Great at Work by Morten Hansen Continued

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The Secrets to Great Performance

What are the secrets to great performance?  The popular StrengthsFinder approach advocates that you find a job that taps into your natural strengths, and then focus on developing those further.

Others argue that an individual’s sustained effort is just as critical or even more so in determining success. In this “work hard” paradigm, people perform because they have grit, persevering against obstacles over the long haul.

Many people believe that working harder is key to success. Talent, effort, and also luck undoubtedly explain why some succeed and others don’t.  There is also plenty of existing advice on how to work smarter. Every author says something different. Prioritize. Delegate. Keep a calendar. Avoid distractions. Set clear goals. Execute better. Influence people. Inspire. Manage up. Manage down. Network. Tap into passion. Find a purpose. There are more than 100 pieces of advice, if you’re looking to work smarter, but Morten Hansen wasn’t satisfied with these arguments.

Hansen conducted a detailed study of 5,000 people and found that seven “work-smart” practices accounted for a whopping 66 percent of the variation in performance.  Work consists of job design characteristics (what a person is supposed to do), skill development (how a person improves), motivational factors (why a person exerts effort), and relational dimensions (with whom and how a person interacts).  Here are the seven “work smart” practices Hansen found:

1. You select a tiny set of priorities and make huge efforts in those chosen areas (work scope).
2. You focus on creating value, not just reaching preset goals (targeting).
3. You eschew mindless repetition in favor of better skills practice (quality learning).
4. You seek roles that match your passion with a strong sense of purpose (inner motivation).
5. You shrewdly deploy influence tactics to gain the support of others (advocacy).
6. You cut back on wasteful team meetings, and make sure that the ones you do attend spark vigorous debate (rigorous teamwork).
7. 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.

Top performers did less and more: less volume of activities, more concentrated effort. This insight overturns much conventional thinking about focusing that urges you to choose a few tasks to prioritize. Choice is only half of the equation—you also need to obsess. This finding led Hansen to reformulate the “work scope” practice and call it “do less, then obsess.”

“Follow your passion,” interestingly, can be dangerous advice. Top performers took a different approach: they strove to find roles that contributed value to the organization and society, and then matched passion with that sense of purpose. The matching of passion and purpose—not passion alone—produced the best results.

Top performers collaborate less. 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.

The very best redesigned their work so that they would create the most value (a term we will define in chapter three) and then they applied intense, targeted efforts in their selected work activities.

Based on these findings, Hansen arrived at a precise definition of working smart: “To work smart means to maximize the value of your work by selecting a few activities and applying intense targeted effort.”

Under the old “work hard” paradigm, high achievers tend to become stressed out, even burned out.  You work harder and your performance improves, but your quality of life plummets.

People in Hansen’s study who worked smarter experienced better work-life balance, higher job satisfaction, and less burnout.  Being great at work means performing in your job, infusing your work with passion and a strong sense of purpose, and living well, too.

 

PART I: MASTERING YOUR OWN WORK

1. Do Less, Then Obsess

Whatever you are, be out and out, not partial or in doubt. —Henrik Ibsen

Writers like Daniel Goleman and Stephen Covey have argued that people can only perform at their best if they select a few items to work on and say no to others.  If you are disciplined enough to choose a few priorities, you will succeed. Picking a few priorities is only half the equation. The other half is the harsh requirement that you must obsess over your chosen area of focus to excel. The term “focus” consists of two activities: choosing a few priorities, and then dedicating your efforts toward excelling at them. Many people prioritize a few items at work, but they don’t obsess—they simply do less. That’s a mistake.

People who were average at other practices but mastered “do less, then obsess” would likely place 25 percentage points higher in the performance ranking than those who didn’t embrace this practice.

“Do less, then obsess” affects performance more than any other practice.

Roughly equal percentages of junior- and senior-level employees excelled at focusing (15 percent and 17 percent, respectively). And only a slightly greater percentage of junior employees were poor at focusing than their senior-level colleagues (28 percent versus 23 percent).

If you work on more tasks, you get more done, and that pleases your boss. Spreading yourself across multiple clients or projects gives you more options.

