In the end, we discovered that seven \u201cwork smart\u201d practices seemed to explain a substantial portion of performance. (It always seems to be seven, doesn\u2019t it?) When you work smart, you select a tiny set of priorities and make huge efforts in those chosen areas (what I call the work scope practice). You focus on creating value, not just reaching preset goals (targeting). You eschew mindless repetition in favor of better skills practice (quality learning). You seek roles that match your passion with a strong sense of purpose (inner motivation). You shrewdly deploy influence tactics to gain the support of others (advocacy). You cut back on wasteful team meetings, and make sure that the ones you do attend spark vigorous debate (rigorous teamwork). You carefully pick which cross-unit projects to get involved in, and say no to less productive ones (disciplined collaboration). This is a pretty comprehensive list. The first four relate to mastering your own work, while the remaining three concern mastering working with others.;<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not What We Expected<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Once they had focused on a few priorities, they obsessed <\/em>over those tasks to produce quality work. That extreme dedication to their priorities created extraordinary results. Top performers did less and<\/em> more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort. This insight overturns much conventional thinking about focusing that urges you to choose<\/em> a few tasks to prioritize. Choice is only half of the equation–you also need to obsess. This finding led us to reformulate the \u201cwork scope\u201d practice and call it \u201cdo less, then obsess.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our results overturned yet another typical view, the idea that collaboration is necessarily good and that more is better. Experts advise us to tear down \u201csilos\u201d in organizations, collaborate more, build large professional networks, and use lots of high-tech communication tools to get work done. Well, my research shows that convention to be dead wrong. Top performers collaborate less<\/em>. They carefully choose which projects and tasks to join and which to flee, and they channel their efforts and resources to excel in the few chosen ones. They discipline their collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Testing the New Theory One leader and his team Achieved the extraordinary, while the other team perished in the polar night. Why? What made the difference? Over the years, authors have offered several explanations. In our book Great by Choice<\/em>, Jim Collins and I attributed Amundsen\u2019s success to better pacing and self-control. Others have pointed to good planning or even luck to explain Amundsen\u2019s success and Scott’s failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, many accounts neglect one critical part of the dramatic South Pole race: the scope of the expeditions. One team fielded superior resources: a grander ship, 187 feet vs. 128 ft; a bigger budget, \u00a340,000 vs. \u00a320,000; and a larger crew, 65 vs. 19 men. How could one win against such a mighty foe? It was an unfair race. Except for one thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amundsen\u2019s Team was the one with the narrow scope. Captain Scott commanded three times the men and twice the budget. He used five forms of transportation: dogs, motor sledges, Siberian ponies, skis, and man-hauling. If one failed, he had backups. Amundsen relied on only one form of transportation: dogs. Had they failed, his quest would have ended. But Amundsen\u2019s dogs didn’t fail. They performed. Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t just his choice<\/em> to use dogs–Scott took dogs, too. Amundsen succeeded to a large degree because he concentrated only <\/em>on dogs and eschewed backup options. During his three-year trip through the Northwest Passage, he had spent two winters apprenticing with Inuits who had mastered dog sledging. Running a span of dogs is hard. They are unruly animals and sometimes drop down in the snow and refuse to work. Amundsen learned from the natives how to urge the dogs to run, how to drive sledges, and how to pace himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amundsen also obsessed over obtaining superior dogs. His research suggested that Greenlander dogs handled polar travel better than Siberian huskies. Greenland dogs were bigger and stronger, and with their longer legs they could better traverse the snowdrift across the ice barrier and the polar plateau. Amundsen traveled to Copenhagen to enlist the help of the Danish inspector of North Greenland. \u201cAs far as dogs are concerned, it is absolutely essential that I obtain the very best it is conceivable to obtain,\u201d he wrote in a follow-up letter. \u201cNaturally, I am fully aware that as a result, the price must be higher than that normally paid.\u201d He sought out expert dog runners to join his team, several more skilled than he. When the star dog driver Sverre Hassel declined, Amundsen didn\u2019t look for the next best but kept pursuing Hassel. According to historian Roland Huntford, \u201cAmundsen now exerted all his charm and force of character to coax Hassel, after all, to sail with him. In the end, Hassel, worn down by his persistence, agreed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hurt by Complexity<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Toggling cases slowed them down. Other studies have shown that switching between tasks can decrease your productivity by as much as 40 percent.\u201d \u2026 If we select just a few items and obsess to excel in those, we can perform at our best. What does obsession look like in the workplace?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massage the Octopus<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For the past fifty years, ninety-one-year-old Jiro Ono has operated the sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro, tucked under the underpass of a subway station in Tokyo. (Margin Note – Jiro!)