The 8th Habit: My Summary

Following the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey decided to write a sequel: The 8th Habit.

While it was not nearly as popular as 7 habits, I find it much more useful.

If you are looking for a single book to summarize all of Covey's thoughts on personal development, this is it.

Throughout the book Covey summarizes the 7 habits, to save you time, I'm not going to summarize someone's summary of something I've already summarized (if that makes sense). Because of this, it is not my best summary. Sorry.

This book builds heavily off of an idea of four intelligences, which you'll learn about shortly, and develop them to help become the best you who can then influence others to be better.

Here is the quick read version of the sequel of 7 Habits: The 8th Habit.

The 8th Habit

The 8th habit is to find your voice and inspire others to find theirs. Your "voice" lies at the intersection of your talent (natural gifts), passion (things that motivate and inspire you), need (what the world will pay you for), and conscience (what is right). The easiest way to find your voice is when you sense a human need and respond while following your conscience.

Pain

Pain is when you repeatedly don't get the result you were hoping for. Like trying to lose those last 5 pounds and failing every Thanksgiving.

The best, and often, the only way to break through pain is to understand the problem causing the pain. The solution to the problem comes from a break away from old ways of thinking. If we keep using the old ways to fix a new problem, we will experience pain.

Identifying The Problem

When you have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that’s success. When you have a challenge and the old, once-successful response no longer works, that’s failure.

Most organizations, and people, have developed a blindness to their own defects. They are not suffering because they cannot resolve their problems, but because they cannot SEE their problems.

Building on the idea of paradigms from 7 habits, Covey believes the problem stems from an incomplete paradigm of who we are. Human beings are not things; they are four dimensions:

1. Body
2. Mind
3. Heart
4. Spirit

Representing the four basic needs of all people: to survive, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy.

Only someone who is respected as a whole person in a whole job – one who is paid fairly, treated kindly, used creatively, and given opportunities to serve human needs can be cheerful, cooperative, and committed.

Look for ways you are not operating from a body, mind, heart, and spirit point of view and that's probably the problem.

The Solution To Any Problem

Two-part solution:

1. Find your voice
2. Inspire others to find their voice

Deep within each one of us, there is a longing to live a life of greatness and contribution, to matter and to make a difference. Finding your voice and inspiring others to find their voice is how you make a difference.

Find Your Voice

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same." - Marianne Williamson

If you were to ask Covey what one subject, one theme, seemed to have the greatest impact upon people, he would answer: we are free to choose.

This power and freedom stand in stark contrast to the mind-set of victimism and the culture of blame. Your power to choose the direction of your life allows you to reinvent yourself, to change your future, and to powerfully influence the rest of creation.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose your response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.

This was a huge part of 7 habits.

Suddenly, there is no excuse. In the book Covey tells a story about a client he was working with who said the following:

“I never knew my father. My father never knew his father, but my son knows his father.”

A role as a transition person will impact generation after generation to come. A transition person is someone who pauses, asks why, and then chooses the best route, not the traditional route.

This requires the sacrifice of short-term selfish interests and the exercise of courage in subordinating social values to principles.

Your voice will be the one where you become a transition person. Whether it is transitioning company culture, family values, industry think, or just daily habits, you need to change something. Change is how humans perceive value added to the world.

What can you change? 7 habits talks a lot about your circle of influence and how to grow it. I suggest reading that portion of my last summary if interested.

The Four Intelligences Behind Your Voice:

There are four types of intelligences:

1. Mental Intelligence (IQ): Our ability to analyze, reason, think abstractly use language, visualize, and comprehend
2. Physical Intelligence (PQ): We are implicitly aware of this, but often discount it.
3. Emotional Intelligence (EQ): Self-knowledge, self-awareness, social sensitivity, empathy, and the ability to communicate with others
4. Spiritual Intelligence (SQ): Our drive for meaning and connection

If you do nothing but the following, you will increase all four:

1. Assume you’ve had a heart attack, live accordingly
2. Assume the half-life of your profession is two years, prepare accordingly
3. Assume everything you say about someone they will eventually hear, speak accordingly
4. Assume you have a one-on-one visit with your Creator every quarter, live accordingly

The highest manifestations of the four intelligences are:

1. Vision (Mental): Seeing what is possible in people, projects, and organizations
2. Discipline (Physical): Paying the price to bring vision into reality
3. Passion (Emotional): The fire and desire to bring vision into reality
4. Conscience (Spiritual): The drive of meaning and contribution of the vision

Your Voice

Covey beats the idea that all things are created twice into your head. Things are created twice because they are created once in our mind and once in reality. This is another thought from 7 Habits.

