Atomic Habits for Startup Leaders: 7 Simple Shifts to Transform Your Life in 6 Months
Small, consistent habits can drive extraordinary results—here’s how seven simple shifts can transform your leadership and startup in just six months.
Enough about Big-Hairy-Audacious Goals. Let’s stalk about small consistent habits that compound for big impact by 2025:
🟠 Team & Task Management: Driving Efficiency and Motivation (4 habits)
1. Celebrating Small Wins Builds Belief in Our Agency
The mistake I see leaders make is setting Big Hairy Audacious Goals and then failing to hit them.
This erodes the team’s belief that they can actually do what they set out to do, creating a negative feedback loop where they get demoralized and become less ambitious.
Instead, continuously remind them of the milestones they’re achieving to build momentum toward the big goals.
2. Delegating Everything Feels Icky But Can Actually Empower
Avoid giving yourself action items.
When I was younger, I wanted to show my team nothing was too big/too small for me. That I could roll-up-my sleeves.
The mistake I see leaders make is when they’re pulled in so many directions, they become a bottleneck on projects. If folks see the same projects stalled week after week because the leader isn’t prioritizing it, it hurts morale and normalizes missing deadlines.
The solution: don’t allow yourself to have any action items. Focus on having output through others. It can feel icky: it almost seems like you’re trying to avoid work, but it can be a relief to your team, who is now able to ship faster and feel more accomplished.
3. Focus on Trends, Not Snapshots
Don’t report on what the KPI is today - report on the trend line over time.
Snapshots don’t show progress. Every team should have a north star metric and know how it’s trending.
When reviewing metrics, ask your team to answer 3 questions:
Is this moving positively or negatively over time?
Why is it moving that way?
What are we doing about it?
This does three things:
It forces the team to get better week after week
It forces understanding: if they don’t understand why the number is moving the way it’s moving, how can they hope to improve it
It forces projects to intersect with impact. If the answer to “what we we doing about it” is “we don’t have time because we’re busy doing projects that don’t move the needle” then either you’re not working on the right projects, or your not measuring the right impact.
4. Align Effort with Impact
Align effort-to-impact by assigning project impact estimates upfront.
I get frustrated when I see team members dumping 20 hours into something low-priority. I realized it happens because they either don’t have as strong an instinct about what’ going to move the needle, or they don’t have as clear visibility into all the other things we could be working on that could drive more impact.
Now iI try to nip this in the bud with a growth prioritization process like ICE, so everyone can see all the projects we considered and what we chose to prioritize. By establishing what each project is “worth” upfront - the team can right-size their effort to the impact.
🟠 Growth & Learning: Creating Opportunities Beyond the Office (1 habit)
5. Make Time for In-Person Events
I work remotely, so in-person meetups are hugely enriching and lead to new opportunities.
Whats unique to me, is that as a growth consultant, in-person networking is driver of net-new opportunities for our business.
But regardless of your role, I’ve found networking events also give me a place where I can funnel people who I want to see but don’t have time to grab 1-on-1 coffees with.
🟠 Personal Growth: Habits for Self-Improvement and Team Connection (2 habits)
6. Ask Every Team Member to Talk to At Least One Customer
I ask every new marketer joining my team to do a research project.
I pick a question we’re currently grappling with - like “What’s the top reason people churn in week 1?” Then I ask them to interview 3-4 customers and bring back an answer.
It’s an invaluable source of raw signal, and it builds empathy.
Most importantly: interviewing customers is intimidating - you may not know where to get contact info, what permissions you need, or how to run an interview. But my team has gone through it once, they realize it’s not so bad, and they’re far more likely to interview customers again when a new question arises.
7. Stack Habits to Build Reflection Into Your Day
I struggle to make time for things that are perhaps important but not urgent. So to counteract this, I habit-stack.
I have to log my billable hours in a spreadsheet - I’m updating it multiple times a day. So I added my daily log of “did I write?” and “did I meditate” to the same spreadsheet. That way when I’m doing one thing, it triggers doing the other.
These habits may be small, but applied consistently, they’ll transform your productivity and mindset.
Recommended reading:
When I was talking about Big-Hairy-Audacious Goals, I was referring to Tiktok’s October Theory. Here’s an interesting take from Mark Travers via Forbes where he notes that turning goals into habits might be better in the long run.
The power of small, consistent habits is transformative, not only for personal growth but also for scaling your startup. A great example of this is focusing on foundational elements, like messaging, which can drive growth across all customer touchpoints—from your homepage to sales decks. Here’s a helpful guide by Alex Estner on building a SaaS messaging framework that strengthens your sales and marketing assets. And if you’re ready to push further, check out his 100+ actionable, proven SaaS growth tactics to accelerate your growth journey.
Kristi DePaul of Harvard Business Review has highlighted the importance of habit formation in leadership development.
The Startup CEO discusses the framework of atomic habits in the context of decision-making, emphasizing the importance of tying habits to identities rather than just outcomes.