Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

An IBM study of 1,709 CEOs concluded that “CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos.”5 Organizations are “flatter” and less hierarchical. As a result, employees and managers must interact more across departments and work more in teams, including teams composed of members from different departments. That changes the skills you need to succeed in your job. In the IBM study, two-thirds of CEOs regarded collaboration and communication as “key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.” We found in our study that such complexity has made certain skills more important. As respondents told us, employees and managers now have to become more adept at working with people from many different departments, over whom they have no formal authority. A full 69 percent strongly or completely agreed with the statement that in their job it was “important to work with people from different areas of the company.”