The Progress Principle (book by Amabile & Kramer)

The Progress Principle

Teresa Amabile & Steven Kramer

 Progress-Principle

 The book in bullets:

• The inner working life of people is strongly connected to their productivity. People are more productive on days when they feel good about their progress.
• The strongest positive influence on inner work life is a sense of progress in meaningful work.
• Setbacks are the strongest negative influence. Events which decrease the “meaning of work” are a sort of setback.
• People experience both positive and negative events that improve and degrade their inner work life. Negative events are much more potent than positive events.

 

This 2011 book describes a long-term study of individual’s reaction to their daily lives. Author Amabile is very prominent in business creativity & culture research, while author Kramer is a psychologist whose academic work focuses on problem solving in the business context. The study involved over 225 people at 7 companies comprising 26 project/work teams. Essentially, individuals completed daily electronic journals that eventually resulted in about 12,000 journal entries. Entries involved a number of questions, but the most important entry was in response to the request “Briefly describe one event from today that stands out in your mind”* and people on the teams were assessed in a number of other ways by the researchers.

 

This information revealed a lot about the inner work life of participants, particularly:

• Inner work life had a strong influence on people’s productivity, commitment, creativity and relationships.
• Inner work life was very important to people.
• Inner work life is very sensitive to the events of the day.

 

The data suggested that three positive forces improved, and their opposites degraded inner work life. These forces were given the following titles, and will be discussed below.

Positive force	Negative force
Progress in meaningful work	Setbacks
Catalysts	Inhibitors
Nourishers	Toxins

 

In general, inner working life was more sensitive to the negative forces than the positive ones. That is, a negative event was much more effective in decreasing mood than a positive event was in increasing mood. This may be due to people being more aware of negative events, or it may be due to the ripple effects that negative events have.

 

Progress & Setbacks

By far, the most powerful promoter of a good internal work life is progress. When people report that they are making progress in meaningful work, they report feeling more positive in almost every way. The implication of this for leaders is that helping people understand their progress may be the most important management tool of all. The authors define the inner work life as emotional and perceptual reaction to their work and environment. People react to events by trying to make sense of the events, and whether objectively right or wrong, this sense making impacts their emotional state. A positive work life supports high motivation, while a negative inner work life is de-motivating.

 

Inner work life has three parts: feelings, perceptions, and motivation. Feelings dominate inner work life. Though participants were not asked to report on their feelings, more than 80% of diary entries did. Privately, these people related how their work and their feeling intertwined. In particular, they reported suppressed feelings. Emotions such as elation, anger and depression are “unprofessional” and go unexpressed. Both the direction (positive/negative) and intensity of emotion is important. People strongly identify with their work, and this means that it is never “just business” – it is their life.

 

Perceptions are the more intellectual aspects of reaction to events. When things happen people try to weave these events into a story that makes sense, and often this sense-making gets tangled up with events of the past. When leaders act in ways that recall positive past events, inner work life improves; recall of negative past outcomes depress inner work life.

 

Motivation is generally extrinsic (work is exchanged for money/prestige), intrinsic (work is exchanged for pleasure) or relational (work is exchanged for altruistic rewards). Judging from the diary entries, intrinsic and relational motivation is much more important that extrinsic motivation. These drive extraordinary effort and positive inner work life. This is where “meaningful” work gains its importance.  Extrinsic rewards become more important when the work is meaningless. Too much stress on extrinsic rewards suggests that work is less meaningful, and undermines intrinsic motivation. Many management paradigms emphasize extrinsic motivators (compensation, promotion, perks) which seem to have relatively little impact on people (according to their diaries).

 

While much of the narrative in this book was about feelings, data was also collected on performance. The data clearly show that better performance was correlated with better feelings. Critically, the variation in performance by a single individual was linked to inner work life; this was not due to different people, with different personalities having different performance outcomes.

 

Grossly simplified, plenty of data (from this study and others) suggests that “happy” employees are more productive, creative and collaborative than “unhappy” employees, and that day-to-day variation in “happiness” impacts these factors.

 

People thrive on progress. It feeds their feelings (I feel good), perceptions (I’m doing good work) and motivation (I have and will deliver in the future). You sometimes hear about successful athletes being confident, and this is probably another expression of the same idea.

 

If progress is a very positive force, setbacks are the negative counterpart.  In fact, as mentioned elsewhere, negative events can be more powerful than positive ones. All work suffers from setbacks, and there is often nothing that can be done except chalk the experience up to learning and try again. But sometimes the setbacks relate more to interacting with the environment than the work itself, and this is discussed in the next two sections.

