Atomic Habits for results-driven teams

Atomic Habits by James Clear is a great book that talks about the power of small habits in creating long lasting changes. At the core of it, there’s the idea that just improving by 1% each day will lead to being 37x better after a year.

Overnight successes are often the results of tiny achievements that compound over time.

The book mostly focuses on helping individuals adopt the habits that will make them successful. But, many of the same principles can be applied to teams, especially when it relates to focus.

Accountability is the #1 challenge for result-driven org

A 2022 HBR article pointed out that 60-90% of strategic plans never fully launch. Quite often the problem isn’t about having a strategy – teams routinely take their leaders on offsites for days to plan the year or quarters ahead. The issue is a lack of monitoring of their execution.

There’s a related great quote coming from a Wharton article on why good strategies fail:

Less than 15% of companies routinely track how they perform over how they thought they were going to perform"

This quote illustrates fairly well the challenge at hand. When you set goals at the beginning of the quarter, you’re only producing your best guess of what you can achieve if everything goes as planned. But, things almost never go as planned, and this is also ignoring all the unknown unknowns that you’ll be facing during execution.

Additionally working on your goals will also create distractions! Working on new problems will require great discipline to stay focused on the main thing. Many new opportunities will arise during the quarter, and you’ll need to put guardrails in place to prevent the scope of your projects from getting out of hand.

All of this boils down to a team’s ability to stay accountable, and this is where the work of James Clear can help.

Fix the system, not the people

You can try to shame your team into remembering their quarterly goals but this hardly works. People aren’t forgetting goals because they don’t care, they’re forgetting goals because they’re busy tackling hard challenges to deliver said goals – and the human brain isn’t great at multitasking.

Let’s take a simple situation. You challenge me and my team to get our first set of paid customers, and we agree that the only thing missing is to build the billing system. Then building the billing system is what we’ll put our minds onto. This means:

• Interviewing potential customers to understand their preferences
• Spec’ing the right subscription flow
• Designing the screens
• Figuring out how to integrate the flow in the app
• Finding the right payment processor
• Coding everything, solving bugs, testing transactions
• Etc, etc, etc

Many things can (and will) go wrong here and we’ll need to be vigilant to deliver this project on time. At the same time our focus has shifted from the outcome of getting paid customers to figuring out how to deliver the output of building the billing system. These 2 are obviously related, but output-thinking will dominate conversations unless you have a forcing function to bring outcome-related discussions back into the flow.

This can become a liability when projects start falling behind schedule (which happens quite often). Say that we haven’t delivered the billing system after 2 months. There are 2 perspectives to consider:

• From a project perspective, the right thing to do is to find ways to cut scope to ship on time (or keep the same scope but say no to future projects).
• From a business perspective, the right thing to do is to pick up the phone and see if we can invoice customers manually. We most likely don’t have to wait for an automated billing system to get our first customers – we can do the things that don’t scale.

But, most teams cannot consider the business perspective unless they have a system in place to bring business goals back into conversations. Daily standups, for instance, are great ways to ensure that projects are moving forward, but they rarely help you highlight core issues with the delivery of your business outcomes.

This is one of the core reasons why executing a strategy is so hard. Most things that we do, including agile techniques, are about finding ways to deliver roadmap items on time. But what ultimately matters is whether or not we’re getting results – and this perspective requires a different type of thinking.

This is why the easier path is to change your system to start building habits around business goals.

In other words, you need to make outcomes a natural part of weekly conversations.

Turning outcome-driven thinking into a team habit

In his framework, James Clear introduces a simple set of rules for creating a new good habit:

• The 1st law: Make it obvious
• The 2nd law: Make it attractive
• The 3rd law: Make it easy
• The 4th law: Make it satisfying

The rest of this post will look into how you can implement each one of these laws with your team.

As mentioned earlier, a key principle for James Clear is to rely on systems rather than trying to micromanage people into adopting a habit. This means both looking at changing your processes, but also investing in “technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behaviour”. Tability, a platform purposely built to keep teams engaged with their strategic goals, is a prime example of such technology and we will also look at how it can be leveraged.

Law 1: Make it obvious

The first law says that we need to make the new behaviour obvious to the team. In this case you can simply set up a weekly meeting on Mondays to review progress on OKRs (or whatever framework you use).

I recommend meeting on Mondays to have the right execution context during the week, then you can close out with demos on Friday. I also want to insist on having a weekly cadence for quarterly goals. You can’t build a habit by bringing OKRs and team goals to the top of mind only once every 30 days.

People using Tability can automate the weekly routine by setting check-ins reminders. Goal owners will be nudged when status updates are due via email or push notifications. This is a simple way to foster a culture of accountability without requiring managers to email their team every Friday.

