In his new book, Great at Work, Morton Hanson highlights his groundbreaking, exhaustive analysis on top performers and shares his seven work-smarter practices that can maximize your job performance without necessarily requiring you to spend more time at it. Today, on the show, Morton explains why top performers concentrate on fewer things but obsess more about them. He then shares some advice on how to convince your boss to limit the number of irons you ve got in the fire.
00:02:26.420So you got a new book out, Great at Work, How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More.
00:02:32.240So you helped co-author Great by Choice, which looked at companies and did some extensive research there.
00:02:39.060What got you thinking about individual performers and looking at and doing the same sort of research you did with Great by Choice on individuals?
00:02:49.480Yes, in the previous book with Jim Collins, we looked at company performance,
00:02:53.200but I've always been intrigued by individual performance.
00:02:56.820And I want to perform better myself, and I'm sure you do, and everyone else does, right?
00:03:01.380We want to do better work and have better results.
00:03:04.260And I was intrigued by this concept of working smarter, not harder.
00:03:09.020So I looked out for advice on that, and what I found was just a fragmented set of advice.
00:03:15.000Lots of books, lots of opinions, not really much research on that topic.
00:04:24.860You know, were you above the peer ranking?
00:04:26.780Were you in the top 10%, top 20%, bottom 50%, and so on?
00:04:30.160And then we sort of correlated and linked the behaviors that seemed to drive that performance difference.
00:04:37.280And what we found, which is interesting, if you really look at it, only seven factors drove the majority of performance.
00:04:45.960So if you look at it, about two-thirds of the difference in performance among these 5,000 can be explained by seven factors.
00:04:53.140So that's kind of good news for all of us.
00:04:54.780It means that if we can focus on a few things and do those things well, we can actually most likely really improve our performance by quite a bit.
00:05:04.780So going into this, what were your initial hypotheses about what would drive individual performance?
00:08:44.260But then they surveyed the corporate customers that were receiving these shipments.
00:08:48.740And they complained that a third of them arrived too late for when they needed them.
00:08:54.780In other words, that was a lousy performance because if you are a corporate customer and you're supposed to get these shipments and you're getting them too late, you're no better off.
00:09:05.820And in other words, this person was measuring an internal metric.
00:09:10.240When does it leave my warehouse versus what I call a value metric, which is when you benefit others who are the beneficiary of your work, which is when do the customers need it?
00:09:20.780And so what we found is that a lot of people have these kind of wrong metrics.
00:09:29.060They measure the number of patients they can see in a day, their own internal productivity measure,
00:09:35.160versus are you providing the right diagnosis and treatment for the patients?
00:09:41.000Lawyers, they're billed by the hours, as opposed to are you actually solving the legal problems of your clients?
00:09:45.880Because, you know, I'm in Silicon Valley, here people measure always, you know, volumes of activity.
00:09:54.760How many hours are you spending on YouTube as a consumer versus are you actually getting high quality programming and maybe you should be spending less hours and not being addicted?
00:10:05.740So there are these, we have these wrong value metrics.
00:10:27.380I mean, if you are, you're not your own boss, right?
00:10:30.720And so you have someone else setting your metrics for you and the metrics they're setting for you are not the correct ones or they're setting too many for you, which is spreading you thin.
00:10:40.620How do you have that conversation with your boss to do that, obsess, do that, you know, doing, do less and then obsess?
00:11:23.440When your boss comes and says, you know, I've given you maybe say three projects and then the boss comes around saying, hey, can you do a fourth project?
00:11:30.580And you know if you're going to add that fourth project, it's going to hurt your performance because now you're spread too thin.
00:12:29.040And at that point, you say, yes, you can, but the work is not going to be as good because you are now, in fact, spreading yourself too thin.
00:12:40.340And it's a totally appropriate conversation to have as opposed to just being the recipient of all this work.
00:12:48.260And what we found is that people who are outperformers, they have that ability to say no and manage up appropriately.
00:12:57.480Yeah, I can imagine another response that some people would take or poor performers is instead of being assertive and managing up, they would just get passive aggressive.
00:13:05.060They'll say yes, but then purposely try to sabotage their boss to say, hey, look what you do.
00:13:13.640And then you go around and you're just complaining to your colleagues, you know, this boss is not managing well and you're just getting fed up and frustrated.
00:13:22.200And the thing is that if you accept all of that, it's going to come back to bite you.
00:13:26.100It is because you cannot do excellent work or you have to put in 100 hours a week to make it happen and then you're going to burn out.
