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Welcome to part six of the series on how to implement the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in a Getting Things Done-style system. Because this is a fairly intensive plan to implement, I am writing a series of posts that will guide you through the stages of implementation over several weeks. This will give you a chance to focus on each new habit in your life for one full week before beginning the next one.

Each weekly post on the habits is supplemented by a worksheet to help you start focusing on the new habit.

For those of you who may not have read Stephen Covey’s landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here is a brief synopsis of the fourth habit: (from Wikipedia)

Think Win/Win describes an attitude whereby mutually beneficial solutions are sought that satisfy the needs of oneself, or, in the case of a conflict, both parties involved.

Habit IV - Think Win/Win

Stephen Covey’s description of the Fourth Habit of Highly Effective People is based on two important concepts:

1. The first three Habits are “Private Victories”, the building blocks of personal growth and development. Being proactive in your environment, practicing the skill of visualizing results, and focusing on the things that are truly important are the core goals of self-mastery. The fourth Habit is the first of the “Public Victories”, an interpersonal skill that enhances your leadership skills.
2. Think Win/Win depends upon the “emotional bank account” that other people hold for you. The emotional bank account is an expression of your credibility, your communication level, and your ability to persuade/influence others.

The Emotional Bank Account

Every time you express your faith in someone else, through trusting them to do their job, or acting on their input, or even just listening when someone needs to talk, you are making a deposit in the emotional bank account that you have with that person. This bank account is a virtual and tenuous thing. It is that person’s measure of you as a person, and of your particular relationship. When you act with integrity, keep your commitments, and communicate clearly you become a depositor.

You can also make withdrawals from that account, and when you do it hurts that person in some way. Being late to a meeting, being disrespectful, acting with immaturity - all of these are examples of how to diminish your ability to influence people in a positive way.

Think about the petty office tyrant in your past (or present), the micro-manager that insists on practically doing your job herself, or that “friend” that you can count on when you are picking up the bar tab - but is never around when you need to clean out your garage. These are the people with low (or over-drawn!) emotional bank accounts. Do they get your trust? Do you put any credence in promises that they make? Can you count on this person in a pinch? I would hazard a guess that the answer is, “No”.

6 Ways to Make Deposits

1. Understand the individual - Like a snowflake, every person is different. Some, of course, are flakier than others. Develop an understanding of what makes people “tick”, play to their strengths and help them to compensate for their weaknesses.
2. Attend to the little things - Small acts of kindness and appreciation go a long way with people. I have seen a co-worker’s attitude turn 180 degrees when I noticed that they were having a tough day and I asked them, “How can I help?” Sometimes they just need someone to talk to, other times they need a little more.
3. Keep your commitments - Be on time to meetings. Complete assigned tasks. Do what you say you will do. This sounds silly, practically a cliche, but it is less common than you think. A corollary is to learn to ask for help. If you find that you are not going to be able to keep a commitment, ask someone to help you. This way those that are counting on you will know that you are not hanging them out to dry.
4. Clarify your expectations/understand theirs - Again, clear communication of the end results of an action as well as the steps to get there enable tasks and projects to be completed successfully. Poor communication or changing expectations creates stress and frustration, enormous withdrawals from the emotional bank account!
5. Show personal integrity - Develop trust and respect for the people you know, and the people that know you. Your personal reputation is the lynch-pin of all of your interpersonal relationships.
6. Apologize for withdrawals - You will make withdrawals from your emotional bank accounts from time to time. Tell them that you know it happened and that you are sorry. Show real sincerity. Ask them how you can learn from the experience so that it doesn’t happen again.

“We have committed the Golden Rule to memory;
let us now commit it to life.”

~ Edwin Markham

Believing in Win/Win

The emotional bank account is the foundation of the fourth Habit. It cultivates a state of mind, and a belief in your heart, that you can and should seek to discover the mutual benefit in all human relationships. Most, if not the vast majority, of your relationships depend on interpersonal transactions that are interdependent upon other relationships. You may have a friend that wants to borrow your truck to help another friend move. If you let your friend down, his friend gets caught in the withdrawal too.

On the other hand, you can make a deposit by not only offering to lend your truck, but offering to help. This can gain a new friend, create a new relationship, and strengthen your current friendship. The moving gets done faster, and everybody wins.

