5 counterintuitive tips for working more effectively

Below, Melissa Swift shares five key insights from her new book, Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World. [Photo: Wiley] Melissa is the founder and CEO of the consulting firm Anthrome Insight. She has held consulting leadership roles at Capgemini, Mercer, Korn Ferry, and Deloitte. Her quarterly columns in MIT Sloan Management Review often rank among their most-read articles, and her writing has also been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Newsweek. What’s the big idea? Many of the problems we blame on ourselves at work are actually rooted in how our jobs, tools, and organizations are designed. When we get clearer about what our work really is—and stop assuming more collaboration, multitasking, or effort is always better—we can work more effectively and with a lot less frustration. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Melissa herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Most of us are not on a first-name basis with our own jobs. When you started your current job role, did you sit there and assiduously pore over the job description for hours? Don’t worry—me neither. Most job descriptions are rough approximations of the work you will actually be doing. Who cares about the job on paper when the job in practice is what you get paid for? But there is a wrinkle. If you asked many of the people around you—your boss, your coworkers, your customers—what they think you should be doing all day, you might get a very different answer from what it is you actually do all day. That dissonance trips up both our performance and our happiness. We spend hours analyzing our behavior and don’t look closely enough at the other critical half of the equation: what is the work we’re asked to do? Sitting down and discussing the nature of your actual job with the people around you can be an incredibly productive conversation. Bonus: Unlike talking about how you do your job, discussing what’s in the job itself is emotionally neutra