Small Habits, Impactful Outcomes

Your Systems Matter

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

Small Habits

According to James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation and a bestselling author, “Bad habits repeat themselves not because you don’t want to change but because you have the wrong system for change. This is one of the core philosophies of Atomic Habits: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

James Clear works with leaders to become better at decision making and continuous improvement through his proven approach to developing good habits and stopping bad ones. He often shares how a simple 1% improvement for a leader can compound over time to have significant impact.

Change can take time to occur. Leaders are encouraged to stay the course, manage their patience, and prepare their team to take action when change emerges. James suggests that leaders focus on systems rather than simply goals. He says that “goals are about the results you want to achieve; systems are about the processes that lead to those results.”

As we studied Clear’s practices, we see a natural alignment with those of the Integrator Leader, especially when leading change.

Whole Systems Perspective

We too often think of the future in terms of the past. Favored ways of seeing become ways of not seeing. Individuals and functional groups become too myopic, failing to understand the big picture and what they need from one another for the operation as a whole to succeed.

Practicing the habit, we call “Whole Systems Perspective”, allows the leader to set the compass heading by defining the team focus, while engaging their team and other critical stakeholders in creating systems as pathways to change. This process begins with the leader providing a “canopy view” or a look at the big picture, where the team can see their activities in the context of the whole operation.

The idea is to widen everyone’s aperture so that they see their actions within the broader organizational context. Never make the mistake of assuming everyone understands the common purpose and has a view from the canopy. Today’s workers are inherently myopic; that is, they possess a deep, yet fragmented, knowledge. Without a clear compass heading to orient their activities, today’s workers won’t be fully productive.

Providing a view from the canopy gives the team a clear line of sight to their goal. Show them where they are going and then ask them how to get there – what “systems” are needed and how may they collectively be created. Mentor, coach, and guide – but don’t tell them how. Help them learn to self-organize behind your intent and become less dependent upon you over time.

Reviewing the Game Films

We want the team to routinely view their operation from the canopy to objectively perform their work. Rather than simply following processes and systems, as the leader, we must practice the habit of asking them to regularly step back to observe and evaluate themselves. The key to this habit is to get them off the jungle floor to see their operation from above, as an integrated whole.

Said another way, ask your team to imagine that they are a pro sports team watching the video of their own performance in yesterday’s game. No matter how good the game plan is, the best teams routinely pause to critique their own performance, so they can constantly improve. As one client put it, “You don’t have to be sick to get better.” Ask your people to be candid and constructive since nothing can be fixed without first identifying it as a problem.

Ask that they think in terms of their own team first, then widen their aperture to think about what is not working in relation to those with whom the team must coordinate to get the ball down the field and through the end zone. Often, one part of the organization may be operating at optimal capacity, but once the ball is handed off to another part of the organization, it is dropped, held too long, or fumbled. This is because too often these other parts of the organization may be operating based on a different set of key priorities, metrics, and measures – maybe with poor or no systems at all.

This misalignment is very common in highly complex organizations with many specialized functions and divisions, each containing specialized workers. The point is that if we fail to coordinate with other parts of the organization, we cannot achieve optimal outcomes—regardless of how well we do our part.

A Leader’s Habit

While coaching a key leader and advising her organization, we introduced the habit of “Whole Systems Perspective”. The leader guided her team and asked that they develop a way to adapt this practice to make it a routine approach to their work. From this, her team soon gained an appreciation for the canopy view, discovering for themselves that operations were fragmented and functioning too much in silos without complete information.

Over time, while listening to her team during team huddles, it was evident that her people were beginning to understand that the true nature of the problem was not so much within the functional groups, but between them in the white spaces of the organization chart. This turned the discussion to what each needed from one another, acknowledging that by working together they all could more effectively achieve their customers’ expectations.

As the habit became routine, team members began to see how they each owned a piece of the problem and together could better function. With the implementation of the “whole systems perspective”, her team was regularly engaging cross-functionally across the entire organization, achieving outcomes for her customers never before realized.

Integrator Leader Reflections

Are you resolving problems at the systems level?
Are you letting good habits fall by the wayside, failing to have the discipline to cross the “critical threshold” unlocking meaningful change?
Are you practicing small habits to create optimum outcomes?