There are two big problems with scattering your efforts in this way. The first is the spread-too-thin trap.  As economics Nobel-laureate Herbert Simon quipped, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The more items we attend to, the less time we can allot to each, and the less well we will perform any one of them.  The second problem with an increase in the scope of our activities is the complexity trap. Coordinating between priorities requires mental exertion.  Research shows that rapidly toggling between two items—reading emails and listening to a colleague’s presentation, for example—renders you less effective at both. Each time you switch, your brain must abandon one task and acclimate itself to the other.

A study of 58,280 court cases before Italian judges in Milan found that the judges who handled many cases simultaneously (multitasking) took longer to complete them than those who performed them in sequence.  The slowest judge spent on average 398 days to close the cases, while the fastest took “only” 178 days, or less than half the time.

Researchers estimated that a 50 percent increase in multitasking led to a nearly 20 percent increase in the number of days to finish cases. Toggling cases slowed them down. Other studies have shown that switching between tasks can decrease your productivity by as much as 40 percent.

Stellar quality—whether it takes the form of a smartphone’s intuitive user interface, a retail store’s exceptional customer service, or a restaurant’s superbly tender piece of octopus—requires both prolonged effort and a fanatic attention to detail. Attaining that quality demands obsession—and focus.

Greatness in work, art, and science requires obsession over quality and an extraordinary attention to detail.

The second-lowest-performing group, at the 53rd percentile, scored very high on “extremely good at focusing on key priorities,” but low on effort. This group was dubbed “Do less, no stress.” These were the people in the study who selected a few priorities, but then failed to obsess. Just choosing to focus, as work-productivity experts would have you do, does not lead to best performance.

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. This group was the “do more, then stress” group.

“Do less, then obsess” was the 82nd percentile group—a whopping 28 percentage points higher than the next category.

There were three main reasons for failing to focus:

1. Broad scope of work activities (too many meetings and too many work items)
2. Temptations (including distractions imposed by others and temptations created by oneself)
3. Pesky, “do-more” bosses (who lack direction and set too many priorities)

There is a  principle called Occam’s razor, which stipulates that people should pursue the simplest explanation possible in science and other areas. Applied to the workplace, this idea is best expressed as follows, “As few as you can, as many as you must.” Instead of asking how many tasks you can tackle given your working hours, ask how many you can ditch given what you must do to excel.

As the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry observed, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”

You can apply Occam’s razor to simplify and narrow the scope of your work. When it comes to goals, customers, metrics, procedures, priorities, tasks, emails, words in an email, meetings, conference calls, the number of sign-offs required during decision making, and many other parts of work, go from many to few.

If using Occam’s razor is working smarter, you might wonder why most people don’t do it. The problem is that we love to keep our options open. Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational, and his collaborator Jiwoong Shin demonstrated through a series of psychological experiments that people cling to options, even when those options no longer provide any value whatsoever. “We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open,” Ariely noted.

In Great by Choice, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen found that the most innovative companies first generated lots of ideas and then killed off the bad ones and obsessed over only a few good ideas. You can do the same in your work.

It takes guts to do less, then obsess, when most of your colleagues are striving to work harder and undertake more activities.

Focus isn’t simply about choosing to concentrate on a few areas, as many people think. There is a second harsh requirement: You must also obsess in those areas to produce exceptional quality. The smart way to work is to first do less, then obsess.

 

2. Redesign Your Work (Targeting)

Maybe if we reinvent whatever our lives give us we find poems. —Naomi Shihab Nye

In a study of high earners, management writers Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce found that a full 35 percent worked more than 60 hours a week, and 10 percent worked more than 80 hours a week.

Does working long hours increase performance? The prevailing “work harder” mindset presumes that it does, but the truth is more complicated.  Working longer hours enhances performance, but only to a point. If you work between 30 and 50 hours per week, adding more hours on the job lifts your performance. But once you’re working between 50 and 65 hours per week, the benefit of adding additional hours drops off. And if you’re working 65 hours or more, overall performance declines as you pile on the hours.

If you’re already working 50 hours per week, resist the temptation to invest more hours at work. Instead, ask yourself: “Can I work smarter, rather than more?”

As Hansen’s study suggests, evaluate the value of your work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.

The advice “start with goals” when planning an effort, is wrong. Instead, start with value, then proceed to goals. Ask yourself: what benefits do your various work activities produce, really?

