stem week 3 SMCC FALL2019

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.