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The worst-performing group consisted of people who took on many priorities, but then didn\u2019t put in much effort. They were the \u201caccept more, then coast\u201d employees and ranked in the bottom 11th percentile. Ouch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second-lowest-performing group, at the 53rd percentile, scored very high on \u201cextremely good at focusing on key priorities,\u201d but low on effort. We named this group, \u201cDo less, no stress.\u201d These were the people in our study who selected a few priorities, but then failed to obsess. Just choosing <\/em>to focus, as work-productivity experts would have you do, does not lead to best performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second best-performing group, at the 54th percentile, consisted of employees who accepted many responsibilities and then became overwhelmed as they worked hard to complete them. They scored low on focus, and high on effort. We called this the \u201cdo more, then stress\u201d group. Susan Bishop, the executive recruiter, landed in this category: she took on too many responsibilities (receiving a poor 3 out of 7 \u201cdo less\u201d score), yet put in a huge amount of effort (a top score of 7). Notice that this group performed at roughly the same level as the \u201cdo less, no stress\u201d group. That is, if you violate either the \u201cdo less\u201d or the \u201cobsess\u201d criterion, your performance will remain about average–slightly above the 50th percentile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, we have the Jiros and then Amundsens of the world, those who excelled at choosing a few priorities and<\/em> channeling their obsessionlike effort to excel in those areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The people in our study cited three main reasons for failing to focus: broad scope of work activities (including having too many meetings and too many work items), temptations (including distractions imposed by others and temptations created by oneself), and pesky, \u201cdo-more\u201d bosses (who lack direction and set too many priorities). These three main reasons correspond in turn to three tactics we can deploy to do less and obsess. Let\u2019s look at how to narrow your scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can apply Occam\u2019s Razor to simplify and narrow the scope of your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tie Yourself to the Mast<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty-one percent of employees in our study regarded temptations and distractions as key impediments to focusing. The second tactic for focusing and obsessing, then, is to seal yourself off from those distractions. I did that while writing this book. Knowing how hard writing is for me, and how tempted I am to procrastinate, I bought a laptop and got rid of the internet browser, email, and the instant messaging app–everything except for Microsoft Word. I carried this barren computer to Starbucks for two-hour intervals. Day after day, I sat there with my dark-roast tall coffee (black, no sugar). I felt a terrible urge to check my email–but I couldn\u2019t. So I kept writing. Before long, I had completed a manuscript.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How to Say \u201cNo\u201d to Your Boss<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNot if you want excellent work,\u201d James replied. \u201cThe merger project requires all my attention for the next three weeks, and there is no slack in the schedule. The key is to deliver the best quality, so we will need some more people on the merger project if you want me to help with the sales bid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make clear to your boss that you\u2019re not trying to slack off. You\u2019re prioritizing because you want to dedicate all your effort to excelling in a few key areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few years earlier, while coaching his son\u2019s Little League team, Green had discovered some instructional videos on YouTube that included annotated drawings illustrating the basics of the game. \u201cYou could actually see what each position did,\u201d he enthused in one of our interviews with him for our study. Green decided to show the YouTube video clips to his son\u2019s team and create some videos of his own. The boys studied the videos at home once a week and came to the baseball diamond prepared. \u201cI realized that I didn\u2019t have to repeat myself over and over to each kid,\u201d Green recalled. \u201cI also realized that the players could go back and review the videos periodically on their own.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As soon as he learned that his school was on the list, Green gathered the teachers in a conference room. He jumped on the Internet and showed them his baseball videos. \u201cLet\u2019s record our lectures and put the videos on the Internet to be accessed by students,\u201d he suggested. \u201cHow crazy would it be to try something like this at Clintondale?