The perennial "Work hard or work smart?" debate has been playing out again, and it's one with substantial implications for my coaching clients, most of whom are technology company CEOs, and my MBA students at Stanford, most of whom came to business school to make a significant professional leap. [1]
But while this debate addresses critically important issues, we're not resolving it successfully, at least in part because we're posing the wrong question as a premise. Rather than ask whether we should "work hard" or "work smart," we should instead be asking: What is the nature of this particular system? What is the relationship between effort and results? And where am I on that curve? Because the answers to these questions will tell us much more about how to proceed.
In a system characterized by increasing returns, additional effort yields ever-greater results, while in a system characterized by diminishing returns, additional effort yields less and less. This is a truism, of course--nothing could be more obvious. The key is recognizing that some systems are fundamentally one or the other, while others change their nature, often depending on the timeframe under consideration.
In general--and to be clear, I'm being extremely reductive here--systems characterized by increasing returns are primarily symbolic, cognitive or inorganic, while those characterized by diminishing returns are primarily tangible, biological or organic. And an essential factor to bear in mind when assessing the nature of any system is that human beings are always both. As the late anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker once wrote, "the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic." We are tangible and symbolic, biological and cognitive, organic and inorganic.
So how do we resolve this paradox? Do we focus on human beings as biological organisms or as symbolic analysts? Here the issue of timeframe is critical, particularly with regard to the importance of sleep, a biological imperative that's dismissed as a luxury in some competitive cultures and yet is closely associated with superior performance in fields ranging from athletics to leadership. [2] From this perspective, any given day is a system characterized by diminishing returns, and when work interferes with our ability to be well-rested, it's time to stop working. I'm not suggesting that we should work all-out and then stop abruptly--research suggests that we're most productive when we alternate between periods of intense focus and regular breaks. [3]
Nor am I suggesting that we should cease work at the first sign of fatigue, but at a given point each day our effectiveness will begin to decline, so on a daily basis we need to know when we've reached that inflection point in our productivity and be prepared to Hit the Brakes because we're no longer working efficiently. As Intel CEO Andy Grove once wrote, "My day always ends when I'm tired, not when I'm done... A manager's work is never done." [4] At the same time, we can take advantage of this dynamic by planning to do our most daunting or challenging work at the very start of the day, when we're best able to focus and direct our attention.
When we consider longer periods of time, the picture changes, and a substantial body of research has documented the relationship between high performance and hard work. In one of the most influential papers in the field, Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson and his colleagues stress the importance of persistent effort in top performance:
Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. [5]
So long periods of time--such as a career, for example--are systems characterized by increasing returns, and achieving excellence in our chosen field will require dedicating ourselves to "intense practice." Hard work won't guarantee results--chance always plays a role in human affairs, much to our chagrin [6]--but such work is almost always a necessary precondition to success. And note that in such a system we must be prepared to work inefficiently at first, an inevitable consequence of our lack of expertise, but we become more effective as we gain experience. So if our goal is to maximize results over the course of our career, we need to be prepared to Hit the Gas in order to power through the inefficient early stages and achieve the rewards that lie beyond the inflection point.
But this still leaves three sets of important questions unaddressed:
1) What about everything else in addition to work and sleep? Where do other activities fit?
Boundaries > Balance
"Balance" is an unhelpful metaphor when it comes to determining how to live our lives, both because it suggests a tenuous state that's difficult to attain (and easy to lose) and because high-achieving people often don't want to live a "balanced" life, particularly if they love their work. It's much more useful to think about boundaries. As I've written before,
Years ago my colleague Michael Gilbert suggested that we substitute "boundaries" for "balance": while balance requires an unsteady equilibrium among the various demands on our time and energy, boundaries offer a sustainable means of keeping things in their proper place. Gilbert drew upon his training as a biologist in his definition of healthy boundaries: "Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy." [7]
While we need temporal boundaries to protect time for activities outside of work and physical boundaries that enable us to get away from our workplaces, the most difficult boundaries to establish are cognitive: We need to manage our attention to insure that we're not thinking about work all the time. [8] There's no simple way to accomplish this, but the best place to start is through meditation or other mindfulness practices. [9]
2) What about time periods in between a day and a career? How do we approach a given week, month or year?
