Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

Does working long hours increase performance? The prevailing “work harder” mindset presumes that it does, but the truth is more complicated.

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.

Redesign isn’t about working longer hours. It’s about changing how you work. Yet, not all redesigns generate better results.

Delving back into our data, we found that fruitful redesigns all shared one thing in common: value. A good redesign delivers more

value for the same amount of work done. That begs the question: what is value, exactly?

As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have c...

Many people never question whether their work...

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?

A customer order-handler in our study reported that his shipments reached corporate customers 99 percent of the time. That’s pretty impressive—except for one thing. When his boss surveyed the customers, a full 35 percent complained that their shipments were arriving later than required. And why was that? The order handler was measuring whether the shipments left his warehouse according to his schedule (an inside-out view) rather than when the customer needed the equipment (an outside-in view).

Being busy is not an accomplishment.

Terry redesigned his packaging process so that the boxes emerged perfectly square. This change allowed the warehouse department to improve its throughput and the trucks to depart on time. Terry didn’t have to take that initiative. He could have confined himself to an inside-out view, paying attention only to the number of boxes he processed. Because he focused on adding value and not simply fulfilling his job specification, he scored as one of the best performers in our study (top 15 percent).

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

The phrase “benefits to others” can mean contributing to your department, your office, a colleague, your company, your customers, your clients, or your suppliers (or even to the community or environment). The benefits themselves can take various forms, including enabling others to do their jobs better, helping create new products, or devising better methods for getting work done. Terry helped his colleagues in the warehouse stack and ship the boxes more expediently.

The second component of value is the quality of your work—the degree of accuracy, insight, novelty, and reliability of your work output. We want an error-free transcription, for instance. Greg Green wanted to create a higher-quality education. The final component of value is how efficiently you work. In the

transcription example, productivity was measured through speed—the number of words per minute. Speed matters in the value equation, too. After al...

delivering an error-free transcript at ten words per minute. 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 tremendou...

With our value equation in place, we’re now better equipped to address the question we raised at the end of the last chapter. If you want to perform at your best, you need to home in on a few key tasks and channel your efforts to perfect them—the “do less, then obsess” principle. But which activities warrant such focus? If you’re going to focus on a tiny set of activities, they’d better be the right ones. The answer ...

“I question how things are done, and I look for new ways to do things. I look for quantum change.”

Moving the containers in and out of the Tangier yard. That’s choosing the right thing. Then he determined how he and his team could redesign that one activity and do it better, faster, and cheaper. That’s doing the thing right

Five Ways to Create Value Main Question Way to Improve Value Example Are You Working on the Right Things? 1. Less Fluff: Eliminate or reduce existing activities of little value. HP Manager’s report that no one read; APM Terminals’ “stripping” and weighing trucks. 2. More Right Stuff: Spend more time on existing activities of high value. Hartmut Goeritz focusing on container throughput. 3. More “Gee, Whiz”: Create new activities of high value. Goeritz’s “routing service” for shipping companies and freight operators.

Are You Doing the Things Right? 4. Five Star Rating: Find new ways to improve the quality of your chosen activities. Greg Green changing the quality of teaching and learning by flipping the classroom; Goeritz’s routing service. 5. Faster, Cheaper: Find new ways to do your chosen activities more efficiently. Goeritz’s “Never drive empty” solution.

Dr. Bennick’s intervention holds a profound insight: When people redesign, the key is not the degree of change they’re undertaking. Instead, it’s the magnitude of the value they can create.

HUNT FOR PAIN POINTS To identify opportunities for redesign, chase “pain points,” thorny problems plaguing a set of people. Carmen, a forty-five-year-old business analyst, worked for a New Jersey–based life insurance company.20 She processed payroll for the company’s insurance agents scattered across the country. For years, she helped the agents handle so-called third-party sick pay (don’t ask) as they stumbled through the bewildering throng of steps and tax filing implications. Carmen estimated that she received, on average, a phone call each day from an agent irate over the labyrinth of steps required to get through the paperwork. That’s a pain point.

pain points are just that, painful. They differ from “pleasure points” in the way “this sucks” differs from “I want.”

What pain points can you spot in your workplace? What do people complain about again and again and again? What gets people confused and frustrated and saying “this sucks”? Where does work tend to get bogged down?

Hunting for pain points is counterintuitive. When we hear people complain, we tend to dismiss them as whiners. Carmen might have grown to resent all those angry insurance agents. Instead, she went beyond her job specification and worked with software coders to create a better setup. As annoying as complainers might sometimes seem, they do us all a service: they identify the pain, for free!

