The after-nighttime-walk-flippy and workplace habits

This is a story about coaching and interacting with peers at work, sort of

This is my first post. There, the obligatory self-congratulation is out of the way.

My wife and I have a very cute and lovable pup named Holly, Holly Berry (imagine the James Bond bit but in a girl dog’s voice) and this is a story about her and our walks and workplace habits. Just trust me and keep reading.

Holly at 9 months.

My wife and I have different sleep schedules. I’m a ‘night-person’ and she is, without a doubt, a ‘day-person.’ Thus, we came to the wonderfully simple agreement that she walks Holly in the morning and I’m on night duty.

I really enjoy our walks at night. I put her on a 30' training leash and let it drag along the sidewalk while she happily skips beside me. Tonight, we came back from our walk around 11:45pm and she followed me to the kitchen to ask for something.

She wanted a flippy. What is a flippy? It’s a rawhide twist stick. The nickname was created by my wife for our previous dog, Gracie, because she used to flip flat rawhide pieces between bites. Later on, I showed Gracie the wonder that is the rawhide twist stick. From then on she was hooked, but the nickname remained. I digress. If you intend on reading my posts in the future, know I am an average writer, at best, and I love a good digression.

Where were we? Ahhh yes, Holly came to the kitchen to ask for something. She wanted a flippy. I mumbled to myself and her, “Holly, that habit of wanting a flippy after your nighttime walk was the habit of someone else first.”

That’s when I froze in my tracks. How on earth did she develop a habit from our previous dog? Was Gracie sending messages from the afterlife? Was it something about the odor in Astoria’s air that reminded Holly of rawhide?

Nope.

It was me. As I reflected carefully over the past few weeks, I noticed I had been giving Holly flippys (or flippies or flippy’s, whatever it’s our word) after some of our nighttime walks. I created this habit. I continued to repeat a behavior where I rewarded Holly for being a good girl on our walks and she remembered that reward. I had subconsciously created an environment that fostered her desire for having a flippy after our nighttime walk.

Pay attention to how you’re leading and interacting with your peers. The environment you create and the actions you take will always create certain responses in others. That’s not to say that people won’t come up with responses of their own but if you lead by example, which you might be doing without even intending to, you’re behaviors, good or bad, can manifest in habits in the workplace around you.

I know there is a usually a much longer “and this is how thought A connects to thought B,” but not this time.

For some great to-dos when leading a technical team, read David Byttow’s piece on Effective Technical Leadership and scroll down to the Actions section.

That’s all for now.