How to Influence Your Productivity For the Better Through Your Peers
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How do your peers influence your productivity? Who we spend most of our time with plays a big role in what we achieve. Here’s how to harness peer groups for good (or for bad)…
Who influences your productivity “set point?”
Here’s what I’ve noticed. The company you keep is a good predictor of how productive you are.
Let’s explore:
- How your peers influence you and…
- How to harness that influence for good:
How do your peers influence your productivity?
Let’s begin with a quick story. Holly was a skilled developer who was hired into her dream job — working for a well-known Silicon Valley company.
She quickly immersed herself in the busy work environment and was impressed with how the team pulled together to efficiently tackle projects. Everyone was dedicated to their work.
Seeing this, Holly worked harder. She was chosen for some key projects and found that as her reputation grew, she was offered more challenging projects.
She described how this group thrived on both teamwork and a sense of competitiveness at the same time. It was an environment that valued achievement, where peers encouraged and fed off each other’s drive to succeed.
Holly was promoted quickly and found herself managing several key accounts. However, she also discovered a flipside. The culture of the workplace valued hard work and talked about balance, but in practice, employees worked long hours and didn’t take breaks or vacations.
For a while, she adopted this same pattern. But it eventually caught up with her. “I was so burned out that my productivity was going downhill, and I wasn’t the only one.”
Your peer group will influence your productivity more than you realize. Holly spent a lot of her time at work and was immersed in the culture. And unfortunately, it was a culture that only understood one side of the high-productivity equation.