00:13:34.260So you've got to take, you know, have that courage, that assertiveness to stand up and say those things.
00:13:42.100So I imagine as you do less and obsess, people are, the natural result, you'll work fewer hours and get more done.
00:13:51.280In your research, like how much did, how much less did top performers work than say mediocre performers?
00:15:21.600It is about how you spend those hours.
00:15:25.060And I imagine that, you know, since you're working, you know, less, you know, 50 hours is still a lot, but not crazy.
00:15:31.400That has effects for your personal life, which makes it better, which comes back and carries over back to your work life because your personal life is good.
00:15:39.060Yeah, I mean, Brett, I absolutely, I think that's a great observation.
00:15:43.260Because when you work 50 hours a week on average, you can actually have a personal life.
00:15:49.040But if you work 65, say, then it's very difficult.
00:15:53.600You have to put in, you know, 11, 12 hours every day and you have to work the weekends.
00:15:58.640So you don't have time to come home and do something in the evening.
00:16:02.240Weekends are going to be spent working for the most part.
00:16:05.260If you add commute to that, it's going to be crazy.
00:16:07.140So there's a huge difference between 50 and 65.
00:16:10.460At 50, you can actually have a personal life.
00:16:17.600We did a sort of statistical correlation between hours worked and whether you did do less than obsess and whether you felt that you had a work-life balance, whether you felt you were kind of burning out and whether you were satisfied with your job.
00:16:32.620And people who do the do less than obsess and work 50 hours a week to make that happen, they perform the best and they report better work-life balance, more job satisfaction, and lower chances of burnout.
00:16:49.860That's what the statistical analysis of 5,000 people show.
00:20:17.880We found people who did this, and they did much better as a result.
00:20:21.540So you need to have that mentality of select one thing at a time, very specific, try to spend 10, 15 minutes a day on that one thing.
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00:22:34.180I think the researcher would confirm that, is that we should follow our passion.
00:22:38.720But you found in your research that there's a difference between passion and meaningful work.
00:22:43.180Sometimes work that's meaningful you might not necessarily be passionate about or something you might be passionate about might not necessarily give you meaning.
00:22:57.520Every time, you know, we get to graduation ceremonies, and we had a lot of them this spring, right?
00:23:02.100We got some speakers to stand on the podium and they say, graduates, I'll tell you one thing.
00:23:07.040Follow your passion and things will work out for you.
00:23:11.360And, of course, that person who stands on that podium is a super successful person like Oprah Winfrey and others, right?
00:23:18.640So, we don't hear from people who follow their passion and tanked and had a terrible career.
00:23:24.540Those are not invited up on the podium in the colleges around the country.
00:23:29.380So, we have a massive selection bias here.
00:23:32.700So, in our data set, we can actually look at that because we looked at people and the degree to which they felt passion and purpose in their work.
00:23:40.700Those two concepts are completely different.
00:23:43.920Passion is doing what you love, whereas purpose is do what contributes.
00:23:51.220Passion is about what excites you, what the world can give you.
00:23:56.020Purpose is about what you can do for others.
00:23:58.780It is about what you can give the world.
00:25:17.740I mean, ideally, you want passion and purpose.
00:25:19.820But there are performers who can get by on just one, perhaps, but not for a long time.
00:25:24.740Yeah, so what we found, we were able to – since we have 5,000 people to study and there were people with different combinations here, we were able to tease this apart.
00:25:31.160So, the worst – so, think about it as the kind of four categories of performance.
00:25:33.960The first one is people who have neither.
00:25:55.200So, another thing you guys sussed out that was probably counterintuitive based on a lot of the literature that's out there about performance in the workplace is, you know, a lot of the stuff you hear is about collaboration is key to work performance.
00:26:09.700And you hear all those open office spaces where people get together and can interrupt each other.
00:26:15.400But you found that top performers actually collaborated less.
00:29:10.580So, give another example from a high-tech company that I recently worked with here in Silicon Valley.
00:29:16.660And it was sitting around saying, what are the most valuable activities for us?
00:29:20.100And head of marketing said, you know, if you really push me on that question, we have major launches and we have minor launches of product features.
00:29:27.940And we sort of tend to spend the same amount of effort on both.
00:29:32.940But where we really should collaborate are the major launches because those are the ones that move the needle.
00:29:37.760And we should really deprioritize the minor launches.
