Great at Work

Morten Hansen: Yes. You know, way back when I started out my own career at the Boston Consulting Group in London, I worked very hard and I tried to succeed like many others. And I did, but I found colleagues that I thought were working more effectively than I did, and they also performed slightly better, and that always put me into this question of, "Why is that?" Then, years later, when I became an academic, I always had that question in my head.

Then I decided to do something about it. And, as an academic, I want evidence; we can all have anecdotes and stories and examples of either high or low performance, but I really wanted to have evidence. And we all talked about "work smarter, not harder." I mean that cliché has been around for many years now, and nobody wants to work dumb. But we need to fill that slogan with some real hard evidence and practical advice, and that's what this study was about.

Rachel Salaman: So what were the parameters, what questions were people asked, who did you ask, and so forth?

Morten Hansen: It was actually a fairly involved process because there has been a lot of writing in the academic literature and also a lot of management and self-help books out there. It's not a new topic, obviously. So I started with a set of hypotheses and then we did a pilot study of 300 people and interviews with more than 50 people, and on that initial study we had to revise our hypotheses because we got a lot of it wrong, basically; there were a lot of surprises to us.

And then we designed a new, 96-item survey instrument that we used for statistical analysis. In addition, we did lots more interviews and case studies to really understand what people were doing specifically. So it's really a combination of the data, the quantitative data and the qualitative insights that we have here.

Rachel Salaman: And what were the headline findings?

Morten Hansen: I defined "work smarter" in the following way: that the top performers in our study, they were very good at selecting a few key activities that maximized the value of their work, and then they applied targeted intense effort to succeed in those, and to excel in those. That means that they are very selective, and it really goes against this conventional way of working today, which is what I call the "do more paradigm."

Everyone who wants to achieve, so many of us, we pile on work, we think by doing more we will accomplish more, and so we add lots of hours, project initiatives, customer calls, whatever your job is, you're just trying to do more to fill your days with as many things as you possibly can in order to try to achieve more.

Actually, what we've found is that top performers to the opposite. They are very selective. They do less and then they excel in those few things and that's how they outperform the rest. It's almost a contrarian view to how you are supposed to work and perform.

Rachel Salaman: From your research you came up with seven "work smarter" practices, which are explored in your book, "Great at Work." Four of these are based on people mastering their own work, and three are about working with others. So if we could just talk about the first practice now, which is "do less, then obsess." Could you tell us about this, and explain the difference between obsessing and just simply focusing, and why that matters?

Morten Hansen: That was a great surprise to me. We all know that we should focus. That's been out there for a long time, to be able to choose priorities, and so obviously I thought that's got to be one way to perform better. And we ran this through the analysis and we found that yes, it is a necessary thing to do, to focus, to choose a set of priorities, but it's not sufficient, it doesn't get you to top performance.

And that is the difference between focusing and obsessing – focusing is a matter of choice. It's the project tasks you're choosing to work on.

And then comes a second strategy, which is the obsessing over those few things. And some of the people who did the first thing, they chose well, they didn't obsess and that didn't get them to be in the top performance category.

And so what is this obsession? It means going all in on the details; going the extra mile to perform. If you are going to a meeting, prepare extremely well for every meeting. If you're giving a presentation, you rehearse the slides three times, you are just very much striving to do it really well, you don't do anything half-baked, you pay an inordinate amount of attention to details, those are the things.

I give an example in the book of the sushi chef, Jiro, which comes from the great documentary movie called "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," and he is considered the best sushi chef in the world. He has this unassuming restaurant in the subway station in Tokyo, but he has three Michelin stars.

I like it because it's an extreme example. What he does to prepare the octopus sushi is to give it a hand massage for 50 minutes – five zero, I kid you not, five zero minutes. So this is someone who is hand massaging his octopus meat for 50 minutes to make it sufficiently tender to serve it.

He goes to the fish market every morning and he only wants the single best slice of tuna, and if he cannot get the single, and I mean the single best slice, he will not buy tuna that day. And you can see it if you're working in a retail store or wherever you're working – are you giving the most to your customer.

Those are examples of extreme attention to detail, and that makes a difference between great and good, because that's what we set out to study here. Now you can't do that if you have too many tasks. If you have too many things going on at work, everything becomes half-baked, you have barely time to prepare meetings, but then you're sitting in meetings unprepared or half-prepared, so you just skim the prep material. It doesn't create excellent work.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose the problem is that sometimes we don't get to choose our workload, so do you have any tips for perhaps managing the expectations of those around us, whether it's our bosses or our team members, so that we have the time and the head space to obsess like that?

