Julie Turpin, Chief People Officer at Brown & Brown, has watched countless teams with solid strategies and capable people hit a quarterly wall—and found a pattern no one talks about. The culprit isn't talent or market conditions. It's habits.
"Results that stick are built by habits that stick over time," Turpin writes. The distance between high-performing leaders and those who plateau almost always comes down to what they actually do, day after day, when no one is watching. It's a gap between intention and action that most organizations leave unfixed.
The numbers tell part of the story. Knowledge workers spend 60 percent of their time on "work about work"—chasing status updates, sitting through unfocused meetings, switching between tools. That's not a strategy problem. That's a compounding habits problem that erodes months of careful planning.
Turpin identifies five habits that separate teams that grow from teams that stagnate. The first is deceptively simple: audit your own habits before trying to overhaul anyone else's. Most organizations measure outputs obsessively while ignoring inputs—the daily behaviors that produce or undermine results. Start with yourself. How do you spend the first 30 minutes of your workday? Do you follow up when you say you will? Then map the same thing across your team. Pick one behavior to shift. One.
The second habit is questioning what nobody else is questioning. Meeting formats, decision processes, communication styles—most of these weren't chosen deliberately. They were absorbed. "The habits leaders never question become the habits their teams inherit, whether productive or not," Turpin explains. Find which habits, if changed, would speed decisions and cut friction. Then make the new behavior the default, not the exception.
The third shifts perspective entirely. Instead of chasing quarterly targets, tie habits to who you're actively becoming as a leader. Leaders who block time for development conversations aren't optimizing for quarterly numbers—they're declaring something about their values. That behavior carries itself. When a habit connects to the leader you want to be, it becomes self-reinforcing.
High-performing teams don't rely on willpower. They design environments where good habits happen automatically. Block strategic thinking time before the week fills in. Set standing check-ins so important conversations stop getting bumped. Schedule weekly reviews so reflection is built in, not dependent on someone remembering. "Consistency and discipline aren't always character traits," Turpin writes. "They happen when leaders ensure the right structures are in place."
Finally, use accountability proactively, before something breaks. Most organizations reach for accountability after failure. Leaders who consistently outperform use it before the work is done. Declaring a goal to someone whose judgment you respect—telling them what you're committed to building, asking them to hold you to it—that single act changes the odds considerably.
The beauty of habits is that they're the one variable leaders actually control. Markets shift. People leave. Habits don't have to follow either. For teams stuck at the same performance level despite capable people and solid strategies, the gap is almost always fixable. It just takes the honesty to look at what you're actually doing, not what you intend to do.