Stephen Covey's book sits on a lot of business owners' shelves, and in most of them the bookmark is somewhere around chapter three. That is not a comment on the writing. It is because the first three habits are private, unglamorous and have no deadline attached, and the ones that look immediately useful come later.
Read as a business model rather than a self-help book, the framework is more demanding than its reputation suggests. It is not seven good ideas you can pick from. It is a sequence, and the sequence is the part that does the work.
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 genuinely 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
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. It is the whole of good selling and most of good management.
6. Synergise
Two different views combined produce an option neither party arrived with. That is not compromise, which produces a worse version of both.
7. Sharpen the saw
Renewal across the physical, mental, social and spiritual. The maintenance habit for the person running everything.
Why the order matters
Most owners 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. The team is not communicating. The supplier is being difficult. The manager will not step up.
It does not work, and the reason is straightforward. Win/win negotiated by somebody who does not know their own numbers is not win/win, it is capitulation with better manners. Seeking first to understand is impossible for an owner whose day is entirely reactive, because listening properly takes time they have not protected. Synergy between a decisive owner and a hesitant team is not synergy, it is the owner deciding while everybody watches.
The first three habits are the price of admission to the second three. That is why the book gets abandoned at chapter three: it is exactly where the work starts.
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. Every one of them was a choice with a cost attached, which is a different thing from an absence of choice.
Habit two. Asked what the business needs to look like in three years, the honest answer is bigger. There is no destination, so there is nothing for anybody else to take responsibility for. You cannot delegate ownership of an outcome that has never been defined.
Habit three. A fortnight's diary audit shows the overwhelming majority of her hours going on genuinely urgent work or on other people's urgent work, and almost nothing on anything important and not urgent.
The team responsibility problem was never a team problem. 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, not an afternoon, which is precisely why the workshop version does not hold.
The habit owners drop first
Habit seven, every time. 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. Habit seven is not a reward for the other six. It is the maintenance schedule on the only piece of equipment in the business you cannot replace.
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. Some will be fine. The uncomfortable ones are the useful ones.
Write the three-year picture on one page
Turnover, profit, headcount, your role in it, and what it is worth. If you cannot fill it in, that is the finding, and it explains a great deal about your team.
Score a fortnight of your diary against the four quadrants
Urgent and important, important not urgent, urgent not important, neither. Most owners are shocked by the third box, which is almost entirely other people's priorities.
Take your worst commercial relationship and write the version they would happily renew
If you cannot construct one, you have a transaction rather than a relationship, and you should price it accordingly.
In your next difficult conversation, earn the right to speak
Do not offer a solution until you can state their position back to them and they agree your version is accurate. It takes about four minutes and changes most of these conversations.
Put renewal in the diary as an appointment
Not an intention. A time, a day, repeating. Judge it after eight weeks on whether you kept it, not on how you feel.
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?
The takeaway. Treated as a menu, the framework confirms what you already were, which is the opposite of its purpose. The decisive owner does habit one enthusiastically and skips habit five. The likeable owner lives at habit four and never gets near habit three. Be honest about which of the first three is missing, and fix that one before touching anything above it.
Where this connects
The private habits are the backbone of Personal Coaching, because a three-year plan with no protected two hours in next week's diary is a daydream in a nicer font. 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.
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Frequently asked questions
Do I have to do the habits in order?
You get to choose, but the sequence is the model rather than a suggested reading order. Habits one to three govern yourself and habits four to six operate through other people, and the second group depends on the first being in place. Win/win negotiated by somebody who does not know their own numbers is capitulation with better manners. Seeking first to understand is impossible for an owner whose day is entirely reactive, because listening properly takes protected time. If you are going to start anywhere other than habit one, start by working out honestly which of the first three is missing.
Which habit gets abandoned most often, and does it matter?
Habit seven, renewal, and it matters more than owners expect. It is the only habit 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, and one badly judged price, one rushed hire or one contract signed without being read costs more than a decade of looking after yourself. Treat it as the maintenance schedule on the only piece of equipment in the business you cannot replace.
My team is the problem, so why start with my own habits?
Because responsibility cannot be taken for something that was never defined. If there is no destination written down, no numbers anybody owns and no protected time to review them, nobody in the business could take responsibility even if they wanted to, and a team day will not create any of the three. Start with a one-page picture of the business in three years, then protected time in the diary, then one number owned by each senior person. Habit four becomes genuinely available at that point, because there is finally something concrete for both sides to win at.