Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

it should have a clear impact on skill development.

“executing and following through to results, no excuses.”

approach one employee where you think there may be an issue with prioritization, and have a brief conversation to make sure that the most important tasks are the first priority.” Bård

“make it a habit to complete one task before moving on to another—look at your list of tasks and pick one that you will definitely finish soon before starting new ones” and “make sure that you’re not slowing others down—check your messages right now for a pending question from a colleague who needs your response and answer it.” By

Examples of chunks--the gist is think about the process (es) where you might apply these skills, then consider how you might correct it to improve the skill. Understand where you fit in the system and how your process might be improved

translate the abstract principle

into specific, daily...

To solve this problem, you can measure micro-behaviors associated with softer skills, as well as the result of those micro-behaviors.

Ask yourself: Which one or two metrics will, if tracked, make a big difference in my efforts to improve my work performance?

What result would track success of my effort? For example, i want to inspire employees to share ideas, so ill try to develop better questions and measure how many ideas i get back--assuming that my questions are poor quality and block people from contributing.

Useful feedback, however, requires more than a simple rating. It includes information about how well a person did and suggestions for how to modify behaviors.

allowed him to request nimble, “140 character” feedback from peers.

Can implement on trello? A feedback board?

In lieu of such an app, you can use email or texting. You could even go old school, sticking your head into a colleague’s office and asking for thirty seconds of feedback on how the meeting went.

If you never take on challenging cases, you won’t learn anything new, and you won’t improve.

If you treat difficult patients, your performance dips in the short term, because it is harder to help those patients. But you can also expand your knowledge.

you start tinkering with the parameters, adding new things, adjusting doses and sequences so that it fits.” Moreover, you can use wisdom gained from the complicated cases to treat more straightforward cases with greater insight.

Variation—trying new ideas—is essential to learning. And tackling difficult problems can provide rich learning opportunities.

The challenge, then, is to learn to tolerate failure in the short term.

To gain in the long term. This is what Range by epstein also reports in top performers. Godin's Dip.

Now, there is a smart and a dumb way to experiment.

A-B testing: You test your new idea on group A,

and then compare it to the control group (B).

After becoming world champion in 2013, he said, “I am still far away from really knowing chess, really. There is still much I can learn, and there is much I still don’t understand. And this makes me motivated to keep going, to understand more and more and develop myself.”

Carlsen’s mindset to keep pushing and improving regardless of his past achievements prevented him from falling into a common trap: the stall point.

Teachers with twenty-seven years of experience (that’s more than 40,000 hours of practice19) were not much more effective than those with two years

Why do so many people stall upon becoming “good enough”?

many of us automate our skills.

We let skills that once required fierce effort lapse into habits.

the moment a behavior becomes automatic, our learning stalls.

take a tip from Magnus Carlsen and constantly push the boundaries, even when you’re on top.

reviewed their work in an effort to learn and improve.

It’s how you learn. And that “how” differs in the workplace from the deliberate practice pursued by athletes and musicians.

implement the learning loop, in which the quality—and not the quantity—of each iteration matters most.

learning while you perform your daily work: you try out a new approach in a small way (e.g., how you ask a question in a meeting), then measure the outcome, then get quick feedback, then tweak your approach based on that feedback (e.g., ask the question differently).

six tactics

1. Carve out just 15 2. Chunk it 3. Measure the “soft” 4. Get nimble feedback, fast 5. Dig the dip...

Effective learners break an overarching skill into...

The action shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to perform and review, and it should have a clear...

Combine the learning loop with redesign (chapter three).

redesign your work so that you add more activities that create value, and stop or reject work that doesn’t.

Value creation differs from goals:

Try to find just one way to reduce the time you spend on activities of little value (like furnishing those reports that no one reads) and to increase an activity that will yield value (returning those customer calls more quickly).

Circle each item that you think created very good value,

Define here what is meant by value, then go

Spend a few minutes this week reflecting on the ways you’re already contributing, perhaps without realizing it.

Look for creative ways to inspire by evoking strong emotions.

Forceful champions also circumvented resistance by deploying smart grit, which means persevering in the face of difficulty (grit) and deploying tailored tactics to circumvent opposition (smart).

To apply smart grit, identify a colleague whose support you need and who does not support your agenda. On a piece of paper, write down your best guess at what her agenda might be. Try to understand the issues from her point of view (cognitive empathy). Then craft one or two influencing tactics to overcome her resistance.

make a better effort to listen (put away that smartphone); articulate your own dissenting views; invite a colleague to argue an opposite position; prompt quiet colleagues to speak up; and pose a good question instead of telling others what you think. Then forge unity: tell yourself to support a decision even if you disagree,

For every collaboration, take a few minutes to examine the unifying goal. Is there one? If so, write it down and share it with others to keep everyone focused. If there isn’t, then spend a bit of time in your next meeting clarifying what it might be.