them altogether.
This concept is important to remember in our professional growth as well. Immediately after we have had some type of professional development- a training, a conference, a coaching session- we feel energized and ready to go. We might implement our new learning for a little bit, but if we do not keep at it, it too quickly goes away. We need to commit to the habit of this ongoing cycle of growth and remember that the growth does not begin and end with that professional development opportunity. It requires feedback and self-reflection and then additional support and training, and that cycle should continue to go round and round.
There are many strategies that can help when establishing and sustaining a good habit. These include:
- Setting a specific, measurable goal (e.g., we are going to meet twice a month for 45 minutes we are going to meet more often).
- Scheduling the habit and doing what you can not to schedule over it.
- Keeping track of impact.
That last one is essential. The point of these good habits is to produce something positive. It is not simply doing for the sake of doing. You need to be clear about why you are doing what you are doing and what the result is. This should always be front and center and will help you stay focused even when you lose momentum.
When establishing the habit, ask yourself:
- What is the point?
- What is the impact?
- What is the process?
When these good habits involve your staff, be sure you communicate these and that you are on the same page. It is important that you agree about how you will maintain the good habit and why it matters. If staff do not see any point or benefit, the good habit will not feel very good to them.
If you find you are going through the motions in your own good habits, it is time to reassess. Is the habit still providing benefit? Is the shift in commitment a result of no longer seeing the point or is it a result of losing that initial excitement and energy?
There is a popular motivational saying that floats around social media- discipline over motivation. This is as simplified as it is true. Even when we know something is good for us, it does not mean that we will always want to do it. Or ever, for that matter. For some good habits, we may learn to enjoy doing them and for others, it may be an ongoing challenge. Are there ways to make these habits more enjoyable? It is certainly worth exploring and experimenting, and it is important to recognize that some habits are going to require more effort than others.
So, how do you start establishing or reestablishing a good habit? The first step, like with all things, is to start with the end in mind. What are you trying to accomplish? Once you have determined that, then you can decide which habits will help get you there. For most goals, there will be many different paths that can get you there, so try out different ones and see which produce the most impact and which are the easiest to sustain.
None of this work is easy, but it becomes a lot easier when you create habits and systems that work. Which one are you ready to try?
