I like Steven Covey, he knows the importance of integrating values with everyday life. This man must be a great husband..all that listening!

Date:   8/29/2005 11:48:30 AM ( 19 y ago)

Investor's Business Daily
8th Habit: Listen To Workers
Friday August 26, 7:00 pm ET
Donna Howell


It takes eight to be great.
Leadership trainer Stephen Covey's bestseller "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" has sold more than 15 million copies since its 1989 debut. Now Covey, the co-founder of professional services firm FranklinCovey, is taking it to the next level.



His new book, "The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness To Greatness," tells how to find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.

Inspiration was key to growth at companies like Toyota, General Electric, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue, he says. Covey says giving workers power and responsibility is a key to tapping their true worth. And that's necessary to compete and win in today's knowledge economy.

For example, Toyota has practiced the seven habits since the 1990s.

The company's known for innovating. It got into producing gas-saving hybrid cars early on and now has the most popular hybrid model, the Prius. And its Lexus brand tops quality rankings.

IBD spoke with Covey about this "eighth habit," and how managers can get into it.

IBD: You write in "The 8th Habit" that it's not enough anymore to just be effective. What's different about the need for greatness?

Covey: Well, because effectiveness is almost the entry price you pay to get into the competition stadium. Otherwise you don't qualify.

And greatness has to do not with prominent-type greatness -- that kind of thing -- but with character and contribution. And that makes all of the difference.

IBD: The eighth habit, you say, is to find your voice and inspire others to find theirs. What does that actually do for an organization?

Covey: Well, what happens is you gradually develop complementary teams where people's strengths or voices are made productive.

And their weaknesses are made irrelevant through the strength of the voices of other people. They come out with beautiful music.

Inspiration means you breathe into people. You find out by listening to them what they really love doing, what they do well. And that inspires them.

It doesn't motivate them. Motivation is a kind of industrial-age term, because it implies it's something someone does to somebody else. You know, like carrot-and-sticking them. That's the great jackass theory of motivation.

IBD: How can managers help employees find their voices?

Covey: Well, one thing would be to come up with a goal with the group that they mostly connect to, and a scoreboard that they themselves design. And get out of the way and let them be accountable to each other.

You have to create -- in your recruiting, selecting, training and development systems -- the whole attitude of wanting to understand other people's main voices, their strengths, their passions and their talents.

You don't give them a job description.

You interact with them and you listen more to them. You have two ears and one mouth. Use them accordingly. You don't talk so much as you listen. And then you try to think in terms of, "How can this talent and this passion be applied to our needs?"

IBD: What companies have the hang of the eighth habit?

Covey: I'm very impressed with what Toyota is doing. I was with the president of Toyota over in Japan just recently.

And I was amazed at the amount of economic literacy they give to everyone in their organization.

It's to the point where they can empower them to close down the line if necessary.

Also, how they treat their suppliers.

I'm also enormously impressed with how Dell computer has moved over the last five years from a culture of blame to a culture of responsibility.

I'm also impressed with what's happening in community policing where crime goes down 50-70% everywhere, and with the efforts in the third world, where they're literally leapfrogging the industrial age into the information and knowledge worker age.

They're creating entrepreneurial centers and learning centers, micro-financing and micro-credit.

IBD: How is Toyota embodying the eighth habit?

Covey: Everything is connected to everything else. It's not a piecemeal approach to the way they manage things and that's why they are making such tremendous advances. And I think that Detroit is really struggling to keep up.

IBD: The first three of your "7 Habits Of Highly Effective People" seem to be about getting the ball rolling: Be proactive. Begin with the end in mind. Put first things first. What companies do all those things very well?

Covey: There are absolutely numerous ones.

I wrote a book called "Living The 7 Habits" which contains about 90 stories. And those were just the tip of the iceberg of the companies we've been working with for about 15 years, since the ("7 Habits") book came out.

And these stories, most of them, are about people who never even had formal authority. They only had moral authority and they changed their organizations from the inside-out. They became change catalysts in bringing about high-trust cultures.

IBD: How about habits four through seven?

Covey: Well, basically the first three deal with the personal.

And the next three deal with the interpersonal, how to build high trust between people:

Think win-win. Always understand first before you seek to be understood. Go for synergistic solutions. And the last one ("Sharpen the saw") deals with the renewal of the six.

IBD: How are companies employing those habits?

Covey: Saturn automobile company (a GM unit) no longer has management-labor fights because the union is a vital partner in the strategic planning. And they got this basically from habits four, five and six. I would say Southwest (Airlines) practices four, five and six in spades. And so does JetBlue.

IBD: What large organizations clearly encourage workers to follow their passion?

Covey: Well I would say many of the divisions in GE and United Technologies are illustrations of a high degree of empowerment. It's because they've distributed leadership throughout the entire organization. They're succeeding so well. GE is number one or number two in most of the categories it enters.

IBD: How do people effect change while lacking formal authority?

Covey: Basically what they do is they just simply work in their own circle of influence, but outside their job. So that if you have influence and see a lot of dumb things going on, you can come up with a recommendation. And if it's within your circle of influence, people will listen to you.

If they buy your recommendation and it works, the results convert the cynics and your circle of influence gets larger and larger. It's what happened in almost every case.

But most people stay inside their job, or their mind is focused on the larger circle of concern, and they get into a blaming, 'victim-ism' mentality and find fault with their boss, or with the organization, or with the government, structures and strictures, all the bureaucracy and so forth, rather than taking responsibility to become a change catalyst themselves.

It's just amazing to see the profound disempowerment.

IBD: You describe in your new book how some people run into "Bermuda Triangles" that stall their efforts. What are some of these traps?

Covey: Well one of them is that someone gets fired up about their own idea. But they don't have a complementary team. Or they don't know how to manage costs. So they have a great entrepreneurial idea but they go down because they can't manage costs. Or they simply get lazy and don't carry forth their idea -- that's another Bermuda Triangle. Another one is they may have a complementary team but there's no trust.




 

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