Morten Hansen: I think one of the most important professional skills required in today's hectic workplace is the ability to say "No," and in an appropriate manner. I'll give an example: in the data we have a management consultant, he is a fairly junior consultant, he works in one of the big consulting companies and he is working on a project, and then comes another partner who says, "Hey, can you also help me with a sales proposal I'm putting together."

And this consultant knows that if he does that, he is going to spread himself too thin, that neither is going to be good, but it takes some courage to say "No" to a senior partner who comes to you and asks you to be on another project. And also you might think that's going to be a good one, so you don't want to lose out, so there's the fear of missing out.

Now this consultant had the courage and the discipline to say "No." But you don't just say "No." He said, "I'm working on the following project, it requires 100 percent of my time, if I also work on a sales project then I know that I can't give it the most and this other one will suffer."

He also explained that he knew of another colleague who was coming off another project and he suggested that the senior partner went to that person. Now he was expecting a lashing from this partner who was known to call people wimps for their workload so it was not an easy thing to do, but the senior partner said this all makes sense. We often say "Yes" in those situations and we need to learn how to focus, because focusing requires saying "No."

Rachel Salaman: Your second "work smarter" practice is to redesign your work, but redesign it along what lines?

Morten Hansen: This is a really interesting finding. You would think that a top performer is someone who is giving a job description, giving a set of metrics, KPIs to meet, and then works really well to meet those. That's the conventional view and it turns out that top performers don't do that, they look at their role and they ask a question before they try to achieve the preset goals.

That question is, "How can I create the most value in my job," and that leads them to change what they do. Now there is a subtle distinction here between just running after goals and preset metrics and creating value, so let me illustrate with a quick example.

We came across a person who was running a logistics operation in a warehouse for a company that sells industrial products, and in his job he was measured on one metric: the number of times those shipments go out of the warehouse on time. And by that measure he had optimized his work and he was 99 percent on time going out of the warehouse. That's pretty impressive. So the person was doing a really good job meeting his objectives, meeting the KPI, so he should get a great bonus.

Then the boss of the company went and surveyed the customers and they complained that only 65 percent of the products were shipped to them when they needed them. In other words, a third of those products were coming late to the customer when they needed them. So the shipper in the warehouse was using an internal metric, which is about when does it leave my warehouse, and not measuring the value that he was supposed to give to the customer: when they need the products.

That's the difference between value (which is, "What does the customer want?") and need, and internal metrics. We see this all the time, everywhere: people are focused on their own internal metrics, not value metrics, which are defined as the benefits that you give to your customers, whether those are clients outside the company or internal customers if you work in human resources.

Think about medical doctors. In most places, medical doctors, physicians that run their own practice, well their metric is the number of patients seen in a day. That's their productivity metric, but the value metric would be the number of times that you gave the right diagnosis and the right treatment.

Lawyers bill by the hour, that is an internal metric, as opposed to the number of times they actually provided advice that helped the client solve their problem. So this is the big difference, as we have the wrong metrics very often.

Rachel Salaman: So if a manager listening to this wanted to just make that change in their focus, from goals or internal metrics to value, how might they go about doing that?

Morten Hansen: Here is a great example of a manager who pursued value creation. It comes from Hartmut Goeritz, who was running the APM shipping terminal in Tangiers in Morocco. When he arrived to become the manager of that terminal… so this is a container terminal where you have lots of containers coming in on the ships, you've got to offload them and then get them to their destination.

When he arrived at this terminal, it was fine. It wasn't doing great but it was doing OK, and he said how can we take the existing resources and maximize value. Then he looked at some additional services that his predecessor had put in place, such as weighing trucks and stripping containers of their contents, and helping put them onto trucks.

He said those are OK, but they are not truly value creating. The number one thing that customers want from us is to get those containers off the ships as fast as possible and off to the destination, and the other way round. It's called throughput. That is the only thing that matters, that's true value creation and all this other fluff has got in the way.

So he does a "do less, then obsess" tactic. He cuts out all the clutter, all this extra stuff that is not really producing most value and is actually a distraction, and he focuses on throughput. So that is number one, he's working on the right things, value creation.

Then he says, with that focus, how can we actually improve that throughput? So one day he was walking around this gigantic container terminal and there are these trucks that are taking a container, putting it back on the yard, going back to the ship and getting another container, and so on, and he noticed with these trucks that half of them were driving around empty, they weren't carrying any containers, and he said how is that possible.

Well, it's because they're going to the ship, getting a container, driving to the back of the yard, and then going back to the ship empty. He said, "What if we had a system whereby they could actually pick up a container in the back of the yard and drive to another ship on the way back?"

