Great at Work

Morten Hansen’s Hidden Habits of Top Performers

• Read this in parallel with “In Search of Excellence” — many similarities at the organizational vs. personal level
• To work smart means to maximize the value of your work by selecting a few activities and applying intense targeted effort
• Out of the 5,000 person study, the 7 work-smart practices accounted for a whopping 66% of the variation in performance (vs. ~10% differences explained by educational background, company tenure, age, genders, and hours worked combined)

1. Do Less, Then Obsess

• “Do less, then obsess” affects performance more than any other practice in the book. You can only press the “more” button so many times
• South Pole challenge: Amundsen team focused only on dogs and hired the most skilled star dog drivers
• Massage the octopus, like Jiro. His focus is what sets him apart.
• “Focus” here means 2 activities: choosing a few priorities, and then dedicating your efforts toward excelling at them. Many people prioritize a few items at work, but they don’t obsess — they simply do less. That’s a mistake
• Many people are quick to say yes. After all, if you work on more tasks, you get more done, and that pleases your boss. Spreading yourself across multiple clients or projects gives you more options. People have an irrational compulsion to keep their options open and want to cling to options. You run the risk of spread-too-thin or complexity traps with our finite supply of attention and time to devote to responsibilities / interrelationships

Bottom 11th percentile employees “accepted more, then coasted.” The second lowest performing group, at 53rd percentile, selected a few priorities but failed to obsess. The third category — slightly above 50th percentile — performed roughly the same as the “do less, no stress” group. Only the “do less, then obsess” group had a meaningfully outsized performance compared to other groups

• Apply a razor at work: do everything possible to cull activities — fewest metrics, fewest goals, fewest steps — while retaining everything necessary to do great work. How many tasks can I remove, given what I must do to excel? Remember, as few as you can, as many as you must
• When you should not focus, where you would want to “do more”:

1. When you need to generate many new ideas: the most innovative companies first generated lots of ideas and then killed off the bad ones and obsessed over only a few good ideas
2. When you know your options, but are uncertain which to choose. Focusing and obsessing over the wrong tasks is a road to ruin

• Say “no” to your boss: explain to your boss that adding more to your to-do list will hurt your performance. Path to greatness isn’t pleasing your boss all the time. It’s saying “no” so that you can apply intense effort to excel in a few chosen areas

2. Redesign Your Work

• To perform better, redesign what you do: reinvent the job to add and focus on activities that maximize more value. Create new opportunities in work — new activities, new projects, new ways of doing things. Break with convention, upend status quo, and try new ways of working
• Redesign isn’t about working longer hours but how you work. A good redesign delivers more value for the same amount of work done.
• Value of our work is defined as how much others benefit from it, an outside-in view. Ask yourself: what benefits do my various work activities produce, really?

Value of Person’s Work = Benefits to Others x Quality x Efficiency, where Quality means accuracy, insight, novelty, reliability and Efficiency means speed

• We tend to have a perverse tendency to view volumes of activity with accomplishments (busyness equals value), even if in reality all these activities may not add value. Being busy is not an accomplishment

Archimedes: “give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I can move the earth.” Clever redesign is about finding that proverbial lever and using it in a clever way. It’s working smarter, not harder

• To identify opportunities for redesign, hunt for “pain points,” thorny problems plaguing a set of people. What pain points can you spot in your workplace? What do people complain about again and again and again? Where does work tend to get bogged down?
• Ask the stupid “why” questions to loosen shackles and spur “what if” redesign questions
• After a redesign or a major change, reiterate and refine over time to continuously improve the model

3. Don’t Just Learn, Loop

• Golf practice: it’s not enough just to put in hours. Instead, it’s deliberate practice, a purposeful and informed way of practicing, the quality of learning and not the quantity of repetitions (Measure, Feedback, Modify, Do / Redo)
• Learning loop: learning as you work, treating meetings or presentations, for instance, as learning opportunities. They spend a few minutes each day learning and rely on informal, rapid feedback from peers, direct reports, and bosses. Try a new approach in a small way (e.g., how to ask a question in a meeting), then measure the outcome, then get quick feedback, then tweak approach based on feedback (e.g., ask the question differently)
• Effective Looping Tactics:

1. Carve out the 15 minutes: stick to one skill at a time to develop and devote just 15 minutes a day
2. Chunk a skill into micro-behaviors: break into smaller, more concrete actions that don’t take more than 15 minutes to perform and review
3. Measure the soft: which 1–2 metrics, if tracked, make a big difference in my efforts to improve my work performance?
4. Get nimble feedback, fast: specific feedback that gives both an assessment and a helpful tip, brief, informal, instant comments — from peers
5. Conduct small A/B experiments to limit downside, implement those that work
6. Push beyond the stall point of being just “satisfied” or “sufficient”: don’t lapse into automated skills but keep pushing to learn and improve by de-automating routines

