How to harness bad habits to help your career

By Amy Levin-Epstein

 (Random House)

(MoneyWatch) Good habits, like being on time and paying attention to details, are essential for a healthy career. Bad habits, like web surfing and letting an inbox reach max capacity on a weekly basis, can have the opposite affect. So how can you nurture good habits at work and bid adieu to bad ones?

In his new book "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg has compiled a wealth of information on why we form habits and how they can be changed, using both scientific research and real life examples (including Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps).  Here's what Duhigg has to say about workplace habits and harnessing them to be more productive:

How can you stop bad habits at work, like web surfing or chatting with coworkers?

You can't eradicate a habit. Once a habit is there you can't flip a switch and say "I don't want it there anymore." But you can change it. Every habit has three parts -- a cue or trigger, the routine or behavior, and the reward (how our neurology learns to remember that habit for the future). Diagnosis the cue and the reward. If you need a break and it entertains you to talk to a coworker or surf the web and you try to power through the work and ignore the reward craving, the pressure will just build up and you'll procrastinate longer. You have to acknowledge that craving and give it an outlet. So every hour, give yourself five minutes on the web. Or after every task, schedule a short break. Unless you address this cue/reward you can't fix these behaviors. 

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How can you use a "playing your video" technique to prepare for an important meeting?

What you should do is imagine ahead of time how you're going to speak up in a meeting. Mentally visualize the perfect scenario, again and again. That day, when it starts living up to the video in your head, you will feel a sense of victory. Start with details like, "Excuse me, I have something to say." Everything will quiet down, just like in your head, and it will all unfold how you expected. When [it begins to] live up to your expectations, success becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

How can leaders use your research to motivate their team?

Think about the outcomes that you want as a group and what habits you want to cultivate to reach those. If your goal is to get someone [on your team] to habitually make one cold call every morning, you need to give a reward -- even if it's small -- for doing that cold call. It might be a pat on the back, or a five-minute break. Without that reward our neurology never makes this behavior into a habit.

What are "keystone habits" and how do they affect our behavior?

Some habits matter more than others, and they are keystone habits. When you start changing these habits it unlocks other habits in your life. An obvious personal keystone habit is exercise. When you start exercising, you start eating better. And interestingly enough, people who exercise also use their credit cards less often. How people communicate [at work] is also a keystone habit. Keystone habits establish [office] culture. [For instance, try] changing how you greet people by learning their names and greeting them properly. Or write your emails in a more friendly manner. When people begin communicating differently it sends a message about that organization -- we're an organization that cares about each other.

5 ways spring fever can boost productivity

By

Laura Vanderkam

Coming into full bloom (Photo courtesy of Flickr user brianfuller6385)

(MoneyWatch) Winter hasn't been too bad this year in much of the country, but even so, the first few weeks of spring just feel different. A pleasant breeze gives you more energy. Sunshine makes you feel happy for no reason. With flowers blooming more copiously by the minute, it's hard to buckle down and focus on work.

But I think spring can be a great time to change things up a bit, and maybe boost productivity in some unexpected ways. Here's how:

1. Take that conference call outside. We live in a virtual world. Many of us sit tethered to our desks in order to type on laptops and talk on cellphones. This doesn't make much sense. If you've got a long call, go sit outside and smell the flowers while you chat. One-on-one meetings can be done just as easily on a park bench outside your office building as they can be done in a conference room.

2. Get up early to exercise. Now that the temperatures are warmer, burrowing deep under the covers isn't quite so tempting. Set the alarm half an hour earlier and go for a run or walk outside. Even two to three days a week can make a huge difference in your health and mood. (See the related post, What the most successful people do before breakfast.)

3. Use that planning instinct. Some ambitious souls think about their summer vacation plans the previous summer. I've never been that organized, and I know I'm not alone. For some reason, warmer temperatures lend urgency to thinking about what you'll do during your time off. But if you can plan a trip four months from now, in July, why not think about other things you'd like to have done by July? What professional goals can be achieved in the medium term? You think through specifics like hotel reservations, so start thinking through specifics like how you'd meet a new client, how you'd scale up work at an existing one, etc.

4. Take a strategic afternoon off. A big chunk of the happiness boost associated with vacations comes from anticipating them. But you don't need to take a whole week off to anticipate good things to come. Look at the 10-day weather forecast, and choose an afternoon that will be lovely. Put in to take that off, block it on your calendar and plan what sort of spring fun you'll have. A picnic with your kids? A hike in a nearby nature preserve? A mini-canoeing trip? Knowing that your afternoon treat is coming, you'll likely be more organized and productive in the mean time.