00:29:41.060And we need to be able to understand that and spend less collaborative activities on the minor and put more of the effort into the major because that really makes a difference.
00:29:51.840Now, that makes intuitive sense, but they kind of worked in the wrong way because they thought everything was important.
00:29:58.720Some things are more important than others.
00:30:00.940And I think I've read other similar research where they found that when people work by themselves, they're able to get more focused and kind of get in that deep work state.
00:30:08.940They're able to come up with different bizarre ideas that they otherwise wouldn't come up with in a group setting because they'd be afraid to say it because they're afraid to get shot down.
00:30:18.600And then so they had these crazy ideas and then they come to the group with those crazy ideas.
00:30:21.760And so there's something about working by yourself that allows, I don't know, especially with creative work for interesting things to have.
00:30:28.640I think Bell Laboratories was an example of that back in the 60s.
00:30:31.280Like they'd have like every person had their own little office and they were working on really hard things, lasers or whatever they're working on back then.
00:30:38.220And then they would have like a cafeteria where they would come and talk.
00:30:41.360And like a lot of fruitful ideas came from that.
00:30:44.680Yeah, we need, you know, you're picking up two important things there.
00:30:47.000The first one is we need to have some time where we can be alone and work alone and focus and come up with creative ideas or spend some time in deep thought.
00:30:57.220And the open landscape, the cubicle kind of landscape often makes that very difficult.
00:31:03.140And so when we asked, you know, these top performers, I mean, how do you get that quiet space?
00:31:10.680How do you make sure you don't get distracted?
00:31:12.400And people have all kinds of interesting tactics for doing that.
00:31:18.780You had people who would come in an hour earlier every day.
00:31:21.980You would have people who put on headphones to make sure they wouldn't be disturbed.
00:31:25.880You had a company where they would have armbands, you know, around the wrist.
00:31:30.500And if you had the red one on, it meant don't disturb me.
00:31:33.300So there was a signal and shared signal in a company.
00:31:36.120You had people who had cubicles and they had drawn fishing lines across the openings and put their swimwear, you know, as curtains on those fish lines, you know, to kind of protect themselves.
00:31:50.320And we created these open spaces that don't allow for that deep thought.
00:31:55.800And so now people are becoming creative and trying to create their own space.
00:32:01.720And we found that people were easily distracted by media, social media and other things.
00:32:08.080I mean, the problem of sitting in front of a computer and you get pinged by all kinds of incoming messages makes it very difficult for people.
00:32:17.360So, I mean, I had myself, when I was writing the book, I came up, I was distracted all the time.
00:32:49.020And, you know, after half an hour, I really want to check my messages, but I couldn't.
00:32:53.580And so you've got to find what works for you to create that quiet space.
00:32:56.960Well, when people do collaborate, you know, a lot of the literature, business literature, pop business literature out there says we need to collaborate cooperatively, right?
00:33:57.000If you're sitting around making a decision, say what should be the prices of a product in a certain market, and people are not able to come up with minority views, with disagreements, and you can't debate that topic, you're probably going to make a wrong decision.
00:34:12.860So the fighting, now you've got to have a good fight, not a bad fight, right?
00:34:17.480It shouldn't be a clash of personalities.
00:34:19.360You're not attacking a person, you're attacking ideas.
00:34:22.380And that principle is super important.
00:35:14.780They just want us to sit around and sort of have an agreement.
00:35:17.660And that's tough, you know, to kind of go to your boss and say, you know, what should we do here?
00:35:22.780One tactic that could work is sort of start asking questions.
00:35:29.360So you're sitting in that meeting and somebody says, you know, the boss says, you know, I think the price should be $12.99 for this product in Wisconsin.
00:36:15.860But, you know, if you have a boss or you're in an environment where you cannot speak up and it's impossible and people who do, people who disagree with something, it's a very toxic work environment.
00:36:28.720And it's going to be underperforming sooner or later.
00:36:35.940I mean, that's, you know, we know this.
00:36:38.520There's lots of research, not only mine, but lots of research, you know, teams that are actually able to have rigorous debates perform far better.
00:36:45.700Well, Morten, we've, you know, scratched the surface on your work and great at work.
00:36:50.020Is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work that you're doing?
00:36:53.900Yeah, we have a website where you can go and you can take a look.
00:37:36.620It's got some quizzes, some other content that fleshes out more what he talked about in the book.
00:37:40.320Also, check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash Great at Work.
00:37:43.540Where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:37:58.540Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:38:01.560For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
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