\u201d Students would view the lessons at home and on the bus and then do \u201chomework\u201d in the classroom. The teacher would no longer be a lecturer, but rather a coach. They would flip <\/em>the process, classroom at home, homework at school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To Perform Better, Redesign What You Do<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead Green redesigned the work itself, changing the way teaching was done. <\/em>He found a way to achieve greater impact with the same effort–in other words, to work smarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Redesign for Value<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Delving back into our data, we found that fruitful redesigns all shared one thing in common: value<\/em>. A good redesign delivers more value for the same amount of work done. That begs the question: what is value, exactly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others <\/em>benefit from it. That\u2019s an outside-in view<\/em>, because it directs attention to the benefits<\/em> our work brings to others. The inside-out view<\/em>, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t Pursue Goals, But Value<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The value of a person\u2019s work = benefits to others x quality x efficiency. Putting it all together, we get a more precise view of value: to produce great value <\/em>at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With our value equation in place, we’re now better equipped to address the question we raised at the end of the last chapter. If you want to perform at your best, you need to home in on a few key tasks and channel your efforts to perfect them – the \u201cdo less, then obsess\u201d principle. But which activities warrant such focus? If you’re going to focus on a tiny set of activities, they better be the right ones. The answer is to redesign work so as to focus on activities that maximize value, as defined in the above value equation. But how exactly do you do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hunt for Pain Points<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What pain points can you spot in your workplace? What do people complain about again and again and again? What gets people confused and frustrated and saying \u201cthis sucks\u201d? Where does work tend to get bogged down?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hunting for pain points is counter-intuitive. When we hear people complain, we tend to dismiss them as whiners. Carmen might have grown to resent all those angry insurance agents. Instead, she went beyond her job specification and worked with software coders to create a better setup. As annoying as complainers might sometimes seem, they do us all a service–they identify the pain, for free!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key Insights – Redesign Your Work<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Key Points<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I respectfully disagree. Deliberate practice translates far better to the workplace then we might think. But there’s a crucial twist. As we discovered in our research, we can’t just take deliberate practice and \u201ccopy and paste\u201d it into the workplace. Instead, we must implement a different version – what I call the learning loop<\/em>. Employees and managers who improve their skills at work follow several tactics that you don’t find in traditional deliberate practice as deployed in the Performing Arts and sports. They discard isolated practice in favor of learning as they work<\/em>, using actual work activities such as meetings or presentations as learning opportunities. They also spend just a few minutes<\/em> each day learning, eschewing the three- to four-hour practice sessions common among musicians and athletes. They also rely on informal, rapid feedback from peers, direct reports, and bosses, and not just coaches. And they take steps to measure the \u201csofter\u201d skills that permeate the workplace. As I will detail, people embracing the learning loop follow six highly effective tactics geared specifically to the workplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looping Tactic #1: Carve Out the 15<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Can you really hammer out significant progress by devoting just 15 minutes a day? Yes, so long as you stick to the Power of One: Pick one and only one skill at a time to develop. <\/em> It’s hard to master a skill if you’re also working on 10 others. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looping Tactic #2: Chunk It<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To start improving a skill, effective Learners in the workplace break it into manageable chunks, what I call micro-behaviors. A micro-<\/em>behavior is a small concrete action you take on a daily basis to improve a skill. The action shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to perform and review, and it should have a clear impact on skill development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brittany broke her overall skill area of getting the team to generate ideas into the micro-behaviors of \u201casking a question that gets people to propose an idea,\u201d \u201casking a follow-up question that generates more detail,\u201d and \u201csecuring follow-up commitment from team members,\u201d among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a leadership development program I have been running for the Scandinavian media company Schibsted, we tackled a tough but common challenge: getting managers to embrace and implement the company’s leadership competencies on a daily basis. Many companies articulate such competencies, yet people often fail to embrace them. Schibsted adopted twelve leadership competencies, including \u201c cultivate speed and flexibility,\u201d \u201cexecute and follow through to results, no excuses,\u201d and \u201cinsist on fact-based decisions.\u201d Although managers understood these formulations, they needed to translate these into daily, concrete actions. To help them do so, we crafted ten micro-behaviors for each competence. Managers completed 360-assessments to identify their specific areas of development. They then used the \u201cpower of one\u201d to pick one and only one competence at a time. To help them, we developed a smartphone \u201capp\u201d that each week sent them to micro behaviors they could use while working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Purpose and passion are not the same. Passion is \u201cdo what you love,\u201d while purpose is \u201cdo what contributes.\u201d Purpose asks, \u201cWhat can I give the world?\u201d Passion asks, \u201cWhat can the world give me?