The Fatal Flaw of Hard Work

Why Rewarding Hard Work Alone is Dangerous

All your life you’ve heard hard work being touted as the key to success.

There are dozens of adages about how hard work is the answer to all of life's problems.

You’ve heard every single one of them:

“Hard work beats talent when talent refuses to work hard.” — Tim Notke

"I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work." — Margaret Thatcher

"I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." — Thomas Jefferson

“The price of success is hard work” — Vince Lombardi

“A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.” — Colin Powell

These are all great quotes.

Indeed, I have no doubt that every single one of these incredibly successful people can attribute that success to grit, determination, putting in the hours — blood, sweat and tears.

You have to do the work that needs doing. As Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “You can’t climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.”

That is my absolute favorite quote about hard work because it rings so deafeningly true. There isn’t a person in this world who achieved individual success — actual success — on their own and did it by accident.

Angela Duckworth wrote 352 pages about how working hard is the key in her game-changing book, Grit. Millions of people have read that book (you should, too, if you haven’t already) and every single one of them likely walked away in shame about how they weren’t working hard enough to achieve success.

From top to bottom, hard work has been celebrated as the fundamental factor of success across every industry, profession and endeavor throughout time.

There is another adage, though. One that you’ve definitely heard before:

“Work Smarter. Not Harder.”

Work smarter.

My whole life has been focused on trying to work smarter.

I despise wasting time. I deplore inefficiency. If there is some way to do something better, I’ll find it. And I’d bet my bottom dollar that all of the people that I quoted above felt the exact same way.

The key is not just working hard for the sake of working hard. The key is putting in the hard work to work smart.

Why Organizations Disproportionately Reward Hard Work

So, why is it that organizations so disproportionately reward hard work?

There are a few obvious reasons.

Production is the easiest thing to effectively measure. No one can hide how well they are or are not producing whatever it is that they are being paid to produce.

Salesperson? How much did they sell?

Account Manager? How much business did they close?

Financial Advisor? How many assets are you managing?

Software Engineer? Lines of code written?

In the early months of 1982, the Lisa software team at Apple found themselves on the brink of a critical juncture. With just six months left to ship the software, a decision was made by some managers to monitor the productivity of each engineer based on the lines of code written weekly. This seemingly straightforward approach, however, led to an unexpected clash of perspectives that forever changed the way we measure software productivity.

Bill Atkinson, a seasoned engineer and cornerstone of Lisa's development, held a unique stance on measuring productivity. He believed that the true mark of a skilled programmer was not the sheer quantity of code produced, but rather the elegance, efficiency, and innovation within it.

The lines of code metric, as Atkinson saw it, was counterproductive and created a needless culture of hard work for the sake of hard work. More code was not necessarily better; in fact, it often led to bloated, error-prone software that was cumbersome to maintain.

Atkinson instead chose to work smarter.

He employed a more streamlined algorithm that not only drastically improved the speed of operations but also resulted in a leaner, more manageable codebase. The optimization, however, resulted in a reduction of approximately 2,000 lines of code. When faced with the weekly progress report, Atkinson made a bold move: he recorded a negative value of -2000 in the lines of code section.

He wasn’t asked to fill out his progress report again.

Atkinson was working hard. He was just working hard at working smart.

Why Hard Work Doesn’t Work

While there are many clear virtues of working hard, we need to understand the not so obvious limitations when hard work is the main thing that’s rewarded in your organization.

1. Hard work isn’t scalable.

In no uncertain terms, just because someone is working hard within a team, they’ll never influence those around them to work just as hard with their mere presence alone.

If you determine your high potential employees — your “rock stars" — as the ones who are willing to come in early, stay late and work up until the bell every day — you can’t guarantee that you’ll always have more of them.

If your hard worker is promoted into leadership, they’ll never be able to get the same level of production from their people if the only trick they have is to simply try to get their new team to work as hard as they did.

You’ll never get the good performer to be “great” in an environment where “greatness” comes only by working harder.

2. Hard work has a limit on rewards.

Let’s use an example of the limitations on an organization's ability to reward a hard worker:

Consider Jack.

Jack has been working at the same company for 4 years now and consistently is one of, if not the, highest producer on his team. He regularly works late into the evenings, rarely takes off for vacations and never misses a deadline.

His hard work undoubtedly adds value, but there is a limit to how much he can achieve through his sheer effort. As Jack continues to work harder, his expectations for increased rewards rise proportionately. It’s not like the workload ever gets smaller.

Joke of the Week: The reward for getting your work done is more work.

Eventually, the organization may struggle to match Jack’s ever-growing expectations. Sure, you can give him big bonuses and pay increases, but eventually those raises will become smaller over time, as there are always limits.

One day, Jack will realize that the effort he is putting into work is more than ever, but his raise was less than last time.

If you were Jack, would you keep working harder?

Jack is now burned out – frustrated that all that effort and hard work yielded less of a proportional reward than when he we putting in less hours in the past. Welcome to the era of phoning it in from here on out.

The moral of this story is that in every case of hard work being prioritized in the incentive system, you will inevitably be limited by how much you can reward that hard work over time.

There’s no way to get an indefinitely increasing amount of effort from your people even with an infinite amount of reward. Of course, you certainly don’t have an infinite amount of reward to give, so you’ll reach that ceiling a lot faster than you’d like.

Say goodbye to your hard worker who will inevitably leave for greener pastures and an organization who will also eventually fail at the rigged game of rewarding hard work alone.

The Solution: Create an Incentive System That is Self-Sustaining

There are ways to create workflows and incentive systems which allow employees to have the work be the reward itself. Jack would be a whole lot happier if he was paid to make his life easier.

It’s possible — and Smartwork shows us how.

Ask yourself:

When you look at your reward system – how would you keep Jack happy for the long run?