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Stephen M R Covey really is a chip off the old block. He sounds like his father, looks like his father and like his father, Dr Stephen R Covey, also challenges traditional thinking to bring about a positive paradigm shift. Who better then to bring his father’s model for personal change, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to the London Business Forum (LBF) other than the man himself?

Covey began with reference to Aesop’s well-known Fable, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg. In this story, he explained, “the health and well-being of the goose” are essential to her productivity. When, through greed, the farmer kills the goose and reaches inside expecting a lump of gold but finds nothing he is deprived of the reward that was previously assured he and his wife daily. Similarly, many organisations are productive but unsustainable because they ignore the welfare of their employees, Covey told the LBF.

“Real effectiveness,” Covey insisted, “is that balance of production and production capabilities.” We are now living in the “Knowledge Worker Age” and The 7 Habits Covey believes are, “ideally suited as the right and accurate paradigm to help us navigate this new world.”

To illustrate the idea a video of Dr Covey was played to the audience. In it, Dr Covey explains that to truly reach the potential of this new age we must break with the traditions of the Industrial Age that dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Although we are living in the Knowledge Worker Age, so many of our modern management practices come from the Industrial Age,” he said. The Industrial Age favours a control paradigm, where those who are managed are “employees or subordinates.” Our financial accounting systems, argued Dr Covey, are still modelled this way; they list people as expenses but computers, stationary, telephones are “assets.”

The 7 Habits advocates that organisations view people as their greatest assets: “We manage things; things don’t have the power to choose. But we lead people; people do have the power to choose.” Leadership, Covey told the LBF, is now a choice and “these 7 Habits are leadership for our lives.” They are:

1. Be Proactive

2. Begin with the End in Mind

3. Put First Things First

4. Think Win/Win

5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

6. Synergise

7. Sharpen the Saw

The first three habits are what Covey calls the “private victory.” These, he explained, are the steps that take us from dependence to independence. But, in this age of collaboration, he emphasised that “most of the world today is interdependent.” The move to interdependence, habits four to six, is defined as the “public victory.” “Interdependence is a higher value than independence […] because you have to be independent to choose interdependence,” Covey told the LBF.

Proactive people, Covey explained, recognise that they have a choice and take responsibility for that choice. By contrast, reactive people focus on things over which they have no control or influence. This, Covey explained, is not a habit of a highly effective person: “If you think that the problem is out there – is everybody else – that very thinking is the problem.” Once a person understands that they are a product of their own choices then they can effectively adopt the other six habits.

The second habit, “Begin with the End in Mind,” is about creating a personal mission statement. To be highly effective it is necessary to have a plan. Covey urges that we recognise our own “purpose, values and principles” just as companies do by completing the sentences:

The things that matter most to me are…

The principles I will use to guide my life are…

The contribution that I want to make is…

“Effective people live by design,” Covey told the LBF. Once you have made the plan it is time to then implement it, or “Put first things first.” Central to this habit is the ability to distinguish what is important from what is not. Ineffective people prioritise what is urgent because those are the things “that act on them,” said Covey. By comparison, effective people prioritise only what is important and the more you do this then fewer urgent things will crop up and interrupt your life.

The habits are in the order they are for good reason, stressed Covey: “The private victory must precede the public victory.” The next three habits are designed to increase trust, or what Dr Covey calls, “the emotional bank account.” Effective people “learn to act in ways to make deposits and avoid withdrawals.” For example, effective people keep promises where ineffective people break them and effective people forgive instead of hold grudges.

Habit four, “Think Win/Win,” is about building effective relationships that are mutually beneficial, Covey explained. What is even better than “Win/Win,” suggested Covey, is to enter into an agreement where both sides have the courage to go for “Win/ Win or no deal.” In an organisation this may be about ensuring the benefits to both the employee and company are aligned.

The fifth habit is about listening but it goes further than that. It challenges us to think about how we listen and whether we listen in the most effective way. “Ineffective people listen with the intent to reply, effective people listen with the intent to understand,” Covey remarked. He and his father champion “empathic listening,” meaning that you seek to understand first before offering counsel or advice. If you listen in this way you can build greater trust and influence, “when there’s high emotion or strong disagreement, this is powerful,” suggested Covey.

Covey acknowledged that sometimes compromise is the best arrangement that two sides can come to but there is a third alternative, which is the sixth habit: synergy. This only comes, he said, when both parties “share a willingness to stay in communication long enough.” When this happens new ideas are created together, leading to new possibilities and greater synergy.

Finally, once these habits are embedded it is necessary to “take time to sharpen the saw.” A person is made up of four parts, suggested Covey: physical, social/emotional, mental and spiritual. We must look after each part, he argued. This can be done by living as if the following assumptions were true:

Body: “Assume that you’ve had a heart attack in the last month.”

Social: “Assume that everything you say about people will be heard by them.”

Mind: “Assume that your knowledge and skills will become obsolete in two years.”

Spirit: “Assume that you only have a year to live.”

It takes work for these seven steps to become habits, Covey admitted. Even his father, he said, struggles sometimes but the more you do them, the more you see results that reinforce the paradigm. In a personal tribute to his father, Covey told the LBF that as well as his father comes across publically, he is an even better person in private: “He is who you think he is and then some.”