How to Become More Effective

I'm about to talk to you about another oldie-but-goodie, business and leadership consultant Steven Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (2004, Simon and Schuster, Inc.)  Originally published in 1989, this book popularized some really annoying--yet somehow irreplaceable?-- buzzwords such as 'proactive', 'synergy', and 'win/win'.  Unlike psychology research, however, (most of which ages out at about 10 years), a really good self-help book written during the Me Decade is like an old Rolling Stones song.  Each time you re-experience it, it makes you want to stand up, shake the dust off your booty and move. 

That's how I felt about reading the Seven Habits recently, having for some reason only enjoyed it in the form of a page-a-day calendar previously.  Clearly this has been a highly influential book, promoting notions of work-life balance, the importance of good (empathic) listening skills, the idea that 'everyone is a leader', having a personal vision regardless of who you work for, walking your spiritual talk at work as well as everywhere else in your life, and organizing your activities according to a coherent set of principle-based priorities that you set on a daily basis.  The field of executive coaching owes a lot to Covey, whose powerful system has been restated a thousand times, but never outsold.

For me, as a psychologist, one of the most resonant ideas in the book is the notion of personal development from dependency, through independence, to interdependence.  You can't properly work as an equal beside others in the world until you accept responsibility for what happens to you.  And once you become independent, you have to begin to see yourself as part of a network of beings that rely on each other for service, and serve each other.  You can't fully succeed unless others succeed, and vice versa.  This is the course of a good relationship of equals, no matter the context: business, marriage, religious communities or the interface of the corporate and natural environments. Win/win... or no deal!  

'Proactive', of course, is business-speak for taking the initiative.  I noticed Covey reverts to the softer term 'initiative' in his forward to the 2004 edition of his book.  Since the forward addresses the increase in anxiety everywhere since the original publication of the book, this seems somehow reassuring.

'Synergy' refers to the blossoming of creative potential that happens when people function together from a place of awareness of their interdependent relationships with each other, intentionality, and good self-care.  It isn't Covey's fault if the term was bandied about in advertising for companies that weren't very good at communicating their true mission to the rest of us.

Like most self-help books, this one contains exercises to work through.  These are robust in their simplicity and take-to-work applicability.  I have been using his principle- and priority-based scheduling to rebalance my own time and energy.  I don't get everything that's on the list done every week, but as it is organized by the various 'roles' that I play throughout my life, I get something notable done for each role each week.  Covey admits it is hard work to follow his own program to the letter, and that he himself is very much a work-in-progress.  Perfectionism is not the object here, however: purposefully balancing where you put your energy is. 

Comments

[Lynn]

It's always to have some useful tips to become effective when people feel too lazy to do anything. Thanks for your thoughts.