The information regarding Jim Collins’ five levels of leadership (last week) led to some interesting email conversation (thank you Lori) regarding personal work habits. If you’ll recall, a “highly capable individual” is defined as one who “makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.” It was on the topic of good work habits that the exchange was based.

Lori pointed out that there are a lot of talented people with skills and knowledge who have terrible work habits, and that she would rather work with less talented, less knowledgeable people any day of the week. She makes a very good point.

Just the other day while working with a client on a hiring policy, we had a long discussion about what we were hiring for. It is generally easier to train work skills than to train someone to be a team player or to train them to have discipline or a good worth ethic. With a few obvious exceptions (surgeons pop to mind), give me an emotionally mature, self-motivated, less experienced person over an undisciplined, undermining or emotionally unstable talented person any day.

You know the type. The manager who never gets any of her work done on time, who is always rifling through a stack of unruly looking paper, frantically behaving as if she has the completed assignment in there somewhere – when everyone, including her, knows it’s not done. Project managers from other departments make jokes about who has to take her as a resource on their next project, because nobody wants to chase her down for the constantly overdue action items. But when her subordinates are late with an assignment or let a detail slip, watch out – the blame finger will standing at rigid attention. It doesn’t matter how much this manager knows technically about her area of responsibility, because the negative energy wrought by the dysfunctional behavior undermines the whole effort.

So what are good work habits? An extremely important work habit to develop – which is frequently overlooked – is the ability to focus at the right level of detail. Some people only focus on the big picture, and don’t know when it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. Other people latch onto some microscopic detail and distract the rest of the environment with their inappropriately applied zoom feature. Both types of people have bad work habits (or, perhaps, demonstrate good work habits only a small percentage of the time). If you want to contribute meaningfully to an organizational effort, you have to develop the ability to go from microscope to telescope, and you have to know when ordinary glasses are all that is required.

Another important work habit is advance preparation for meetings. This seems so basic, but it’s astounding how many people show up for a meeting without having read the meeting materials, done preliminary research related to the meeting agenda, or given even a few minutes of reflection to what they intend to accomplish in the meeting. And let’s not forget how many meetings don’t have an agenda even posted in advance (a terrible work habit). Considering the expense of most meetings, each one should be prepared for as if preparing to negotiate the price on a new car. Corporate values would increase overnight if people would just prepare in advance for their meetings.

A work habit that is somewhat controversial due to the record creating component is that of journaling. If managers would all journal – keep notebooks that don’t have perforated pages (so don’t fall apart), mark each of their action items with a readily-recognizable icon in the margins (the better to cross off, my dear), and record decisions made and key points of discussions held, corporate memory and achievement would increase dramatically. Of course, the lawyers frequently don’t like this, because then there is a written record that could be subpoenaed in litigation. But it seems crazy to sacrifice achievement for fear of litigation, and it seems much simpler to just never do anything unethical or illegal (of course, that’s a topic for another day). Journaling is a great work habit.

Some bad work habits would be laughable if they weren’t so pernicious: answering your phone during a conversation with someone else or during a meeting (why do we think voice mail exists?); wandering out of meetings when our presence is requested or required – and forgetting to wander back in again; having conversations and arguments over email that would be better addressed in meetings, and making decisions or having important discussions without key people present all come to mind. Other bad habits were supposedly bred out of us during grade school, like our aforementioned manager who fails to complete work on time, poor attendance, sloppy work, poor grammar and spelling, basic math mistakes, and jumping to conclusions. And the really big one - the person who spends all their time acting like they work harder than everyone else, when in fact they work very little.

I’m not saying I don’t value people with tremendous talent, intelligence, and drive. I am saying that if you’re going to go to the effort to develop those admirable qualities, why waste your potential impact through sloppy and inconsiderate behaviors? Let’s all sing the praises of good work habits. I know that just typing that sentence made my old school Principal, Sister Lucy, smile sweetly wherever she is.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill