The Art of Manliness - #441： Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More

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00:01:14.900 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:01:18.680 Do you feel like you're putting your nose to the grindstone and working longer and longer hours,

00:01:22.440 but not getting anywhere with your career?

00:01:23.780 My guest today makes the case that if you want to be a top performer and advance your job,

00:01:27.480 you need to start working smarter instead of harder.

00:01:29.620 His name is Morton Hanson, and in his book, Great at Work,

00:01:32.080 he highlights his groundbreaking exhaustive analysis on top performers

00:01:35.060 and shares his seven work-smarter practices that can maximize your job performance

00:01:39.040 without necessarily requiring you to spend more time at it.

00:01:41.660 Today on the show, Morton explains why top performers concentrate on fewer things

00:01:45.060 but obsess more about them, as well as the optimal number of hours to be working each week.

00:01:49.000 He then shares some advice on how to convince your boss to limit the number of irons you've got in the fire.

00:01:52.480 We then discuss a practice Morton calls the one thing that'll elevate your skills,

00:01:56.760 why you shouldn't pursue a job based on passion alone,

00:01:59.140 why the best collaborations involve a bit of heated debate,

00:02:01.540 and why you need to find more time to work alone.

00:02:04.100 The show busts a bunch of myths, as well as offers a lot of really interesting insights

00:02:07.740 that you can put into practice today.

00:02:09.080 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash great at work.

00:02:12.760 Morton Hanson, welcome to the show.

00:02:24.700 Thank you for having me.

00:02:26.420 So you got a new book out, Great at Work, How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More.

00:02:32.240 So you helped co-author Great by Choice, which looked at companies and did some extensive research there.

00:02:39.060 What got you thinking about individual performers and looking at and doing the same sort of research you did with Great by Choice on individuals?

00:02:49.480 Yes, in the previous book with Jim Collins, we looked at company performance,

00:02:53.200 but I've always been intrigued by individual performance.

00:02:56.820 And I want to perform better myself, and I'm sure you do, and everyone else does, right?

00:03:01.380 We want to do better work and have better results.

00:03:04.260 And I was intrigued by this concept of working smarter, not harder.

00:03:09.020 So I looked out for advice on that, and what I found was just a fragmented set of advice.

00:03:15.000 Lots of books, lots of opinions, not really much research on that topic.

00:03:19.860 And I got very frustrated.

00:03:21.320 I said, you know, what am I supposed to be doing here?

00:03:23.500 So I decided as a researcher, well, I need to do a large study to find out how can you work smart and improve your performance?

00:03:32.000 And that's what I did.

00:03:33.080 Well, tell us about the research process.

00:03:34.740 How do you study something like that?

00:03:37.300 Yeah, it's a difficult thing to study.

00:03:39.120 You need a large data set.

00:03:40.700 You can't just study 10 individuals because people might get at this from different angles.

00:03:45.720 So I decided to study 5,000 people across corporate America.

00:03:49.720 So we got all kinds of industries, junior jobs, more senior roles, men, women, half of the sample is women, and so on.

00:03:58.420 And we had bosses rate the performance, self-report, and also direct reports rate their bosses.

00:04:05.620 So we did a fairly comprehensive study.

00:04:08.400 And we looked at a whole bunch of factors, right?

00:04:11.440 I didn't sort of pick and choose.

00:04:13.500 I said, okay, here's a list of possible hypotheses we think might actually drive performance.

00:04:20.280 And then we looked at performance outcome.

00:04:21.960 What was the rating vis-a-vis peers?

00:04:24.860 You know, were you above the peer ranking?

00:04:26.780 Were you in the top 10%, top 20%, bottom 50%, and so on?

00:04:30.160 And then we sort of correlated and linked the behaviors that seemed to drive that performance difference.

00:04:37.280 And what we found, which is interesting, if you really look at it, only seven factors drove the majority of performance.

00:04:45.960 So if you look at it, about two-thirds of the difference in performance among these 5,000 can be explained by seven factors.

00:04:53.140 So that's kind of good news for all of us.

00:04:54.780 It 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.

00:05:04.780 So going into this, what were your initial hypotheses about what would drive individual performance?

00:05:11.200 Yeah, so interesting.

00:05:11.980 So, of course, people have studied this before, so I didn't start from scratch.

00:05:15.980 What we found, though, is that there are some differences in these factors that make a huge difference.

00:05:20.960 So one of the key factors is the ability to focus, the principle of focus, doing a few things.

00:05:28.260 Now, you know, Stephen Covey said that, you know, in Seven Habits 30 years ago.

00:05:34.160 That's not a new thing to say.

00:05:36.560 But here is interesting what we found, though.

00:05:38.340 So we looked at, we measured focus, you know, were people focused or not focused?

00:05:41.980 Did they feel that they were spread too thin, doing too many things, their boss giving them too many things to do, and so on?

00:05:48.240 And yes, people who focus, they tend to do better.

00:05:53.460 But here's the twist.

00:05:55.660 There were lots of people who focused, but they only apply sort of average effort to those things they focused on.

00:06:00.940 And then there were some people who were really good at focusing, doing very few things, but they obsessed over those few things.

00:06:07.800 They dedicated everything they had into those few things.

00:06:13.520 And those people performed far better than those who merely focused.

00:06:17.640 I call that principle, do less, then obsess.

00:06:22.240 You got to do both.

00:06:23.540 You got to sort of obsess over the few things.

00:06:26.660 And I chose that word obsession on purpose because it sounds a little harsh, but that is what it takes to be a top performer.

00:06:35.500 You got to go all in, a fanatic attention to detail, go the extra mile, seek perfection in a very, very few things that matters the most.

00:06:44.140 That principle was the most important one in our study.

00:06:47.100 How much of an influence did it have?

00:06:48.600 How much better did those people who did less and obsess perform than those who try to do a lot?

00:06:53.560 So about 25 percentage points in the performance ranking.

00:06:56.620 So think about that.

00:06:57.460 Let's say that you are a top, you're a rank sort of top 70 percentile.

00:07:03.240 So, you know, 70%, you're better than 70% of your peers, but 30% are better than you.

00:07:08.140 Right?

00:07:09.360 Now, if you are able to master this principle, you will, as a matter of fact, go to the top 5%.

00:07:16.460 So it boosts you 25 percentage point in the ranking.

00:07:20.460 I mean, that's a massive amount if you think about it.

00:07:23.080 There's a huge difference being a top 30% among peers.

00:07:26.320 Like, say, a sales force of 200 people and you're in the top 30% versus the top 5%.

00:07:30.780 Now you're an extraordinary performer.

00:07:32.940 This matters a great deal.

00:07:34.000 And I imagine you have to obsess about the right things, right?

00:07:37.800 So how do you figure that out?

00:07:39.420 Yeah, that's the next principle.

00:07:40.860 So we asked the question, well, you know, if you obsess about the wrong things, you're not going to perform, obviously.

00:07:47.500 And so we looked into that and I call that redesign work for value.

00:07:53.380 It turns out, and this was a big surprise to me, lots of people are chasing the wrong objectives.

00:08:00.320 And so we all heard that you've got to set some clear objectives and work hard towards some objectives, right?

00:08:08.240 That start with objectives in mind, start with the end in mind.

00:08:11.940 And that's only partially right because so many times people are focused on the wrong objectives.

00:08:18.900 Give you a very clear example.

00:08:20.600 We came across this guy who was running a logistics function in a warehouse for a large company.

00:08:26.460 And his job was to send these shipments to corporate customers on time, according to his own schedule, right?

00:08:33.140 So he had a schedule and are these shipments going out on time?

00:08:36.740 And he hit those 99% of the time, which is fantastic.

00:08:40.460 He reached that objective, right?

00:08:42.600 And his boss was very happy.

00:08:44.260 But then they surveyed the corporate customers that were receiving these shipments.

00:08:48.740 And they complained that a third of them arrived too late for when they needed them.

00:08:54.780 In 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.

00:09:05.820 And in other words, this person was measuring an internal metric.

00:09:10.240 When 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?

00:09:20.780 And so what we found is that a lot of people have these kind of wrong metrics.

00:09:25.820 I mean, think about a medical doctor.

00:09:29.060 They measure the number of patients they can see in a day, their own internal productivity measure,

00:09:35.160 versus are you providing the right diagnosis and treatment for the patients?