5. Bring some blooms into your life. Flowers are rare in January but they aren't now. Make a habit of cutting a few from the yard and bringing them to work with you. Even if you're trapped in a cubicle, a few magnolia blossoms floating in a glass bowl make life a little more calm and sweet.

How are you celebrating spring?

BOOKS

Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To Transforming the Way We Work and Live [Paperback]

Tony Schwartz (Author), Jean Gomes (Author), Catherine McCarthy (Author)

Why You Need to Make Your Life More Automatic

Why is it that three prominent books published just during the past several months focused on the subject of willpower?

The first answer is that neuroscience has finally begun to open a window into the complex way our brains respond to temptation and what it takes to successfully exercise choice.

Second, a raft of recent studies have shown that the capacity for self-control — even more than genetic endowment or material advantage — fuels a range of positive outcomes in life, including more stable relationships, higher paying and more satisfying work, more resilience in the face of setbacks, better health, and greater happiness.

Finally, these books — Willpower, The Willpower Instinct, andThe Power of Habit — are a response to an increasingly evident need. Demand in our lives is truly outpacing our capacity.

The sheer number of choices we must make each day — what foods to eat, what products to buy, what information merits our attention, what tasks to prioritize — can be overwhelming. As Roy Baumeister puts it in Willpower, "Self-regulation failure is the major social pathology of our time."

Each of these books provides compelling studies and fascinating stories that illustrate the challenges we face in exercising more self-control. All of them also come to the same paradoxical conclusion that I did two years ago in a book of my own, Be Excellent at Anything, and that I've oftenwritten about here.

Put simply, the more conscious willpower we have to exert each day, the less energy we have left over to resist our brain's primitive and powerful pull to instant gratification. According to one study, we spend at least one-quarter of each waking day just trying to resist our desires — often unsuccessfully.

Conversely, the more of our key behaviors we can put under the automatic and more efficient control of habit — by building something I call "Energy Rituals" — the more likely we are to accomplish the things that truly matter to us.

How different would your life be, after all, if you could get yourself to sleep 8 hours at night, exercise every day, eat healthy foods in the right portions, take time for reflection and renewal, remain calm and positive under stress, focus without interruption for sustained periods of time, and prioritize the work that matters most?

Right now, the vast majority of what we do each day occurs automatically. We're often triggered, as these authors make vividly clear, by subtle cues we're not even aware of — a smell, a visual image, a familiar sight. These cues prompt us to move away from any potential pain and discomfort, no matter how minimal, and toward immediate reward and gratification, no matter how fleeting.

The primary role of our prefrontal cortex is to bias the brain towards doing the "harder" thing. Unfortunately, our rational capacity is often overwhelmed by the power of our own most visceral and primitive desires.

We're often captive to our biochemistry. When the neurotransmitter dopamine is triggered, for example, what we feel is craving, not pleasure. This explains not just why we fall into a range of self-destructive addictions, but also why we don't take better care of ourselves and make wiser choices day in and day out.

The solution is to learn how to co-opt the more primitive habit-forming regions of our brains, so that rather than reinforcing our negative impulses, they become the soil in which we build positive rituals that serve our long term interests.

So how do you get started? The first step is simply to understand better what you are up against. That requires slowing down. Speed is the enemy of reflection, understanding and intentionality. When we slow down, we can begin to notice both what's driving us, and how to take back the wheel.

Eat slower, for example, and you not only begin to notice how rarely you savor the food you eat, but also how often you eat for reasons other than hunger and how rarely you notice when you've had enough.

To begin strengthening your capacity for self-observation, take two or three minutes at several designated times a day to breathe in to a count of three and out a count of six with your eyes closed. Notice the thoughts, feelings or sensations that arise, name them, and then let them pass. Return to the breath. You're training mindfulness.

We each have an infinite capacity for self-deception — endless ways that the awesome power of our desires cause our prefrontal cortex to defend the indefensible and rationalize behaviors that aren't serving us well. The first step to building willpower and self-control is recognizing how little we currently have.

You can't change what you don't notice.

BOOKS MENTIONED HERE:
Willpower by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney
The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal Ph.D.
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Be Excellent at Anything by Tony Schwartz

What Makes an Effective Executive

An effective executive does not need to be a leader in the sense that the term is now most commonly used. Harry Truman did not have one ounce of charisma, for example, yet he was among the most effective chief executives in U.S. history. Similarly, some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I’ve worked with over a 65-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses. They ranged from extroverted to nearly reclusive, from easygoing to controlling, from generous to parsimonious.

