Codie Sanchez (speaker) argues that coworkers' performance levels are contagious: sitting next to a high performer increases your performance by about 15%, while sitting next to a low performer decreases productivity by about 30%. She cites Arthur Brooks' studies on contagion effects (happiness, obesity, divorce) to support the general idea that behaviors and outcomes spread through social networks.
About 15%.
About 30%.
Arthur Brooks.
If you sit next to a high performer at a company, that high performer, on average, will increase your performance by 15%. If you sit next to a low performer at your company, that low performer will decrease your productivity by about 30%. If you think about it this way, the people that you surround yourself with, whatever energy that they bring, it's contagious. And so for our teams, I obsess on this fact, and we've all felt it. You felt that person who sat next to you, you're like, God, shut up, my Marge. Like, it's not always negative. I don't feel good at the end of these conversations. I don't feel like we're progressing. That is a real phenomenon. And now there's a lot of studies. Arthur Brooks has incredible studies on the effect of happiness as contagion, on the effect of obesity as contagion, on the effect of divorce as contagion. And the same thing tends to be true with performance. If you surround yourself with high performers, you will perform higher. If you surround yourself with low performers, you will double your underperformance.
