Why Team Habits Matters Now More Than Ever

Celebrating a year of improving how we work together

Wow, it’s been quite the year since the hardback release of Team Habits! The paperback edition was just released, we’re now up to 8 translations, and more people are asking me to speak on and share ideas from Team Habits now than during the launch window.

In a future post, I’ll share more of the lessons-learned over the year, both from the content and process perspective. But today is a Show Your Work day (one of the core team habits), so instead of talking about the book, I thought I’d share an excerpt from the book and let the work speak for itself. If it resonates with you, I’d be honored if you picked up a copy, maybe even one for your whole team, to join us in celebrating.

Remember: in your team, you have more influence than you might think. Teamwork can be productive, fun, and meaningful — if you band together with your team and make it so.

– Charlie 

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Most of us spend 80 percent of our work time with the same four to eight people. These people are our true team, regardless of what the org chart says.

And it’s in this team that we experience belonging — or the opposite. Most of us have had the experience of sticking through a bad work experience because of our team; if it weren’t for them, we would’ve flipped the table and walked out a long time ago. We’ve also experienced the feeling of having the good work we’re doing soured by a frustrating or toxic environment created by a poorly functioning team.

That’s the power of teams.

With a strong team, we have an incredible amount of rapport, influence, and can-do attitude. If our meetings suck, we can change them. If we want to come up with a different way of talking about goals, we can do it. If we want to cover for each other, we can come together and figure out how.

And if we make our team’s work life better, we make 80 percent of our work life better. When our team’s life becomes better, our sense of belonging goes up, making us even more invested in sticking with the team and making things better.

That’s the power of teams, too.

Throughout the experience of reading Team Habits, when you see something that makes you want to shake your fist at all the things you can’t change at work, remember that what we’re talking about is improving your team’s belonging and performance, not the entire organization’s.

But it turns out that focusing on your team is often the best way to change the organization.

How 3 Percent Shifts the Culture 

We tend to think that change comes from the top, but the reality is that two-thirds of all top-down organizational change projects fail.¹

Top-down change projects are tricky undertakings, in part because getting groups of people to change behavior is less about inspiring them with visionary ideas than about translating those ideas into everyday habits that everyone participates in. 

But it turns out that a relatively small percentage of a culture or organization — as small as 3 percent— can shift the rest of the culture or organization they belong to. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes convincingly about this in his book Skin in the Game², where he suggests that within a complex system, it takes only “three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.”

While we might not live in a truly meritocratic culture, our culture does value what works. When one team starts outshining other teams, people at all levels of the organization take notice. The team’s peers notice; studies suggest that employees learn more from their fellow employees than from higher-ups or managers.³ And the better that team performs, the more likely it is that the organization’s managers and leaders will start trying to figure out what’s working.

Sure, they’ll start by focusing on the people of the team and attributing their success to them. But, as I’ve argued, it’s not about the people per se. It’s about their habits.

Organizational culture can be defined as a shared set of values, goals, attitudes, and practices that make up an organization. Team habits are the practical component of culture; while values, goals, and attitudes are important, when it comes down to it, what we do as a collective is who we are as a collective.

Changing our habits can be an incredible lever for changing our organizational culture. Continuing with our existing habits reinforces our current culture. If you don’t like your organization’s culture, then you have to change its habits.

To continue running the same habits is only to reinforce the culture. The single best way to shift your organization is to shift your team.

And the single best way to keep your team together is to show that it’s not the members of the team as much as it is the team habits — and those can be replicated across the organization fairly quickly and with minimal heartbreak and personnel disruption.

The power is in your hands.

1. Marcus Chiu and Heather Salerno, Changing Change Management: An Open Source Approach (Gartner, 2019).

2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Random House, 2018).

3. The Definitive Guide to Peer Coaching (Imperative, 2019).