\u201d…high levels of both passion and purpose–\u201dP-squared,\u201d as I call it–was the second most important one, predicting a boost in a person\u2019s percentile rank of 18 points compared with a similar person who had neither passion nor purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s the real magic of P-squared? It provides people with more energy <\/em>that they channel into their work. Not more hours as in the \u201cwork harder\u201d paradigm, but more energy per hour of work.<\/em> That\u2019s working smart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Climb the Purpose Pyramid<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Another way to maximize your passion-purpose match is to infuse your present job with more purposeful activities. Let\u2019s remember the key difference between passion and purpose. Passion is doing what you love; purpose is doing what contributes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Convincing Other People<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As Telford\u2019s story demonstrates, getting our work done hingest on our ability to gain support from others, including bosses, subordinates, peers, colleagues in other departments, and partners. These individuals control resources we need–information, expertise, money, staff, and political cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Analyzing our data, we found that top performers mastered working with others in three areas: advocacy, teamwork, and collaboration. In this chapter, we explore the vital task of advocating for your goals so as to win other people\u2019s support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Champion Forcefully<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of us believe that we need to appeal to people\u2019s rational minds to gain their support for our projects and goals. Just explain <\/em>the merits of the case using logic and data, and others will rise up in support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>–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 \u201csmart grit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, the forceful champions in our study Inspired people appealing to their emotions as well as their rational minds to garner support. As Maya Angelou reminds us, people never forget how you make them feel. Her point is echoed by academic theory is that show how leaders gain support by making others feel excited about their vision, goals, and plans. While leadership theory often emphasizes the role of personal charisma in eliciting such emotions, you don’t need to be charismatic to inspire others. The forceful champions in our study used a number of practical techniques to start emotions that everyone can adopt regardless of their job titles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second skill that forceful champions used in our study, smart grit, and Tails persevering in the face of difficulty and deploying tailored tactics to overcome opposition to their effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Psychologists such as University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth have demonstrated that grit–which she defines as perseverance and passion for long-term goals–distinguished successful people from others. In pursuing their goals, forceful champions in our study applied such grit to overcome opposition. But rather than simply plod forward, mustering endless amounts of energy and verbiage to overcome obstacles, they also deployed smart tactics to address their colleagues\u2019 specific concerns. Like Ian Telford, they identified and read their opponents\u2019 intentions and took steps, such as compromising or co-opting, to convince them to support their cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make Them Upset . . . And Excited<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. Ian Telford got it all wrong at first. In proposing his idea for an online business, he aroused negative emotions among the managers. They worried that the future online business would cannibalize their existing business. And they felt happy about the present state, meaty profits from that existing business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Telford spoof reversed those emotions, rendering his bosses fearful <\/em>about the current state (falling behind the competition) and joyful <\/em>about the prospect of keeping existing customers and adding revenues from new online customers. Now their emotions lined up in Telford\u2019s favor, and they supported his proposal. Of course, the prank was borderline unethical, and as such it sparked an additional emotion that risked getting out of hand: anger–at him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Show It (Don\u2019t Just Tell)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet \u201cshowing, not telling\u201d is by no means a common tactic. Only 18 percent of people in our 5,000-person dataset scored high on the statement, \u201cfrequently taps into people\u2019s emotions to get them excited about their work.\u201d That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make Them Feel<\/em> Purpose<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also use purpose to inspire other people<\/em> so that they will commit to your projects and goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you make people feel <\/em>the purpose, they will try that much harder to help you achieve your goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Smart Grit<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Grit at work is not about putting your head down and bulldozing through successive walls of resistance. Smart<\/em>grit involves not only persevering but also taking into account the perspective of people you\u2019re trying to influence and devising tactics that will win them over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Empathize With Your Opponents<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In his book Power, <\/em>Stanford Business School professor states that \u201cputting yourself in the other\u2019s place is one of the best ways to advance your own agenda.