The Rockefeller Habits Checklist

Over the previous few months, I have written detailed articles on each of the 10 Rockefeller Habilts Checklist sections. This article is an index to these posts.

Habit #1 - Team Health and Alignment

This habit is all about ensuring that you have a functional leadership team that is able to have constructive debate so they can resolve strategic and operational issues as they occur in the life of the business, whilst also continually updating the learning within the leadership team. If your leadership team works effectively as a team and you are continuously raising the knowledge and intellect of the team, you will very soon notice the impact on the rest of the business. Employees work best when they can see the leadership team working effectively and productively together.

Habit #2 - The Number 1 Priority

Whilst you need to be crystal clear on your long term direction and destination, it is just as important to know what your focus is for the next 90 days. Every quarter, you need to be very clear on what is the most important thing to achieve over the quarter even if you have identified more than one priority for the quarter.

Habit #3 - Communication Rhythms

Rockefeller Habit Number 3 is all about communication rhythms and how information flows through the business. It is about making sure that each employee has an opportunity to synchronise and collaborate with their teams on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis. It reads:

”Communication Rhythm is established and information moves through the organisation accurately and quickly."

Habit #4 - Functional and Process Accountability

Rock Habit Number 4 focuses on ensuring these right people are doing the right things right by creating clear functional and process accountabilities.

Habits #5 & #6 - Employee and Customer Feedback

Gathering data from employees and customers is vital to ensure that you know both the blockers and the opportunities within the business. The leadership team often are not close enough to really understand what is going on day to day so ask the people that live it every day.

Habit #7 - Core Values and Purpose

Core Values and Purpose are the Ideologies of the business. They define what your company is on earth to do and the guiding principles that the founders of the business hold true. All things the business does and how it does it should hold true to these two concepts. As they are so important, they should be used for hiring, on-boarding, development, appraisals (positive and negative) and recognition. And, because they are so important to the organisation you should put in place activities and actions that strengthen, reinforce and communicate the core values and purpose throughout the organisation.

Habit #8 - BHAG, Core Customers, Brand Promises

Whilst the core values and purpose are all about the reason for being and the organisations “guiderails” for decision making, this Rockefeller Habit talkers to everyone in the business knowing where the business is going, the profile of the typical (and desirable customer) and what we promise to the customer. Knowing this isn’t enough, your employees also need to be able to confidently articulate what this means in a short and succinct elevator pitch.

Habit #9 - Have you and your employees had a good day or week?

Having clear priorities for the business for each quarter is critical but not enough; these priorities need to be broken down and cascaded down appropriately through the leadership team priorities, down through management and to all levels in the organisation. So this habit is all about everyone in the business being able to say if that have had a good day or week - quantitively. So everyone in the business needs to know what their priorities are, how they are measured and how they are tracking to those measurements which gives them clear line of sight from what they need to do straight to the company's purpose and BHAG (via the 3HAG of course).

Habit #10 - The company's plans and performance are visible to everyone

Posted by : ged | On Sunday, 10 March 2019 | Modified On Sunday, 12 January 2020