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The New Year reminds us how hard it is to change our own habits. It's even harder to change someone else's.

The season of attempted habit-change is nearly upon us.

And while I wish you each, individually, the best of luck in your New Year’s resolutions, it’s also a good time to reflect on habit-change within the organization. That is a major, and vexing, concern of any leader.

In my estimation, most of us drastically underestimate the sheer difficulty of habit change, including our own. I will never forget the time my wife rearranged the drawers in our kitchen. It was many, many annoying weeks before I stopped pulling open the drawer where the utensils USED to be every time I wanted to grab a fork.

Every employee in your organization has built up countless such habits, including around how they do their job. To be effective leaders, we must be realistic about how deeply ingrained those habits are and what it takes to alter them.

Specifically, I find that CEOs, HR teams, and managers often hire for “experience” without thinking critically about the ingrained habits that come with that experienc…