\u201d He notes, however, that our obsession with our own concerns and objectives prevents us from doing so. We assume that opponents just don\u2019t \u201cget it,\u201d and thus we pummel them with more facts and arguments in an effort to make <\/em>them get it. That\u2019s working hard, not smart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mobilize People (Don\u2019t Go It Alone)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s better to enlist even just a few people to help convince others. In our study, some managers and employees rallied emissaries; 29 percent scored high on the statement, \u201cShe\/he is very effective in mobilizing people to make change happen.\u201d Ian Telford scored a 7 (highest) on this statement. As you’ll remember, he mobilized his boss to get an urgent meeting with the new top brass, Bob Wood, to plead for his Venture. He didn’t Advocate alone. As our data showed, those like Telford who mobilized people performed better (the correlation between the mobilization aspect and performance was a high 0.66).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Bay of Pigs disaster stands as a monument to a horrible team decision-making process. As the leader of the group, President Kennedy failed to foster a rigorous debate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having One Heck of a Fight<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two team meeting principles stood out among the rest. The first was something most of us don’t feel good about: fighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unite<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Becht chuckled. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what happened. They said, \u2018Nobody is leaving until we take a decision.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once teams discussed issues, they achieved closure and moved quickly. If a Reckitt Benckiser team couldn\u2019t decide within a reasonable period of time, the senior person in the room, usually the chair, made the final call. Every meeting ended with a judgment that was acted upon–fast. \u201cYou\u2019re through and out the other side at the speed of light–and then on to the next one,\u201d one executive said of meetings at the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone also committed to implementing <\/em>the decision. No second-guessing or political maneuvering would transpire in the hallways to undermine a path already chosen. \u201cI think it [politics] is poison,\u201d Becht said about the tendency to undermine decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reckitt Benckiser performed so well in part because so many of its managers and employees not only fought but also united.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In teams that unite<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We find similar teamwork cultures at other high performance companies. At Amazon, the company expects managers and employees to \u201cchallenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting\u201d and \u201conce a decision is determined, they commit wholly.\u201d Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen described how his company’s investment team debates when a partner proposes a deal. \u201cIt’s the responsibility of everyone else in the room to stress test the thinking,\u201d Andreessen says. Whenever [partner Ben Horowitz] brings in an idea, I just beat the s— out of him. And I might think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard, and I’ll just, like, trash the crap out of it. Ad I’ll get everybody else to pile on.\u201d If the partner prevails, they will stop arguing. \u201cWe\u2019ll say, \u2018OK, we\u2019re all in, we\u2019re all behind you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seek Diversity, Not Just Talent<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To fight better, try to bring in people with more diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re a participant, you don’t necessarily get to pick who’s on your team or who gets invited into the conference room. Still, you can inject diversity by seeking out viewpoints and information from different places. Go consult peers who are not part of the team. Find that new market report that no one has bothered to consult. Seek out the \u201ccrazy\u201d engineer who always has a contrarian thought. Then bring these different viewpoints to the next team meeting, either by inviting those people or presenting their views.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make it Safe<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There was also a toy horse, which people could toss at a speaker who was blathering on for too long–as in \u201cbeating a dead horse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speak Up (Correctly)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Of the following four mindsets you might have during a team discussion, only one advances debate. Can you identify which?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Good performers also don’t show up behaving like an impartial academic (\u201con one hand I think\u2026 on the other hand I think\u2026\u201d). You\u2019re also not there to sell your ideas. What matters isn\u2019t whether your suggestions get accepted. It’s whether the team can generate the best possible solution, which may or may not involve your solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CIA Deputy Richard Bissell didn’t understand this point when discussing the Bay of Pigs invasion. He thought that his job was to get his<\/em> plan approved, when in reality it was to help the group get to the best <\/em>decision. Bisell later confessed, \u201cSo emotionally involved was I that I may have let my desire to proceed override my good judgment on several matters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ask Nonleading Questions<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Ham, people have a confirmation bias<\/em>, asking for information that supports what they want to hear. 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs a manager, how do you seek out dissenting opinions?