Chapter 5:
Starbucks and the Habit of Success – When willpower
becomes automatic
The cornerstone habit in Starbucks approach to training is willpower. Many studies apparently identify willpower/ self control/ self-discipline as the single most important keystone habit for individual success. Longitudinal studies observing childrens’ willpower, then tracking their lives consistently find a high correlation between those who resisted and those who attained selection for sought after schools and obtained higher SATs. Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than IQ. So push to make willpower a habit. Starbucks now train self-discipline to achieve better service quality. Willpower is learnable.
Researcher Mark Muraven not
satisfied with explanation of willpower as a skill. A skill is something
usually attained and not forgotten, so why does it seem to ebb and flow? He
demonstrated that willpower is finite. Like a muscle, if used a lot it gets
depleted. Hence if undertaking something that requires willpower, bring it
earlier in the day and if that’s not possible, conserve your willpower til you
need it. Not easy to put in place training for self-discipline though – many
companies tried and failed. If you have low self-discipline, prob not likely to
attend or do the work that’s needed.
Study in 1992 in an orthopaedic unit
in Scotland demonstrated that patients will improve recovery rates following
surgery if they plan and anticipate how they are going to manage the pain
involved in recovering from joint ops. And if they plan themselves (not
following someone else’s plan), and if the plan is specific. So, not “if/ when
pain occurs I will…” but “when I go to the bus stop my knee will ache. When
this happens I will rest on a seat for 5 minutes before pushing on”. Knowing
their plan also meant planning ahead and thinking about what to do when their
temptation to stop would be at its greatest, hence connection with willpower.
Starbucks gives employees routines
to habitualise around difficult situations, but the training manuals also have
lots of blank pages. Each employee is asked to think ahead and figure out for
themselves what they will do when the cue occurs. And populate their own
training manual.
Muraven wondered why in some
situations willpower was easy to build and in others it was not. He found that
when people were given a task that required willpower and they felt they had a
choice or were asked in a friendly way, it was easy. It took less willpower. If
people felt coerced or forced to participate, it took more willpower and was
harder to foster. Hence, giving employees a sense of agency can radically
increase the amount of energy and focus they bring to their jobs. And vice
versa; lack of autonomy needs more willpower and likely more mistakes will
occur when/ if it runs out.
Chapter 6
The Power of a Crisis – How Leaders Create Habits
Through Accident and Design
Rhode Island Hospital had a lot of unhealthy habits. This was evident in a number of wrong site surgeries and incidents as well as staff climate. Uses this example to highlight that there are no organisations without habits. There are only those with ones that have been deliberately designed, and ones where habits have been created without forethought. But sometimes in the heat of a crisis, leaders can transform undesirable ones into virtuous ones.
Seminal economic study by Nelson and
Winter of many organisations found that, though it might seem like
organisations make rational choices based on deliberate decision making,
particularly larger orgs are guided by long-held org habits formed from the
thousands of interactions and independent decisions of its employees. These are
what gets the work done. Or not. The habits of an org are the unspoken truces
that dampen the civil war of rivalry, power-grabbing and success seeking that
takes place within companies. They can prevent the outbreak of out and out
conflict. However as with Rhode Island, they can create an unstable peace which
can be as corrosive as any civil war. The truce here was inequitable, the
nurses found workarounds to tyrannical medical behaviour.
A more equitable truce may have
saved things, but a truce in keeping everyone level also has to paradoxically
make it clear who is in charge. Lengthy case study into the KX fire in 1987
illustrates this point.
Rhode Island and KX both suggested
that things had to deteriorate so low before enough people were motivated to
change their daily routines. Never waste a good crisis.