We have a perverse tendency to equate volumes of activity with accomplishments.  Here’s a traditional productivity equation: A person’s work productivity = output of work / hours of input

Now consider an equation that emphasizes value: The value of a person’s work = Benefits to others × quality × efficiency

Putting it all together, to produce great value at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality.  Redesign work to focus on activities that maximize value.

When people redesign, the key is not the degree of change they’re undertaking. Instead, it’s the magnitude of the value they can create.

Research has discovered that stand-up meetings are 34 percent shorter than sit-down meetings, and the decisions they produce are equally effective.

What pain points can you spot in your workplace? What do people complain about again and again and again?  What if slide presentations were banned in meetings and replaced by questions to be discussed?

Clever redesign is about finding that proverbial lever and using it in a clever way. It’s working smarter, not harder.

 

3. Don’t Just Learn, Loop (Quality Learning)

The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill is misleading. One year of practice repeated in the same way for ten years doesn’t make perfect. Rather, a certain kind of practice makes perfect. Professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and his colleagues have studied how people achieve mastery in music, science, and sports. As Ericsson and Robert Pool discuss in their book Peak, two factors contribute to mastery: hours of repetition, yes, but more important, what Ericsson coined deliberate practice. Individuals who progress the most meticulously assess outcomes, solicit feedback based on known standards of excellence, and strive to correct tiny flaws that the feedback has uncovered. This purposeful and informed way of practicing explains why some learn at a much faster rate than others.

We can’t just take deliberate practice and “copy and paste” it into the workplace. Instead, we must implement a different version—what Hansen calls the learning loop.  Hansen’s study found that effective learners were likely to place 15 points higher in performance than the less effective ones.  Learners were characterized by these kinds of descriptors: “makes changes in an effort to improve”; “tries out new approaches”; “learns from failures”; “is curious”; “doesn’t believe he/she knows best”; and “experiments a lot.”

Want to be a better learner?  You can deploy six tactics to implement the learning loop in your job:

1. Carve out just 15

It takes about 15 minutes of work time every day to improve a skill using the learning loop.

Can you really hammer out significant progress by devoting just fifteen 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.

 

2. Chunk it

To start improving a skill, effective learners in the workplace break it into manageable chunks, what Hansen terms the “micro-behaviors.”

 

3. Measure the “soft”

Implementing the micro-behavior of asking specific questions such as “What ideas do you have?” rather than less effective questions such as “Do you have any ideas?” will provide a significant difference.  Measure progress by tracking the outcome of this simple micro-behavior, noting how many ideas employees proposed and whether they agreed to a follow-up.

Ask yourself: Which one or two metrics will, if tracked, make a big difference in my efforts to improve my work performance?

 

4. Get nimble feedback, fast

Measurement and feedback often go together. But be careful: The quality of feedback matters.

 

5. Dig the dip

“Quality management” techniques in companies urge employees to eliminate the defects and waste that cause performance to vary. These techniques seek to drive out variation and failure. That’s a grave mistake. Variation—trying new ideas—is essential to learning. And tackling difficult problems can provide rich learning opportunities. People who pursue the learning loop typically see their performance dip over the short term as they introduce challenges and experiment with ways to solve them. But they realize gains over time. The challenge, then, is to learn to tolerate failure in the short term.

The people in Hansen’s study who dared to risk a short-term performance dip reaped performance benefits. Statistically, there was a strong positive association between experimentation and excellent performance.

 

6. Confront the stall point.

In Stanford Professor Carol Dweck’s growth mindset theory, those who believe that you either have talent or not (a fixed mindset) don’t bother to improve much, while those who believe that talent is malleable (a growth mindset) put in extra effort, even when they excel at something.

As people develop expertise and skill in an activity, they can become very good, even excellent. But then something happens. They plateau.  Nobel laureate in economics Herbert Simon termed this “satisficing” (a play on words that combined “satisfying” and “sufficing”).

Why do so many people stall upon becoming “good enough”? Researchers have found that many of us automate our skills.  The moment a behavior becomes automatic, our learning stalls.

Seventy-four percent of top performers constantly reviewed their work in an effort to learn and improve. That compares with only 17 percent of people in the underperforming category.

Top performers don’t rest. They keep learning.