Getting to Win/Win

The Win/Win mind-set can be a difficult path to follow until you develop the skills and attributes that are needed. The first of these is Character - the measure of your personal integrity, maturity, and an abundance mentality.

• Integrity - Can your friends and colleagues count on you? The first three Habits are the tools that you need to pro-actively execute your daily activities according to your deeply-held principles and values. Becoming results-focused aids you in keeping your commitments, and knowing which results are most important and actively working toward them creates a discipline of success.
• Maturity - Having the courage to stand up for your principles while maintaining a sense of consideration for the principles of others is the hallmark of the Win/Win philosophy. Communication is at the core of maturity, in order that you listen and understand the situation completely.
• Abundance Mentality - Believe that there is plenty of success to go around. In our hyper-competitive business culture, this may seem counter-intuitive or even wrong. The truth is, “success” is not a pie of limited size - just because I get a bigger slice doesn’t (necessarily) reduce the size of your slice. Become part of the culture that enables and cultivates this mentality, as opposed to the back-stabbing and sabotage that accompanies a mentality of scarcity.

Practical Applications

Those of you who have been reading since the beginning of this series should now see where the first three Habits have brought you. A brand-new paradigm is in front of you that has the power and potential to revolutionize your relationships. Using the trust that comes from your character will enable you to grow and enrich your relationships with enhanced credibility; open, two-way communications; confidence in risk-taking that can lead to incredible successes.

1. Incorporate Your Weekly Plan

Take some time to discern Win/Win activities during the Weekly Planning of your activities this week. (See the last post for a 7 Habits Worksheet and instructions.) Download this week’s worksheet and brainstorm some ideas for taking this interaction to the next level, making it a Win/Win proposition:

• Clarify the desired results
• Communicate guidelines and measurements
• Allocate resources
• Define the accountability for each party
• Outline the consequences of failing to live up to the agreement

2. Make a Personal Commitment

Commit to the Abundance Mentality. Let go of the idea that others win at your expense, or that your success diminishes another. Pull more people into your circle, your team must get larger in order to have greater success!

3. Teach to Learn

One of the best ways to establish your own understanding of a new topic is to explain it to another person. Pick someone that you can teach the new habit to, it can be your accountability partner or someone else that you have recently added to your circle of influence.

Read the rest of the posts in this series here: The 7 Habits and Your Personal Practice.

Download this week’s worksheet.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5mouxp. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I thought these were supposed to come from Nigeria:

Dear Beloved,

My name is Mrs. Anika Sander from England, I am a dying woman who has
decided to donate what I have to charities through you. You may be
wondering why I chose you. But someone has to be chosen. I was diagnosed
for cancer about 2 years ago, after the death of my husband who had left me
everything he worked for.

I have been touched by the Lord to donate from what I have inherited from
my late husband to charity through you for the good work of humanity,
rather than allow my relatives to use my husband’s hard earned funds
inappropriately.I have asked the Lord to forgive me all my sins and I
believe he has, because He is merciful. I will be going in for an
operation in few weeks , and I pray that I survive the operation. I have
decided to Will/Donate the sum of 6,500,000.00 pounds (Six Million Five
hundred thousand pounds) to charities through you for the good work of the
Lord, and to help the motherless,less privileged and also for the
assistance of the widows.

Presently, I have informed my consultant about my decision in willing this
fund to charity through you. I wish you all the best and may the good Lord
bless you abundantly, and please use the funds well and always extend the
good work to others. If you are interested in carrying out this task, I
will inform my consultant of your contact, so that he can arrange the
release of the funds to you. I know I have never met you but my mind tells
me to do this, and I hope you act sincerely. I decided that 30% of this
money should be taken by you from the total sum upon the success release
of this fund, because I am now too weak and fragile to do things myself
because of my cancer. NB: You will be given the right to verify this
directly with the Bank where the fund was deposited.

I will appreciate your utmost confidentiality in this matter until the
task is accomplished, as I don’t want anything that will jeopardize my
last wish, due to the fact that I do not want relatives or family members standing in the
way of my last wish.

Regards
Mrs. Anika Sander
PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR FULL NAME, ADDRESS, TELEPHONE/FAX NUMBER ON YOUR REPLY
FOR EASY AND IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATION WITH MY CONSULTANT.

