Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

Social scientists and management experts explain performance at work by pointing to people’s innate gifts and natural strengths.

I decided to take a different approach, exploring whether the way some people work—their specific work practices as opposed to the sheer amount of effort they exert—accounts for greatness at work. That led me to explore the idea of “working smart,” whereby people seek to maximize output per hour of work. The phrase “work smarter, not harder” has been thrown around so much that it has become a cliché. Who wants to “work dumb”? But many people do in fact work dumb because they don’t know exactly how to work smart. And I don’t blame them, because it’s hard to obtain solid guidance. I scanned for existing advice on how to work smarter, and the picture I arrived at was incoherent and overwhelming.

THE PERFORMANCE STUDY

These and other surprising insights turned out to be critical. The very best people didn’t just work smart in a conventional sense, but pursued more nuanced practices, like doing less and obsessing, and matching purpose with passion. Comparing these seven practices, I realized that they all embodied the idea of selectivity. Whenever they could, top performers carefully selected which priorities, tasks, collaborations, team meetings, committees, analyses, customers, new ideas, steps in a process, and interactions to undertake, and which to neglect or reject. 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. Based on these findings, I arrived at a more precise definition of working smart: To work smart means to maximize the value of your work by selecting a few activities and applying intense targeted effort.

The talent and effort explanations still play a significant role in determining how individuals perform. But the real key to individual performance is the seven “work smarter” practices.

For all that has been written about performance, no book to my knowledge has presented an evidence-based, comprehensive understanding of what enables individuals to perform at the highest level at work. Great at Work fills this gap. It gives you a simple and practical framework that you can use to work at your best. Think of it as a complement to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, updated to reflect the realities of work today, and backed by an unprecedented statistical analysis.13

The seven “work smarter” practices didn’t just improve performance. They also improved people’s well-being at work. As I show in chapter nine, people in our study who worked smarter experienced better work-life balance, higher job satisfaction, and less burnout.

DO LESS, THEN OBSESS

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.

Far more people than we might imagine have at least some latitude in their job to focus their work activities. Of course, some job activities are fixed and cannot be changed. Others, however, are discretionary or can be modified.

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. A study of 58,280 court cases before Italian judges in Milan found that the judges who handled many cases simultaneously (multitasking) took longer to complete them than those who performed them in sequence. The differences were striking: the slowest judge spent on average 398 days to close the cases, while the fastest took “only” 178 days, or less than half the time. (They all had the same workload and cases were assigned randomly, so their cases were comparable.) The researchers estimated that a 50 percent increase in multitasking led to a nearly 20 percent increase in the number of days to finish cases. Toggling cases slowed them down.17 Other studies have shown that switching between tasks can decrease your productivity by as much as 40 percent.18

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. It’s no surprise that in our study, a full 65 percent of people strongly or completely agreed that their organization was “very complex—many departments, policies, processes, and plans that require coordination.”

In fact, as the number of things to be managed, tasks or people, increases arithmetically, complexity increases logarithmically. For a group of two people, the complexity level is 4, but for three people it's 8, and for six it's 36.

We often disparage obsessions in our daily lives, viewing them as dangerous or debilitating. But obsession can be a productive force.

Greatness in work, art, and science requires obsession over quality and an extraordinary attention to detail. “What many another writer would be content to leave in massive proportions,” Ernest Hemingway reflected, “I polish into a tiny gem.”22 Alfred Hitchcock required more than seventy shots to perfect the shower scene in the movie Psycho.23 To create his famous vacuum cleaner, James Dyson created 5,000 prototypes. It took him fifteen years. Now that’s obsessing!24

The Link between Focus, Effort, and Performance The “Do Less, Then Obsess” Category Out-Performed All Others Note: These estimates were produced by running a modified regression analysis. We substituted the “do less, then obsess” scale with two variables; one measuring focus (using the item “extremely good at focusing on key priorities, no matter how much work and how many things I have to do”) and one measuring effort (“puts a lot of effort into his/her job”). We then ran a regression analysis, converting the variables to percentiles and entering these two variables and their interaction term.