The more acute the discomfort and the more people suffering from it, the louder they yell—and the greater the prospect for a powerful remedy to create value.

ASK STUPID QUESTIONS Sometimes we fail to imagine great new redesigns because we’re trapped inside webs of convention. We only see the current use of a practice, process, or method, for instance.

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.22

recommend that you start asking some “stupid” why questions: Why do hotels have a reception desk for check-in? Why do we make presentations filled with slides? Why do we call Monday morning staff meetings? Why do kids have two months of summer vacation from school? Why do we have to submit expense reports? Why do patients have to spend two days in a hospital bed after surgery? Why do we conduct annual performance reviews?

ask some “what if” questions.

The combination of asking a “stupid” question and crafting some “what-ifs” can help you discover a nifty redesign and lift your performance.

The way individuals get ahead is by innovating work.

Don’t just see yourself as an employee—see yourself as an innovator of work. Hunt and cure pain points, ask stupid questions, and zoom in on how you can redesign and create value for others.

Once you’ve made a major change, you have to stick with it and refine it little by little over time.

Afterward, he and his team had to learn how to operate better within the flipped method, day in and day out. But how can you continuously learn and improve while also concentrating on performing your job?

KEY INSIGHTS REDESIGN YOUR WORK The “Work Harder” Convention The more hours people work, the better they perform. Great performance is about delivering on existing goals, tasks, and metrics as defined in one’s job description. The New “Work Smarter” Perspective If you already work at least fifty hours a week, piling on still more hours won’t improve your performance much. It can even make it worse. To achieve great results, redesign work. Upend the status quo and craft new tasks, goals, and metrics that maximize the value of your work. Key Points • Our statistical analysis of 5,000 managers and employees demonstrates that those who redesigned their work performed significantly better than those who didn’t. • According to our statistical analysis, if you work up to 50 hours, performance improves as you add more hours. Beyond 50 hours, the benefit of adding more hours starts to wane. Beyond 65 hours, adding more hours causes performance to decline. Outworking others is not a clever strategy. • Good redesigns create more value—the benefits work activities bring to others. That outside-in view is very different from

traditional, inside-out ways of setting goals, tasks, and metrics. People can achieve their goals and be very productive, yet produce zero value. • The value equation emphasizes three distinct components. To produce great value at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality. • 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. • Where to start redesigning your work? You can hunt for and cure pain points, and you can dare to ask stupid questions.

The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. —William Pollard1

deliberate practice.

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.

He knew what percentage of his shots went down the fairway (40.9 percent), what percentage missed going left (31.0 percent), and what percentage missed going right (28.1 percent). He tracked his driving accuracy for each round of golf, and he graphed his recovery performance (41.5 percent “scrambling” and 23.5 percent “sand saves”).7 He used sophisticated 3-D technology at a facility outside Atlanta to capture a three-dimensional scan of his movements. Sharing this information with his coach, he obtained precise feedback and concrete suggestions for the next swing (“widen your stance by one inch,” the coach might say). Dan also tracked his progress by monitoring one key performance metric: his handicap score.

Dan made every minute of practice time count. It was this quality of learning, and not the quantity of repetitions, that helped Dan achieve that 2.6 handicap in four

short years.

If you glance around the workplace, you’ll find that few people strive to enhance their skills the way Dan enhanced his golf game. As a result, people conduct meetings or give presentations or make sales pitches just as they’ve always done. They become “good enough,” but not great at work.

Deliberate practice is also incompatible with the realities of today’s hurried workplaces. The idea of “practice” in sports and

the arts entails rehearsing exhaustively before the real performance (a concert or competition). But most employees struggle to set aside their regular work to rehearse skills—they’re too busy.

But how do you measure skills like prioritizing tasks, making a sales pitch, handling a customer complaint, writing an effective email, and listening in meetings? For these reasons, some experts don’t recommend deliberate practice for individuals at work. As Professor Ericsson notes, deliberate practice only helps in situations where a performer possesses a clear performance metric, and where he or she knows the skills required to perform well and can break them down into discrete steps.

Deliberate practice translates far better to the workplace than we might think. But there’s a crucial twist. As we discovered in our research, we can’t just take deliberate practice and “copy and paste” it into the workplace. Instead, we must implement a different version—what I call the learning loop.

They discard isolated practice in favor of learning as they work, using actual work activities such as meetings or presentations as learning opportunities. They also spend just a few minutes each day learning, eschewing the three-to-four-hour practice sessions