Stress / Rest / Stress (Repeat)
In any given day, and over the course of a career, and within every intermediate span of time in between, we will go through alternating periods of increasing and diminishing returns. So in actuality, every human system looks like this:
But we need not be passive witnesses to this process--we can take an active role in managing ourselves to take advantage of these dynamics by attuning ourselves to the inflection points that make the transition from one period to the next and responding accordingly. This Stress / Rest / Stress cycle is critical to maximizing our performance. As coach and human performance expert Brad Stulberg has written,
The world’s best performers--in domains as varied as sport, art, and business --follow a common pathway to continual growth. They take on challenges and make themselves uncomfortable (stress) and then follow those challenges with recovery and reflection (rest). Then they rinse and repeat, with a slightly greater challenge. [10]
Interestingly, note the parallel with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of a state of flow, that optimal psychological condition in which we're so immersed in the task at hand that we may even lose track of time. [11] Just as we maintain the ability to enter a flow state by alternating between enhancing our skills and tackling bigger challenges, we work most effectively by alternating between ongoing periods of stress and rest.
3) What about other people? How do we create organizations in which groups can achieve excellence together?
In 2007 I wrote about the Managerial Style Grid, a framework developed by Jane Mouton and Robert Blake in the 1960s, and here's an illustration I used in that post [12]:
So how do we get to Paradise? Obviously there's no simple solution--but there is one easy way to guarantee failure, and that's making the assumption that either we can hold people accountable or we can empathize with them. In part, this stems from the mistaken idea that empathy is the same thing as agreement. As I've written before,
[W]e act as though empathizing with someone entails endorsing their perspective and their feelings, but this need not be the case. Understanding someone’s perspective and their emotions while suspending our judgments about both does not necessarily imply that we agree with that perspective or believe that the resulting emotions are justified. It simply means that we comprehend their perspective and emotions, and we are able to envision ourselves experiencing that perspective and those emotions under similar circumstances. Just as we can empathize with someone without sympathizing, we can empathize with someone while disagreeing with them and considering their perspective inaccurate and their emotions unwarranted. [13]
Once we've overcome that conceptual obstacle, to put any solutions into practice we must have the difficult conversations that are necessary to both support a culture of accountability while also conveying empathy and care. As is so often the case, the key is increasing our comfort with discomfort. [14] For some of us, this involves being more effective at holding people accountable: setting high standards, rewarding excellence, calling out inadequate performance. And for others this involves being more effective at expressing empathy: sensing and acknowledging distress and vulnerability, offering comfort, taking steps to provide relief.
This is a companion piece to the following:
- Accountability and Empathy (Are Not Mutually Exclusive) (2019)
- Hard Problems in Soft Cultures (2022)
Footnotes
[1] The Gospel of Hard Work, According to Silicon Valley (Nitasha Tiku, Wired, 2017)
[2] For more on the impact of sleep on performance, see the following:
- Sleep Is More Important Than Food (Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review, 2011)
- You Can't Do Your Job if You Don't Sleep (Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review, 2012)
- Building Better Athletes with More Sleep (Mark McClusky, The Atlantic, 2014)
- Relax, Turn Off Your Phone, and Go To Sleep (Larry Rosen, Harvard Business Review, 2014)
- Sleep-Deprived Leaders are Less Inspiring (Christopher Barnes, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
- There's a Proven Link Between Effective Leadership and Getting Enough Sleep (Nick van Dam and Els van der Helm, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
- Senior Leaders Get More Sleep Than Anyone Else (Rasmus Hougaard & Jacqueline Carter, Harvard Business Review, 2018)
[3] A Formula for Perfect Productivity: Work for 52 Minutes, Break for 17 (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 2014)
[4] High Output Management, page 47 (Andy Grove, 1983/1995)
[5] The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, (Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, Psychological Review, 1993)
[7] Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance
[8] The Art of Self-Coaching: Attention
[9] Don't Just Do Something, Stand There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)
[10] The Growth Equation: Stress + Rest = Growth (Brad Stulberg, Thrive Global, 2017. Brad is the co-author, with Steve Magness, of Peak Performance, a book I highly recommend.)
[11] Spiral Learning and Flow States
[12] Conflict Modes and Managerial Styles
[13] The Difficulty of Empathizing Up
Photo by Thomas Quinet.
