Why the 7 Habits?

Sean Walsh, the Co-Founder of 1904labs, explains why having a good company culture is essential to success and why Covey’s 7 Habits work for 1904labs.

I got introduced toThe 7 Habits through my management training that I went through at Andersen Consulting. There’s a course out there that’s done by the organization that’s behind the Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership and it uses the Covey 7 Habits book as a foundational text for that training.

One of things we talked about in the lunch and learns is we’re not trying to script people or saying you know you got to become a Covey-ite, or whatever, but it does really give you a simple set of seven habits, that if practiced, and if everybody in the company would practice these habits, we’d have an extremely effective place to work and extremely effective culture.

The other thing is I personally try to model it. You know trying to listen better make sure I understand and you know let people know that everybody has the right to be understood, first. And you know with my leadership team I continue to emphasize you know make sure that the people working for you and in your practices are being heard first.There’ll be time for you to be heard. And just to continue to model that behavior because I think if we were giving out the book and that we weren’t behaving along the lines of the book it would be just kind of an empty thing.

Covey’s not the only thing that’s at work here. We’re using agile. Which is very much a planning centric and a kind of a time boxed approach to building the solutions that we build, and we’re also embracing human centered design. Which means we’re focused on the humans that our solutions are going to be involved and we spend the time to understand what those humans want need.

And more importantly, just as importantly, how they want the things that we’re building to happen. And so if you do enough planning, which is really at the center of Covey, about being in control yourself, and then doing you know, spending time to understand what’s needed. Before you just act.

And then using the synergize principle, number six, to kind of figure out what you can do. It actually takes pressure off I think that comes a way to you know making it true that you can do complex work, you know under tight deadlines, and under pressure, and at the same time have fun.