BTW, This font is created with the “tt” command, and I happen to be old enough to have actually used a TeleType machine. With a strip of paper that had a bunch of holes in it.

Take that Naomi!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6mdesn. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

After posting my “audition” at Slacker Manager yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with Dave Seah about the concept of trust and how it underscores every part of the marketplace.

Seah’s first comment addressed the ideas of loyalty and culture:

Trust has always been the currency of the world…it’s what underlies actual money, and it’s what allows Organizationally speaking, I think the various types of corporate structures have minted their own bank notes for trust: in the hierarchy, the implicit promise is that if you do your job, you will be rewarded and taken care of. This has broken down as people realize that the companies themselves do not have the same loyalty to them as they expect from their employees. And thus, that particular type of trust has become devalued within the organization itself and becomes worthless.

Culture is an interesting way of describing “shared goals and values, and methods for achieving them”, which is how I think of it. Culture is then a generator of trust.

~Dave Seah

I heartily agree with this idea. It is the breakdown of trust (between employer & employee, between buyers & sellers, between consumers & marketers) that has jeopordized so many companies and led to the proliferation of social networking websites where consumers can post their own quality statements on products and services that they have used.

I would submit that “trust” is becoming more important, especially interpersonal trust and intra-community trust. Both of which are gaining ground where institutional and governmental trust are declining. The whole idea of Web 2.0 is that conversations are growing, and while a market may cover the globe, its members are connected more closely than ever. And they are relying on each other for trusted information and evaluations of products and services, rather than the Marketing and PR companies that dominated the late 20th-century marketplace.

As you mentioned, companies no longer trust or show loyalty to their employees, so new conversations are taking place, new cultures are being developed.

~ Stephen

Seah had an excellent response to this, which I shall quote in full, as it addresses all of these concepts:

On “trust” becoming important, I would agree. I think it’s always been important in general, but trust itself as distinguishable ingredient in our transactions is relatively new. Institutional Trust has been failing, at least here in the USA, since Nixon, when we lost faith in government.

And in the post-bubble, post-Enron era, more and more people are starting to realize that they just don’t trust organizations for the sake that they’re organizations. Before people would presume that trust was an inherent part of the makeup of any institution or government agency at the very core, but now people are starting to recognize that it’s really people you meet that matter.

I saw a recent episode of House where a girl said that our lives are defined by the people who happen to be in the room with us. Culture I think is part of the shared value and vision. I think Community is also part of it…not exactly the same as culture, though they are intertwined. What it comes down to is that people are looking for “good people” they can trust to be authentic and straight with them.

The new heroes are not the ones that have been erected by institutional forces, but ones that have the semblance of democracy (American Idol, in a perverse way) or are ordinary people who have started to speak what they think is the truth. Truth is the foundation of trust, and in the media world today it’s difficult to find.

~ Dave Seah

This is precisely what I was aiming at! Seah’s statement that “…it’s really people you meet that matter…” is at the heart of the concept of the Web 2.0 culture that is flourishing in today’s economy. The question is, will business get the message?

Seah goes on to describe a five-point evolution of this process:

1. Trust has always been part of any successful social endeavor.
2. Our naïve trust in organizations and what they say has been eroded over the past 30-40 years because what they have stood for and said was good for Americans has proven to be a façade built from special interests.People have had to adapt by separating trust from authority and success, whereas before trust was automatic.
3. Trust is the “gut check” that people are now applying to their daily interactions, and they are growing increasingly canny. Kids today, for example, are incredibly media-savvy compared to their grandparents. The emphasis has shifted from “I trust that company” to “I trust what that person is saying is true”.
4. The next stage of actualization would be, “I trust that person to do what he says” followed by “I have seen what he said and did, and it was good.”
5. Companies that reach to consumers have had to adopt this model, an interesting combination of business brand and public relations work.

Culture serves as a beacon to more easily find a certain type of trust and compatible mindset. The social need to flock together, however, is what Community is all about. Culture is the surface expression of values, and community is the underlying sense of belonging. That’s my hypothesis, anyway.

What do you think about the changes in the influence of Culture and Community? Where will it go next? Let’s carry on the discussion.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6dal8g. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen