The 7 Habits.

The first three habits in Stephen Covey’s book are private and have no deadline attached; the ones that look immediately useful come later.

Read as a business model, the framework is a sequence rather than seven separate ideas.

What is the model?

Covey published it in 1989 and built it on what he called the maturity continuum: a movement from dependence, through independence, to interdependence.

Habits one to three are the private victory. They are about governing yourself, and nobody sees you do them. Habits four to six are the public victory, and they only become available once the first three are in place. Habit seven is renewal, and its job is to stop the other six decaying.

1. Be proactive

You act on what is inside your control rather than reacting to what is not. The tell is language: I have to, versus I have chosen to.

2. Begin with the end in mind

Define the destination before you build the plan. For an owner that means what the business is for, what it needs to look like, and what it should be worth when you stop.

3. Put first things first

Covey's important-versus-urgent grid. The work that changes a business is important and almost never urgent, so it loses by default unless it is scheduled.

4. Think win/win

Make deals both sides can live with for years. Your best supplier terms are the ones your supplier can still afford to honour three years from now.

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood

Diagnose before you prescribe.

6. Synergise

Two different views combined produce an option neither party arrived with.

7. Sharpen the saw

This is renewal across the physical, mental, social and spiritual.

Why the order matters

Owners often try to start at habit four or six, because those are the ones about other people, and other people are where the visible problems are.

Starting there does not work. Win/win needs an owner who knows their own numbers. Seeking first to understand is impossible for an owner whose day is entirely reactive, because listening properly takes time they have not protected.

The first three habits have to be in place before the second three work.

What starting at the bottom looks like

An illustration, not a client. An owner runs a nine-person firm and the presenting problem is that the team will not take responsibility. Everything comes back to her, decisions included, and she is working sixty-hour weeks. The instinct is to reach for habits four to six: a team day, better communication, clearer values on the wall.

Start at the bottom instead. Habit one, a language audit over one week: she counts the number of times she says some version of I have no choice or I have to do it myself. Each was a choice with a cost attached.

Habit two. Asked what the business needs to look like in three years, her answer is “bigger”. There is no destination, so there is nothing for anybody else to take responsibility for.

Habit three. A fortnight's diary audit shows the overwhelming majority of her hours going on urgent work or on other people's urgent work, and almost nothing on anything important and not urgent.

Nobody in that business could have taken responsibility for anything, because nothing had been defined, measured or protected in a calendar. What changes, in order: a one-page picture of the business at three years with three numbers for this year; then a protected two-hour block every week and a monthly numbers review, both treated as unmovable; only then does each senior person get one number to own. At that point habit four becomes real, because there is finally something concrete for both sides to win at. That sequence takes a quarter to bed in.

The habit owners drop first

Habit seven, renewal, is the one owners drop first. Renewal is the only one with no deliverable attached, so it loses to everything else, and then the other six degrade quietly for months before anybody connects the two.

Make the argument commercially rather than as a wellbeing point. A tired owner makes worse decisions. One badly judged price, one hire made in a rush because there was no time to do it properly, one contract signed without reading it, and you have spent more than a decade of looking after yourself would have cost.

How to use it this week

Audit your language for two days

Note every I have to and I had no choice. Rewrite each as I chose to, and add the reason.

Write the three-year picture on one page

Include turnover, profit, headcount, your role in it, and what it is worth.

Score a fortnight of your diary against the four quadrants

Use four boxes: urgent and important, important not urgent, urgent not important, and neither. The third box is often other people’s priorities.

Take your worst commercial relationship and write the version they would happily renew

If you cannot construct one, price it as a transaction.

In your next difficult conversation, listen first

Do not offer a solution until you can state their position back to them and they agree your version is accurate.

Put renewal in the diary as an appointment

Set a time and day that repeats, and after eight weeks check whether you kept it.

Questions to ask yourself

• Out of ten, how much of last week was proactive rather than a response to something that landed?
• If you were held to habits one to three only, for ninety days, what would be different about the business by the end of it?
• Where are you asking the team for interdependence while running a structure that requires them to depend on you?
• What have you been calling no choice, and what is the price you have decided not to pay?
• Which habit are you already good at, and is that why you keep returning to it?

Where this connects

The private habits are the backbone of Personal Coaching. Read habit two next to The Rubber Band, which is what happens when the destination and today's reality are held together, and habit three next to The Rules of the Game, which is how you get the urgent work off your desk and onto somebody else's.