\u201d People who crave to learn the truth about an issue don\u2019t ask leading questions. They ask open-ended questions<\/em>–inquiries that do not convey an opinion or bias. Ham would have been better off putting her query this way: \u201cWhat\u2019s your view on the foam damage?\u201d Or she could have asked, \u201cDoes someone have a different point of view?\u201d Or: \u201cCan someone argue the opposite point of view?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make It Fair, Then Commit<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sharpen the Team Goal<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In many teams, personal goals and infighting prevail because the team lacks a compelling, common goal. Team members retreat into their own individual interests, and before too long, team unity dissolves. You can unite a team by sharpening the team goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You as Team Leader: <\/strong>To what extent do these two statements describe your team? 3. My team debates issues really well and everyone says what they truly think in meetings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. Everyone buys into decisions made and works hard to implement them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. –Kenyan proverb<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two Bad Extremes of Collaboration<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/u><\/strong>It\u2019s hard enough to work well within <\/em>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<\/em>. Those groups include other teams, divisions, sales offices, departments, geographic subsidiaries, and business units.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ding<\/em>! Teams with minuscule experience in either the topic of the bid or the client’s industry benefited from outside help. That was obvious–after the fact, of course! By contrast, teams with deep expertise fared worse<\/em> when receiving input from colleagues. The more help they received, the lower<\/em> their chances of winning the sales bid. These teams spent precious time searching for experts and, later, trying to incorporate their advice. They wound up dealing with more conflict and produced more chaotic, less effective sales proposals. These teams overcollaborated<\/em>, because no compelling reason existed for them to seek outside help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why did smart, seasoned professionals request help from colleagues across the firm when they didn\u2019t need it? Interviewing individual consultants, we learned that they felt pressure to collaborate. \u201cThere\u2019s a norm around here that you ought to collaborate,\u201d they told us. \u201cIf you don\u2019t ask for help, it can count against you.\u201d And so they collaborated, even though they lacked a compelling reason. They applied an old-fashioned \u201cwork harder\u201d approach to collaboration, exerting extra effort to obtain and incorporate knowledge, aiming for quantity of collaboration, not quality. As a result, they did worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the study for this book, we found plenty of instances in which overcollaboration compromised performance. Connor, a 31-year old marketing analyst in a Minnesota retail company, grumbled that \u201cpeople from other business units constantly ask me for help on trivial things, which prevents me from focusing on my task at hand.\u201d That lack of focus in turn caused him to disappoint his bosses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First Ask, Why Collaborate?<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mike undertook the first, fundamental step in disciplined collaboration: building a clear, rigorous business case. Not every collaboration is beneficial. (margin note: EMTS) <\/em>During my years studying collaboration in companies, I\u2019ve found that few people instinctively build business cases for potential collaborations. That\u2019s unfortunate: Our study confirmed the strong relationship between selective collaboration and performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Calculate the Premium<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n How precisely do you build a \u201cbusiness case\u201d–a compelling reason–for a proposed collaboration? The following equation from my research and consulting provides a useful guide: Collaboration Premium = Benefit of Initiative – opportunity costs – collaboration costs<\/p>\n\n\n\n The First Rule of Disciplined Collaboration: Establish a compelling \u201cwhy-do-it\u201d case for every proposed collaboration. If it\u2019s not compelling, don\u2019t do it and say \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Get Them Excited<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Why might people prove unwilling to collaborate with you? One major reason is the lack of a unifying goal. What could the project managers have done differently? They could have articulated a compelling unifying goal, such as \u201cgrow combined<\/em> market share in food by 50% in 3 years.\u201d That’s a common<\/em> goal that could excite each sales force to work toward winning in the market place together. That more comprehensive goal helped unify the interests of the two business units. Such unifying goals are powerful because they ask people to subordinate their individual interests to the common good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second Rule of Disciplined Collaboration: Craft a unifying goal that excites people so much that they subordinate their own selfish agendas. But beware: not all unifying goals will help. 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, <\/em>and finite.<\/em> The key to incorporating these four qualities is to concretize what is vague<\/em>. Don’t say, \u201cOur objective is to fight malaria in the world.\u201d Say, \u201cWe want zero deaths from malaria in 20 years,\u201d and then track the number of deaths by country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reward (Yes, But What?)