Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

tackle the big question: why do some people perform great at work while others don’t?

These talent-based explanations are deeply embedded in our perceptions of what makes for success. But are they right?

In another, people maximize efforts by doing more: they take on many assignments and are busy running to lots of meetings.

They didn’t account for why Natalie performed better than I, nor did they explain the performance differences I had observed between equally hardworking and talented people.

But many people do in fact work dumb because they don’t know exactly how to work smart.

To organize the vast array of potential “work smart” factors, I grouped them into categories that scholars regard as important for job performance.

Are these the best groups for organizing these ideas?

job design characteristics (what a person is supposed to do), skill development (how a person improves), motivational factors (why a person exerts effort), and relational dimensions (with whom and how a person interacts).

we measured their performance relative to their peers. That way, we could compare the effects of hours worked and our “work smart” factors on performance.

We winnowed down the number of plausible factors until we arrived at eight main factors.

In the end, we discovered that seven “work smart” practices seemed to explain a substantial portion of performance.

When you work smart, you select a tiny set of priorities and make huge efforts in those chosen areas (what I call the work scope practice).

You focus on creating value, not just reaching preset ...

You eschew mindless repetition in favor of better skills practice...

You seek roles that match your passion with a strong sense of purpos...

You shrewdly deploy influence tactics to gain the support of...

You cut back on wasteful team meetings, and make sure that the ones you do attend spark vigorous...

You carefully pick which cross-unit projects to get involved in, and say no to less productive ones...

Top performers did less and more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort.

“Follow your passion,” we found, can be dangerous advice.

they strove to find roles that contributed value to the organization and society, and then matched passion with that sense of purpose.

Passionate and useful. Passion alone is consuming—literally and figuratively. To do more of what you love, you need to also contribute something that people want more of

Top performers collaborate less. They carefully choose which projects and tasks to join and which to flee, and they channel their efforts and resources to excel in the few chosen ones. They discipline their collaboration.

Comparing these seven practices, I realized that they all embodied the idea of selectivity.

Yet this more nuanced way of working smart wasn’t just about being selective. The very best redesigned their work so that they would create the most value (a term we will define in chapter three) and then they applied intense, targeted efforts in their selected work activities.

To work smart means to maximize the value of your work by selecting a few activities and applying intense targeted effort.

a systematic and empirically tested way to lift performance that holds across jobs. By improving on the seven practices, you can boost your performance beyond what it would be if you relied on talent, luck, or the sheer number of hours worked.

I want to emphasize that you can incorporate these ideas into your daily work and make them a habit, just like you would other routines, like grabbing that morning coffee, checking your mail, and exercising. You can start small and build up these routines bit by bit, until you master them.

Amundsen had chosen one method and mastered it. He had done less, then obsessed.

He also recruited and leveraged the skills of himself and his team far better than Scott.

two common beliefs about work.

The first is that we should increase the scope of our activities, pursuing multiple responsibilities and options,

“Doing more,” as we shall see, is usually a flawed strategy.

The second misconception concerns the idea of focus.

Picking a few priorities is only half the equation. The other half is the harsh requirement that you must obsess over your chosen area of focus to excel.

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.

“Do less, then obsess” affects performance more than any other practice in this book.

Hedging your bets seems like a smart move, a good way to accomplish more.

The first is the spread-too-thin trap. Neither Bishop nor Scott could devote enough time and effort to mastering even one of their tasks.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

the less time we can allot to each, and the less well we will perform any one of them.

Diligent, consistent, deliberate practice on only a few (or just 1) thing(s) creates compounding as we build competency toward excellence. Jack of all trades, master of none leads to mediocre results and poor returns on invested resources and low efficiency

A second problem with an increase in the scope of our activities is what I call the complexity trap.

their interrelationships,

renders you less effective at both. Each time you switch, your brain must abandon one task and acclimate itself to the other.

The complexity trap wreaks havoc inside companies. In the name of progress, we pile on goals, priorities, tasks, metrics, checkpoints, team members, and so on. But adding these items increases complexity, which we can define in terms of the number of items and the number of connections between them.

If we select just a few items and obsess to excel in those, we can perform at our best.

These people strive to produce exceptional quality.

Notice though that they don't let pursuit of excellence keep them from shipping the work. They both obsess over the quality of their work and ship. Feedback is critical to excellence.

requires both prolonged effort and a fanatic attention to detail.21 Attaining that quality demands obsession—and focus.

failed to obsess. Just choosing to focus, as work-productivity experts would have you do, does not lead to best performance.

That is, if you violate either the “do less” or the “obsess” criterion, your performance will remain about average—slightly above the 50th percentile.

Interesting, mediocre whether you work more or less and fail to obsess (either out of apathy or spread too thin)

those who excelled at choosing a few priorities and channeling their obsessionlike effort to excel in those areas. Their performance placed them in the 82nd percentile,

It also means paying attention to what weakens my focus.

The people in our study cited three main reasons for failing to focus: broad scope of work activities (including having too many meetings and too many work items), temptations (including distractions imposed by others and temptations created by oneself), and pesky, “do-more” bosses (who lack direction and set too many priorities).