Stephen Covey is best known for his bestselling book The 7 habits of Highly Effective People. Over the years I have given numerous presentations on how to incorporate the 7 habits into customer service. For those of you not familiar with the book, here are the 7 habits:

  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. Synergize
  7. Sharpen the saw

I have numerous ideas about how these habits can create the framework for highly effective web teams. Stay tuned, I can see a presentation at a future HighEdWebDev conference. For now, I’d like to focus on just a couple of ideas.

Habit One is “Be Proactive”. Our basic nature is to act, not to be acted upon. Effective web teams are proactive. They take the initiative. They are Web Evangelists. The are constant and relentless in advocating for the web.

Habit Three is “Put First Things First”. The idea is that you shouldn’t prioritize your schedule, you should schedule your priorities. As I mentioned in a previous post, effective web teams will focus their energy on projects that provide true value to their institutions. As the Pareto Principle states, 80% of the results flow from 20% of the activities. And for those of you familiar with Covey’s work, the most effective web teams spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II.

In 2004, Covey published The 8th Habit – from Effectiveness to Greatness. In the beginning of the book Covey chronicles the move from the Agriculture Age to the Industrial Age to the current Information Age to the coming Age of Wisdom. The transition to each new age brought about a dramatic downsizing of the existing workforce. He asks the question “Do you believe the Knowledge Worker Age will eventually bring about the downsizing of up to 90% of the Industrial Age workforce?

Covey believes it will. How about you?