Working Smart

In 2011, Business professor Morten T. Hansen studied the work habits of 5,000 managers and employees to determine how and why some people excel. His team found that the top performers generally don’t work longer hours. Instead, they make each hour count by following seven “work-smart” principles. “Being great at work,” Hansen writes, “means performing in your job, infusing your work with passion and a strong sense of purpose, and living well, too.”

Principle One: “Do Less; Then Obsess”

When people strive to excel, Hansen points out, they often decide they should work more than everyone else. They load up their schedules with every available project and work long hours in hopes of accomplishing it all. Since they don’t have the time or resources to master the intricacies of all these tasks, they’re unlikely to turn in first-rate work on any of them. People who are overwhelmed need to coordinate the way their many tasks relate to each other, but instead they often end up constantly multitasking – that is, shifting their attention among activities, thus reducing their effectiveness at each task.

The best performers, Hansen learned, commit to a smaller range of priorities and concentrate on getting those done right, which means doing less and focusing more. The author provides a striking example of how the power of narrowing your focus affected the 1911 race to be the first to reach the South Pole. One team leader, Robert Scott, kept his options open. He prepared five ways to traverse the Antarctic: dogs, motorized sledges, ponies, skis and manual hauling. By contrast, the rival team leader, Roald Amundsen, focused on just one means of transport: sled dogs. Amundsen obsessed on sled dogs, learning all he could about the best breeds and hiring the best dog drivers for them. Amundsen won, in part because Scott had spread his attention over so many possible methods of transport that he didn’t get any of them right.

Hansen recognizes that narrowing your focus isn’t easy in a complex and fast-moving business environment. He provides these helpful strategies:

• Recalibrate how you measure accomplishment – Instead of calculating how many tasks you can take on, see how many you can eliminate and still reach your overall goal.
• Cut off your access to distractions – Just as Odysseus lashed himself to the mast of his ship to resist the temptations of the Sirens’ songs in Homer’s Odyssey, cut off your access to the digital siren call of email and the web. Remove internet capability from a laptop and designate it as your work-only computer. If your co-workers distract you, Hansen suggests that you arrive at your office an hour early and stay an hour late or commandeer an empty conference room.
• Involve your boss – Streamlining your focus is difficult if your boss sets vague goals or hands you more and more projects. Ask your boss to identify priorities, and make it clear that you want to focus on the most important ones.

Principle Two: “Redesign Your Work”

To prioritize the elements of a complex, unwieldy work flow, Hansen advises streamlining your load to increase your efficiency. Calculate the importance of a task by assessing the value it provides for you, your co-workers or your firm. Value is a more effective metric than conventional quotas or productivity targets. “When you create value for your organization,” the author writes, “you contribute and your work has purpose.”

To measure value, the author recommends considering an activity from an “outside-in view.” Conventionally, businesspeople take an “inside-out view” in which they measure performance by internal targets; that conflates accomplishment with activity. With an outside-in view, the main metric isn’t how fast a task gets done, but how it benefits other stakeholders, such as customers, your colleagues or the business as a whole. As the author writes, “Rapidly toggling between two items – reading emails and listening to a colleague’s presentation for example, renders you less effective at both.”

Principle Three: “Don’t Just Learn; Loop”

Finding the time to practice and refine important skills can be difficult. Unlike an athlete or musician, Hansen understands that you can’t hunker down in a gym or practice room for hours each day. He offers “the learning loop,” which integrates practice into your daily responsibilities. You carry out your tasks, solicit feedback on your performance and tweak your techniques in response. Hansen offers six guidelines for creating a learning loop:

1. Set aside 15 minutes a day – Concentrate on one skill at a time, and devote a quarter-hour daily to honing it apart from other tasks. Use coaching and performance analysis to collect feedback.
2. Break the skill into micro-behaviors – Say you want to get better at motivating your team to propose more ideas. Begin by practicing one micro-behavior, such as learning how to ask questions that spark creative thinking.
3. Develop metrics – Once you’ve learned which questions to ask, track how often you ask them. Monitor growth in the number of new ideas that team members propose.
4. Get immediate feedback – Regularly ask a co-worker, a boss or a mentor for concrete evaluations of your performance.
5. Expect the “dip” – After improving a skill for a while, you’ll probably see your performance drop a few notches. This is a sign that you’ve moved up to a new level of expertise that you have yet to master. Unless you continually face new challenges, you won’t continue to improve.
6. Push past the “stall point” – When you hit a plateau, you don’t struggle with tasks, but you don’t improve, either. When you master a skill, you do it without thinking. You stop trying to improve. Top performers constantly review and improve their skills, even activities that now seem easy. “Small changes in behaviors,” the author points out encouragingly, “can have a disproportionate effect on outcomes.