00:09:41.000 Lawyers, they're billed by the hours, as opposed to are you actually solving the legal problems of your clients?

00:09:45.880 Because, you know, I'm in Silicon Valley, here people measure always, you know, volumes of activity.

00:09:54.760 How 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?

00:10:05.740 So there are these, we have these wrong value metrics.

00:10:09.920 So what we need is value metrics.

00:10:11.880 So what we found is that people who do really good work, they first figure out what is the value I can bring in my job.

00:10:19.820 And those should be my objectives.

00:10:21.900 Those should be my metrics.

00:10:23.540 And those are the few things I should pursue.

00:10:26.220 And what do you do?

00:10:27.380 I mean, if you are, you're not your own boss, right?

00:10:30.720 And 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.

00:10:40.620 How do you have that conversation with your boss to do that, obsess, do that, you know, doing, do less and then obsess?

00:10:48.580 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:10:49.880 And it turns out to be tricky, but we found people who did that and did it well.

00:10:54.460 You need to manage up, which is manage up towards your boss and not just take everything that comes your way as a given.

00:11:03.740 And so you need to learn to say no to your boss.

00:11:07.880 And a lot of people fear that.

00:11:10.080 They fear it because they think if they say no, they will be seen as a bad performer.

00:11:14.580 But the opposite can be true.

00:11:17.540 And so what we found is that people who are really good at this, they say no appropriately.

00:11:22.280 So here's what they do.

00:11:23.440 When 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?

00:11:30.580 And 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.

00:11:38.080 And now we have a choice.

00:11:39.840 You can either do all four.

00:11:41.240 And what's going to happen then, and we saw that in our data, is that people are going to start doing mediocre work.

00:11:46.700 Their meetings are not as well prepared.

00:11:48.820 Their Excel spreadsheet is not as well done.

00:11:50.760 The customer calling pattern is not as well done.

00:11:53.600 I mean, all kinds of things depending on the job.

00:11:55.920 And then your boss is going to say, why are you not doing such a good work anymore, right?

00:12:00.860 So you want to say to the boss, instead of just accepting that fourth project, you want to go and say, let me give you a minute.

00:12:09.720 I can do this additional one, but what should I do first?

00:12:13.620 What of these four, which one should I prioritize and do first?

00:12:17.640 In other words, you're putting the burden of prioritization back on the boss.

00:12:21.180 And that's a totally fair thing because they are, after all, the manager.

00:12:24.640 Now, you know, the boss might say, well, can't you do all four, right?

00:12:27.680 That's a typical response.

00:12:29.040 And 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.

00:12:38.040 You need to have that conversation.

00:12:40.340 And it's a totally appropriate conversation to have as opposed to just being the recipient of all this work.

00:12:48.260 And what we found is that people who are outperformers, they have that ability to say no and manage up appropriately.

00:12:57.480 Yeah, 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.

00:13:05.060 They'll say yes, but then purposely try to sabotage their boss to say, hey, look what you do.

00:13:11.220 And that's not productive.

00:13:13.060 Exactly.

00:13:13.640 And 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.

00:13:22.200 And the thing is that if you accept all of that, it's going to come back to bite you.

00:13:26.100 It 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.

00:13:34.260 So you've got to take, you know, have that courage, that assertiveness to stand up and say those things.

00:13:42.100 So I imagine as you do less and obsess, people are, the natural result, you'll work fewer hours and get more done.

00:13:51.280 In your research, like how much did, how much less did top performers work than say mediocre performers?

00:13:56.680 So that's interesting.

00:13:58.620 We looked at hours worked and of course we're thinking, you know, the top performers are working crazy hours, right?

00:14:05.160 That's kind of work hard mentality that we have in society.

00:14:09.680 And so we looked at the relationship between hours worked per week and performance.

00:14:13.260 And it's not a one-to-one relationship.

00:14:16.340 So this is very important.

00:14:17.960 If you're working 30 hours a week on a full-time job, it really pays to increase that.

00:14:23.880 That's just too low.

00:14:25.700 40 is too low.

00:14:27.240 We found 50 hours in our data set.

00:14:29.520 So this is corporate America across number of industries.

00:14:33.000 About 50 hours a week is sort of the point where it pays, you know, to go to 50.