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Be careful about how exactly you frame incentives. I often see people trying to reward collaboration activities<\/em>, not results. Many managers know whether people participate in collaborative activities such as task forces, committees, and joint visits to customer sites. And so people check the box–\u201dyes, did show up for that community meeting.\u201d 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third Rule of Disciplined Collaboration: Reward people for collaboration results, not activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fourth Rule of Disciplined Collaboration: Devote full resources (time, skills, money) to a collaboration. If you can\u2019t, scale it back or scrap it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Engineer Trust, Fast<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As we\u2019ve seen, Mike\u2019s effort with the LC triple quad illustrates all five disciplined collaboration rules: he established a compelling business case (and was prepared to ditch it if it wasn\u2019t good enough). He set forth a compelling unifying goal of \u201c$0 to $150 million in 3 years.\u201d He aligned incentives well, especially by assigning all the revenues to the life sciences unit. He made sure the project was fully resources (money, skills, time). And he used trust boosters to build confidence that collaborators would commit to their shared goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Goal of Collaboration is Not<\/em> Collaboration<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The goal of collaboration isn\u2019t collaboration. It\u2019s better performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, to achieve some semblance of a personal life, we go back in and erect a protective shield around our lives to protect work from crushing them. We switch off the smart phone at home, or refrain from checking email when watching our kids baseball games, or leave work early on certain days–all to prevent work from burying our private lives. Such measures only serve to treat the \u201csymptom\u201d–the result of working too much–and not the root cause, the work itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out that the way to achieve both better performance and better well-being isn’t to put in more hours and then buttress your personal life with ironclad boundaries. It’s to concentrate on working smarter<\/em>. Work on how you work, not on protecting your life from your work.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n How Do You Really<\/em> Get Better Work-Life Balance?<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two practices did improve work-life balance, most notably \u201cDo less, then obsess.\u201d When you narrow your scope of work and jettison less important tasks, you free up time that you can spend outside work. More disciplined collaboration can also improve work-life balance. People who collaborate stand to benefit from the help they receive, allowing them to work less. Meanwhile those who discipline<\/em> their collaboration don’t get roped into unnecessary working groups and nighttime conference calls. They minimize the extra time required to collaborate, reducing the chances that work will bog down their private lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How Do You Prevent Burning Out? How Do You Enhance Your Job Satisfaction?<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As for job satisfaction, our last well-being factor, four out of our seven practices enhance this benefit, two of them strongly. Passion and purpose loom large.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our study, people who redesigned their job tasks also felt much more satisfied, perhaps because they got a chance to work on more valuable activities, or because they appreciated the autonomy or discretion they had to reimagine their role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t Take It Personally–And Don\u2019t Fight Nasty<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Don’t shy away from \u201cmental\u201d fights in meetings, but be sure to fight in the right way. As we discussed in chapter seven, don’t make your fighting in team meetings personal, and don’t take the comments cast in your direction personally, either. Avoid inflammatory language (\u201cthat\u2019s a stupid idea\u201d), because such toxic language upsets people. Likewise, when other people make disputes personal in a meeting, try to reorient them. One great tactic is to get more objective, highlighting impersonal data, facts, and numbers as opposed to emotion-laden opinions. Another is to play the \u201cdevil\u2019s advocate\u201d, a tactic that reduces interpersonal conflict by allowing you to play a role <\/em>rather than speaking for yourself (\u201cfor the sake of argument, I am going to disagree\u201d). Make fights about ideas, not people. The quality of your debates will improve, The emotional conflict will subside, and your sense of well-being will be better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Work Smarter, Not Harder<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If someone has emerged as a superstar, we assume that he or she works harder than everyone else. Yet the idea that working harder–longer hours–beyond some threshold will yield superior performance is flawed. The best performers don\u2019t work harder. They work smarter<\/em>. They maximize the value of their work by choosing a few priorities and applying targeted, intense effort to excel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He goes on to explain: \u201cI would have picked fewer petty fights with my peers in the organization, because I would have been generally more centered and self-reflective. I would have been less frustrated and resentful when things went wrong, and required me to put in even more hours to deal with a local crisis. In short, I would have had more energy and spent it and smarter ways\u2026 AND I would have been happier.