Principle Four: “P-Squared (Passion and Purpose)”

Passion matters, but Hansen notes that passion can’t guarantee success on its own. He believes you should combine your passion with your purpose (in his terms, that’s P-squared). Passion involves the interesting, enjoyable parts of a task. Purpose describes the benefits it provides to others. P-squared generates energy. You don’t work more hours, but you put more spirited effort into each hour of work. To find P-squared in your work, use these strategies:

• Find or create a new role in your company – Reframe your job, or design a new role for yourself. The author provides the example of Steven Birdsall, who felt stuck after holding various COO positions in his 10 years at the software firm SAP. Birdsall’s great passions were helping customers and pursuing intrapreneurial ventures, such as developing new products and opening new markets. He drew on both passions by proposing and then owning a plan to build a market for an undersold, off-the-shelf version of SAP’s software.
• Look beyond your daily tasks – People rarely love the individual tasks that make up their job; they find more meaning in the results. Such outcomes include feelings of accomplishment, the pleasure of learning new skills and the satisfaction of being competent in your role.
• “Infuse your job with more purposeful activities” – Look for opportunities to generate value and, therefore, meaning. Shift your perspective to appreciate how your work benefits others. Seek new responsibilities that benefit the larger society, like the Scripps Health manager who mobilized a team to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Principle Five: “Be a Forceful Champion”

To perform at your best, Hansen knows you need the support of your bosses, teammates and staff. This is particularly true when you’re proposing a new idea. You might think your best bet is to craft a clear, logical explanation of the idea and its benefits. But when you hit opposition – often ill-informed or illogical – you have to redouble your efforts to get your point across.

Successful persuaders, the author relates, combine logical arguments with appeals to emotions. Evoke a contrasting series of “high-arousal” emotions – feelings like fear and excitement – that stimulate a desire to act. For example, paint a picture of your company’s status that makes the audience fearful about its future. Then stimulate excitement by showing how your proposal leads to a brighter future.

To speak directly to people’s emotions, demonstrate your points visually instead of just talking about them. Hansen holds up as an example celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who worked on a project to motivate West Virginia elementary school students and parents to eat less fat. Instead of using facts and statistics, he had a truck dump a mountain of animal fat into a huge dumpster. When he explained that this represented the amount of fat the school consumed in a year, the members of the horrified group pledged to change their diets.

Inspire purpose, the author coaches, by connecting your proposals to a greater cause. For example, workers at a call center that raised funds for a university’s scholarships faced regular rejection and never saw what happened with money they raised. Then they read letters from grateful scholarship recipients and met a student who described how their work had changed his life. In a month, the team’s weekly fundraising average more than doubled.

Winning support requires perseverance – “smart grit,” not stubborn determination that butts repeatedly against the same obstacles. As you try to persuade your listeners, modify your approach based on what you learn about your opponents. When you understand their perspective and reasoning, you can counter it effectively or make concessions that neutralize it.

“Co-opt” your adversaries, Hansen says, by inviting them to participate in the project. They won’t regard the proposal as a threat if you let them share in its success.

Principle Six: “Fight and Unite”

Bad meetings are a time sink that often produces nothing but a need for more meetings. To make your meetings more effective, Hansen suggests cultivating two contrasting modes:

1. Fight – Allow debate in which participants challenge each other’s opinions, dissect assumptions and examine options.
2. Unite – Before adjourning, come to a firm decision and have every participant commit to it. At the British firm Reckitt Benckiser, for example, if the team can’t reach a decision in a reasonable amount of time, the most senior member makes the call.

Principle Seven: Avoid the “Two Sins of Collaboration”

When a team with expertise in a certain area solicits help or advice in that area from other departments, Hansen reports surprisingly that it performs worse than when it operates solo. Avoid the sin of “overcollaboration” by seeking help only in areas in which you lack proficiency. Avoid the sin of “underrcollaboration” by breaking down siloes that discourage effective communication.

For “disciplined collaboration,” the author urges you to make a business case for each proposed joint project. Estimate the project’s potential value, subtract the “opportunity costs” (how it will affect each team’s regular work) and the “collaboration costs” (the time and effort needed for coordination). Then determine if the remaining value is worth pursuing.

Establish a unified objective that details the benefits for each side and for the organization as a whole. Avoid vague goals like, “Our objective is to fight malaria in the world.” Establish a concrete, quantifiable goal that includes a deadline, such as, “We want zero deaths from malaria in 20 years.”

Beyond Work

This book is a crucial basic text. Hansen’s comprehensive research provides a treasure trove of counterintuitive and contrary-to-popular-mythology advice. If you read and follow only his urging to work fewer, more productive hours, you will gain great value from his prose. It’s hard to argue with a man who has gathered so much evidence behind his suggestions and it’s hard not to take great pleasure from the clarity with which he describes both his research and what he and others learned from it. Hansen offers knowledge not in the form or self-help or exhortations or slogans, but as a meticulous, common sense plan to garner greater success and pleasure from your labors. His awareness of the natural human tendency to self-contradictory thoughts and actions makes his advice all the more valuable.