 

4. P-Squared (Passion & Purpose)

In 2008, on a sunny day in Palo Alto, California, Oprah Winfrey delivered a soaring commencement address to Stanford’s graduating class.  “When you’re doing the work you’re meant to do,” she said to the 25,000 people assembled in the stadium, “it feels right and every day is a bonus, regardless of what you’re getting paid.” And then she delivered the punch line: “So, I say to you, forget about the fast lane. If you really want to fly, just harness your power to your passion. Honor your calling. Everybody has one. Trust your heart and success will come to you!”

Richard Branson agreed when he said, “Since 80 percent of your life is spent working, you should start your business around something that is a passion.”

A Huffington Post blog summed up what has become a mantra for our age: “The Key to Success: Loving What You Do.”

As the well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted, “The problem is that we do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love.”

The advice to follow your passion—in other words, letting your passion dictate what you do—can be dangerous.  Is there a solution to this tradeoff between “following” or “ignoring” passion? Yes. Hansen’s research uncovered a third option: “matching.”

Great performers matched passion with purpose.

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?”

Of the seven factors that predict performance, high levels of both passion and purpose—“P-squared,” as Hansen calls it—was the second most important one, predicting a boost in a person’s percentile rank of 18 points compared with a similar person who had neither passion nor purpose.  People who had just one of the two—passion but no purpose, or purpose but no passion—scored lower on performance.

Among the 5,000 study participants, people who scored high on passion and purpose worked an average 50 hours per week compared to 43 hours for those who scored low. Seven hours more isn’t trivial, but it isn’t that much, either. Passion and purpose didn’t compel people to pour 70 or 80 hours into their jobs. Analysis also revealed that those additional seven hours of work didn’t enhance performance much, only 1.5 percent.

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.

If you love what you do, you’ll show up with a certain amount of vigor. And if you also feel that you’re helping other people—that they need you and depend on your contributions—your motivation to excel becomes that much greater.

As the study results show, you activate positive emotions such as joy, excitement, pride, inspiration, and hope, all of which gives you more energy.

As Yale School of Management professor Amy Wrzesniewski discovered in her study of hospital janitors, some found their jobs highly meaningful. In their eyes, they weren’t simply cleaning floors. They were caring for patients and helping their families during their times of need.

If people have found passion and purpose in nearly every corner of the economy, then chances are you can find it in your job, too.  In fact, there are three steps in particular you can take to find and grow your passion and purpose while staying in your organization.

1. Hunt for a New Role

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.

 

2. Grow Your Circle of Passion

Fewer than 15 percent of study participants completely agreed with the statement: “I feel that the actual work I do is rewarding in and of itself.” For most of us, the actual work may be somewhat rewarding, but not that rewarding.  Additionally, just shy of 20 percent of people completely agreed with the statement: “I feel good about my job because it allows me to experience success.”

A different source of passion at work is what might be called “people passion.” We relish the deeper relationships we form at work, the sense of being cared for.

More than half of the study participants (56 percent) were enthusiastic about their job because it gave them a chance to learn and grow.

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.

 

3. Craft Personal Meaning

Two individuals can have the same job, with only one feeling that it is of any consequence. In a 2009 study of zookeepers, researchers found that some saw cleaning cages and feeding animals as a filthy, meritless job, while others saw it as a moral duty to protect and provide proper care for the animals. Same job, different feelings of purpose.

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.

Purpose at work isn’t just about reaching the top level of contributing to society. It also includes adding value and finding personal meaning.

Strive to match passion with a strong sense of purpose—to aim for P-squared.

 

PART II: MASTERING WORKING WITH OTHERS

5. Forceful Champions (Advocacy)

Getting our work done hinges 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.

The ability to advocate for one’s goals and gain the required support is only one of a broader set of people interaction skills required in modern workplaces.

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.

In an IBM study, two-thirds of CEOs regarded collaboration and communication as “key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.”

Top performers mastered working with others in three areas: advocacy, teamwork, and collaboration.  The best advocates—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.”

Forceful champions 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.

The second skill that the forceful champions in Hansen’s 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.

The study revealed a third technique that forceful champions use to inspire people: connecting daily work to a broader purpose. Many companies have “purpose” or “mission” statements: one of the best known is Disney’s purpose “to make people happy.”

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.

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.”

