Living the Habits

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December 11, 2017
Aug 11, 2022
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5
 min
Living the Habits

Sean Walsh, the Co-Founder of 1904labs, gives examples of how 1904labs team members use the habits.

Transcript

I noticed also people who didn't know anything about the principles and then seeing some of the things I've seen transformative interactions between people.

People having crunchy human interaction issues that have learned the principles and have applied them, and some of those issues have completely evaporated. And it's not to say everything's hunky-dory, because every organization has things that they continue to need to work on but I have seen demonstrated, demonstrated proof that watching somebody use habit five, and understanding somebody before being understood, and just seeing the tension melt away, and the problems and then using habit six, synergizing to figure out hey how can we solve this in a way that works for both of us.

Just bring yourself to work every day and just be open to learning from your teammates and be open to giving your teammates you know things to learn from you.

And just embracing the habits and I think you'll I think the culture will reveal itself if it's somebody new and hopefully you'll see it in action, and once again, if you don't, I'd like to know about it.

Yeah, I mean well first of all we don't have any offices so everybody sits out in the office and I've tried to model that I'm approached you can approach me on anything at any time. Whether you want to come up to my desk and talk to me about it or ask for time to meet with me, send me a message on slack or on email and I do the best to get back with somebody in a timely manner, kind of understand the issue.

And I think people would tell you that a lot of the things that we've done so far are as a result of our employees saying, "Let's not do it this way, let's do it this way." And we do everything in an agile and human-centered way, including improve the company. We actually have an active continuous improvement backlog that is influenced by the feedback we've gotten in our surveys from employees, and we're going to continue down that path, because the employees, you know, the employees will tell us what to do. And they'll tell us when to make changes if we will only listen to them.

And I'm committed, and our leadership team is committed, to listening to people. And understanding once again habit five, seek first to understand before being understood. It's the number one habit, and we're going to use that, and everywhere, including, "Hey, is something wrong at 1904labs? Let us know."

We may not agree, once again, understanding is not agreement, but we certainly want to understand.

And if we do agree or if we need to use habit six synergize to figure out what we're going to do about it, then we'll take action.

ATTRIBUTION:
All excerpts are from: https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits.php and the book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®.