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January 6 - January 27, 2019
We tend to mingle with people like ourselves—what sociologists call “homophily.”
To fight better, try to bring in people with more diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.
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.
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 interrupt. Let others finish their thoughts (except for that long-winded colleague). • Don’t listen just to prepare your own answer. First listen to understand (a golden nugget from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits). • Paraphrase what someone else said and check it for accuracy (“Did I get that right?”) • Make eye contact with whoever is speaking. • Don’t snooze. Or doodle. Or cross arms. Even if you are listening, your body language may suggest that you are not. • Ask nonleading questions. Look for the truth, not for
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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
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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.
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.
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.”
SECOND RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Craft a unifying goal that excites people so much that they subordinate their own selfish agendas.
I have identified four qualities that can guide you to make them effective. Try to make them common, concrete, measurable, and finite.
The most famous—and successful—unifying goal of all time might well be President Kennedy’s dream, articulated in a 1961 speech, “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
The key to incorporating these four qualities is to concretize what is vague.
When you reward activities, that’s what you get—lots of collaboration activities. This leads to overcollaboration and people working long hours (and evenings). Activities are just that—activities—and not accomplishments. What counts is results.
THE THIRD RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Reward people for collaboration results, not activities.
“Part-time people, part-time results.”
FOURTH RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION Devote full resources (time, skills, money) to a collaboration. If you can’t, scale it back or scrap it.
FIFTH RULE OF DISCIPLINED COLLABORATION If you lack confidence in your partners, tailor trust boosters to solve specific trust problems, quickly.
Disciplined collaboration consists of the following five rules: 1. Establish the business case—a compelling reason—for any proposed collaboration initiative, small or large. If it’s questionable, say no. 2. Craft a unifying goal that excites people, so that they prioritize this project. 3. Reward people for collaboration results, not activities. 4. Commit full resources—time, skills, and money—to the collaboration. If you can’t obtain those resources, narrow its scope or kill it. 5. Tailor trust boosters—quickly—to specific trust problems in the partnership.
one practice—infusing work with passion and purpose—worsened work-life balance.
one of our seven practices—“fight and unite”—increased the chance of burning out.
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.
SPEND YOUR TIME DIVIDEND
KEEP YOUR PASSION IN CHECK
DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY—AND DON’T FIGHT NASTY
employees and managers have lacked a clear framework for how to work smart. They haven’t parsed out what this phrase really means, nor have they had at their disposal concrete guidelines for what to do on a daily basis. The preceding chapters have provided a framework for working smart.
SMALL CHANGES, BIG RESULTS
This approach yields four broad categories corresponding to what a person should work on (job design); how the person should improve over time (learning); why a person should exert effort (motivation); and with whom a person should interact at work (relation). Put colloquially, these four categories represent the what, how, why, and who of work.
Popular books like Driven to Distraction at Work by Hallowell (2015), Focus by Goleman (2015), and Essentialism by McKeown (2014) have picked up on this research trend and argued for the need to focus (i.e., for a more narrow scope of work activities).
The idea of redesigning one’s job to create more value aligns well with recent scholarship on work and management innovation. Julian Birkinshaw’s Reinventing Management (2012), Thomas Malone’s The Future of Work (2004), and Lynda Gratton’s The Shift (2011), for example, outline how individuals and teams innovate their core work tasks.
In chapter six, I bring these ideas together to form a “smart grit” concept, arguing that it is the combination of Duckworth’s grit concept and Pfeffer and Cialdini’s political influence tactics that explain performance.
The seven hypotheses form a “work-smarter” theory of work. To work smart means to maximize the value of work by selecting a few activities and applying intense targeted effort. First, people who work smarter select a few activities that produce high value: They redesign work (hypothesis 2), do less and then obsess (hypothesis 1), and also choose a few collaborations and reject others (hypothesis 7). Second, people who work smart apply intense, targeted effort toward those activities. They create tremendous motivation by tapping into their passion and purpose (hypothesis 4), which is a more
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I would also like to express my profound gratitude to Jim Collins, Carol Dweck, Adam Grant, Chip Heath, Herminia Ibarra, and founders Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove at Thinkers50.
