Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

After you fight, you must unite. That means people on a team have to commit to a decision—to agree to it and exert effort to implement it. So why wouldn’t people commit? Research on the topic of fair processes in groups has shown that employees have trouble committing to a decision when they perceive the process as unfair. In a meta-analysis of 148 field studies covering 56,531 employees, Professors Yochi Cohen-Charash and Paul E. Spector conclude that employees viewed a process as unfair if they could not voice their opinions before a decision was made. That perception in turn led people to harbor negative attitudes and engage in counterproductive behaviors (including spreading rumors, doing work incorrectly, and even stealing and destroying equipment!).34 The first requirement to get people to commit, then, is to make sure everyone on the team has a chance to express their opinions and that people consider and discuss them. Then people will be more likely to commit to a decision, even if they disagree with it.

STOP PLAYING POLITICS Office politics can undermine unity: People scuttle team decisions if those decisions conflict with their own selfish agendas. But as our study found, participants who scored high on “she/he goes to great lengths to eliminate politics that would prevent a decision from being implemented” performed much better (the correlation was 0.61). To stop playing politics and forge unity, try the following: • Don’t second-guess team decisions that go against your personal interests (avoid that hallway chatter, “I’m not sure we should be doing that . . .”). • Don’t appeal a team decision that conflicts with your personal agenda to higher-ups. Accept it and move on. • Clarify with your boss any conflict that may exist between your individual goals and a team goal (“I can’t spend 100 percent of my time selling insurance when the new team goal requires me to help sell mortgages, too . . .”) • Send an email declaring your support to the team. “I am on board.” • Do one thing—fast—that shows you’re implementing the decision, even if it goes against your interests (“I’ve already set up the meeting with the supplier . . .”) • Confront a colleague who’s playing politics: “We made the decision, stop second-guessing . . . let’s go and do it!”

Sometimes people on a team act in their own interest, like Pippen, without regard for what’s best for the team. If these prima donnas don’t get their way, they stop contributing, or they keep on challenging a decision, even though it has been made and everyone else is working hard to implement it.

KEY INSIGHTS FIGHT AND UNITE The “Work Harder” Convention To maximize a team’s performance (and by implication, your own), solicit the participation of the best and brightest. Then maximize team effort by scheduling plenty of meetings. If a meeting fails to work, schedule another, and so on. The New “Work Smarter” Perspective To maximize performance, maximize team debate and team unity. To have a “good fight” in a team, prioritize diversity over individual talent. When you fight and unite well, you don’t need follow-up meetings because your team discussed it well the first time. You meet smart.

Key Points • A full 80 percent of respondents in our study acknowledged, “Leading teams effectively is really important in my job.” Whether as a leader or a participant, you achieve not alone, but with teams. • Much of a team’s joint work occurs in group meetings. Your team’s effectiveness and your own individual performance therefore hinge on the quality of those meetings. • Yet most people—69 percent according to one study—complain that their meetings aren’t productive. • In our study, many people struggled with two important aspects of team meetings. Some failed to hold rigorous “fights” or debates in which they explored ideas and scrutinized assumptions. Some also failed to commit to decisions once they were made and to work hard to implement them (to unite as a team). In either case, team meetings suffered, and an employee’s individual performance diminished. • To have a productive fight in meetings, pursue the following strategies, either as leader or participant: • Maximize diversity, not talent • Make it safe to speak up • Prod the quiet to speak • Show up as an advocate, not a salesperson • Ask nonleading questions. • To improve team unity, try the following: • Ensure everyone has a voice (being heard creates buy-in) • Commit, especially when you utterly disagree • Confront the prima donna • Sharpen the team goal • Stop playing office politics and get behind decisions.

THE TWO SINS OF COLLABORATION

Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. —Kenyan proverb

These caregivers committed what we might call the First Sin of Collaboration: undercollaboration. The health system in Fort Dodge wasn’t designed to help people coordinate decision making and share information. Like most hospital systems in the United States, Fort Dodge Hospital was composed of departments that were separated by tall walls—what many call a siloed organization. This phenomenon of siloed care has expanded in recent years. Specialization has exploded: The American Board of Medical Specialties listed 65 specialties in 1985, 124 in 2000, and 136 in 2017.2 Meanwhile, the fragmentation of care has led to serious problems. A large study of 10,740 patient admissions across nine hospitals in the United States found that poor communication in handoffs from one provider to another resulted in many medical errors. When staff learned to use a simple communication tool, injuries from those errors decreased by 30 percent.3 When people fail to communicate across silos, bad things happen.

It’s hard enough to work well within teams, as we saw in the last chapter. But with entrenched silos, many individuals struggle as well to collaborate across boundaries. By collaborating I mean connecting with people in other groups, obtaining and providing information, and participating in joint projects. Those groups include other teams, divisions, sales offices, departments, geographic subsidiaries, and business units.

My research has uncovered an approach that keeps you within the two extremes of collaboration. Disciplined collaboration, as I call it, is a set of practices that allows you first to assess when to collaborate (and when not to) and to implement the effort so that people are both willing and able to commit to it and deliver results.