In this case they would always be carrying a container, so the motto became "never drive empty," and they created a system to make that happen. And you're talking a gigantic yard here, where driving around is actually very time consuming, and it nearly doubled the efficiency of those trucks.

And he did a number of things like that and they increased the throughput by 30 percent with the same staff and resources. That's value creation, and it's because he said, "How can I create the most value in my job," as opposed to saying, "Let's just run the things that they always have done."

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Rachel Salaman: Moving onto the third practice – that's quality learning, and you urge people don't just learn and loop. This is where, in the book, you explain the flaws in the popular idea that we need to practice 10,000 hours to master a skill. So could you outline the main points of your contrary approach?

Morten Hansen: This research is based on Anders Ericsson's (a professor at Florida State University) research, who has done a lot of work, and that's where that 10,000 hours thing comes from, although it's not exactly what he says. We have this belief that it's the quantity of practice that matters, like practice makes perfect, that's what we heard when we grew up, just do it enough times and you will be perfect.

The problem with that is that it doesn't pay attention to the quality of that learning. We all practiced or played a sport, maybe tennis, and we stand out there and hit the ball because it's a hobby. But if you're not paying attention to what I call a "learning loop," which is you do something, you measure the outcome, you get specific feedback in a moment, you modify your approach and then you loop again. When you do that with quality then your rate of improvement is vastly better than if you were just standing out there and repeating your practice.

Like hitting the tennis ball, or as a manager running a meeting – we are on autopilot when we run meetings, as an example. I often ask managers, "How many meetings do you run a day?" and they usually say at least two: that's 10 a week, 500 a year, 1,500 meetings that you run in three years.

How much attention do you pay to the actual learning loop in terms of improving those meetings every time you do it, and as a result most people don't and they don't run particularly good meetings. Whereas, if you do this you run vastly better meetings, and that is the difference. It's not about the quantity or repetition of practice, the 10,000 hours, it is about the quality of those hours.

Rachel Salaman: If we could talk about the fourth "work smarter" practice that came out of your research now. It's inner motivation, or what you call "P2," passion and purpose, and you reframe another myth here, the one about following our passions. What should we do instead?

Morten Hansen: Yes, there's a great myth out there that you should follow your passion. What that really means is let passion dictate what you do, the job, the career, whatever you choose to do. It's flawed thinking because what it really means is that you don't have any other considerations, because that is what it means to follow your passion.

The top performers did something else. They actually started with an opposite question, which is purpose, which is, how can I contribute. So passion and purpose are in fact very different concepts. Passion is what can the world give me, how can I be excited at work, and it's almost a hedonistic quality I'm looking for. Purpose is the opposite: what can I give the world, what are the contributions that I make, and I am uniquely suited to make.

And if you answer that question then you are making contributions, and if they are valuable, as we talked about, people will reward you for that, they will give you better promotion, better careers, better pay, more job security, and so on.

And so what the top performers do is that they find jobs and roles within companies that allow them to combine passion and purpose, hence the P2, and that leads to best performance. We looked at the data in detail on this and we found the reason is that they apply more effort per hour worked. It's not like they work more hours, they're just more engaged when they work, and it's the energy they apply to every hour of work, and that drives performance.

Rachel Salaman: And I suppose if you work fewer hours you have more energy to apply, because you're not burning out.

Morten Hansen: Exactly, and this by the way is also a great preventer of burnout. We looked at that, too: people who are P2 report much less chance of burnout.

Rachel Salaman: The four practices we've discussed so far focus on the individual, but the last three in your model are about team working, starting with advocacy, which you bring to life with the idea of "forceful champions." So, could you explain that term, and tell us what that is?

Morten Hansen: Most work today, you have to work with others and with others over whom you have no formal authority. So even if you are a middle manager or a senior manager in a large company you have to work across the company. If you work in marketing you have to work with manufacturing and sales and whatever, and it means we need to be good at gaining support from others who we need to work with.

They might be naysayers, they might not be as supportive of us, they may not be committed, and hence we need to do two things, and that's what the forceful champions do so well. First, they inspire, so they stir emotions in other people so they will support their project, their initiatives, their tasks.

They also persuade, which is more like the political maneuvering that is required in any work setting, they might be naysayers or people with different agendas, they are not bad people, they just have different priorities, so they're not going to put their people to help you on your projects.

You need to be good at that political maneuvering, which might be that you might compromise, you might be able to circumvent, you might build allies that can support you, you need to be able to read a political landscape of your organization. So, forceful champions, they inspire and they persuade.

Rachel Salaman: The next practice that you identified is rigorous teamwork, and here in the book you recommend the "fight and unite" approach, which sounds a little bit contradictory. How does fight and unite work in practice?