Our tendency when confronted by opponents is to pull out our swords and charge into battle. Yet sometimes it serves our own interests to make people part of our project, if possible. President Lyndon B. Johnson is supposed to have quipped about an opponent: “it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.” Whenever you can, work smart and invite the opposition into your tent.

In the new “Work Smarter” perspective, the best performers don’t just argue rationally for their ideas. They compel others to support them by deploying a two-punch maneuver. First, they inspire by evoking emotions in individuals whose support they need. Second, they apply smart grit, tailoring and adjusting their tactics in the face of opposition.

 

6. Fight & Unite (Rigorous Teamwork)

Diversity in Counsel, Unity in Command —Cyrus the Great

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.

One source that summarized a range of studies calculated that 36 to 56 million meetings occur every day in the United States. And yet, in a worldwide Microsoft survey of 38,000 people, 69 percent said their meetings weren’t productive.

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.

At Amazon, the company expects managers and employees to “challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting” and “once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”

Columbia Business School professor Katherine Phillips has concluded that diversity “encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision-making and problem solving.” Likewise, University of Michigan professor Scott Page has demonstrated that the key to a fruitful debate is “cognitive diversity,” the presence of dissimilar perspectives on an issue.

Most people don’t assemble teams or show up at meetings with diversity in mind. Inject diversity by seeking out viewpoints and information from different places. Go consult peers who are not part of the team.

 

Prod the Quiet to Speak

Even with clear expectations in place, many shy and quiet people will still refrain from speaking up. In her book Quiet, Susan Cain (see my summary here) describes how introverted people (those who prefer their own “inner” mental life and solitary activities) find it hard to participate in buzzing, heated meetings where loud people wave their arms and contest the point. They often feel left out of the discussion.

The best performers 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.

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.  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.
• Don’t let a single disruptive person prevent the entire team from implementing a decision that has been well argued. Many people fail to intervene in such situations.

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.

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, remember that more than two-thirds of employees complain that their meetings aren’t productive.

Many struggle with two important aspects of team meetings. Some fail to hold rigorous “fights” or debates in which they explored ideas and scrutinized assumptions. Some also fail 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 suffer, and an employee’s individual performance diminishes.

 

7. The Two Sins of Collaboration (Disciplined Collaboration)

Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. —Kenyan proverb

The first Sin of Collaboration is under-collaboration.  It’s hard enough to work well within teams, but with entrenched silos, many individuals struggle as well to collaborate across boundaries. By collaborating, Hansen means 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.  The solution, experts say, is simple: bust the silos!

It’s a way of thinking typified by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s famous “boundaryless company.” Inevitably, this idea trickles down to employees, leading to a pervasive belief that collaboration is good, and more of it is even better.

The second Sin of Collaboration is over-collaboration.  There are plenty of instances in which over-collaboration compromised performance. Connor, a thirty-one-year-old marketing analyst in a Minnesota retail company, grumbled that “people from other business units constantly ask me for help on trivial things, which prevents me from focusing on my task at hand.” That lack of focus in turn caused him to disappoint his bosses.

Hansen’s research uncovered an approach that keeps you within the two extremes of collaboration. Disciplined collaboration 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.

In Hansen’s previous book Collaboration, he detailed how leaders can design an organization—its structure, incentives, and culture—to promote disciplined collaboration.  Interestingly, in Hansen’s study, women benefited twice as much as men from disciplined collaboration.  The 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.

The first, fundamental step in disciplined collaboration, is building a clear, rigorous business case. Not every collaboration is beneficial. In determining which to choose, managers and employees should focus on one criterion: value. What’s the compelling benefit of getting together and collaborating on a product, service, project, or cost-cutting exercise?

Study data showed that the best performers sought information and expertise from different places in the company, yet they also resisted collaborating if there was no clear value.  To be disciplined about collaboration is to say “no” to the wrong opportunities and only select those few that produce compelling value.