We asked people in our study what prevented them from doing less.25 I assumed most people don’t focus because they’re distracted. Almost weekly, it seems, an article pops up in the media about how overwhelmed people are by incoming communications, how much time they waste on social media, and how much FOMO (fear of missing out) they feel, causing them to peek at every text, email, or ping. But when our data came back, I discovered that these distractions were only part of the problem. 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). These three main reasons correspond in turn to three tactics we can deploy to do less and obsess.

Main Reported Reasons for Lack of Focus Among People in Our 5,000-Person Study The three main reasons for participants’ inability to focus, broken down by the percentage of people citing each one.

Occam’s razor at work doesn’t say that you should simplify all the way to one. It says you should do everything possible to cull activities—the fewest metrics, the fewest goals, the fewest steps, the fewest pieces of sushi—while retaining everything necessary to do great work. 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.”28

This is similar to von Moltke's description of an order or what the Marines now call a "mission order." "The rule to follow is that an order should contain all, but also only, what subordinates cannot determine for themselves to achieve a particular purpose."

If using Occam’s razor is working smarter, you might wonder why most people don’t do it. The problem is that we love to keep our options open. Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational, and his collaborator Jiwoong Shin demonstrated through a series of psychological experiments that people cling to options, even when those options no longer provide any value whatsoever.30 “We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open,”31 Ariely noted. To perform at your best, discipline yourself to shave away any options that you stick with for psychological comfort alone.

WHEN YOU SHOULD NOT FOCUS There are two circumstances when you may want to “do more” and not focus, at least temporarily. 1. When you need to generate many new ideas. When we start a new task, we often don’t know what the best option will be. In this phase, academic research suggests it’s best to generate and consider many ideas. As Wharton professor Adam Grant reports in his book Originals, “Many people fail to develop originality because they generate few ideas.”32 At a certain point, you must cull your ideas and zoom in on the one that works best. In our book Great by Choice, Jim Collins and I found that the most innovative companies first generated lots of ideas and then killed off the bad ones and obsessed over only a few good ideas.33 You can do the same in your work. 2. When you know your options, but are uncertain which to choose. A manager in one of my executive education programs at the University of California, Berkeley recalled an instance when she had pursued two technological solutions to a product because her team didn’t know which one would win in the marketplace. Eventually, she and her colleagues grew confident that one solution would succeed. Only then did they select that solution and ditch the other. “It would have been disastrous for us to select a solution prematurely,” she noted. “We might have chosen the wrong one.”34

The second tactic for focusing and obsessing, then, is to seal yourself off from those distractions. I did that while writing this book. Knowing how hard writing is for me, and how tempted I am to procrastinate, I bought a laptop and got rid of the Internet browser, email, and the instant messaging app—everything except for Microsoft Word. I carried this barren computer to Starbucks for two-hour intervals. Day after day, I sat there with my dark-roast tall coffee (black, no sugar). I felt a terrible urge to check my email—but I couldn’t. So I kept writing. Before long, I had completed a manuscript.

KEY INSIGHTS DO LESS, THEN OBSESS 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.

Key Points • People in our study who chose a few key priorities and then made huge efforts to do terrific work in those areas scored on average 25 percentage points higher in their performance than those who pursued many priorities. “Do less, then obsess” was the most powerful practice among the seven discussed in this book. • “Doing more” creates two traps. In the spread-too-thin trap, people take on many tasks, but can’t allocate enough attention to each. In the complexity trap, the energy required to manage the interrelationship between tasks leads people to waste time and execute poorly. • This chapter highlights three ways you can implement the “do less, then obsess” principle: 1. Wield the razor: Shave away unnecessary tasks, priorities, committees, steps, metrics, and procedures. Channel all your effort into excelling in the remaining activities. Ask: How many tasks can I remove, given what I must do to excel? Remember: As few as you can, as many as you must. 2. Tie yourself to the mast: Set clear rules ahead of time to fend off temptation and distraction. Create a rule as trivial as not allowing yourself to check email for an hour. 3. Say “no” to your boss: Explain to your boss that adding more to your to-do list will hurt your performance. The path to greatness isn’t pleasing your boss all the time. It’s saying “no” so that you can apply intense effort to excel in a few chosen areas.