4. Passion & Purpose

• Passion and purpose are not the same. Passion is “do what you love,” while purpose is “do what contributes.” Passion asks, “What can the world give me?” Purpose asks, “What can I give the world?”
• To be passionate about work is to feel energized by it, to experience a sense of excitement and enthusiasm (for some, it’s a quiet, inner sense of satisfaction and contentment, whereas for others, it’s a louder, “let’s go!”)
• You have a sense of purpose when you make valuable contributions to others (individuals and organizations) or to society that you find personally meaningful and that don’t harm anyone
• Top performers match passion with purpose — “P-squared”
• Tapping into P-squared provides people with more energy that they channel into their work. Not more hours as in the “work harder”paradigm, but more energy per hour of work (e.g., positive emotions, paying extra attention, noticing the details, engaging colleagues and customers, bringing in new ideas)
• Passionate people exist in all kinds of jobs and industries! Neither company size nor number of years on the job had much bearing on how much people loved their work
• Our preconceptions on purposeful jobs are inaccurate. We think mundane or menial jobs can’t contain purpose, and some research has shown people don’t find low-paying service jobs as meaningful. But other research such as this book’s study shows that some people can and do derive a sense of purpose from even the most menial, low-status tasks
• You don’t have to quit your job or leave your company in a risky quest to search for passion and purpose! You don’t hear much about passionate truck drivers or store clerks or call center employees, but as the data indicates, they’re out there! Many people who didn’t work in the more “obviously meaningful” sectors felt a strong sense of purpose
• Methods to match passion & purpose:

1. Hunt for a new role within the organization
2. Develop more passion in the current role: passion can be defined beyond an intrinsic joyous feeling. Passion can come from achievement, creativity / innovation, people socialization, delight from learning and growing, elation from mastering competence and doing one’s job well
3. Climb the purpose pyramid, which doesn’t have to mean directly contributing to society! When you create value for your organization, you contribute, and your work has purpose. Take steps to feel that what you’re contributing is meaningful. It’s a mental shift — reframing its meaning

5. Forceful Champions

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou

• Top performers mastered working with others in 3 areas: advocacy, teamwork, and collaboration
• Forceful champions can effectively pursue their goals at work via 2 skills:

1. Inspiring others by evoking emotions (making others feel excited about their vision, goals, and plans)
2. Circumventing resistance by deploying “smart grit” (persevering in the face of difficulty and deploying tailored tactics to overcome opposition to their effort)

• Men had more impact as forceful champions than women did, even though women who were forceful champions still performed better than those that didn’t
• To inspire people and gain their support, line up high-arousal emotions on your side — make them mad and fearful about the present, and joyful and excited about your proposed future goal. They show and don’t just tell, using striking photos and demos to evoke intense emotions. They make people feel purpose, connecting daily tedious work to a grander purpose
• Forceful champions display “smart grit” to break down opposition and garner support for their projects by tailoring tactics from the opponents’ perspective, concerns, and agendas. They confront opponents, when needed. They make concessions they can live with to appease opponents. They co-opt opponents, so that they, too, feel a sense of ownership. They exert pressure by mobilizing people to advocate on their behalf

6. Fight & Unite

• To maximize performance, maximize team debate and unity. “Have a good fight” or debate in a team to explore ideas and scrutinize assumptions. Then create true commitment, not mere obedience
• Sample ground rules, “implicit” social norms for a good debate:

1. Show up to every meeting prepared
2. Craft an opinion and deliver with conviction (and data)
3. Stay open to others’ ideas, not just your own
4. Let the best argument win, even if it’s not yours (and often it isn’t)
5. Feel free to stand up and shout, but never make the argument personal
6. Always listen — really listen — to minority views
7. Never pursue consensus for its own sake

• To have a productive fight in meetings: as the leader or participant, maximize diversity, make it safe to speak up, prod the quiet to speak, show up as an advocate, not a salesperson, ask non-leading questions
• Foster unity and have team members commit to the decision taken (even if they disagree), and all the hard work to implement the decision without second-guessing or undermining it
• To improve team unity: ensure everyone has a voice (bein heard creates buy-in), commit, especially when you utterly disagree, confront the prima donna, sharpen the team goal, stop playing office politics and get behind decisions

7. Two Sins of Collaboration

• Disciplined collaborators, those who can balance over- and under-collaboration, are the top performers. Some people under-collaborate and talk too little across teams. Some people talk too much
• They carefully select which collaboration activities to participate in (and reject others), and then follow specific rules to make the chosen activities a success

Collaboration Premium= Benefit of Initiative (Less) Opportunity Costs (Less) Collaboration Costs, where Collaboration Costs refer to the hassles of working across units

• Women benefit twice as much as men from disciplined collaboration, just as men do better championing forcefully
• 5 rules to disciplined collaboration:

1. Establish a compelling “why-do-it” clear, rigorous business case for every proposed collaboration. What is the value? If it’s not compelling, don’t do it and say “no”
2. Craft a unifying goal that excites people so much that they subordinate their own selfish agendas. Try to make the goal common, concrete, measurable, and finite
3. Reward people for collaboration results, not activities. Activities are just activities, not accomplishments. Results are what count
4. Devote full resources (time, skills, money, talent) to a collaboration. If you can’t, scale it back or scrap it
5. If you lack confidence in your partners, tailor trust boosters to solve specific trust problems, quickly

Great at Work…and at Life, Too

Infusing work with passion and purpose worsens work-life balance (excitement for work made her think about it when she went home).

“Do less and obsess” protects people from becoming exhausted at work because it leaves them with fewer priorities to handle and track

People who are deeply passionate and feel a strong sense of purpose feel far more satisfied in their jobs