Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

The “Work Harder” Convention We need 10,000 hours of practice to master a job skill. Practice—repetition—makes perfect. The New “Work Smarter” Perspective It isn’t how many hours you practice. It’s how you learn. And that “how” differs in the workplace from the deliberate practice pursued by athletes and musicians. The best performers at work implement the learning loop, in which the quality—and not the quantity—of each iteration matters most. Key Points • Statistical analysis of our 5,000-person dataset showed that people who applied the learning loop perform much better than those who didn’t. • To learn well at work, we must overcome important challenges that people don’t face when trying to master skills in sports, music, chess, and memory tests (the areas where most research on deliberate practice has been conducted). • The Learning Loop is an approach to 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). • You can deploy six tactics to implement the learning loop in your