Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

Top performers did less and more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort. This insight overturns much conventional thinking about focusing that urges you to choose a few tasks to prioritize. Choice is only half of the equation—you also need to obsess. This finding led us to reformulate the “work scope” practice and call it “do less, then obsess.”

“Follow your passion,” we found, can be dangerous advice. Our top performers took a different approach: they strove to find roles that contributed value to the organization and society, and then matched passion with that sense of purpose. The matching of passion and purpose, and not passion alone, produced the best results.

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.

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.

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.

The term “focus” consists of two 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.

As economics Nobel-laureate Herbert Simon quipped, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Coordinating between priorities requires mental exertion. Many regard multitasking as efficient, but research shows that rapidly toggling between two items—reading emails and listening to a colleague’s presentation, for example—renders you less effective at both. Each time you switch, your brain must abandon one task and acclimate itself to the other.

Ockham is known for a principle called Occam’s razor,27 which stipulates that people should pursue the simplest explanation possible in science and other areas. Applied to the workplace, we can express this idea as follows: As few as you can, as many as you must. Instead of asking how many tasks you can tackle given your working hours, ask how many you can ditch given what you must do to excel.

As the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry observed, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”

The “Work Harder” Convention The conventional wisdom states that people who work harder and take on more responsibilities accomplish more and perform better. Countering this view, management experts recommend that people focus by choosing just a few areas of work.

The New “Work Smarter” Perspective Doing more is usually a flawed strategy. The imperative to focus is also misunderstood. Focus isn’t simply about choosing to concentrate on a few areas, as many people think. There is a second harsh requirement: You must also obsess in those areas to produce exceptional quality. The smart way to work is to first do less, then obsess.

reveals, working longer hours enhances performance, but only to a point. If you work between 30 and 50 hours per week, adding more hours on the job lifts your performance. But once you’re working between 50 and 65 hours per week, the benefit of adding additional hours drops off. And if you’re working 65 hours or more, overall performance declines as you pile on the hours.

The advice “start with goals” when planning an effort, is wrong. We need to start with value, then proceed to goals. Ask yourself: what benefits do your various work activities produce, really?

Here’s a traditional productivity equation:10 A person’s work productivity = output of work / hours of input

Now consider an equation that emphasizes value: The value of a person’s work = Benefits to others × quality × efficiency

Putting it all together, we get a more precise view of value: to produce great value at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality.

“It’s easier to sell aspirin than vitamins.”

As Dan Pink has argued in his book Drive, we’re entrapped by what academics call “functional fixedness”—our inability to solve problems due to our fixation on how work has always been done.

Explore five ways to redesign work to create value: • Less fluff: eliminate existing activities of little value • More right stuff: increase existing activities of high value • More “Gee, whiz”: Create new activities of high value • Five star rating: improve quality of existing stuff • Faster, cheaper: do existing activities more efficiently.

The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. —William Pollard

As Ericsson and Robert Pool discuss in their book Peak, two factors contribute to mastery: hours of repetition, yes, but more important, what Ericsson coined deliberate practice. Individuals who progress the most meticulously assess outcomes, solicit feedback based on known standards of excellence, and strive to correct tiny flaws that the feedback has uncovered.6 This purposeful and informed way of practicing explains why some learn at a much faster rate than others.

A micro-behavior is a small, concrete action you take on a daily basis to improve a skill. The action shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to perform and review, and it should have a clear impact on skill development.

“Quality management” techniques in companies urge employees to eliminate the defects and waste that cause performance to vary. These techniques seek to drive out variation and failure. That’s a grave mistake. Variation—trying new ideas—is essential to learning.

So much for the 10,000-hour rule! People seek out new improvements, but only until they reach a certain level of satisfaction. Then they stop, judging themselves “good enough.” The Nobel laureate in economics Herbert Simon termed this “satisficing” (a play on words that combined “satisfying” and “sufficing”20).

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead. —Nelson Mandela

As the well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted: “The problem is that we do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love.”

Is there a solution to this tradeoff between “following” or “ignoring” passion? Yes. Our research uncovered a third option: “matching.” Some people pursue passion in navigating their careers, but they also manage to connect this passion with a clear sense of purpose on the job—they contribute, serve others, make a difference. They have matched passion with purpose.

What’s the real magic of P-squared? It 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. That’s working smart.

Passion at work is an expanding circle that encompasses all six areas: joy doing the tasks, excitement at succeeding, the thrill from unleashing one’s creative energy, enthusiasm from being with people at work, delight from learning and growing, and elation from doing one’s job well.

Passion is doing what you love; purpose is doing what contributes.

What matters, as far as purpose on the job is concerned, is how each individual feels about his or her own work. As long as people are contributing value in their job, it’s up to each individual to determine whether they see their work as purposeful.

12 So when a boss evaluates a man who uses forceful champion tactics, the boss may think, “Wow, smart guy.” When a competent woman does the same, he may think, “Really aggressive woman” and downgrade his perception of her performance. Our finding in part may be shaped by such a gender stereotype: People regard female forceful champions as performing more poorly than their male counterparts, when in reality they are not.

People acted on those high-arousal emotions. “Make people mad, not sad,” Berger concludes.

Based on our interviews, I tried to discern the unspoken rules—social scientists call them “implicit norms”—for having a good fight at Reckitt Benckiser. I came up with the following list: • Show up to every meeting 100 percent prepared. • Craft an opinion and deliver it with conviction (and data). • Stay open to others’ ideas, not just your own. • Let the best argument win, even if it isn’t yours (and often it isn’t). • Feel free to stand up and shout, but never make the argument personal. • Always listen—really listen—to minority views. • Never pursue consensus for its own sake.

Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. —Kenyan proverb

My research has uncovered an approach that keeps you within the two extremes of collaboration. Disciplined collaboration, as I call it, is a set of practices that allows you first to assess when to collaborate (and when not to) and to implement the effort so that people are both willing and able to commit to it and deliver results.

precisely do you build a “business case”—a compelling reason—for a proposed collaboration? The following equation from my research and consulting provides a useful guide:12 Collaboration Premium = Benefit of initiative – opportunity costs – collaboration costs

THE FIRST RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Establish a compelling “why-do-it” case for every proposed collaboration. If it’s not compelling, don’t do it and say “no.”

Why might people prove unwilling to collaborate with you? One major reason is the lack of a unifying goal.

SECOND RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Craft a unifying goal that excites people so much that they subordinate their own selfish agendas.

But beware: not all unifying goals will help. Based on my two decades of studying and advising on unifying goals, I have identified four qualities that can guide you to make them effective. Try to make them common, concrete, measurable, and finite.

THE THIRD RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Reward people for collaboration results, not activities.

FOURTH RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Devote full resources (time, skills, money) to a collaboration. If you can’t, scale it back or scrap it.

FIFTH RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION If you lack confidence in your partners, tailor trust boosters to solve specific trust problems, quickly.

The goal of collaboration isn’t collaboration. It’s better performance.

Disciplined collaboration consists of the following five rules: 1. Establish the business case—a compelling reason—for any proposed collaboration initiative, small or large. If it’s questionable, say no. 2. Craft a unifying goal that excites people, so that they prioritize this project. 3. Reward people for collaboration results, not activities. 4. Commit full resources—time, skills, and money—to the collaboration. If you can’t obtain those resources, narrow its scope or kill it. 5. Tailor trust boosters—quickly—to specific trust problems in the partnership.

The Mayo Clinic defines job burnout as a “special type of job stress—a state of physical, emotional or mental exhaustion combined with doubts about your competence and the value of your work.”

Make fights about ideas, not people.