I like the way he finds ways to recast concepts like grit (Smart Grit) and collaboration (Disciplined Collaboration)

In our 5,000-person dataset, we found that individuals who practiced disciplined collaboration were likely to perform far better than those who didn’t. People who mastered disciplined collaboration were likely to rank 14 percentage points higher in their performance ranking than those who scored at the bottom.9

Interestingly, women benefited twice as much as men from disciplined collaboration. Why might women benefit so much more from collaborating? Our data revealed that a higher proportion of women were good at building trust, ensuring that parties were motivated, and crafting a common goal. More women were also better at seeking information outside their core team. This gender effect is the second among the seven practices in this book: women in our study did better collaborating, while men did better championing forcefully (as discussed in chapter six).

How precisely do you build a “business case”—a compelling reason—for a proposed collaboration? The following equation from my research and consulting provides a useful guide:12 Collaboration Premium = Benefit of initiative – opportunity costs – collaboration costs

THE FIRST RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Establish a compelling “why-do-it” case for every proposed collaboration. If it’s not compelling, don’t do it and say “no.”

Mike’s situation might seem different from the kinds of collaborations you typically consider in your job. He was proposing a significant business initiative, one that would involve dozens of people and millions of dollars in investment, and one that would potentially yield a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What about collaborations that are simpler and smaller, and where the stakes are lower? Is it still desirable and practical to calculate a Collaboration Premium in these situations? Absolutely. You may not be able to assign numbers, but you can still use this logic and do a ten-minute calculation to evaluate whether you should collaborate or not.

SECOND RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Craft a unifying goal that excites people so much that they subordinate their own selfish agendas.

Based on my two decades of studying and advising on unifying goals, I have identified four qualities that can guide you to make them effective. Try to make them common, concrete, measurable, and finite. The

The key to incorporating these four qualities is to concretize what is vague.

When you reward activities, that’s what you get—

THE THIRD RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Reward people for collaboration results, not activities.

As our case studies suggested, you can “engineer” trust quickly using a few techniques.

FIFTH RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION If you lack confidence in your partners, tailor trust boosters to solve specific trust problems, quickly.

The goal of collaboration isn’t collaboration. It’s better performance.

GREAT AT WORK . . . AND AT LIFE, TOO

Intrigued by examples like Bishop and Green, I wondered whether a statistical link existed between the seven practices and improved work-related well-being.

Although the seven practices enhance well-being as I’ve defined it, a few of them turned out to lower certain parts of well-being. To attain the biggest improvement, you can’t just strive to master the seven practices. You must also employ three additional tactics to prevent the negative side effects from occurring. Let’s first look at how the seven work-smart practices affect well-being and then examine those extra tactics you need to become truly great at work.

Previous studies of employee engagement—a concept similar to passion—have also suggested a link between passion and poor work-life balance. A study of 844 firefighters, hairstylists, educators, caregivers, bankers, and other working adults in the United States revealed that employee engagement—measured by an employee’s degree of vigor, dedication, and absorption in work (“when I am working, I forget everything else around me”)—increased work’s interference with family life (“my work keeps me from my family activities more than I would like”).4 Too much engagement at work led to poor work-life balance.5

The Mayo Clinic defines job burnout as a “special type of job stress—a state of physical, emotional or mental exhaustion combined with doubts about your competence and the value of your work.”6 Such job stress is quite common in the workplace. We asked the 2,000 self-respondents in our sample to rate their level of work-related burnout. Many experienced some level of mental and emotional exhaustion. About a fifth (19 percent) strongly or completely agreed that they felt burned out. Another quarter (25 percent) agreed somewhat, with the remaining 56 percent reporting little or no sense of burnout.

I was surprised that one of our seven practices—“fight and unite”—increased the chance of burning out. Upon reflection, I came up with a possible explanation. Vigorous debates during meetings may produce better decisions, but they can also wear you down —all that frowning and head-shaking, all those moderately raised voices, all those attacks and counterattacks. Research has shown that a good intellectual fight (what scientists call “cognitive conflict”) often accompanies interpersonal friction or “emotional conflict.”8 In a study of 612 employees working in industries like manufacturing, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and governmental defense, an increase in cognitive conflict (for example, “how often did the members of your team debate different ideas”) predicted higher levels of emotional conflict, as measured by interpersonal clashes, anger, tension, and intrateam rivalry.9 Friction between colleagues can in turn lead to burnout.

Overall, our analysis demonstrates that different smart-work practices affect well-being differently. It’s not the case that one or two of the seven practices produce well-being, nor are all the effects positive. As a result, simply mastering all seven practices won’t yield the greatest performance and well-being gains. You do need to master them, but you also need to adopt three additional tactics to mitigate the negative impacts that some of the practices have on well-being.

You have two choices: You can reinvest that extra time in work, or you can spend it on outside personal and family time.

And you can monitor it by monitoring how much work time you spend in the office and at home and setting a maximum amount.

One study of fifty-two staff in a small private hospital in Northern California found that nurses who experienced more unpleasant interactions with colleagues and supervisors were more emotionally exhausted from work and suffered from much higher burnout levels.11 For introverts and those who tend to avoid conflict, heated debates might prove especially taxing.

A partial solution to this mental fatigue is to allow for a recovery period

As the data and stories in this book demonstrate, small changes in behaviors can have a disproportionate effect on outcomes.

Telling stories only about small changes that have large, positive effects ignores the situations where the small change has no effect or a negative effect.