The most important vision is to develop a sense of self, our of own destiny, our own mission, and our own purpose. Think about whom you want to be and create that vision in your head. Does the vision tap into your voice, energy, and unique talent? Does it give you a sense of calling?

To do this, you must see yourself through the lens of the potential and the best actions rather than through the lens of current behavior or weaknesses. If you start doing this with yourself, you will slowly generate positive energy which will help you reach out and embrace others.

While building your future in your mind is an important step, you must also build it in the real world as well. To build something, it requires discipline to accept reality, acknowledge the stubborn facts, and continue. Sacrificing today for tomorrow’s good is discipline and only the disciplined are truly free. The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites, and passions. The successful person has formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do. This is what you'll have to do if you wish to build your future.

To help you develop your voice, take your primary roles (from 7 habits) in life and ask yourself the following:

1. What need do I sense?
2. Do I possess a talent for that?
3. Does the opportunity to meet the need tap into my passion?
4. Does my conscience inspire me to take action and become involved?

Inspire others to find their voice

The 8th Habit was written after Covey worked with a lot of large corporations to help them align strategy and human resources challenges. This has influenced the writing to be toward more corporate concerns. For example, Covey expresses that the highest challenge inside organizations is to set them up and run them in a way that enables each person to inwardly sense his or her innate worth and potential for greatness in order to contribute their unique talents and passion to accomplish the organizations purpose.

Luckily, an organization is made up of individuals who have a relationship and a shared purpose. Similar to a family, class, or group of friends.

Covey plays off his idea from 7 Habits that both BOTH management and leadership are vital, one without the other is insufficient (and they are different):

• You lead people
• You manage things

Four problems for organizations

Covey believes all organizations problems revolve around the four intelligences. It is often easiest to identify a problem by looking at the symptoms:

If the spirit/conscience is neglected, what will result?

• Low trust: Backbiting, internal strife, victimism, defensiveness, information hoarding, and protective communication
• To fix: focus on modeling aka set a good example.

If you neglect the mind/vision, what will result?

• No shared vision or common value system: Hidden agendas, politics, and different criteria in decision making
• To fix: focus on pathfinding, determine the course as a group

Neglecting the discipline, what will result?

• No alignment: Inefficient systems and processes, poor sales, poor customer experience
• To fix: focus on aligning goals, structures, compensation, and processes

What happens when you neglect the heart?

• Disempowerment: Moonlighting, daydreaming, boredom, anger, fear, apathy, and malicious obedience
• To fix: focus on empowering individuals and teams by looking at results, not methods

Trust

A huge portion of all of Covey's writing revolves around trust. His son wrote another book specifically about trust that I'll review later, but here is the 8th Habit version:

Personal development precedes the building of trusting relationships, and trusting relationships are a prerequisite for developing teamwork. To build trust and teamwork, you must model, pathfind, align, and empower.

In any organization, it is the Trim-Trab that leads the way. The Trim-Trab is the small rudder that turns the big rudder that turns the ship. You want to be the Trim-Trab. To do so you need to focus on your circle of influence (7th habits), take initiative, own not only the problem, but the solution to the problem as well. This will inspire trust.

To become the Trim-Trab, you must gain the trust of your peers. This involves telling the trust, keeping promises, dealing with the tough issues, seeing the world from an abundance mentality (7 habits), being competent in your work, seeing the big picture, and understanding how all of life is connected (interdependency from 7 habits).

There is no way you can make progress in your relationships with other people if your own life is a mess or if you’re untrustworthy. To go from untrustworthy to trustworthy, make and keep promises, involve people in the problem, and work out the solution together.

Leadership

Leadership is creating an environment in where people want to be part of the organization and not just work for the organization. Leadership creates an environment that makes people want to, not just have to.

An easy way to evaluate current leadership is to ask yourself the following questions:

• Do people clearly understand the organization's goals?
• Are they committed to these goals?

To better create a strategy around leadership, ask yourself the following questions:

• Market realities: What drives your economic engine?
• Core competencies: What can you be the best in the world at?
• Stakeholders’ needs: What do your employees, owners, suppliers, customers, and leaders need and want?
• Values: What does your conscience counsel?

Create a written mission statement and strategic plan that encompasses your sense of purpose, your vision, and your value. It should cover how you will provide value to your stakeholders.

