A new routine needs a witness

When owners bring an operating problem to the table, the answer is usually something they already know. A weekly numbers meeting. Real one-on-ones with direct reports. A written plan with names and dates on it. Knowing has rarely been the problem. Keeping it going is.

Every new discipline feels clumsy at first. The meeting runs long, the scorecard has holes in it, and someone asks why the company needs this when things were fine before. That is the point where most owners quietly let it go.

I saw the same pattern on evening walks with my boys. For the first few weeks the question every night was, “Why are we going on a walk?” A few weeks later the walk had become one of their favorite parts of the day. The route stayed the same. Their ability to do it grew. There’s an old line I come back to often: “That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the nature of the task has changed, but our power to do has increased.”

In a business, that shift usually takes six to ten repetitions. A few things help you get there:

• Make it small. A 30-minute weekly meeting you keep is worth more than a two-hour meeting you cancel.
• Put it on the same day and time for 90 days.
• Decide ahead of time that you won’t judge it until it has run a full quarter.
• Tell people outside the business who will ask you about it.

That last one is the piece most owners skip, and it is the reason I believe in a council. When you say in front of ten other owners that you will hold the weekly meeting, and you know they will ask next month whether you did, the awkward phase gets a lot shorter.