The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (25 page)

“I’ve been really lucky,” he said. “And I really, genuinely believe that if you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.”

Schultz’s focus on employee training and customer service made Starbucks into one of the most successful companies in the world. For years, he was personally involved in almost every aspect of how the company was run. In 2000, exhausted, he handed over day-to-day operations to other executives, at which point, Starbucks began to stumble. Within a few years, customers were complaining about the quality of the drinks and customer service. Executives, focused on a frantic expansion, often ignored the complaints. Employees grew unhappy. Surveys indicated people were starting to equate Starbucks with tepid coffee and empty smiles.

So Schultz stepped back into the chief executive position in 2008. Among his priorities was restructuring the company’s training program to renew its focus on a variety of issues, including bolstering employees’—or “partners,” in Starbucks’ lingo—willpower and self-confidence. “We had to start earning customer and partner trust again,” Schultz told me.

At about the same time, a new wave of studies was appearing that looked at the science of willpower in a slightly different way. Researchers had noticed that some people, like Travis, were able to create willpower habits relatively easily. Others, however, struggled, no matter how much training and support they received. What was causing the difference?

Mark Muraven, who was by then a professor at the University of Albany, set up a new experiment.
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He put undergraduates in a room that contained a plate of warm, fresh cookies and asked them to ignore the treats. Half the participants were treated kindly. “We ask that you please don’t eat the cookies. Is that okay?” a researcher said. She then discussed the purpose of the experiment, explaining that it was to measure their ability to resist temptations. She thanked them for contributing their time. “If you have any suggestions or
thoughts about how we can improve this experiment, please let me know. We want you to help us make this experience as good as possible.”

The other half of the participants weren’t coddled the same way. They were simply given orders.

“You
must not
eat the cookies,” the researcher told them. She didn’t explain the experiment’s goals, compliment them, or show any interest in their feedback. She told them to follow the instructions. “We’ll start now,” she said.

The students from both groups had to ignore the warm cookies for five minutes after the researcher left the room. None gave in to temptation.

Then the researcher returned. She asked each student to look at a computer monitor. It was programmed to flash numbers on the screen, one at a time, for five hundred milliseconds apiece. The participants were asked to hit the space bar every time they saw a “6” followed by a “4.” This has become a standard way to measure willpower—paying attention to a boring sequence of flashing numbers requires a focus akin to working on an impossible puzzle.

Students who had been treated kindly did well on the computer test. Whenever a “6” flashed and a “4” followed, they pounced on the space bar. They were able to maintain their focus for the entire twelve minutes. Despite ignoring the cookies, they had willpower to spare.

Students who had been treated rudely, on the other hand, did terribly. They kept forgetting to hit the space bar. They said they were tired and couldn’t focus. Their willpower muscle, researchers determined, had been fatigued by the brusque instructions.

When Muraven started exploring why students who had been treated kindly had more willpower he found that the key difference was the sense of control they had over their experience. “We’ve found this again and again,” Muraven told me. “When people are
asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons—if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else—it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower.”

For companies and organizations, this insight has enormous implications. Simply giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.
One 2010 study at a manufacturing plant in Ohio, for instance, scrutinized assembly-line workers who were empowered to make small decisions about their schedules and work environment.
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They designed their own uniforms and had authority over shifts. Nothing else changed. All the manufacturing processes and pay scales stayed the same. Within two months, productivity at the plant increased by 20 percent. Workers were taking shorter breaks. They were making fewer mistakes. Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.

The same lessons hold true at Starbucks. Today, the company is focused on giving employees a greater sense of authority. They have asked workers to redesign how espresso machines and cash registers are laid out, to decide for themselves how customers should be greeted and where merchandise should be displayed. It’s not unusual for a store manager to spend hours discussing with his employees where a blender should be located.

“We’ve started asking partners to use their intellect and creativity, rather than telling them ‘take the coffee out of the box, put the cup here, follow this rule,’ ” said Kris Engskov, a vice president at Starbucks. “People want to be in control of their lives.”

Turnover has gone down. Customer satisfaction is up. Since Schultz’s return, Starbucks has boosted revenues by more than $1.2 billion per year.

When Travis was sixteen, before he dropped out of school and started working for Starbucks, his mother told him a story. They were driving together, and Travis asked why he didn’t have more siblings. His mother had always tried to be completely honest with her children, and so she told him that she had become pregnant two years before Travis was born but had gotten an abortion. They already had two children at that point, she explained, and were addicted to drugs. They didn’t think they could support another baby. Then, a year later, she became pregnant with Travis. She thought about having another abortion, but it was too much to bear. It was easier to let nature take its course. Travis was born.

“She told me that she had made a lot of mistakes, but that having me was one of the best things that ever happened to her,” Travis said. “When your parents are addicts, you grow up knowing you can’t always trust them for everything you need. But I’ve been really lucky to find bosses who gave me what was missing. If my mom had been as lucky as me, I think things would have turned out different for her.”

A few years after that conversation, Travis’s father called to say that an infection had entered his mother’s bloodstream through one of the places on her arm she used to shoot up. Travis immediately drove to the hospital in Lodi, but she was unconscious by the time he arrived. She died a half hour later, when they removed her life support.