00:14:38.480 And if you think about 50, that's not, you're not slacking off.

00:14:42.240 You're working pretty hard.

00:14:44.320 And so that's a lot of hours, in fact.

00:14:46.540 But beyond 50, we found that you don't get a lot of extra bang for the buck for hours worked.

00:14:53.860 So when you go from 50 to 65 hours per week on average, you're getting very little extra performance for that.

00:15:01.920 And beyond 65 actually turns negative.

00:15:04.540 So it's like an inverse U kind of shape to this.

00:15:07.680 So the upside for all of us is, you know, put in hours.

00:15:11.940 Work hard to about 50 hours, you know, give and take depending on your job, of course.

00:15:17.320 And beyond that, it's not about the hours.

00:15:19.960 It's not about the hours.

00:15:21.600 It is about how you spend those hours.

00:15:25.060 And I imagine that, you know, since you're working, you know, less, you know, 50 hours is still a lot, but not crazy.

00:15:31.400 That 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.

00:15:39.060 Yeah, I mean, Brett, I absolutely, I think that's a great observation.

00:15:43.260 Because when you work 50 hours a week on average, you can actually have a personal life.

00:15:49.040 But if you work 65, say, then it's very difficult.

00:15:53.600 You have to put in, you know, 11, 12 hours every day and you have to work the weekends.

00:15:58.640 So you don't have time to come home and do something in the evening.

00:16:02.240 Weekends are going to be spent working for the most part.

00:16:05.260 If you add commute to that, it's going to be crazy.

00:16:07.140 So there's a huge difference between 50 and 65.

00:16:10.460 At 50, you can actually have a personal life.

00:16:12.880 At 65 or 70, it's almost impossible.

00:16:16.240 And that's what we found.

00:16:17.600 We 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.

00:16:32.620 And 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.

00:16:49.860 That's what the statistical analysis of 5,000 people show.

00:16:53.060 In other words, it is possible.

00:16:55.400 It is possible to have it both ways.

00:16:57.820 You can be a top performer and you can have a good personal life.

00:17:01.300 That's what we found.

00:17:02.140 That's heartening to know that that's possible.

00:17:06.000 Yeah, but a lot of mythology around says that you can't.

00:17:08.840 You've got to sacrifice.

00:17:10.560 That's what I heard.

00:17:12.360 I started working as a management consultant after grad school many years ago at Boston Consulting Group.

00:17:17.620 And that's where sort of the message.

00:17:19.340 You've got to put in the 80, 90 hours and you're going to have no personal life.

00:17:24.420 And that was the mythology.

00:17:26.420 And it turns out to be wrong.

00:17:27.800 Well, another thing you guys found in your research is that top performers continue to learn even when on the job.

00:17:34.560 But I'm curious, how do they manage to fit that in when they're doing less to obsess and they're working 50 hours on average?

00:17:43.280 How do they manage to keep learning when they already got a lot?

00:17:45.980 I mean, not a lot, but they're focused on a few little things.

00:17:49.440 Yeah, it goes back to the principle of focus.

00:17:52.640 So what we found is that top performers, they have a sort of a continuous improvement mentality at work.

00:18:02.140 And they don't spend a lot of time sort of learning or training, but they focus on a few things.

00:18:08.220 So, for example, you will have somebody who goes in and says, I'm going to ask better questions in meetings.

00:18:13.040 If I'm a supervisor, we found this person who was trying to get better ideas out of her team.

00:18:18.660 But she was not able to.

00:18:21.180 So she said, I need to lead these meetings we have in a better way so I actually get those ideas for improvements out of my team.

00:18:28.660 So I need to be able to ask better questions.

00:18:30.800 I need to follow up better.

00:18:32.340 There's a whole set of small things I need to do better.

00:18:36.080 And that's what she did over a period of time.

00:18:37.780 She went into those meetings.

00:18:38.840 She said, OK, here's how I'm going to ask questions.

00:18:40.960 Here's how I'm going to go follow up.

00:18:42.220 So she spent, on average, about 15 to 20 minutes a day trying to improve on that particular thing.

00:18:50.620 And that's it.

00:18:51.780 That did it for her.

00:18:53.480 She got a lot better ideas out of her team.

00:18:55.480 They implemented more ideas.

