Routines

By: Jeff West

“The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.”

― Vilayat Inayat Khan - teacher

In a previous article I wrote about the “Habits of Thinking.” In this article I’d like to take the next logical step. Routines. Habits grow into routines. The way a group of people, or individuals, habitually do things is a routine.

When your business is small and just getting going the need for defined routines is usually minimal. Whatever needs to get done to keep the business in business and growing gets done. However as a business grows and continues to add additional employees, finding a way to manage the business or organization requires some thinking about the best way to remain productive. The discussion often turns to what procedures and processes need to be implemented.

Are processes and procedures necessary? I think an easy argument can be made for them. In some cases they’re required legally. In other cases they can be valuable for safety. Would you want to fly somewhere on vacation in an airspace with no required procedures?

So while agreeing that processes and procedures,,, routines, are a good thing in certain instances we need to be careful of when and where they’re used and just how engrained they can become. Bureaucracy can quickly permeate a business. In a bureaucracy, not violating the rules, ‘following them to the letter’, becomes more important than what was supposed to be accomplished. Have you ever been told, “That’s not our company policy.” by a business you no longer do business with?

Once routines become entrenched, changing them gets to be a tough assignment. Even when the benefits of doing something better can be clearly pointed out you find yourself battling the dreaded ‘status quo.’ There will be many who prefer keeping things just as they are. They will even develop – rational explanations – for why they do what they do whether it’s rational or not.

We often take the resistance to change personally and begin to look for the guilty parties holding our great ideas at bay. That would be the way a manager might look at it. As a leader we need to realize that people naturally have a vested interested to continue doing things, “the way it’s always been done.” Why is that? Herein lies the seduction of routines. It allows people to function on auto-pilot. Meaning they can function without really being engaged mentally or emotionally in what they’re doing. People becoming more and more disengaged from their work is the byproduct of routines. If you’re not aware of this problem you’ll be constantly frustrated at the lack of improvement and engagement of your people.

People not engaged with their work are not going to be the ones who look for or implement ways of improving said routines. They’re going to be the ones that, “follow the rules” even if it means doing something completely contradictory to your organizations stated purpose. The more routinized, the less engaged. As the quote at the beginning of this article states, the human spirit dies in conformity and routine. Probably not the kind of company culture you’re trying to instill right?

So what to do? We discussed this recently in my current Applied Leadership Program group. One of the members of the group, we’ll call him Shaughnessy, said what was needed was, “Routines with autonomy.” I love that. As leaders it’s our responsibility to have people in every role who are fully competent and engaged in what they are doing. Great leaders do this by making it ‘impossible’ for routines to take root and become part of the organizations culture. How? By making engagement with the work every person is doing necessary. The more routinized one’s life is, the less life there is in what people do. Unfortunately you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see this in many, many organizations.

Find the balance between the need for policies, procedures, routines and the ability for your people to still have the autonomy, the creativity, to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish irrespective of what some rule may say. Set that in motion and watch what happens to employee engagement, customer satisfaction and ultimately to your businesses bottom line.