How Can You Be a Top Performer? Take This Quiz to Find Out
Here’s an important question: do you think you work optimally? Most of us believe we can work better, not just harder. If so, the next question is, do you know what areas to focus on to improve your job performance? That turns out to be a tricky question. If you look around for advice, as I did, you will find literally hundred pieces of advice for what to improve in one’s job. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly to focus on that drives real performance improvement. To get some real evidence, I undertook a five-year study of 5,000 managers and employees in Corporate America to answer a fundamental question: why do some people perform better than others at work? The results have surprised me: only seven key practices explained a whopping 66% of the difference in performance among the 5,000. If you practice these seven, your performance will likely get a boost.
Now, another key question is, where do you begin? I believe in focusing on one key practice at a time. So which one of the seven do you pick? I invite you to take the following quiz to find out. I have reduced the original large survey instrument used in my study to a shorter 20-question quiz that approximates the larger one. When you’re done answering the questions, we will benchmark you against the 5,000 person sample, so that you can compare your scores on each of the seven practices to others. Say you score in the top 10% on the “do less, then obsess” practice. No need to improve that one much! But then you might score “below average” on “passion and purpose,” so that may be the one to focus on. When I took the quiz, I scored “below average on three of the practices, so I have some work to do now in 2018! Luckily, so did my wife, so we will work on these together!
To find out where you want to begin to improve yourself in 2018, take the quiz, compare your scores, spot the one key practice where you want to start, then learn more about how to do that by consulting that chapter in Great at Work (each practice is outlined in a chapter).
Why do some people perform better at work than others?
Morten Hansen reveals the answer in his “Seven Work Smarter Practices” that can be applied by anyone looking to maximize their time and performance.