MANTRAS AT WORK

The age-old question – how do you make change stick?

The companies I work with invest significantly in helping their leaders achieve growth by getting them together in workshops and rooms to inform, educate and engage.

Workshops and conferences are an essential step to gaining buy-in when it comes to setting and delivering on a new strategy or changing cultures to be more constructive and productive. Often, people leave these spaces fired up, full of positive intent, and ready to take action.

But that momentum quickly wanes when they get back to their busy calendars, full email inbox’s and long task lists. Sometimes it’s just easier to revert to what you know when you feel overwhelmed with responsibility.

So how do you keep that momentum going once your people have left the workshop room? How do you help people overcome the pull towards old habits?

We are creatures of habit. Changing one habit with a new one, takes considerable effort. This is why James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” has been a New York Times best seller and continues to be in Top 20 bookseller lists year on year. The central theme in Clear’s book is to choose one habit at a time, and just focus on getting 1% better every day. Moving the needle just 1% everyday, creates compound interest over time delivering exponential impact.  Hence, the “atomic” in atomic habit.

But to change a habit, one must first remember to do so.

This is where mantras come in.

Mantras are short, sharp, repeatable statements that stick in the mind and act as sign-posts to behaviour change. Mantras drive momentum because they become the call to action, the pneumonic for growth, the ditty to change.  

Over the last two weeks, I’ve worked with companies to not only deliver memorable learning experiences, but also embed the Mantras that will support new habit formation once they get back to work.

At IDP Education, a company who help people achieve their internal education goals, I delivered my INSPIRE two-day leadership program to a group of high potentials learning to be leaders.

Over two days we applied empirically based methods to effective goal setting, feedback, coaching, and bringing a strengths-based approach to leadership. Some of the mantras the team took away were:

• Ask vs Tell – to empower others to solve their own challenges and own their own solutions
• 6:1 – the ideal ratio of positive to constructive feedback to build a high performing team
• AID for feedback: a model for feedback that involves stating the Action, Impact, and Desired Outcomes.
• Put strengths to work: to remember to always ask what people do well, and get them to use more of their strengths
• Start with why: also the title of Simon Sinek’s book, but a great mantra to remember to communicate the purpose or intent behind your communications.

At Viridian Glass – Australia’s largest and most customer centric glass processor, I delivered a strategy check-in workshop for their top 30 leaders. Viridian Glass are 6-months in to launching a new growth ambition, and this conference was designed to check in on progress and refocus the group on their shared mission.

The key mantra here was collaborate to grow, which also happens to be a key strategic theme of the plan. This conference challenged leaders across regions to each own their share of responsibility and find ways to leverage capability across the group to deliver even better customer outcomes.

Whatever your ambition – whether it be to grow yourself, your team, or your company – find the mantras that stick. Find your call to action that will constantly act as the key motivator to get outside your comfort zone and try something new.