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It’s just this kind of ordinary zone of getting done the things you need to get done and making sure your work has the impact it’s supposed to have.’
There’s a lot of talk about high performance in leadership literature. But perhaps a more realistic goal, and the one with the potential to transform an organization root to branch, is effectiveness, argues Melissa Swift.
Her new book Effective: How to do great work in a fast-changing world, explores what it really means to be effective at work – not crushing it, not hustling, just consistently doing the right work well in a world where nobody is ever really ‘done’.
In this conversation, she talks about why we need to become our own personal organizational consultants: stepping back from the inundation of work to understand what our job actually is, where the friction points are, and what boundaries we need to keep doing good work sustainably.
She also talks about the craft of writing business books, including what business book writers can learn from journalists and how to get the balance right between informing and entertaining.
A thoughtful, practical conversation about work, writing, resources and realistic goals.
Melissa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swiftmelissa/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Melissa Swift, who is founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, a consultant and a keynote speaker. And throughout her career, she’s pioneered techniques to reshape organizations for digital and workforce transformation. She’s the author of Work Here Now: Think like a human and build a powerhouse workplace, and her new book is called Effective: How to do great work in a fast-changing world.
So first of all, welcome, Melissa. It’s great to have you here
Melissa Swift: Thank you. It’s great to be here
Alison Jones: It’s such an interesting title, isn’t it? It’s one of those one-word titles that you have to go, “Oh, effective. I need a bit of that.”
So let’s start there. When you say ‘effective’, what do you mean by that?
Melissa Swift: You know it’s interesting, a simple word that reflects a lot of thinking I’ve done over a lot of years, there’s all this literature on kind of productivity, and it’s how to get all the things done, right? And then there’s a probably more legit body of literature for the most part on, high performance and how to be excellent.
But the question that I found people wrestling with wasn’t either one of those things. It was like day to day, how do I just do my job well and the best possible version of how I can do it? And that’s not about being amazing, and it’s not about crush it, hustle mode.
It’s just this kind of ordinary zone of getting done the things you need to get done and making sure your work has the impact it’s supposed to have. And, this is interesting because this is the real challenge for everybody, and nobody’s talking about it, so let me go talk about it.
Alison Jones: And it is at the intersection of a lot of things that people are talking about. As you say, there’s the high performance thing and there’s the productivity thing, but there’s also the– I don’t know if you’ve read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, but that kind of idea that, oh, in today’s world, we’re never done. We are literally never at the end of our to-do list, our inbox, whatever it is.
And we have to make peace with that, but we also have to decide in the narrow zone of control that we have in some cases, what… It’s that classic thing, isn’t it? Productivity is doing things right and effectiveness is doing the right thing.
Melissa Swift: The right things. Exactly.
Alison Jones: What’s the right thing and how do you get that? How do you know?
Melissa Swift: Yes it’s a great question because I think the fantasy of the organization is that at executive level, at C-suite level, we’re going to set all these beautiful priorities, and we’re going to be really crisp about it. And then through each layer it’s just going to filter through, and then the team below us knows what to do, and the team below them knows what they need to do, and it just keeps flowing gorgeously. And the reality is the opposite of that, that even at C-suite level, and some research that my company did last year really proved this out, they’re already overloaded. They are already just absolutely drowning. So when you start with, it’s not like the priorities are set so crisply up here, then by the time you get to the average working person, it’s just that what you were describing, that absolute muddle. It’s never done.
So it becomes incumbent on us to figure that out in our own jobs. And one of the red threads of the book is me thinking, Okay, I know all these ways of thinking about jobs and work because I’m an organizational consultant. What would happen if we were each our own organizational consultants and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to really think through how my job is defined.’?
Now, if I really understand how– take me out of the equation. What is my job? If I started to think that way, then some of the priorities actually flow out in a much more logical way because you’ve defined the actual work you’re doing, and that gives it a shape rather than, to your point, this just constant formless inundation.
Alison Jones: And that’s emotionally sometimes quite challenging, I think, isn’t it? Because it is, let’s face it, quite easy to stay in that zone where you are busy and you have answered I don’t know how many emails and, you’ve ticked all these, and there’s a real endorphin hit with that. And it can feel like going back– I was really interested in your kind of the meta work of working out what the work is.
That just can feel like one more damn thing to do, can’t it?
Melissa Swift: Absolutely but it’s the sort of slow down to speed up move, I believe, because it’s one of the things that I’ve gotten some of the strongest early feedback on is, people are starting to read the book and people are going, “Whoa. Whoa whoa. That thing of looking at my job from not just my own perspective, but my boss’s perspective, my customer’s perspective. Ooh, mind blown.”