Additionally, Tability will clearly mark goals that need to be updated with a red dot. The whole app is designed to put goals at the centre and make it obvious that there is a clear set of objectives to accomplish.

Law 2: Make it attractive

Status reporting can feel like a chore, especially if the user isn’t getting much value from the process. This is personally how I felt the first time that I got introduced to OKRs. One day my manager shared a spreadsheet with me with a bunch of new cells to fill in – it was hard to see it as anything other than additional reporting work on my plate for upper management.

Buy-in takes time and most people start seeing the value of a framework like OKRs during their second quarter. So before that, you’ll need to invest in ways to make the process appealing.

If you’re using a doc or a spreadsheet, I would recommend opting for the simplest template that allows people to see week-by-week changes. This continuity aspect will help increase engagement by making their dashboard more complete the more they use it.

If you’re using Tability, you will find that the platform is making both the reporting process and the reading process attractive. The governing principle is that the more people find value in their interactions with goals in Tability, the more likely they are to engage with their weekly check-ins.

Some of the ways Tability makes engaging with goals attractive:

• Visual check-in form
• Annotated progress trends for every goal
• Extra actionable insights available (confidence trends, KRs vs. task progress, growth statistics…)
• Miro-like maps to see how goals align and cascade in the org
• Activity feed to easily read everyone’s update
• Filters, custom dashboards to create your own views

The more value people find in the tool used to track goals, the easier it will be to make goals part of your weekly workflow.

Law 3: Make it easy

In the Atomic Habits summary, reducing friction is listed as the most important step to make good habits take root. This can take several form for goal-tracking:

• Making sure that data for the check-ins is readily available
• Reducing the number of steps required to find and update goals
• Investing in technology that can automate the habits and lock in future behaviour

The “make it easy” law is usually where docs and spreadsheets start to break as you try to scale. A spreadsheet is often the right way to start as it’s a familiar and flexible tool that most users will know. But, flexibility can become a disadvantage when each team starts to create their own custom spreadsheet with the custom set of rules.

Rolling out a platform like Tability is similar to adopting a design system for goals. It will provide a standard way to set and track goals across all teams, while also significantly reducing the time spent on reporting:

• Each user has a personal dashboard with their active goals. This allows most users to do their weekly check-in in under 20 minutes (there’s even a bulk update view).
• You can connect Tability to your tools to automatically pull data for the right sources (including databases, BigQuery, Power BI, Salesforce etc…)
• Reports, notifications, charts are all managed by Tability.
• Goal-setting AI that helps users write better goals.

The goal here is to reduce the distance between needing to share progress updates, and making these updates readily available to the stakeholders. The shorter the distance, the easier it will be to repeat this action every week.

Investing in an open culture is another critical element of making outcome-thinking a natural part of the week. You need to encourage people to share their progress, even when things aren’t looking great. Make it ok to say there’s trouble. There are many instances where people will obfuscate the truth or make excuses to skip their check-ins if they feel like they’ll be punished for being the bearer of bad news.

You can have the best tools, but nothing will happen unless people worry about the consequences of being open and transparent.

Law 4: Make it satisfying

This is a good segway from the last point. We all want our metrics to go up and to the right with great success. But, there will be many occasions where things won’t be looking so positive – and that’s perfectly normal! Achieving ambitious goals means overcoming difficult situations and solving complex puzzles. So, your team will have to mark things off track more times than they’ll want, and their dashboard might be filled with red or yellow at times.

This can be demoralising if you don’t find a way to reward the process itself. You need to find ways to reward people for engaging with their goals, even when things aren’t looking bright.

This may be as simple as having a leader thanking people in the team chat for sharing their progress. But even better, you can comment directly on the progress updates. Getting feedback on a key result check-in will both show the author that people read their updates (their work is valued), and make them feel supported in their efforts.

Also, do not forget to celebrate the wins! It’s easy to fall for the trap of only commenting on red and yellow items, or to only create dashboards that contain items that are at risk. But it’s just as important to reward great achievements if you want to create long lasting habits.

Celebrating wins and providing feedback is something that you can easily do from Tability’s inbox feed. You can filter the feed to focus on the plans or people that you follow and then add reactions and comments in 1-click.

But there’s more! Tability will do the following to reward users when they engage with their goals:

• Read notifications are automatically to check-in authors
• Check-in streak count increases whenever you complete all your check-ins in any given week
• There’s a streak ladder putting the most active users at the top

The key here is to provide your team with a simple habit tracker for their goals – one that is able to drive engagement when times are hard, and provide great satisfaction when goals are accomplished.

How to try Tability

Here’s how you can try Tability today to start building habits around your business goals:

1. Go to https://tability.app/signup 
2. Follow the onboarding steps

You’ll get a 14-day trial (no credit card required).

If you want to learn more about the platform, go to https://www.tability.io