REDESIGN YOUR WORK

A few months into Scheel’s experiment, when Green sat down at his desk to check the students’ first set of exam scores, he thought something had corrupted the data. Students in the flipped classroom were outperforming the traditional class. The lowest grade was now a C. Students who had been forced to repeat a grade were now thriving. Best of all, the failure rate had plummeted. To zero. How was this result possible? Green suspected that Scheel’s students had succeeded in the flipped model because they could receive help with their homework in the classroom. Once these students left school, it was hard for them to focus—their homes were too chaotic, their neighborhoods too dangerous, the demands of their after-school jobs and other obligations too heavy. These students usually had nowhere to turn for assistance if they had trouble with their homework, since the subject matter exceeded their parents’ comprehension. Under the flipped model, students watched the lessons wherever they happened to be—on the bus, in their bedrooms, in the break room at the grocery store. During class time, when they dug into the work itself, a teacher or fellow student had helped them clear each academic hurdle.

How can you boost your performance if you don’t redesign? The obvious alternative is to put in longer hours, working harder in the same way. Chances are you’re already doing that. In a 2009 survey by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow and research associate Jessica Porter, 94 percent of the 1,000 professionals surveyed reported working 50 hours or more a week, and a staggering 50 percent of them said they worked more than 65 hours a week.3 The latter figure translates into 13 hours per day, five days a week. Ouch! In a study of high earners, management writers Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce found that a full 35 percent worked more than 60 hours a week, and 10 percent worked more than 80 hours a week.4 A job with the traditional 40-hour workweek seems like a part-time gig.

Does working long hours increase performance? The prevailing “work harder” mindset presumes that it does, but the truth is more complicated. We analyzed the relationship between weekly hours worked and performance among the 5,000 managers and employees in our study.5 As the “Squeezing the Orange” chart 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.6 Other research has documented the same inverted U. Studying factory workers at a weaponry plant in Britain in 1914, Stanford economist John Pencavel found that performance topped out at 64 to 67 hours per week, beyond which it began to fall.7 Where the curve starts to flatten and where it plateaus may vary from job to job and industry to industry. It’s like squeezing juice from an orange. At first, you get a lot of liquid. But as you continue to squeeze and your knuckles turn white, you extract a drop or two. Eventually, you reach the point where you’re squeezing as hard as you can, but producing no juice. You would have done better just to leave the well-squeezed orange alone. It’s the same with hours worked. If you’re already working 50 hours per week, resist the temptation to invest more hours at work. ...

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.

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 completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

DON’T JUST LEARN, LOOP

He's right, but this is more like work design than learning.

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

All of this is true. it's why Ericsson calls what people in most jobs should do "purposeful practice:

Companies have long deployed improvement techniques such as “six sigma,” and a whole field called “organizational learning” has arisen to help businesses improve quality in manufacturing, logistics, customer ordering, and service.8 Yet this approach has not expanded much outside such organizational processes, and it has not filtered down to individual employees.

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. Athletes also have an easier time measuring outcomes than employees.

Basic Steps in a Learning Loop

Observing Brittany’s progress, we find that it’s the quality of each of these loops that helped her improve and not their sheer number. Imagine what might have happened had she attempted an endless series of repetitions with no learning from failures, no feedback, and minimal modifications. She would have invested a great deal of hard work but progressed very little. Learning on the job is not about practicing for 10,000 hours; it’s about making sure you perform each loop with high quality.

LOOPING TACTIC #1 CARVE OUT THE 15

LOOPING TACTIC #2 CHUNK IT

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.

They then used the “power of one” to pick one and only one competence at a time.

LOOPING TACTIC #3 MEASURE THE “SOFT”