What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:

• They asked, “What needs to be done?”

• They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”

• They developed action plans.

• They took responsibility for decisions.

• They took responsibility for communicating.

• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems

Positioning Yourself for Career Advancement

http://hbr.org/search/managing%20yourself

It's no secret that promotion rates in most industries have slowed during the extended recession. The good news, at least in the United States, is that with the current glimmers of economic growth the "ice floes" surrounding upward movement are beginning to break up. The bad news: competition for the C-suite positions that will open up over the next few years will be intense due the backlog in promotional activity. As a result, upwardly-aspiring executives need to take steps now to position themselves to be "first off the bench" as opportunities for promotion become available.

Given the fact that traditional career paths are extinct in most industries, managers have few guideposts for advancing to the executive level. Only a distinct minority of companies are truly adept at succession planning and career development — and even these firms tend to focus on only a few senior-level people. As a result, aspiring executives are left in the dark about what they need to do to get ahead. Worse, most managers operate under four misconceptions regarding career advancement.

• The belief that producing results in your current job is sufficient. In fact a track record of strong results is what one of my clients calls "table stakes": the minimum required for you to be considered for promotion to the executive level.
• Confidence that you'll get the feedback you need from your boss in your annual performance review. This assumption is, unfortunately, flawed for several reasons. First, most annual reviews focus on performance in your current job, not what you need to do to advance. In addition your boss may not know how you are perceived by the company's senior-level decision makers — and will thus likely steer clear of any feedback that relates to getting ahead.
• The sense that promotions are all about who you know — when in reality in most organizations it's about who knows you and whether you've been able to breed confidence on the part of senior-level decision makers that you can succeed at the executive level.
• A naïve belief that all it takes is adding a little polish, a new suit, a new style. Although senior executives often struggle to define it, executive presence is critical, but it's more profound than a new look. Rather, in most companies it relates to your ability to project the self-confidence that you can handle the unpredictable situations that come with the territory at the executive level.

Positioning yourself to be a top candidate for promotion doesn't happen overnight. It's the result of combining a track record of performance with demonstrated evidence of the core leadership skills required for success at the senior level. Assuming that you're a consistently strong performer, consider the following three strategies to make yourself first off the bench.

First, and this is often the hardest part, take steps to tease out two vital pieces of information: 1) the factors that senior-level decision makers in your company use to make C-suite promotion and placement decisions and 2) how you are viewed by senior management in terms of those skills. Although many companies publish extensive lists of leadership competencies, in most organizations such decisions turn on a limited set of capabilities — for example, strategic thinking and the ability to establish a new direction for the organization; your ability to ensure execution without getting pulled down to too low a level of detail; your skill in leading innovation and managing change; and your knowledge of how the organization works as well as the influence and persuasion skills required to get things done across organizational lines. Without a clear sense of how you are viewed by your company's senior-level decision makers — the strengths you have displayed and the skills you need to develop — you're at a disadvantage in knowing where to devote your career development energies.

Your next step is determining whether you are in an assignment where you can display the necessary capability or need to engineer a move to a new job that allows you to do so. For example, some jobs put such a premium on execution that it's virtually impossible to demonstrate your strategic ability. More often than not, however, with some creativity and assistance from your boss, you can devise a way to both develop and display a needed skill — for example, by participating in a company-wide project to showcase your ability to work with peers from different parts of the company to drive change. It's even better if the team has the opportunity to present its final recommendations to senior management.

Finally, seek out candid feedback on your executive presence — and dig below surface issues related to dress, grooming, and personal carriage. Are you able to project the sense of confidence required to make difficult decisions and take control of unexpected situations? Can you maintain your poise and composure under stress? (Note: how you handle yourself in executive-level presentations is an important indicator of your ability to manage stress in most organizations.) And do you convey a sense of unused "bandwidth," the ability to take on even greater levels of responsibility — or do you project a harried, overwhelmed demeanor that leads others to conclude that you are "maxed out" at your current level?

Some managers, in the absence of this kind of feedback, wait passively in hopes of being tapped for a promotion. By taking the initiative in your own career development and actively working to display your executive-level skills in your current job, you'll find that you're much better equipped to advance when the next promotional opportunity arises.