00:18:57.360 And the productivity and results for her as a manager just shut up as a result of that. 0.99

00:19:03.860 So the principle here is I call it the 15 minute a day.

00:19:09.260 If you can carve out 15 minutes where you reflect a little bit upon one thing at a time, I call that the power of one.

00:19:18.300 Select only one thing, not 10 things, not five things, and try to improve that one a little bit every day or a couple of times a week.

00:19:27.100 That is what it amounts to.

00:19:30.340 Now, I know that you have had Anders Ericsson on your show.

00:19:34.960 And he has done fantastic research on the idea of deliberate practice.

00:19:39.260 And with a very good book, Peak.

00:19:42.480 And he associates study mostly chess players, musical performers, artists, spelling bee competitors, and so on.

00:19:51.080 In other words, not people working, not professionals.

00:19:54.620 And the question then is can you use that methodology to improve what you think of as soft skills at work,

00:20:01.020 to be better at communication, better at meeting, better at prioritizing, better at motivating employees, better at sales, for example.

00:20:07.540 And what we found is that, yes, you can.

00:20:10.500 You just need to modify the approach.

00:20:12.580 I talk about sort of a few things you need to do differently in the workplace.

00:20:16.860 But that is what we found.

00:20:17.880 We found people who did this, and they did much better as a result.

00:20:21.540 So 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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00:22:18.120 Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash manliness to try it for free.

00:22:21.040 One more time.

00:22:21.660 ZipRecruiter.com slash manliness.

00:22:23.060 ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. 0.96

00:22:25.560 And now, back to the show.

00:22:26.600 I love that.

00:22:28.700 So, another, I think, myth that we've heard.

00:22:32.000 I mean, some people say it's a myth.

00:22:34.180 I think the researcher would confirm that, is that we should follow our passion.

00:22:38.720 But you found in your research that there's a difference between passion and meaningful work.

00:22:43.180 Sometimes work that's meaningful you might not necessarily be passionate about or something you might be passionate about might not necessarily give you meaning.

00:22:50.820 Can you talk about that distinction?

00:22:53.000 Yeah, it's a very important distinction.

00:22:54.540 I think it's absolutely a myth.

00:22:57.520 Every time, you know, we get to graduation ceremonies, and we had a lot of them this spring, right?

00:23:02.100 We got some speakers to stand on the podium and they say, graduates, I'll tell you one thing.

00:23:07.040 Follow your passion and things will work out for you.

00:23:11.360 And, of course, that person who stands on that podium is a super successful person like Oprah Winfrey and others, right?

00:23:18.640 So, we don't hear from people who follow their passion and tanked and had a terrible career.

00:23:24.540 Those are not invited up on the podium in the colleges around the country.

00:23:29.380 So, we have a massive selection bias here.

00:23:32.700 So, 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.

00:23:40.700 Those two concepts are completely different.

00:23:43.920 Passion is doing what you love, whereas purpose is do what contributes.

00:23:51.220 Passion is about what excites you, what the world can give you.

00:23:56.020 Purpose is about what you can do for others.

00:23:58.780 It is about what you can give the world.

00:24:01.260 So, they're completely different.

00:24:02.660 And we found that there are people who have one but not the other.

00:24:07.440 You can be extremely passionate for what you do.

00:24:10.380 Like, say, you are in sales and it's incredible competitive and you get all the adrenaline and it's fantastically exciting for you.

00:24:16.760 But you might feel like what you're doing is not contributing to the world and vice versa.

00:24:21.460 So, these are very different.

00:24:25.420 And I call them the people who have both.

00:24:28.340 They have excitement about their job.

00:24:31.160 They go to – in the morning, they go to work every day and they're fired up about their work.

00:24:35.240 And they feel like what they do has meaning, contributes to a greater good.

00:24:41.180 Those people perform the best.

00:24:44.320 And why is that?

00:24:45.820 It is because they have more energy in their every hour they spend.

00:24:50.620 They don't work more hours.

00:24:52.860 They just have more energy at work.

00:24:56.040 And that translates into better performance, which makes total sense.

00:25:00.940 We've probably all been in some kind of workplace or situation where we're sitting and we feel like work is drudgery.

00:25:06.180 And we're just sitting around and we get distracted and we look at the internet and we just want to go home.

