Alastair WallaceCEO. Lead Consultant. Trainer. Coach, Brainfood Ltd · Leadership & Management Training for Busy Managers. Helping senior leaders stop handholding | Brain-friendly, diary-friendly | Save 5+ hours a week | 23,500 managers trained | 200% ROI guaranteed. TED

QUICK FIXES for common leadership habits

19 Nov 2023 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:03

In this solo YouTube talk, Alastair Wallace shares his personal struggle with bad habits—untidiness, nail‑biting, multitasking, and constant task‑switching—and explains why they hinder effective leadership. He debunks the popular 21‑day myth, citing neuroscience that the average time to reach automaticity is about 84 days. Wallace then distills James Clear’s Atomic Habits framework into four actionable rules: make the habit obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. He illustrates each rule with concrete workplace examples, such as installing a whiteboard for sales metrics, improving labeling, and removing a single click from a UK government tax form, which boosted response rates from 19% to 23.4%. Finally, he introduces habit stacking—linking small actions (e.g., shutting down the computer, emptying the recycling bin, checking the mailroom) to create a reliable end‑of‑day routine—and invites viewers to share their own tips.

Chapters

What are your bad habits? Come on, you can tell me. I'm definitely a bit untidy. Well, more than a bit. And I used to bite my nails. At work, my bad habits are trying to multitask. It doesn't work, by the way. And task switching. Again, fatal for managing time. So, bad habits. We all have them. How do we cure them, I hear you say? How do I stop myself trying to multitask at work? How do I replace them with good habits? You might have heard that myth that it takes 21 days to change a habit. I'm really sorry, folks, there ain't no research to back that up. It's a load of old hooey. According to the latest neuroscience— yes, I am a brain geek— the average is 84 days to reach automaticity. Some habits will be quicker and some will be slower, just like everything in life, eh? James Clear's book Atomic Habits gives us some really good hacks about habit change. Let me summarize some of them for you. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. So this could be as simple as introducing a whiteboard for sales results in your team area, labeling a work or storage area more obviously, perhaps even simplifying a process by removing clicks or bureaucracy. In fact, removing one click when completing the UK government tax form improved the response rate from 19% to 23.4%. Habit stacking also works really well for creating good habits. Linking habits together means we're less likely to forget them. So when you leave at the end of the day, switch off your computer, empty the recycling bin, check in with the mailroom. What's your best tip for habit change? Comment below.