Managing Yourself: The Paradox of Excellence

Why is it that so many smart, ambitious professionals are less productive and satisfied than they should or could be? Why do so many of them find their upward trajectories flattening into a plateau? In our experience—Tom’s as a business school professor and consultant and Sara’s as a psychiatrist—high achievers often let anxiety about their performance compromise their progress. Because they’re used to having things come easily to them, they tend to shy away from assignments that will truly test them and require them to learn new skills. They have successful images to preserve, so instead of embracing risk, they hunker down and lock themselves into routines—at the expense of personal growth.

We’ve seen this time and again with the executives and managers we’ve counseled—between us, some 600 professionals over a combined 35 years. Many high performers would rather do the wrong thing well than do the right thing poorly. And when they do find themselves in over their head, they’re often unwilling to admit it, even to themselves, and refuse to ask for the help they need.

Consider Ted, a highly successful sales executive at a major enterprise software firm. He excelled at the huge deals that were the revenue engine for the company. He knew the product inside and out, understood the pain points of his customers, and could unerringly sniff out and connect with the real decision maker in a deal. After years of praise and enormous commission checks, Ted began to sense that something was off. The company had expanded in a new direction, shifting to a software-as-a-service business model. Though the majority of revenue was still coming from the legacy products, all the innovation and energy were focused on the subscription offerings. At first, Ted was contemptuous—selling software as a service was all about small transactions and high volume. “Just get some telemarketers for that nickel-and-dime stuff,” he’d say. “I’ll handle the big boys.” Soon, though, he began to see the writing on the wall: He was becoming increasingly marginalized in the company—and in the industry. But he was paralyzed by fear and self-doubt. His professional identity and self-esteem were wrapped up in his success as a salesman.

Consider, too, Kurt, a lawyer known for his trial skills and intellectual heft; he was a natural in the courtroom and a skilled writer with a keen sense of nuance. When he was assigned a case that required combing through thousands of technical documents, he believed it would just be a matter of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. But early on, he realized he didn’t have enough content expertise and couldn’t make sense of the casework his associates delivered. He began to find himself alone in his office, late at night and on weekends, wading through and deciphering the facts. It wasn’t until almost the eve of a trial that Kurt finally asked for help—which didn’t endear him to colleagues who suddenly found themselves joining him in the office after hours.

Of course, leaders within organizations bear some of the blame for this mind-set. They don’t always want to hear that somebody’s struggling, nor do they necessarily reward new ways of doing things, despite the lip service they might pay to innovation and prudent risk taking. As one executive we worked with pointed out, “My boss wants innovation as long as it’s done perfectly the first time.” Another confided, “We tell our people over and over again that we will support their professional development, but if a new project doesn’t work out immediately, we basically push them over the cliff.”

However, it’s possible to break this cycle and make the next move toward professional growth. First, you have to take a hard look at yourself and identify the forces that escalate your anxieties and cause you to turn to unproductive behaviors for relief. (See the sidebar, “The Curse of Being a High Achiever.”) Then you must adopt counterintuitive practices that give you the courage to step out of your comfort zone. This won’t happen overnight. It requires acknowledging vulnerability, something that driven professionals don’t like to do and that runs counter to their obsession with managing their image at all costs.

The Curse of Being a High Achiever

ome behaviors that help you succeed can also get in your way. The classic high achiever is:

Driven to get results. Achievers don’t let anything stop them. But they can get so caught up in tasks that providing transparency to colleagues or helping others feels like a waste of valuable time.

A doer. Achievers believe, often rightly, that nobody can do it as well as they can. That can make them poor delegators—or micromanagers.

Highly motivated. Achievers take all aspects of their jobs seriously. But that means they often fail to distinguish between the urgent and the merely important.

Craving of positive feedback. Achievers care intensely about how others view their work—but they tend to ignore positive feedback and obsess over criticism.

Competitive. An appetite for competition is healthy, but achievers obsessively compare themselves with others, which can lead to a chronic sense of insufficiency, false calibrations, and ultimately career missteps.

Passionate about work. Intense highs can give way to crippling lows. For achievers, it’s a fine line between triumph and agony.

A safe risk taker. Achievers aren’t likely to recklessly bet the company on a risky move, but they may shy away from the unknown.

Guilt-ridden. Achievers are driven to produce, but no matter how much they accomplish, they feel like they aren’t doing enough.

To achieve continued success, you must open yourself up to new learning experiences that may make you feel uncertain at best and incompetent at worst. Remember that those feelings are temporary and a prelude to greater professional ability.

Let’s look at steps you can take to get past self-imposed limitations.