00:25:12.480 But if you have passion and purpose, you're much more in tune with work.

00:25:16.940 But it is possible.

00:25:17.740 I mean, ideally, you want passion and purpose.

00:25:19.820 But there are performers who can get by on just one, perhaps, but not for a long time.

00:25:24.740 Yeah, 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.

00:25:31.160 So, the worst – so, think about it as the kind of four categories of performance.

00:25:33.960 The first one is people who have neither.

00:25:35.760 Those are the worst.

00:25:36.740 Right.

00:25:36.900 They have no drive at work.

00:25:38.780 They have no good people who have passion but no purpose.

00:25:41.440 They have a little boost in the performance.

00:25:44.280 They have people with purpose but no passion.

00:25:46.820 They have an even better boost of performance.

00:25:49.420 And they've got people with both.

00:25:50.600 And they have the biggest boost in performance.

00:25:53.220 So, it's sort of like a ladder.

00:25:54.620 Right, right.

00:25:55.200 So, 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.

00:26:09.700 And you hear all those open office spaces where people get together and can interrupt each other.

00:26:15.400 But you found that top performers actually collaborated less.

00:26:19.540 What's going on there?

00:26:20.460 Yeah, there is that convention out there that collaboration is a good thing.

00:26:25.460 It's like dental floss, you know.

00:26:27.120 It's a good thing for you and the more is better.

00:26:30.200 That's how we think of collaboration.

00:26:32.140 Can't hurt you, right?

00:26:33.500 And we found the opposite.

00:26:34.980 There are two sins of collaboration.

00:26:36.480 There is under-collaboration and there is over-collaboration.

00:26:39.760 So, we found instances where people under-collaborate, yes.

00:26:42.140 There are silos.

00:26:43.100 The people who should be talking should be working together and they don't.

00:26:45.760 But then we have another problem which is actually extremely common and that is that people collaborate on too many things.

00:26:54.620 And that is because we have this mantra out there.

00:26:56.700 Teamwork, collaboration is a good thing.

00:26:58.880 So, just do more of it.

00:27:00.460 So, you got people who schedule meetings.

00:27:02.380 They go to an enormous amount of task forces and meetings and they sit there and they talk, talk and talk.

00:27:08.800 And they don't have time to really excel and do their own work.

00:27:15.400 And so, they are not doing less and obsessing.

00:27:18.720 They're just doing more and more and more of these collaborative activities.

00:27:23.920 So, what you have to do is to be able to say what are the most valuable collaborative activities that I need to engage in.

00:27:32.100 And then say no to the rest or challenge the rest.

00:27:35.740 And, again, you have to look at the meetings.

00:27:39.700 Do I need to go to those meetings?

00:27:41.780 Is it important for me to spend two hours?

00:27:45.020 Do I need to call a meeting and invite 10 colleagues from five different departments to attend?

00:27:49.980 Is this really necessary?

00:27:52.520 And here we have this problem that, you know, people go to these meetings because they have a fear of missing out.

00:27:58.000 Maybe something important is happening when those 10 people from five different departments are coming together.

00:28:02.440 So, I need to be there.

00:28:03.600 And now you have spent your morning, wasted your morning on something that was not necessary.

00:28:08.680 So, we need better discipline here.

00:28:10.180 I call it disciplined collaboration.

00:28:13.060 To be able to say these are the important collaborative activities that are going to really improve results.

00:28:19.120 And these other ones are not.

00:28:21.060 And I need to be able to select that appropriately.

00:28:24.440 I mean, what are some examples of, like, important collaborative activities that you found?

00:28:28.660 So, again, it goes back to this idea of value.

00:28:30.200 If we are sitting here together and we're going to improve collaboration, are we going to move the results?

00:28:36.480 So, should we be sitting here and coordinating between sales and marketing in a new launch campaign?

00:28:42.420 Probably.

00:28:42.920 That's going to be important if we are not coordinated.

00:28:44.880 So, let's coordinate on that.

00:28:46.040 And then somebody comes around saying, we created a task force to improve the use of coffee in the office.

00:28:53.560 I kid you not.

00:28:54.360 I mean, I've seen this.

00:28:55.260 Okay.

00:28:55.400 So, people say, all right, do we need to have a committee to look at the coffee use in the office?