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s learn from Moskovitz\u2019s experience. And let’s learn from our study of 5,000 people drawn from many industries and all kinds of jobs, senior and junior. We can all become great at work–and in life–by working smarter, not harder. Focus on just seven core practices (and three tactics to improve well-being). Understand them. Apply yourself to these seven. Master them. Your performance will likely improve, and you’ll feel less stressed and more fulfilled. One day, you might even noticed something strange and wonderful happening. You know that colleague who outperforms everyone else, yet mysteriously leaves the office at a decent hour at the end of every day? The Natalie that I mentioned in chapter one and whom I encountered while working at the Boston Consulting Group in London?<\/p>\n\n\n\n That could be you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In chapter two (\u201cDo Less, Then Obsess\u201d), we saw that the best performers chose a few key areas to work on and then obsessed to excel in those. They went narrow and deep, not broad and shallow. Of course, sometimes you must cut out substantial areas of work–a big project, a large customer, or even a job–to get to that level of intense focus. But just as often, small changes–one-by-one–can free up enough time to do less and obsess. Start by learning to say \u201cno\u201d to new request for your time. Give yourself a buffer – the next time someone asks you for something, respond with, \u201cLet me think about it, and I will get back to you tomorrow.\u201d In the meantime, ask your spouse or a colleague to play the role of naysayer for you. Why might committing to the request be a bad idea? What do you have to lose by taking on the additional work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Great At Work – How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More Morten T. Hansen Chapter 1: The Secrets to Great Performance How often have you heard phrases like \u201cShe\u2019s a natural at sales\u201d or \u201cHe\u2019s a brilliant engineer\u201d? One influential book titled The War for Talent argues that a company\u2019s ability […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,5,8,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-booknotes","category-ideas","category-learning","category-productivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4066,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions\/4066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
How often have you heard phrases like \u201cShe\u2019s a natural at sales\u201d or \u201cHe\u2019s a brilliant engineer\u201d? One influential book titled The War for Talent<\/em> argues that a company\u2019s ability to recruit and retain talent determines its success. The popular StrengthsFinder approach advocates that you find a job that taps into your natural strengths, and then focus on developing those further. These talent-based explanations are deeply embedded in our perceptions of what makes for success. But are they right?
Some work experts take issue with the talent view. They argue that an individual\u2019s sustained effort <\/em>is just as critical or even more so in determining success. In one variant of this \u201cwork hard\u201d paradigm, people perform because they have grit, persevering against obstacles over the long haul. In another, people maximize efforts by doing more: they take on many assignments and are busy running to lots of meetings. That\u2019s the approach I subscribed to while at BCG, where I put in long hours in an effort to accomplish more. Many people believe that working harder is a key to success.
I decided to take a different approach, exploring whether the way<\/em> some people work–their specific work practices as opposed to the sheer amount of effort they exert–accounts for greatness at work. That led me to explore the idea of \u201cworking smart,\u201d whereby people seek to maximize output per hour of work<\/em>. The phrase \u201cwork smarter, not harder\u201d has been thrown around so much that it has become a cliche. Who wants to \u201cwork dumb\u201d? But many people do in fact work dumb because they don\u2019t know exactly how<\/em> to work smart. And I don\u2019t blame them, because it\u2019s hard to obtain solid guidance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/u><\/strong> In fact, they accounted for a whopping 66 percent of the variation in performance among the 5,000 people in our dataset.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chapter 2: Do Less, Then Obsess<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<\/a>Chapter 3: Redesign Your Work<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Picture1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>Chapter 4: Don\u2019t Just Learn, Loop<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Chapter 5: P-Squared (Passion And <\/em>Purpose)<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Chapter 6: Forceful Champions<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a>Chapter 7: Fight And Unite<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cWell, when I hear about them\u2026\u201d
\u201cBut Linda, by their very nature you may not hear about them.\u201d
\u201cWell, when somebody comes forward and tells me about them.\u201d
\u201cBut Linda, what techniques do you use to get them?\u201d
She did not reply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Give yourself a score from 1-7 using the scale above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>Chapter 8: The Two Sins of Collaboration<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Part 3: Mastering Your Work-Life
Chapter 9: Great at Work\u2026 And at Life, Too<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/u><\/strong>The Mayo Clinic defines job burnout as a \u201cspecial type of job stress–a state of physical, emotional or mental exhaustion combined with doubts about your competence and the value of your work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a>Epilogue: Small Changes, Big Results<\/h1>\n\n\n\n