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July 19 - July 22, 2018
That’s indeed what happened. Over time, doctors who treated tough cases went on to excel. For a clinic’s first 100 cases, doctors who stuck with less complicated patients enjoyed a higher success rate. After 100 cases, doctors who had treated more difficult patients all along snuck into the lead, because benefits from their learning kicked in. At 400 cases, their success rates surpassed those of the “easy case” doctors by 3.3 percent, and their learning continued. Their looping had made them the top performers.
Our 5,000-person study revealed a yawning gap in people’s inclination to experiment.
The people in our study who dared to risk a short-term performance dip reaped performance benefits. Statistically, we found a strong positive association between experimentation and excellent performance.
LOOPING TACTIC #6 CONFRONT THE STALL POINT
The top performers in our study followed Carlsen’s dictum. A whopping 74 percent of the top performers in our dataset constantly reviewed their work in an effort to learn and improve. That compares with only 17 percent of people in the underperforming category.22
Sidebar: What Hurdles at Work Prevent You from Looping? Hurdle at Work Tactical Looping Solution at Work I am too busy with work to deal with training and practice. #1. Carve out just 15 minutes per day of your time, and focus on one key skill at a time (the power of one). I don’t know where to start—it’s too difficult to improve a broad skill, like “prioritize better.” #2. Chunk it, breaking your desired skill into small, concrete, daily micro-behaviors. I don’t know how to measure the outcome of what I am doing. For instance, how do I know I am listening better in a meeting? #3. Focus on
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The best performers adapt successfully to disruptions by combining redesign and the learning loop. In their seminal study, Professors Amy Edmondson, Richard Bohmer, and Gary Pisano at the Harvard Business School chronicled how a few surgery teams managed to adapt to a new technology that disrupted their profession: They shifted from open-heart surgery to a new method, minimally invasive cardiac surgery (MICS), while others struggled to do so.24
KEY INSIGHTS THE LEARNING LOOP 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
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P-SQUARED (PASSION AND PURPOSE)
three. Just because you’re not saving kids in Africa or helping homeless people on the streets of Chicago doesn’t mean your job lacks purpose. Our study led us to define purpose more broadly: You have a sense of purpose when you make valuable contributions to others (individuals or organizations) or to society that you find personally meaningful and that don’t harm anyone.
Purpose and passion are not the same. Passion is “do what you love,” while purpose is “do what contributes.” Purpose asks, “What can I give the world?” Passion asks, “What can the world give me?”10
Like Birdsall, you can seek opportunities within your existing company to merge your passion with a strong sense of purpose. But be prepared: It takes work. Even though Birdsall’s career move may seem straightforward in hindsight, it emerged out of months of contemplation on his part. He explored dozens of options before finding a good fit. He refused to settle until he found his match.
In one study, 70 percent of working adults reported that they thought they could only find passion at work if their job “fit” them perfectly from the outset. They neglected the possibility that they could develop their passion in their current job.21
Break out that 1 to 7 scale again and rate the following: “I am passionate about my job because I relish the experience of achieving results and success.” (achievement passion) “I am passionate about my job because I am energized around the creative aspect of my work.” (creative passion) “I am passionate about my job because I adore working and socializing with my colleagues.” (people passion) “I am passionate about my job because it affords me the opportunity to learn and grow professionally and personally.” (learning passion) “I am passionate about my work because it gives me the opportunity
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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.
The Purpose Pyramid
If we only define purpose as giving to others, we miss a crucial distinction: You can contribute to one group, yet damage another. Contribute to General Motors, yet harm young Amber Marie Rose. A strong sense of purpose only arises when you don’t harm anyone—customers, suppliers, your boss, your organization, employees, the community, the environment.28
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.
KEY INSIGHTS P-SQUARED The “Work Harder” Convention Follow your passion at all costs and no matter how hard you work. If you do what you love, success will come. Conversely, if you ignore passion, you’re setting yourself up for a career that is bleak, unsatisfying, and filled with drudgery. The New “Work Smarter” Perspective Passion is key, but doing only what you love is bad advice—it can lead to failure and ruin. The best course is to strive to match passion with a strong sense of purpose—to aim for P-squared. People who do so unleash a tremendous amount of energy that they apply to every
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Key Points • Many people either follow their passion, or they ignore their passion. But as our research shows, the issue of achieving passion at work is not a matter of “following” or “ignoring,” but rather of “matching.” • In our study, managers and employees who matched passion and purpose performed far better than those who didn’t. They were likely to place 18 percentile points higher than those who didn’t in our 5,000-person dataset. • People with a strong sense of both passion and purpose are more energized, getting more done in each hour of work (and they don’t work many extra hours).
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FORCEFUL CHAMPIONS
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
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When we analyzed our case studies, I was struck by how the best performers went beyond rational arguments and adopted various tactics to advocate for their projects. I discovered that the best advocates—what I call forceful champions—effectively pursued their goals at work by mastering two skills to gain the support of other people. They inspired others by evoking emotions, and they circumvented resistance by deploying “smart grit.”
The second skill that the forceful champions in our study used, smart grit, entails persevering in the face of difficulty and deploying tailored tactics to overcome opposition to their effort.
Psychologists such as University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth have demonstrated that grit—which she defines as perseverance and passion for long-term goals—distinguishes successful people from others.8
I don't think she's "demonstrated" anything. She has good insights, but the supporting research is flawed.