00:28:59.520 I know that sounds a little trivial example, but you're getting stuff like that.

00:29:02.940 So, you need to say, what are the two or three most important collaborative activities that are going to improve the results?

00:29:08.540 And let's focus on that.

00:29:10.580 So, give another example from a high-tech company that I recently worked with here in Silicon Valley.

00:29:16.660 And it was sitting around saying, what are the most valuable activities for us?

00:29:20.100 And 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.

00:29:27.940 And we sort of tend to spend the same amount of effort on both.

00:29:32.940 But where we really should collaborate are the major launches because those are the ones that move the needle.

00:29:37.760 And we should really deprioritize the minor launches.

00:29:41.060 And 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.

00:29:51.840 Now, that makes intuitive sense, but they kind of worked in the wrong way because they thought everything was important.

00:29:56.140 Everything is not important.

00:29:58.720 Some things are more important than others.

00:30:00.940 And 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.

00:30:08.940 They'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.

00:30:18.600 And then so they had these crazy ideas and then they come to the group with those crazy ideas.

00:30:21.760 And so there's something about working by yourself that allows, I don't know, especially with creative work for interesting things to have.

00:30:28.640 I think Bell Laboratories was an example of that back in the 60s.

00:30:31.280 Like 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.

00:30:38.220 And then they would have like a cafeteria where they would come and talk.

00:30:41.360 And like a lot of fruitful ideas came from that.

00:30:44.680 Yeah, we need, you know, you're picking up two important things there.

00:30:47.000 The 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.

00:30:57.220 And the open landscape, the cubicle kind of landscape often makes that very difficult.

00:31:03.140 And so when we asked, you know, these top performers, I mean, how do you get that quiet space?

00:31:09.560 How do you do less?

00:31:10.680 How do you make sure you don't get distracted?

00:31:12.400 And people have all kinds of interesting tactics for doing that.

00:31:18.780 You had people who would come in an hour earlier every day.

00:31:21.980 You would have people who put on headphones to make sure they wouldn't be disturbed.

00:31:25.880 You had a company where they would have armbands, you know, around the wrist.

00:31:30.500 And if you had the red one on, it meant don't disturb me.

00:31:33.300 So there was a signal and shared signal in a company.

00:31:36.120 You 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.

00:31:50.320 And we created these open spaces that don't allow for that deep thought.

00:31:55.800 And so now people are becoming creative and trying to create their own space.

00:31:59.960 And that's very, very important.

00:32:01.720 And we found that people were easily distracted by media, social media and other things.

00:32:08.080 I 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.

00:32:17.360 So, I mean, I had myself, when I was writing the book, I came up, I was distracted all the time.

00:32:22.540 As you know, writing is really hard.

00:32:24.220 You've got to sit there alone for hours and trying to write something.

00:32:27.900 So I came up with my own technique of this thing.

00:32:30.600 So I got an old computer, laptop.

00:32:33.140 I stripped it of everything.

00:32:35.180 No browsers, no email software, nothing except this word.

00:32:40.440 And I took that computer and left my phone at home and took it to Starbucks, you know, for two hours every day.

00:32:47.140 And I just sat there.

00:32:49.020 And, you know, after half an hour, I really want to check my messages, but I couldn't.

00:32:53.580 And so you've got to find what works for you to create that quiet space.

00:32:56.960 Well, 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?

00:33:05.580 Everyone gets a turn speaking.

00:33:07.600 It's done civilly.

00:33:09.260 But I think you guys found something different that top performers don't collaborate like that.

00:33:14.460 Yeah, that's another convention that you're supposed to be sitting in this room and be nice to each other.

00:33:20.000 And you mentioned before it, you know, if you come to a meeting, you've got to sort of have your own ideas and present them.

00:33:25.320 But it doesn't mean that people are listening to you, that they are engaging with your ideas.

00:33:29.620 It doesn't mean they even allow you to speak up.

00:33:32.500 So niceness is not the formula for success here.

00:33:36.660 It is what I call fight and unite in meetings.

00:33:40.300 You need to have a good fight in the meetings.

00:33:44.060 You need to be able to have a rigorous debate around the ideas.

00:33:49.020 And people who fail to do so, they make terrible decisions and they have worse ideas.