Follow these five rules of Disciplined Collaboration:

1. Establish a compelling “why-do-it” case for every proposed collaboration. If it’s not compelling, don’t do it and say “no.”
2. Craft a unifying goal that excites people so much that they subordinate their own selfish agendas. But beware: not all unifying goals will help. 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.”  Contrast Kennedy’s “moon goal” with the goal that then-NASA administrator James Webb wanted: preeminence in space, including satellites, science, rockets, a moon landing, and so on.  Webb’s formulation wasn’t a common goal, bringing together satellite engineers and scientists, for example. It was vague—you needed another page of text to explain it. It was impossible to measure (when have you reached “preeminence”)? Finally, it specified no deadline (someday?).
3. Reward people for collaboration results, not activities.
4. Devote full resources (time, skills, money) to a collaboration. If you can’t, scale it back or scrap it.
5. If you lack confidence in your partners, tailor trust boosters to solve specific trust problems, quickly. In our zeal to coordinate efforts, we often lose perspective on collaboration’s true value and purpose. We think more collaboration is always better—that the key to success is to be ever more wired, networked, coordinated. This belief is wrong. The goal of collaboration isn’t collaboration. It’s better performance.

Disciplined collaboration is the last of our seven practices that you can adopt to transcend the traditional “work harder” mindset and work smarter.

 

PART III: MASTERING YOUR WORK-LIFE

Great at Work…and at Life, Too

Hansen started his study with this question, “Why do some people perform better at work than others?”  Interestingly, he found an interesting pattern: Many of the top performers interviewed, the ones who embraced the practices outlined in this book, realized benefits that extended well beyond their work performance. They were less stressed out, more balanced, and more satisfied with their job.

Top performance in any field seems to demand personal sacrifice. We presume that rising to the top requires crazy hard work, fortitude, endless practice, long hours—that it entails doing without vacations, neglecting your kids or your spouse, and spending weekends and holidays glued to your computer screen. Because we think this way, we tend to let our job responsibilities balloon out of control.

If the seven working smart practices contributed to work-related well-being, then work could become part of the solution, not the problem. We could attack the root cause of our diminished private lives by working smarter.

Data shows that mastering just seven practices can substantially improve work-life balance, enthusiasm on the job, and job satisfaction.

Two practices improve work-life balance, most notably “Do less, then obsess.” 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 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.

Hansen’s analysis also turned up a surprising result: one practice—infusing work with passion and purpose—worsened work-life balance. Many people think of passion at work as exclusively positive, but the study results suggest that passion makes it harder for us to sustain boundaries around our work.  Previous studies of employee engagement—a concept similar to passion—have also suggested a link between passion and poor work-life balance.  When you feel passionate about your work and engage with your job, you can short other parts of your life.

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.”  Burnout is serious.

“Do less, then obsess” can protect people from becoming exhausted at work because it leaves them with fewer priorities to handle and track.  As the Mayo Clinic’s definition suggests, burnout can stem from a sense that work is stressful, bristling with interpersonal friction, and lacking in meaning.

One practice—“fight and unite”—increased the chance of burning out. Thinking about it, Hansen postulates that 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.”

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.

1. Manage Your time

Consider how you manage your time.  The traditional “work harder” mentality runs deep. We think we have to attend that extra meeting, agree to that extra collaboration, or put that extra hour into tweaking that presentation. Don’t fall into that trap. You need to break your work-harder pattern, setting some clear limits.

 

2. Keep Your Passion in Check

Even if you’re working a reasonable number of hours, don’t let your passion for work seep into your leisure time.  Top performers from the study pursued passions for sure, but they also kept those passions in perspective.

 

3. Don’t Take It Personally—and Don’t Fight Nasty

Don’t shy away from “mental” fights in meetings, but be sure to fight in the right way. Don’t make your fighting in team meetings personal, and don’t take the comments cast in your direction personally, either. Avoid inflammatory language (“that’s a stupid idea”), because such toxic language upsets people.

Make fights about ideas, not people.

The idea that working harder—longer hours—beyond some threshold will yield superior performance is flawed. The best performers don’t work harder. They work smarter. They maximize the value of their work by choosing a few priorities and applying targeted, intense effort to excel.

Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, reputed to be the youngest self-made billionaire in history, has reflected on his time at Facebook and lamented the excessive time he put in. “I wish I had slept more hours, and exercised regularly,” he wrote in a 2015 blog posting. “I wish I had made better decisions about what to eat or drink—at times I consumed more soda and energy drinks than water. I wish I had made more time for other experiences that helped me grow incredibly quickly once I gave them a chance.”

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.