Watching and listening, observing and learning what our people are doing. There is no substitution for being attentive to your people. If not they will go off the reservation quickly and will either not continue to perform at the level you want or they will begin to do things that you would not approve of. That is the Brokers primary responsibility. Make sure that people get things done and that they are done the right way.
People are creatures of habit and habits are hard to break. Even when someone has a bad habit that doesn’t do them any good, the habit is really hard to break and doing without support is close to impossible.
Ask any large tobacco company how they make their money. Bad habits.
Ask any member in a twelve step program if they could have done it alone.
They are all bad habits and in order to break the habit they all require someone to do something that is very difficult. Sometimes it feels impossible or at least improbable to the person who has the habit. In the worst case scenario the person who is suffering with a habit that they have that hurts them doesn’t recognize the habit as being counter to their own good.
These people can be found in any office kitchen, talking to their coworkers about how the grass is greener somewhere else or that the market is doing them an injustice. These people don’t realize the impact they have on others and they absolutely have no idea what they are doing to their coworkers, family and friends. We need to approach these people with wearing a pair of kit gloves so that they don’t feel they are being attacked as this is their first reaction generally. Remember habits are hard to break and the longer they have been burdened with the habit, the harder it is to break.
Letting go of a habit can be scary. Don’t unsettle them with further threats of “If you don’t do this I am going to do that” it rarely works the way we would like.