In a recent Beyond the To-Do List podcast, Michael Sliwinski of Nozbe talks about modelling the behaviours he wants his team to put into practice in how they use Nozbe. Here’s the (slightly edited) extract that stood out to me (starting at 21m23s):
“You don’t email me. I don’t accept emails from my team. If you email me, my assistant … will reject it and tell the person “What is this?” So we don’t use email at all; we communicate through tasks. So people very quickly learn that either they communicate through Slack to me, but when we do a chat, like “Michael, I need this and this from you.” My reply is create a task for me. That’s it. I started like this, and now my whole team is like this. Our chief designer is like “where’s my task.” So very quickly we have this culture of creating tasks for each other.”
In User Adoption Strategies I talk about the strategy of executive support, where executives model the behaviours they want to see embraced in new tools. It sets a standard, it sets an expectation, it starts to move culture. Michael’s example above is a perfect illustration of this.