And I really think there’s something to it. If you can take that reflective moment and say, this is… and the thing is, you’re not going to come out with a perfect answer. You’re not going to come out with, “Oh, I figured out exactly what my job is. Let’s go,” right? “Let me go do all the things.”
It’s not that at all. It’s you’re going to uncover friction points and contradictions and things that are weird. But knowing where the friction points are, knowing where the contradictions are, the next time that you’re fighting six competing things to do with your time, understanding that it comes out of a job friction point really does help you think through it a lot better.
Alison Jones: Yes. It’s so true, isn’t it? And just because you like doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually the thing you need to be doing right now for the job.
Melissa Swift: Absolutely
Alison Jones: We touched earlier on that point that effectiveness, it feels like an individual capability, but so much of being effective at work is outside your control.
It’s to do with the resources you’re allocated and the workload that you’re given, and the fact that what you were given last year as your priority changed this year. And so how do we keep ourselves sane and resilient and flexible in the midst of all that?
Melissa Swift: Some of the equation there is just having healthy boundaries that there’s a recurring theme in the book that you cannot allow things to endlessly be piled onto you, right? That there’s a lot of myths in working culture that, this idea of, I want to be the employee that gives 120%, we need people to just really go the extra mile. And you need some of that, but it’s unsustainable all of the time.
So if you can be really– It’s absolutely counterproductive. You end up with very burned out people who can’t do the high strategic work, can’t do the creative work, and oftentimes just can’t do the normal work either, right?
You just, you lose people.
I think each of us is in charge of, okay, where can I set my boundaries such that, as long as I want to stay in this role, and, open questions about, there’s in chapter 10 I talk about if you are fundamentally not given the resources you need to produce the outcomes you’re required to produce, like that’s a broken job and you have got to do something about that, right?
And there’s whole concentric circles of things you can do. It doesn’t mean just go quit immediately at all.
Alison Jones: But even the work of identifying what the job is makes it more, makes you more able to articulate that to the people who need to know, right?
Melissa Swift: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it takes all of this out of kind of that personal narcissistic realm where it’s very hard sometimes to have conversations with your manager because managers often say, I hear this from leaders all the time, “My people are just whiny and all they do is whine about themselves and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
But, if you come to your manager and say, “I think there’s a structural issue here, and I want to talk about this structural issue,” that’s a less emotionally inflected conversation. A lot of times it just goes better.
Alison Jones: Yes and it’s hard to do when you are feeling overwhelmed, but you’re right, that sort of distancing. It’s almost like a defusing, isn’t it? Defusing yourself from the job so that you can see it more clearly. Yes, I love that.
And one of– I think the book’s great, and one of the things that I particularly liked about it was- because effectiveness is such a general term. Everybody at every level in an organization needs to be doing their job effectively if the whole thing’s going to work well.
So how do you narrow down that readership? You don’t, the way you’ve done it is to have a little, at the end of each point that you’re discussing, there’s sort of points for everyone, points for the boss, and points for the big boss, which I really where did that come from? What was the thinking behind that?
Melissa Swift: So it’s interesting, it actually comes from a bit of the same sort of reader questions after my first book that sparked the writing of this book. So in Work Here Now, I had, things that, you know, kind of organizational things and then team-level things. And I got a lot of feedback about these are great, but I have no control over my organization and question mark on the control over my team, right?
Especially got a lot of the, “I have no control over my organization.” And this was oftentimes from very senior people. This wasn’t somebody at entry level. This was like a C-suite executive saying, “I have no control,” which is very disturbing. So I really thought about, okay, if we’re going to empower people maximally, then we need those ground-level recommendations, and you need recommendations for leaders, and then some of the people reading this book will be quite senior people, and let’s give them something to work on, too.
But I wanted to really make sure that everybody in every role got something that they felt like they could do, because I think that was a– It was an interesting statement coming out of Work Here Now that the thinking really resonated, but people wanted more things they could personally take action on.
Alison Jones: And that, I think that’s such a, I was going to say an obligation, that makes it sound very weighty, but I think it is an opportunity for a business book writer. And you’re showing the research, you’re showing the lived experience, you’re telling the stories, you’re drawing out the insights, the ideas, and then you’ve got the so what.
And I love that sort of layering of the… locate yourself in this.
Melissa Swift: Right.
Alison Jones: Yes, really nice.
Melissa Swift: Thank you
Alison Jones: I want to know more about your approach to writing per se. You’ve done two books now. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a fluke. I know. You came back. What do you what does it look like for you writing a book?
Melissa Swift: Yes. It, so it’s interesting. I often say my superpower as a writer is that I don’t have a lot of hangups anymore about just getting words on paper, because the most brilliant people I know, that is their big barrier to writing, is I think it’s very easy to internalize a certain perfectionism.