Yet “showing, not telling” is by no means a common tactic. Only 18 percent of people in our 5,000-person dataset scored high on the statement, “frequently taps into people’s emotions to get them excited about their work.” That’s too bad. As our study also revealed, arousing emotional responses gets results, including for junior people. In fact, about 19 percent of people in either a senior job position (division manager) or a junior one (technical specialist) scored very high on their ability to stir emotions.
A story is a way to show, not tell, because people experience stories, they don't just read or listen to them.
While Thaysen inspired a crowd with a lofty purpose, people in our study managed to connect an overarching purpose to even the most tedious of tasks.23
Purpose doesn't need to be grand and world-changing. If you help someone else, a customer or co-worker that's purpose, too.
Research confirms the power of connecting daily work to purpose. Wharton professor Adam Grant and colleagues conducted a study of people working at a call center to raise university alumni donations for scholarships.25 Hour
The tactics of lining up emotions properly, showing (and not just telling), and making people feel purpose enable you to inspire people so that they will support your efforts. Everyone can use these tactics; you don’t have to have a charismatic personality to inspire colleagues at work.
SMART GRIT
You don't need research to know that grit is important if you want to achieve goals, but the research on grit is flawed and incomplete. The concept of "smart grit." makes a good case without needing to reference any research. The concept of "grit" is good. It's the research that's flawed.
His relentless pursuit—his grit—prompted him to adjust elements of his production or operational strategy (where to get the pads, how to test his idea, how to build the machine), but his approach to people remained rigid. He didn’t listen to their concerns and instead barreled ahead. His sheer grit frightened them away.
Grit at work is not about putting your head down and bulldozing through successive walls of resistance. Smart grit involves not only persevering but also taking into account the perspective of people you’re trying to influence and devising tactics that will win them over.
Psychologists call her approach “cognitive empathy,” which we can define as the capacity to understand another’s perspective or mental state.28
In his book Power, Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer states that “putting yourself in the other’s place is one of the best ways to advance your own agenda.”29
FIGHT AND UNITE
Diversity in Counsel, Unity in Command —Cyrus the Great1
Much of a team’s work occurs in group meetings. It follows, then, that a team’s performance and your own individual performance hinge on the quality of team meetings—how well people debate issues, and how fully they commit to implementing decisions.
While team meetings are a crucial part of teamwork, many of them aren’t effective. And there are lots of them. One source that summarized a range of studies calculated that 36 to 56 million meetings occur every day in the United States.9 And yet, in a worldwide Microsoft survey of 38,000 people, 69 percent said their meetings weren’t productive.10 A Harris poll of 2,066 employees even found that almost half of respondents would “prefer to do almost anything else instead of sitting in a status meeting.” Would they rather watch paint dry? A
When teams have a good fight in their meetings, team members debate the issues, consider alternatives, challenge one another, listen to minority views, scrutinize assumptions, and enable every participant to speak up without fear of retribution.
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.
In teams that unite, team members commit to the decision taken (even if they disagree), and all work hard to implement the decision without second-guessing or undermining it.
We find similar teamwork cultures at other high-performance companies.
I would have expected that people in positions of authority would have enforced unity better. But unity is not something that you “enforce.” You need true commitment, not mere obedience.
Most people don’t assemble teams or show up at meetings with diversity in mind. We tend to mingle with people like ourselves—what sociologists call “homophily.” When we seek out the best and the brightest, we don’t look far but instead tend to gather teams with people whose backgrounds resemble our own.
To fight better, try to bring in people with more diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. Bart Becht of Reckitt Benckiser told us, “It doesn’t matter whether I have a Pakistani, a Chinese person, a Brit or a Turk, man or woman, sitting in the same room, whether I have people who have done sales or something else—so long as I have people with different experiences. Because the chance for new ideas is much greater when you have people with different backgrounds.”22
The best performers advocate properly: They craft an opinion, argue their case with vigor, outline its weaknesses and assumptions, listen to other points of view, debate the issues, and change their mind if warranted. (See the sidebar for tips for debating and listening drawn from my conversations with hundreds of managers and employees.)
TIPS FOR DEBATING WELL • Present new data: “I pulled some market data from Atlanta that is interesting . . .” • Jot down three questions beforehand (and especially around key assumptions): “Does your number assume that customers will buy additional products?” • Jump into a dissenting role: “For the sake of argument, let me state an alternative point of view . . .” • Build on other viewpoints. (“If we expand your idea to a larger market . . .”) • Change your mind from time to time. Fight for the best idea, not for yours. TIPS FOR LISTENING WELL (so that you can build on what others say) • Don’t
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Like Ham, people often have a confirmation bias, asking for information that supports what they want to hear.32 Ham got her answer, even though the engineers remained uncertain about the state of the foam damage (which, as it turned out, was the cause of the disaster). In the hearings following the accident, she came under heavy criticism for her inability to probe the issue:33
People who crave to learn the truth about an issue don’t ask leading questions. They ask open-ended questions—inquiries that do not convey an opinion or bias. Ham would have been better off putting her query this way: “What’s your view on the foam damage?” Or she could have asked, “Does someone have a different point of view?” Or: “Can someone argue the opposite point of view?”
