Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go

further faster. On today's podcast we'll talk about creating habits that can change your organization.

Andy, one of the things we've talked about many times in the podcast is how our leadership team

is often reading through a book together, you know, having a discussion

and actually today's podcast comes from one of those discussions, but it was a little different in that

you didn't bring a whole book in, you brought a book in and had us read one chapter.

Yeah, usually we read entire books together.

Sometimes we spend months working through books together, which we all enjoy at least you all act like you enjoy.

I enjoy it.

We do.

Yeah, you do. In this particular case I brought I ask everybody to just simply to just read chapter 4 of Charles Zewig's book, The Power of Habit. I'm sure most of our podcast listeners have either seen the book, heard of the book, or perhaps read the book.

And specifically, I wanted us to talk about this issue of a keystone habit.

He defines a keystone habit as essentially a habit that triggers a series of related or in some cases

unrelated behavior sometimes even habits so it's one thing that an individual

does or in this case one thing an organization can do that changes the behavior or reaffirms and underscores other behavior.

So as a keystone habit you focus on one thing but it has the potential to impact a series of things. Can you give us some examples?

The easiest way to understand a Keystone habit

is not to think of it within the context of an organization.

We'll get to that in a minute, but to think about it personally.

One of the examples he gives in the book

is the habit of eating dinner together as a family.

And he talks about a study or a couple of studies that say families that consistently

...