As the data and stories in this book demonstrate, small changes in behaviors can have a disproportionate effect on outcomes. In chapter three, I used the Archimedes lever to make that point, invoking the phrase “give me a lever and a place to stand, I can move the earth.” Dr. Michael Bennick, the senior doctor described in that chapter, did “move the earth,” so to speak. Wanting to help hospital patients sleep better at night, he didn’t launch some large-scale bureaucratic transformation to make the hospital quieter. Rather, he told the attending nurses and physicians that they should wake him first if they wanted to wake a patient during the night to take a blood sample. No one did. That small alteration changed hospital care and led to a dramatic improvement in the patients’ “quiet at night” score from the 16th to 47th percentile. A minute lever, with a big outcome.
That insight—that tiny changes can yield big results—has vast implications for how we choose to work. We don’t have to make massive changes in our work to lift our performance. Small changes can be just as effective. That’s a hopeful message: start with small steps. That’s working smart, not hard.
To close out this book, I highlight a few of those smaller changes from each chapter that can be just right for you as you embark on your journey of becoming great at work.
In chapter two (“Do Less, Then Obsess”), we saw that the best performers chose a few key areas to work on and then obsessed to excel in those. They went narrow and deep, not broad and shallow. Of course, sometimes you must cut out substantial areas of work—a big project, a large customer, or even a job—to get to that level of intense focus. But just as often, small changes—one by one—can free up enough time to do less and obsess. Start by learning to say “no” to new requests for your time. Give yourself a buffer: The next time someone asks you for something, respond with, “Let me think about it, and I will get back to you tomorrow.” In the meantime, ask your spouse or a colleague to play the role of naysayer for you. Why might committing to the request be a bad idea? What do you have to lose by taking on the additional work? Do you really have to answer those emails, create those extra PowerPoint slides, schedule pre-meetings to prepare for a meeting, or return that phone call? Everything takes time, so chopping off even small tasks can free you up to zoom in and obsess over the few key areas that matter.
That brings up the question of what, exactly, you should focus on and obsess over. Not all work is created equal: some tasks produce far more impact than others, as we discussed in the “Redesign Work” chapter. The answer, we found in our research, is to redesign your work so that you add more activities that create value, and stop or reject work that doesn’t. Value creation differs from goals: remember the Hewlett-Packard manager who submitted the quarterly report on time (achieving his goal), but no one read his report (zero value creation). In contrast, Principal Greg Green of Clintondale High School in Detroit flipped the entire method of teaching (doing homework at school and lecturing via video at home) and thereby transformed student learning and created tremendous value
This is an extract from Morten T. Hansen's Great At Work published by Simon & Schuster
