Working hard

I struggle all my life with this working hard thing! It’s one of my themes. As a knowledge person I believe more in working smart than working hard, but the hard work ethic is there under the skin from my background and I can’t ignore it. My employer is a work hard company – 100%! – and I try to shift it a bit more towards working smart. I have an example from this last week where I helped out on a proposal. I just knew we weren’t clear enough about what we were proposing. But I couldn’t get people to sit down and figure it out. The result was that we wasted several days of work chasing our tails. It all got sorted out at the 11th hour when we finally did sit down and get a clear view of what we needed to do – – which needed actually far less effort than we had put in!

Remember at school you used to get grades for effort and achievement? This is a real psychological and cultural divide – which of them you value more I mean. At a previous employer our recognition and reward system (that I was part of the management for) usually got bent to compensating someone for something heroic someone had had to do (I mean hard work and suffering) rather than really encouraging the smart, positive behaviours that we wanted to recognise. I really fought that … I wanted it to be more positive … but on the other hand I couldn’t help thinking that I did want to recognise someone who had gone way out of their way to do something as well,but try to get the organisation to shift away from putting people in that position in the first place too.

So I think the right effort has to be rewarded, but we have to be smarter and kinder as well.

OK, achievement… Some cultures are really hot on this. In general the commercial companies far more so (“we want results and fast”) than the public sector organisations which follow a far more ‘formal’ mindset (“We do what we do because that’s what we do”). There’s a puzzle about this, though. Who gets the achievement award? What I mean
is that generally it’s a mix of situation, timing, the lead-up and the team … but often a ‘star’ is picked to get the award. I find it’s very political who gets the recognition for the achievement. So take my proposal, for instance. If we win it won’t be due to one person. It will have been a team of people who all pitched in and responded. More than that, there was a whole history of getting our relationship with the prospect, reputation and capability to a point where we could actually bid with a prospect of winning.

To me it’s like the final missed or scored goal in a football match: people think the match was won or lost at that point but really it was won or lost a hundred times before in the match when a goal was scored or missed or whatever.

I think there’s a lot more to who gets the plaudits. Curiously, you know, I find that I’ve been rewarded and feted for things I really felt were quite minor, and then overlooked for pieces of work I thought were really landmark  achievements.

So all I think is take the praise when you get it and bank it against the times you went unnoticed. That’s me – – I don’t do things for praise, but at the same time I do really like to get it!

So with people I work with I try to make the effort to recognise the small things they do (like a chap yesterday who made a really good presentation – I made sure of complementing him afterwards and I went home thinking of sending a note to his manager to say what a good job he had done). I take more lightly the salesman who closes the big deal. I try to encourage people not to go overboard on the hard work thing (I often get people telling me they’ll do some work for me at the weekend and I always tell them not to!) – but I always express my gratitude when they do.