A week later, Travis’s father was in the hospital with pneumonia. His lung had collapsed. Travis drove to Lodi again, but it was 8:02
P.M.
when he got to the emergency room. A nurse brusquely told him he’d have to come back tomorrow; visiting hours were over.

Travis has thought a lot about that moment since then. He hadn’t started working at Starbucks yet. He hadn’t learned how to control his emotions. He didn’t have the habits that, since then, he’s spent years practicing. When he thinks about his life now, how far he is from a world where overdoses occur and stolen cars show up in driveways and a nurse seems like an insurmountable obstacle, he wonders how it’s possible to travel such a long distance in such a short time.

“If he had died a year later, everything would have been different,” Travis told me. By then, he would have known how to calmly plead with the nurse. He would have known to acknowledge her authority, and then ask politely for one small exception. He could have gotten inside the hospital. Instead, he gave up and walked away. “I said, ‘All I want to do is talk to him once,’ and she was like, ‘He’s not even awake, it’s after visiting hours, come back tomorrow.’ I didn’t know what to say. I felt so small.”

Travis’s father died that night.

On the anniversary of his death, every year, Travis wakes up early, takes an extra-long shower, plans out his day in careful detail, and then drives to work. He always arrives on time.

THE POWER OF A CRISIS
How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design

The patient was already unconscious when he was wheeled into the operating room at Rhode Island Hospital. His jaw was slack, his eyes closed, and the top of an intubation tube peeked above his lips. As a nurse hooked him up to a machine that would force air into his lungs during surgery, one of his arms slipped off the gurney, the skin mottled with liver spots.

The man was eighty-six years old and, three days earlier, had fallen at home.
Afterward, he had trouble staying awake and answering questions, and so eventually his wife called an ambulance.
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In the emergency room, a doctor asked him what happened, but the man kept nodding off in the middle of his sentences. A scan of his head revealed why: The fall had slammed his brain against his skull, causing what’s known as a subdural hematoma. Blood was pooling within the left portion of his cranium, pushing against the delicate folds of tissue inside his skull. The fluid had been building for almost seventy-two hours, and those parts of the brain that controlled
his breathing and heart were beginning to falter.
Unless the blood was drained, the man would die.
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At the time, Rhode Island Hospital was one of the nation’s leading medical institutions, the main teaching hospital for Brown University and the only Level I trauma center in southeastern New England. Inside the tall brick and glass building, physicians had pioneered cutting-edge medical techniques, including the use of ultrasound waves to destroy tumors inside a patient’s body.
In 2002, the National Coalition on Health Care rated the hospital’s intensive care unit as one of the finest in the country.
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But by the time the elderly patient arrived, Rhode Island Hospital also had another reputation: a place riven by internal tensions. There were deep, simmering enmities between nurses and physicians. In 2000, the nurses’ union had voted to strike after complaining that they were being forced to work dangerously long hours. More than three hundred of them stood outside the hospital with signs reading “Stop Slavery” and
“They can’t take away our pride.”
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“This place can be awful,” one nurse recalled telling a reporter. “The doctors can make you feel like you’re worthless, like you’re disposable. Like you should be thankful to pick up after them.”

Administrators eventually agreed to limit nurses’ mandatory overtime, but tensions continued to rise.
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A few years later, a surgeon was preparing for a routine abdominal operation when a nurse called for a “time-out.” Such pauses are standard procedure at most hospitals, a way for doctors and staff
to make sure mistakes are avoided.
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The nursing staff at Rhode Island Hospital was insistent on time-outs, particularly since a surgeon had accidentally removed the tonsils of a girl who was supposed to have eye surgery. Time-outs were supposed to catch such errors before they occurred.

At the abdominal surgery, when the OR nurse asked the team to gather around the patient for a time-out and to discuss their plan, the doctor headed for the doors.

“Why don’t you lead this?” the surgeon told the nurse. “I’m going to step outside for a call. Knock when you’re ready.”

“You’re supposed to be here for this, Doctor,” she replied.

“You can handle it,” the surgeon said, as he walked toward the door.

“Doctor, I don’t feel this is appropriate.”

The doctor stopped and looked at her. “If I want your damn opinion, I’ll ask for it,” he said. “Don’t ever question my authority again. If you can’t do your job, get the hell out of my OR.”

The nurse led the time-out, retrieved the doctor a few minutes later, and the procedure occurred without complication. She never contradicted a physician again, and never said anything when other safety policies were ignored.

“Some doctors were fine, and some were monsters,” one nurse who worked at Rhode Island Hospital in the mid-2000s told me. “We called it the glass factory, because it felt like everything could crash down at any minute.”

To deal with these tensions, the staff had developed informal rules—habits unique to the institution—that helped avert the most obvious conflicts. Nurses, for instance, always double-checked the orders of error-prone physicians and quietly made sure that correct doses were entered; they took extra time to write clearly on patients’ charts, lest a hasty surgeon make the wrong cut. One nurse told me they developed a system of color codes to warn one another. “We put doctors’ names in different colors on the whiteboards,” she said. “Blue meant ‘nice,’ red meant ‘jerk,’ and black meant, ‘whatever you do, don’t contradict them or they’ll take your head off.’ ”