The litmus test of a good mission statement and strategic plan is being able to approach any person at any level of an organization and have them be able to describe how what they do contributes to the strategic plan and is in harmony with the governing values

Management

Management is designing and executing systems that reinforce the core values and goals of the organization. Create cascading goals throughout the organization that are aligned with your shared vision. Adjust and align yourselves for regular feedback from the marketplace and the internal organization. One of the easiest ways to manage someone is through compensation.

For instance, the size of the compensation pie may be based upon cooperation and synergy, but a particular individual’s piece of that pie would be based on individual effort within the team. Nurturing both interdependence on other team workers and independence of effort.

Set up individualized win-win performance agreements with every person and every team. If they win, you win. You don’t have to stay bound to “industry” standards. Try looking at other industries to break the mold.

To go further, management should empower the organization. If you want to truly empower someone ask them, “What do you think?” People are experts, people have opinions. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Leaders deal with one basic question: What matters most?

Managers deal with one basic question: Are we on target?

Time is money and corporations constantly waste time and resources through crap meetings with crap outcomes. To fix this, all reports should consist of only 2 pages:

• The present health of your organization aka financial statements
• The future strength of your organization aka relationships with key stakeholders (like employees, suppliers, clients, and financiers.

Empowering Others

Possibly the hardest part of being a leader or manager is getting your colleagues to work at their optimal output. Unfortunately, no one knows they are capable of something if you keep reminding them. For example, when I was in jr high I was tasked with feeding the dogs. It wasn't my favorite chore, so I would do my best to get out of it. My parents constantly reminded me, which made me not have to remember and then if they didn't remind me, I just didn't do it. This isn't the right approach.

Leaders should decide how and when employees will be held accountable and what the consequences and rewards should be. This is giving up control and it is one of the hardest things to do.

Empowerment does not come from simply abandoning people. It comes when there is a commonly understood end in mind, with agreed-upon guidelines, and a supportive structure and system. People become accountable for results but have the freedom (within guidelines) to achieve those results in a way that taps into their unique talents. Self-evaluation is tougher than anyone else’s evaluation will ever be because only you know your true capability.

As a leader, when you evaluate someone ask these question:

• How is it going
• What are you learning
• What are YOUR goals
• How can I help
• How am I doing as your helper

Every job can be broken down into three phases: Plan, Do, Evaluate. By letting employees take control of all three stages, you will see their true potential

Breakdowns in execution typically occur because people don’t know what the goals of their team or organization are, people don’t believe in the goals, or people don’t know what they need to do individually to achieve the goals.

To avoid these breakdowns focus on clarity, commitment, translation, enabling, synergy, and accountability. However, everyone should focus on 1 thing at a time. Covey found that adding a second goal decreases odds of success by 25% and adding a third goal decreases odds of success by 40%.

So, what is the most important thing to fulfill the needs of your stakeholders? What is the most consequential thing you can do to advance our strategy? Which few goals would bring the most significant return?

A strategic plan should be broken down into 1 – 3 wildly important goals and then you need to keep score. Without measures, people can interpret goals their own way. Create a compelling, visible, accessible scoreboard for all your wildly important goals that tracks your current result, has your target result, and has the deadline to get from A to B.

What to do with your life

Organizations are established to serve human needs. What need to you find the greatest? Enter that industry.

As you progress, you'll find the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. That's why you must become a servant leader. When people with formal authority refuse to use that authority and power except as a last resort, their moral authority increases because it is obvious that they have subordinated their ego and position power and use reasoning, persuasion, kindness, empathy, and, in short, trustworthiness instead. Similiar to parenting. Remember when you hated your parents "throwing their weight around" or saying "because I said so". That's not the kind of leadership you want to express.

As you lead and manage, remember people are whole people – body, mind, hearth, and spirit. As a person engages in the sequential 8th habit of finding their own voice, making the choice to expand their influence by inspiring others to find their voice, they increase their freedom and power of choice to solve their greatest challenge and serve human needs.

Leadership is a choice, not a position. We manage things. We lead and empower people.

Summary

Like I said at the beginning since this book plays so heavily off of the 7 Habits, this is not my best summary. However, this does not mean the book isn't 100% worth reading.

I actually believe that you could read the 8th Habit and get everything valuable from the 7 Habits plus some (due to Covey's constant summarization of the 7 Habits).

I have two more Covey inspired books in the library that I'll review as time goes on.