And I, especially in writing my first book, it was a little bit of a trial by fire. I’d always been a big writer. I’d always written lots of articles, white papers, but when you sit down to write a book, you’re like, “Oh my goodness, this is a book.” And I had to push through that every sentence has to be perfect. I had to really do this mental thing of “I’m going to get it on paper, and then I’m going to go back and fix problems later.”
And for this book, it’s interesting because again, just cycles and wraps and in between first book and now, I’ve also written a series of quarterly columns for MIT Sloan Management Review and worked with a wonderful editor there, Laurianne McLaughlin..
And working routinely with a great editor really gave me more confidence in my writing because each time you get edited, you internalize some of what they did, and then you write differently the next time. And so this time I felt almost more of like a momentum as I was writing, and I hope that comes out in the way that the book reads, because I think if you have this rhythm in it coming onto the page, then the rhythm, like the reader, can hear that rhythm as they’re reading it.
Alison Jones: I think rhythm’s a great word for it. It’s exactly right. I think energy is another word that’s really in there. I’m going to dig a little bit into that because I think that’s fascinating and you can share some of your learning with other people. What specifically did you take from… because it’s all about the craft of writing this, isn’t it? What did your editor teach you that you now do differently?
Melissa Swift: There’s a part that’s hard to put into words because it’s literally the musicality of language. And some of it you can think about in very rote terms, like varying the length of your sentences. When you read blah corporate writings, like everything is in this very official tone and, each sentence kind of sounds the same.
And when you read great fiction writing, “He stopped. There was something in the village.” You know what I mean? You get these wonderful beats where the structure, yes really varies.
And also I just blatantly, again, from writing for publications and also just having a bunch of friends who are great journalists, I learned how to write ledes, like L-E-D-E, like the beginning of an article, right?
Where you get in and hook the reader. I just– I sat down and just taught myself how to write ledes. So the beginnings of the chapters particularly hopefully read more like the lede to an article. And that, again, as you get into kind of the nitty-gritty of the writing craft, that’s something I would advise all business book writers to learn how to do.
Because when you look at business books, a lot of times it’ll just start with “40% of Americans are disengaged at work,” and you’re like, “Womp, womp.” Whereas if you write it like, “Peter put his head down on his desk. He couldn’t take it anymore.” That’s a little more fun and exciting, and…
Alison Jones: …suddenly we’re in the office, we’re looking at Peter. Yes.
Absolutely, yes, they personalize it. They bring the abstract into a human story. that’s a great– Yes. I think actually, and I don’t think we’ve had this point come nearly often enough in the podcast, you can learn so much from good journalism because they have to write to catch attention.
Melissa Swift: Yes, absolutely. Especially today when there’s so much competition for mainstream journalism. There’s Substacks and there’s tweets and everything else. I really find that emulating good journalism is– that’s the way to go.
There are some genuine things that, to your point, those folks are forced to learn. And just, and some of the way they flow in quotes, the way they flow in statistics, there’s just blocking and tackling things that, again, especially in a business book, make it a lot more readable if you can do that with kind of a deft hand rather than just like slamming in, just like stuff willy-nilly…
Alison Jones: …yes, absolutely.
Melissa Swift: Totally.
Totally
Alison Jones: And actually, your point about how you start, you can learn a lot from journalists, as you say, in that lede, that sort of little sentence at the start. And I always think it’s a bit like giving a presentation, and we’ve all been in those presentations that start with the history of the company, and we’re like, “Nobody cares,” and so many people want to start their book by saying, “Let me tell you why I wrote this book.” No, I don’t care. Just tell me the stuff. Don’t tell me about the stuff. Tell me the stuff, so there is that.
You can absolutely weave in your thinking and your story and the history of your company and all of that, but don’t start with it or you’ll lose your people before they’ve even got past page one.
Melissa Swift: Yes. exactly. I just thought a lot about what would I like to read? What would I genuinely enjoy? And I got some good advice from a marketing person that I worked with where he said, “Look, the job of a business book is to inform, but also to entertain. So don’t be embarrassed to entertain.”
I was like, “Oh, entertaining. I can do that,”
Alison Jones: it’s true. We can only take so much informing, can’t we, before our sort of brains just scramble out the window.
So I always ask my guests, Melissa, for their one best tip for– doesn’t have to be business book writer, it could be any book writer? But, the people listening to this, if they’re just at the start of this journey, what’s the one thing that you’d want them to know?
Melissa Swift: So something interesting that I’ve learned over the course of, again, writing two books is don’t try to force when words stop coming out of you for the day, stop writing. You know? It just– And it’s weird. I could almost set a word count that I can in a day reasonably write between, let’s say 1,000 and 2,000 words.
