Overview

This new addition to the Habitudes series was created with one goal in mind: to help business leaders move their new employees from backpack to briefcase. Very often, the workplace is a long distance journey from the school campus. The tone of a workroom looks and feels different than a dorm room. The need of the hour is to equip new professionals to not only fit into your workplace, but to flourish in it.

More than 7,000 schools, businesses, and organizations around the world utilize Habitudes every day. The Art of Launching Your Career helps your young employees:

• Take initiative and set the pace for other teammates
• Stay creative, even when a supervisor doesn’t embrace their ideas
• Overcome a sense of entitlement towards tasks that seem “beneath them”
• Persevere in a career when it may move slower than they wish
• Trust their supervisor, even when they don’t completely agree with an objective

Most Popular Uses

There are many ways Habitudes can be leveraged to connect with and train growing leaders. Specifically, we’ve seen this resource used most effectively when harnessed as a training resource for:

• Lunch & Learns
• Onboarding new teammates
• Internship programs
• Ongoing employee training

How Habitudes Has Helped Businesses

“Implementing the Habitudes program has helped us reinforce the important of leadership and character with our team members.  The images helped us reinforce our mission, vision and values, and teach team members practical ways to personally own them in all of their actions.”

–David McAnally, Jr., Vice President, Emergency Medicine for LocumTenens a division of Jackson Healthcare

“Our future success as leaders depends on our ability to inspire, harvest and unleash the potential of our youth in the workplace. I have used Tim’s insight and solutions to train countless managers in hiring, engaging and retaining the very best new talent. Thank you Tim for sharing such valuable insight and solutions… it’s priceless.”

–Steven Krajenka, Retail Executive for Gap Inc., Sony, and American Eagle Outfitters

ISBN-13: 978-0-9960783-4-4

Case Study from Hire Dynamics

Hire Dynamics is an industry-leading, award-winning staffing and professional recruitment organization. 

Since 2001, Hire Dynamics has been built around the concept of loyalty – to its clients, its internal staff, and the talent it places.  By doing things the right way, and never compromising on its values, they have become a leader in providing talent on-demand.

Hire Dynamics is a different kind of company, and it shows in everything they’ve accomplished:

• Top 5 Best Staffing Firms to Work for in the U.S.
• The #2 Best Place to Work in Atlanta
• The #1 Best Place to Work in Greenville, SC
• The #1 Best Place to Work in Charlotte, NC
• A 2014 Inavero Best of Staffing™ Client Award Winner
• A 2014 Inavero Best of Staffing™ Talent Award Winner

In 2012, Hire Dynamics decided to implement Habitudes as a tool to teach basic leadership ideas and soft skills to young employees. To find out more, we interviewed Sonya Buckley, the Chief People Officer at Hire Dynamics. Here’s what she had to say:

What challenges were you facing before implementing Habitudes®?

As our company gained national recognition and rapid growth, we began to experience a shifting corporate demographic – a large increase in younger staff. With this demographic shift, we saw many positives, but at the same time, there were some challenges. Many of our managers were finding it difficult to connect with younger employees and communicate expectations. This disconnect was also hindering the younger staff from embracing our corporate core values in both client and office interactions. What’s more, our managers didn’t have the time to design and develop new systems to combat this challenge.

So we sought outside help, and after some searching, we found Growing Leaders and their Habitudes® system.

How did Habitudes fit into your organization?

Habitudes gave us a wide variety of image-based leadership principles that perfectly aligned with our corporate values and culture. It also provided us with a turnkey system we could hand to our Branch Managers, complete with teacher guides and workbooks.

As a result, our Branch Managers have been able to discuss one image per month. These managers plan on going through each book in the Habitudes series with their staff members.

In addition, our corporate staff is going through an image from Habitudes for Communicators each month.

What results did Habitudes help create for your company?

The results have been great! We are now exploring ways to increase the frequency of Habitudes conversations. Simply going through one image per month, we’ve already seen a number of strong outcomes, including:

• Greater transparency between managers and employees that has lead to deeper, more relevant conversations.
• Timed saved for our managers, who would have had to design and develop a new training program.
• It’s helped reveal how each staff member reacts to different situations, allowing our managers to better relate with and cultivate each team member’s strengths.
• Strengthened communication between the corporate office and our branch locations, clients, and contract employees.

Habitudes will continue to grow as a part of Hire Dynamic’s strategic training programs in the following years.