#118: Being Great At Work

Happy Sunday

The process behind today’s letter was a bit bumpy.

In April, I bookmarked this Wisdom from the Top podcast on performance at work. Guy Raz is one of my favourite podcasters. His guest, Morten Hansen, is a highly regarded researcher. It was sure to be good! And it was, except Raz spent 80% of the conversation exploring Hansen’s earlier work.

I was left with a choice, focus today’s letter on their discussion – which was fascinating – or restructure my diary to read enough of Hansen’s book to write to you about being great at work.

The pragmatic choice was the former. The right choice was the latter. So, I restructured the diary and got reading.

 

/strategy

In writing Great At Work,  Hansen reviewed hundreds of articles, did 120 in-depth interviews, and surveyed 5,000 employees and managers.

Hansen identified seven ‘work smart’ habits, that account for a 66% variation in performance outcomes. Habits that will make you ‘great at work’.

Two of the habits are “Do Less, Then Obsess” and “Redesign Your Work”.

Hansen notes that high performers narrow their focus to a set of priorities, and then they ‘obsess’. They dedicate themselves to being excellent in those key areas.

Focus is an important part of success. It’s only half the answer. You get excellent performance when you marry focus with high-quality effort.

Many of us are spread too thin. Sometimes that’s a result of organisational dictate, sometimes we are guilty. We don’t pay sufficient attention to what we agree to or volunteer for.  Stop doing what dilutes your attention.

Identify your focal areas. Be aware of the whirlpools that suck time.

This leads logically to Hansen’s second lever, “Redesign Your Work”.

Hansen recommends two heuristics to guide our work. They are superficially self-evident and, because we forget them so often, are simultaneously powerful:

• “Hunt for and cure pain points.”
• “Create output that benefits others.”

Self-evident? Yes. Often forgotten? Absolutely yes!

Your performance will increase if your actions take away pain points and the output benefits others. Too often we spend enormous resources on activities that do neither.

Do a quick assessment. Which of your activities don’t benefit others or take away pain points? Get rid of them.

Of course, redesign is often more subtle than that. Hansen recounts the case of a hospital that had a terrible track record in treating heart attacks. The process required a cardiologist to verify the emergency room doctor’s diagnosis. This created a bottleneck. The result was that 35% of patients waited too long to receive critical surgery.

The emergency room suggested skipping the cardiologist step. That would enable them to get people into surgery in time. The cardiologists were initially skeptical, but they visited a few other hospitals that had solved this problem. The solution was that the cardiologists train the emergency room personnel to a standard that they were comfortable with. Then, they trusted their diagnosis.

Within a year they had eradicated the 35% shortfall. Every patient that needed surgery got it on time!

They redesigned their work, reducing complexity.

Getting there required that they visit the future.

They found somewhere else that was already doing what they thought was impossible (NB: this might mean looking for examples outside of your sector). They did less and enabled each person in the chain of care to obsess over doing their roles excellently.

(If you want to explore this topic further, read Peter Tollman and Yves Morieux’s Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity Without Getting Complicated. Organisational guru Nick Christelis recommended it to me years ago and I return to it often.)

Of course, winning support for change is not always easy.

Hansen tells us that high performers are adept at using data and analysis and at evoking emotion to win support.

They’re able to key into people’s negative emotions about the current situation and entice them with positive emotions – excitement, joy, thrill, delight – about what the future holds if the change is made. He calls this habit being a ‘forceful champion’.

If you can connect with their sense of purpose, even better.

Hansen explains that purpose need not mean seismic societal change, it can simply mean matching the outcomes of the work with what someone finds personally meaningful.

If you’re leading change and you enable others to see how it helps them to make a better contribution, you’ll get greater results. If you match it with what they’re passionate about, they’ll love you.

Hansen names this the power of “P-squared”.

Performance increases when passion and purpose intersect.

 

/self 

His research shows that if you’re working up to 50 hours a week, extra hours can create increased performance. After 50 hours there is little return, and after 65 hours, performance declines. After 65 hours, you’re both more tired and worse off than if you’d just stopped 20 hours earlier in the week. And increasing your week from 50 to 65 hours also has a significant negative (-20%) impact on work-life balance.

This presents us with a powerful opportunity. If there is no performance divided beyond 50 hours, then we want to create the discipline to use that as a hard limit. Aside from the fact that there’s no return beyond 50, it also forces us to prioritise.

Without the cap, we’d probably work the extra hours, reducing impact and almost definitely diffusing our energy across multiple priorities. The limit forces us to focus on the key projects that really deliver value.

Constraints force creativity.

Be disciplined enough to impose them and then look for the solutions. That’s being strategic.

/soul

In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore writes that “Art, broadly speaking, is that which invites us into contemplation—a rare commodity in modern life. In that moment of contemplation, art intensifies the presence of the world. We see it more vividly and more deeply.”

The writing of this letter is always witnessed by Kenyan artist Chemu Ng’ok’s Psychological Portrait II, which hangs to the left of my desk.

Years ago, when she was still a student, I received an email from her gallery. By chance I was online at the moment it landed. I fell in love and immediately phoned them. I was lucky and was able to buy it. In subsequent years, my calls were always too late. The gallerist would sigh and apologise – the works always sold in minutes.

Still, I am blessed to have this one piece in my life. It was an anchor when my research plans went awry. I looked at it for a while and knew that I needed to remain true to my intention for this week’s letter to you. I suspect that even though you didn’t know my intention, you would’ve intuited that I hadn’t done my best. Thankfully the art anchored me to my purpose.

I hope that today’s letter inspired some new possibilities for you. If it did, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it.

If it’s the first time you’re reading my letter, you can subscribe here.

This week, this gorgeous work of Chemu’s appears in a group show in New York’s Chelsea.  And this Colbert Mashile piece brought a wry smile to my lips, it was a good way to end my writing day.

Best wishes

Karl

PS: If you’re curious about my coaching practice, you can learn more here and connect with me on LinkedIn.