But then I just top out. There is a point where I just, I am done writing for the day, right? And I just have to, okay, I’m going to close my computer. I’m going to do some other task, I can’t write anymore. There are no more words coming. And it sounds a bit mystical and weird, but like that’s just…
And it’s just an interesting lesson and like I could sit here and say Melissa, it’s got to be 3,000 words a day…
Alison Jones: …grind it out. Come on
Melissa Swift: Exactly. Exactly. But I’ve just learned with practice there’s a certain amount of words that I have in me to produce. I produce those words and then I’m done for the day.
The writing part of my brain is exhausted.
Alison Jones: And it’s like willpower, isn’t it? If I’ve got to make two difficult decisions before lunch, then the rest of the day is just the, “I’ve got no willpower left.” It’s a finite resource.
Melissa Swift: The bucket is empty.
Alison Jones: I love that. “I’m sorry, all the words are gone for today.”
Melissa Swift: That’s it. That’s it. Done with words.
Alison Jones: “There are no more words.”
Melissa Swift: Words are gone.
Alison Jones: That’s always tricky when you’re a writer, isn’t it? Yes. I love– And also actually what you’re saying as well is find out how you write and go with it. Don’t try and make yourself be the kind of writer you’re not.
Don’t try and be somebody who writes for a two days solid if your words stop after two hours or whatever, yes, stop
Melissa Swift: Absolutely. And it’s funny because there are all these sort of beliefs about, like I was talking to someone last night about they were going to do like a writer’s circle, and it was like should we have everyone write longhand?” And I said, “Sorry, that’s not how I write.
I write on a computer. That’s just– Sorry, that’s…
Alison Jones: …yes. Experiment…
Melissa Swift: …not me.
Alison Jones: Be curious, find what works for you, double down on it.
Melissa Swift: Absolutely, and some people have to do pen and paper, right? Some people are much happier doing pen and– Some people dictate first, which I find fascinating, it’s just different strokes for different folks.
And to your point, you really do have to find that method and the rhythm that works for you and, so for instance, I’m almost agnostic to do I need a desk? Can I sit on the couch? Whatever.
But sound, it really has to be quiet. Like it really has to be. That’s, so I have like my negotiables versus my non-negotiables, and my non-negotiable is very sound oriented
Alison Jones: Love it. And not giving yourself a hard time for that, just going, “It’s just the way it is.” Yes. It’s not good, not bad, it’s just, it just is. It’s just the thing. I love that.
And I always ask my guests too, Melissa, for a recommendation. You’re not allowed to recommend your own books, sorry. But what book would you like to recommend to listeners? Doesn’t have to be a business book
Melissa Swift: One book that I found really thought-provoking that is not a business book, but made me think about certain things in business differently The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova.
Alison Jones: Ah, I don’t know that.
Melissa Swift: And it’s a– she wrote an elaborate– It’s basically an elaborate typology of scams and how different scams work. What is the machinery of the most common scams? And so first of all, there’s some really funny stories in there. But second of all, understanding the structure of swindles, you can then see if somebody’s trying to pull one over on you.
Alison Jones: This feels like a book for our times, doesn’t it?
Melissa Swift: Oh my God, yes. Yes, absolutely. But it really– So, certain things like anytime someone is putting time pressure on you, right?
It’s a classic hallmark of a number of scams. So literally anytime now I’m in a situation where somebody’s like there’s this time pressure. I’m like, Is there? Is there now? It really reframed a lot of my thinking, and I think that’s the hallmark of a great book.
Alison Jones: Yes, I love that. Thank you. Great recommendation.
And then, Melissa, if people want to find out more about you, more about the work that you do, more about your books, where should they go?
Melissa Swift: Let’s see. So I’m very active on LinkedIn. You can come find me there. The book is available wherever books are sold. I’m building a presence on Instagram and TikTok as well, so please feel free to join me there if you’re not a big LinkedIn person. And I always really welcome dialogue with readers about the book.
To me, that is the fun part. If you read it, don’t hesitate to send me a ping. Like I just, I love that dialogue and that back and forth.
Alison Jones: I hope you don’t live to regret that, but I hope it’s…
Melissa Swift: That would be a high-class problem.
Alison Jones: That would be a great problem, wouldn’t it? Amazing.
I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, Melissa. Thank you so much for your time today. I feel like I’m just going to be that little bit more effective from now on.
Melissa Swift: Oh, amazing. That’s what we’re going for. Thank you for having me. I love talking about some of this stuff, especially the writing process, which, I think the mission of demystifying that is such a good one.
Alison Jones: Amazing. Thank you so much.