Morten Hansen: Let me illustrate an example. It comes from England, with the company Reckitt Benckiser, and I came across this company in a very strange way, a little unrelated to the research for this book. We were doing a ranking of the best performing CEOs in the world, and we wanted an objective ranking. And we had a very simple idea: let's compute a stock price of the performance of the day that the CEO takes over a company, and then the day the person leaves, and see what is the cumulative effect.

There are all kinds of measures but at least it was objective, and we did 2,000 companies across the world, and we looked at this ranking and we published it in the Harvard Business Tribune. Number one was not surprising, it was Steve Jobs, and then we went down the list and some very famous CEOs.

Jeff Bezos was up there, and then it got to number 16 and it was Bart Becht at Reckitt Benckiser, and I said that's a top one percent performer out of 2000, and that is an amazing performance. And I did not know, I must confess, what Reckitt Benckiser was doing and so I looked them up – and then I fell off my chair! It was selling soap and dishwashing liquid.

Actually, they do more than that, but nevertheless they are not in a sexy high-tech industry, and then I looked around to read about the company and there wasn't much written and so I contacted Bart Becht and asked if I could write a business case on you, and he said "Yes." So we went to the company, and to cut a long story short, one of the secret things we found by interviewing a lot of executives in the company is the way they run meetings.

They basically had two sets of norms in the meetings: one, it's a mental fight, you come 100 percent prepared, you argue and let the best arguments win, the best ideas emerge, you go to incredible lengths to get the minority views out and unsquash the minority views. You make sure that everybody speaks up, you have diversity in the room, different kinds of people.

So they have that, but of course they also have the other part – unite, the commitment to decisions being made. As Bart Becht said, "I hate politics," that if we undermine decisions being made it's terrible. So that's the principle, fight and unite, and the uniting part is not the same as consensus, it's not like we need to agree on a course of action.

At Reckitt Benckiser, if they can't come to a natural consensus in an appropriate amount of time, the senior person in the room will call it and make the decision, and then everyone has to fall in line. That is what fight and unite is, and why it's so important is because it fixes a big pain point in companies and that is ineffective meetings.

If you look at all the survey data out there, people are complaining about meetings, they think they are terrible – not all, but many of them are terrible. And they are, and meetings [should] just be for one thing and one thing only: having a rigorous discussion among the people there.

If all you are doing is a status update, you can put that in an email or in a slide deck and you don't need to be in a meeting to read slides, that makes no sense, yet we do it. It's a rigorous discussion.

Here is the almost perverse consequence: a bad meeting leads to scheduling a follow-up meeting to talk about what you should have resolved in the first meeting, and that's not great at work.

Rachel Salaman: No, and I think you have a few more tips in your book about making the most of meetings.

Morten Hansen: Yes, I think in the book here I go into great practical detail, how you can ask questions, how you can listen, how you can get unity. There are some real tactics you can deploy here, either if you're a manager or a participant.

Rachel Salaman: The final "work smarter" practice that you identified is "disciplined collaboration," and in this section of the book you warn against the "two sins" of collaboration. Can you tell us about those and how managers can avoid them?

Morten Hansen: This is something I've studied for a long time. I've studied collaboration for 25 years, I wrote my original PhD thesis at Stanford about collaboration and I wrote another book called "Collaboration," and so what I've found over the years, and also in this study, is the following. First of all there is the sin of under-collaboration, as we live in silos and we don't collaborate when we should and create more value that way.

Then we have the other sin, and that is over-collaboration. It's become the buzzword today, so too many people collaborate on too many things with too little value, and if we dare say "No" we are seen as not a team worker, but a lot of time those are ineffective collaborations.

One thing that happens in companies is that there are too many collaboration efforts but there aren't enough resources or time to do them well, so they are only done half-baked. We need to scale back, we need to be more disciplined in saying "Yes" only to those collaboration projects of the most value, and "No" to the rest, and that is in between these two extremes of either too little or too much collaboration.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered a lot of ground in this discussion. What for you are the top tips for managers who want to be great at work so that they perform better, and also their teams do?

Morten Hansen: I like the way you asked that question, Rachel, because this is really for managers and their teams and for employers. It's the first principle, essentially: do less, then obsess.

Sit down and look at your calendar for the next two weeks, and the next six months, and say what are the key priorities here, what must we do, and get rid of as much else you can and then go all in on those few things. That will lift the performance above the manager and the employees.

Rachel Salaman: Morten Hansen, thanks very much for joining me today.

Morten Hansen: Thanks for having me, Rachel.

The name of Morten's book again is "Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better and Achieve More," and we cover Morten's book "Great by Choice," co-authored with Jim Collins, in a Mind Tools book insight podcast. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.