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January 6 - January 27, 2019
Ask yourself: Which skill would, if improved, lift your performance the most? Choose that one to work on first, and devote fifteen minutes a day—yes, just fifteen.
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. To help them, we developed a smartphone “app” that each week sent them two micro-behaviors they could use while working.
Ask yourself: Which one or two metrics will, if tracked, make a big difference in my efforts to improve my work performance?
Measurement and feedback often go together. But be careful: The quality of feedback matters.
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.
“satisficing” (a play on words that combined “satisfying” and “sufficing”
But the moment a behavior becomes automatic, our learning stalls.
You can deploy six tactics to implement the learning loop in your job: 1. Carve out just 15 2. Chunk it 3. Measure the “soft” 4. Get nimble feedback, fast 5. Dig the dip 6. Confront the stall point.
Is there a solution to this tradeoff between “following” or “ignoring” passion? Yes. Our research uncovered a third option: “matching.” Some people pursue passion in navigating their careers, but they also manage to connect this passion with a clear sense of purpose on the job—they contribute, serve others, make a difference. They have matched passion with purpose.
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?”
high levels of both passion and purpose—“P-squared,” as I call it—was the second most important one,
What’s the real magic of P-squared? It provides people with more energy that they channel into their work. Not more hours as in the “work harder” paradigm, but more energy per hour of work. That’s working smart.
“intrinsic motivation.”
(achievement passion)
(creative passion)
(people passion)
(learning passion)
(competence passion)
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.
our book Great by Choice, my coauthor Jim Collins and I held weekly phone calls that we called “Chimposiums,”
Consider how you might bolster your feelings of passion across each of the six dimensions. Look for a task that requires creative problem solving. Seek out a customer-facing activity to experience the thrill of success. Attend a training seminar to learn a new skill. Make sure you get invited to brainstorming meetings. Sign on to competitive projects, like a sales pitch against a competitor (or if not that, join that department’s softball team). Ask your boss to assign you a stretch goal to challenge yourself. Seek ways to spend more time working with people you like and admire. Avoid
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Passion is doing what you love; purpose is doing what contributes.
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.
There are three ways to expand your passions and sense of purpose:
Discover a new role.
Expand the circle of passion.
Passion can also come from: success, creativity, social interactions, learning, and competence.
Climb the Purpose Pyramid.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. —Maya Angelou1
we found that top performers mastered working with others in three areas: advocacy, teamwork, and collaboration.
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.
A great way to inspire others is to foster both negative and positive emotions—getting people upset about the present and excited about the future.
book Contagious, Wharton Business School professor Jonah Berger
People acted on those high-arousal emotions. “Make people mad, not sad,” Berger concludes.
“showing, not telling”
a third technique that forceful champions use to inspire people: connecting daily work to a broader purpose.
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.
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.
“cognitive empathy,” which we can define as the capacity to understand another’s perspective or mental state.
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.”
Too many people try to get others to change by doing all the convincing themselves. They become lone crusaders for their efforts—and they exhaust themselves in the process.
Forceful champions use a variety of behaviors to arouse emotions and inspire coworkers to support their efforts: • They make people angry about today and excited for tomorrow. • They show and don’t just tell, using striking photos and demos to evoke intense emotions. • They make people feel purpose, connecting daily tedious work to a grander purpose.
Forceful champions display smart grit to break down opposition and garner support for their projects: • They consider the perspective of opponents (“standing in their shoes”), tailoring their tactics to address opponents’ specific concerns and agendas. • They confront opponents, when needed. • They make concessions they can live with to appease opponents. • They co-opt opponents, so that they, too, feel a sense of ownership. • They exert pressure by mobilizing people to advocate on their behalf.
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.
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.
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.
key to a fruitful debate is “cognitive diversity,” the presence of dissimilar perspectives on an issue.
