Harvard Business School professor Francis Frei explains.


How to decide where to be great, and where to fail, at work

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How to decide where to be great, and where to fail, at work


How do you decide which things that you're going to be bad at? Especially when you think about work, right? So you're talking about these different aspects of your life within your own job, where there are things that you also decide. How does one do that? That's exactly the right question. So first is decide what you're going to be great at and reverse engineer what you have to be bad at. So don't have a meeting on, like, what should I be bad at? It's depressing. And the people who self select to attend you don't want to hang out with. But what do I like? What do we What does the team need from me in this week? In this day in this month, what can I do even more of? And then what does that mean? I have to give up. Um, and I recommend having those conversations. If you say, like, what? Where do you need? Like the best version of me? We refer to it as like you can think about super you average you and bummer you and where do you want super you to show up? And I would have that conversation with the people you work with, Where do you need like us to really kill it? And then let's reverse engineer what we can give up in order in order to sustain that. That's really interesting. Okay, so when you think about what this is going to do to workplaces and this idea of your culture of work, how can you create a culture when we when we are operating this way? Yeah, so I think we need We need to build resilience into our cultures like never before. I think, you know, cultures were like good cultures or bad cultures. But resilience hasn't always been the thing. But I think now we have to build in resilient cultures because if it's not a pandemic, it's going to be something we want to be prepared for it. So if you think about like, what do you need in a resilient culture, it means that some things are going to go wrong, so you have to be able to bounce back to us. That means you have to build a culture that's built on trust, because if we have a reservoir of trust, you're going to get the benefit of that doubt if we have to bounce back. If somebody has a bad day, if something goes wrong, we're like locked arms and we can come back for it. So I would think about culture with resilience and trust. And I think you can design both of those pretty purposely. I know you talk a lot about trust. How is that harder to do right now? And what are the lessons and six that recommend? Well, so, you know, building trust over zoom versus in person. So a big part of trust is empathy. And so, um, if I'm in a room with you like a making eye contact, I could chair I sit in, could be right next to you. I could get up and get you a cup of coffee. So I have all these micro actions I can do to reveal empathy. And on June, it's only my words. So on Zoom, I might ask, how are you doing? And you're going to say fine or if you say fine, I can't stop there. Because if I were, we were in the same room. We could pick up on all of the other cues, so I have to find some way to engage you. So how are you doing? And you say I'm doing fine. And I'm like, You know, it sounds like the schools in Cambridge are never opening again. How's that working out for your family? Like I just have to do something to get you to engage so I can see all the micro signals so I can know where the empathy. So we have to do some prodding, I guess. Some sanding so we can see the stuff that we would normally see in a physical environment.