00:33:55.520 And that makes sense.

00:33:57.000 If 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.

00:34:12.860 So the fighting, now you've got to have a good fight, not a bad fight, right?

00:34:17.480 It shouldn't be a clash of personalities.

00:34:19.360 You're not attacking a person, you're attacking ideas.

00:34:22.380 And that principle is super important.

00:34:25.500 And then you also need to unite.

00:34:26.680 Once you've had a good fight and make decisions, you need to be able to unite behind those decisions.

00:34:31.620 And we found that people who disagree with something in a meeting, they go out afterwards and they undermine it.

00:34:37.140 They question the decision in the hallway.

00:34:39.500 They try to kind of sabotage it.

00:34:42.160 Of course, you can't have that.

00:34:43.620 You can't be a top performer as a team or as an individual if that's the way you behave.

00:34:48.680 So I call it the fight and unite.

00:34:50.580 And it's not about being nice.

00:34:52.200 It's about having a good fight.

00:34:54.300 And how do you manage up with this?

00:34:56.080 Let's say you have a boss that's not on board with it, doesn't understand this.

00:35:00.020 How would you kind of guide them through that?

00:35:03.180 Ooh, that is tough.

00:35:04.960 I had a lot of students when I teach this and they come and say, you know, my boss doesn't want to have disagreements.

00:35:10.860 They don't want to be challenged.

00:35:13.300 That's the last thing they want.

00:35:14.780 They just want us to sit around and sort of have an agreement.

00:35:17.660 And that's tough, you know, to kind of go to your boss and say, you know, what should we do here?

00:35:22.780 One tactic that could work is sort of start asking questions.

00:35:29.360 So 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.

00:35:39.960 And you disagree.

00:35:43.760 You think that is too high.

00:35:44.780 It's not going to sell.

00:35:45.860 And you have data to prove it.

00:35:47.400 What you could do instead of saying, I disagree with you, boss, you could say a question.

00:35:52.360 You can ask a question.

00:35:53.560 You could say, how does that price level compare to competing products in the stores?

00:36:00.720 And are we going to be, are we in the top range of the price or are we in the bottom range?

00:36:06.700 In other words, you're just asking questions that indirectly challenge the decision.

00:36:13.560 So those are some of the tactics.

00:36:15.860 But, 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.

00:36:28.720 And it's going to be underperforming sooner or later.

00:36:32.580 Right.

00:36:32.720 So you might have to think about going somewhere else.

00:36:35.160 Possibly.

00:36:35.680 Yeah.

00:36:35.940 I mean, that's, you know, we know this.

00:36:38.520 There'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.

00:36:45.700 Well, Morten, we've, you know, scratched the surface on your work and great at work.

00:36:50.020 Is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work that you're doing?

00:36:53.900 Yeah, we have a website where you can go and you can take a look.

00:36:56.720 I have some articles.

00:36:57.720 I got some summary notes.

00:36:59.760 And we also have a quiz, an assessment you can take.

00:37:02.100 It takes you about five to seven minutes.

00:37:04.060 And you can see how you score according to the seven principles that drive performance.

00:37:09.320 And the website is www.mortonhansen.com.

00:37:14.760 That's M-O-R-T-E-N-H-A-N-S-E-N.com. 1.00

00:37:19.400 Well, Morten Hansen, thanks for coming on.

00:37:20.700 Really appreciate it.

00:37:22.200 Well, thank you for having me.

00:37:23.000 My guest today was Morten Hansen.

00:37:25.280 He's the author of the book, Great at Work.

00:37:27.120 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:37:29.560 You can also find out more information about his work at mortenhansen.com.

00:37:33.200 That's M-O-R-T-E-N-H-A-N-S-E-N.com. 1.00

00:37:36.620 It's got some quizzes, some other content that fleshes out more what he talked about in the book.

00:37:40.320 Also, check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash Great at Work.

00:37:43.540 Where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:37:58.540 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:38:01.560 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.

00:38:05.560 And if you enjoy the show, you've gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.

00:38:10.440 It helps out a lot.

00:38:11.120 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:38:12.620 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.

00:38:16.360 As always, thank you for your community support.

00:38:18.200 Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - September 18, 2018

#441： Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More

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