 

The principle of the book’s title is this: the most important way to positively affect people’s inner work life is to facilitate progress in meaningful work. Meaningful work is work perceived to be useful to someone else (customer, family member, team members). Management usually does not need to highlight what makes work meaningful, but managers must not:

• dismiss work/ideas of employees (ignore the contributions or suggestions)
• diminish employee’s ownership of the work (take the work away to give to another)
• create doubt that the employees work will be used
• assign work that offers no challenge to the employee (be careful about assigning mindless work)

The creation of doubt is particularly common. While it is true that priorities change, excessive use of this reason undermines the belief that managers take their employees efforts seriously because it is apparently acceptable to “waste” that time.

 

Catalysts & Inhibitors

Catalysts are actions that increase people’s ability to make progress, and the analysis of diary entries suggested seven major catalysts. Most of these need little explanation. The inhibitors are the opposite of these catalysts – and slow progress and depress inner work life.

1. Setting clear goals
   1. Clarify what the goal is
   2. Allowing autonomy
      1. Allow people to determine how to achieve the goal
      2. Providing resources
      3. Giving enough time – but not too much
      4. Help with the work
         1. Offer to help solve problems, make connections for people, or find information
         2. Learning from problems and successes
            1. Failure is inevitable, and must be an opportunity for learning. So is success.
            2. Allowing ideas to flow
               1. Listening to ideas without judgment frees employees to be more creative, and creativity is very motivating

 

Within an organizational culture, catalysts (and inhibitors) respond to three main forces:

• consideration for people and their ideas
  • Do people at every level respect people and their ideas/work?
  • Coordination
    • Do the systems, procedures, and organizational structure ease work and collaboration?
    • communication
      • Does communication clarify intentions? Is it honest? Is it open and multi-directional? 

 

It is possible for individuals to be powerful catalysts in a culture weak in all of these areas, but it takes a significant toll on those individuals and they will probably leave eventually for a more hospitable climate. A number of participants in this study were able to sustain a team for a prolonged period (based on diaries of their teams) in the presence of very inhibitory cultures, but their own diaries recorded the cost this imposed on them. What also became clear in the study was that a lot of inhibitory behavior was essentially accidental. The people who muddied goals or micro-managed thought they were acting appropriately. The diaries made clear that people loved when leaders checked in on them and their work and hated when they checked up on them. Many of the most positive statements about leaders reflected events when somebody “just stopped by to see how things were going”. Across the study, the most effective leaders checked in regularly with their teams just to “chat”. Staying on the right side of the fine line between “in” and “up” was a strong positive force.

 

Nourishment and Toxins

Nourishment is all of the actions that improve human connections. One of the strongest influences on inner work is the connections that people feel to their co-workers, their leaders and their “customers”. Diary accounts suggest four main types of nourishment.

• Respect
  • Civility, honesty, recognition, and acknowledgement indicate respect. People are very sensitive to respect (and disrespect)
  • Encouragement
    • Expressions of confidence in, and enthusiasm for, a person work increases their sense of self-efficacy (being an effective person) which improves inner working life.
    • Emotional support
      • People are strongly affected by their emotions, and acknowledgement of these emotions is a simple, useful form of support. Though much more difficult to apply, empathy can have much stronger positive effects.
      • Affiliation
        • Modern organizations are not as stable (virtual teams, contract employees, re-organizations) as some in the past, and people may struggle more to feel connected to co-workers. Activities that increase social contact between people in a “semi-work” context can increase connection between people and support affiliation. In fact, it is clear that people who have developed a good relationship can deal with much more challenging problems and conflicts than people who are relatively unacquainted.

While much of the above discussion might seem like the activities of managers, much of the nourishment people get is from co-workers. In other words, nourishment is a cultural attribute as much as a personal one.

 

If nourishment is something to actively cultivate, toxins must be actively avoided. The four main toxins are disrespect, discouragement, emotional neglect, and antagonism which are the counterparts to the nourishers. In many case, the simple absence of nourishers create a toxic environment. Diaries reported numerous examples of toxic behavior in interactions with leaders and co-workers. Sometimes, lack of understanding of differing working/cognitive/decision/communication styles contributes to malnutrition, but often is results from the belief that nourishment should not be required (“that’s their job” or “they’re professionals”). Some leaders think that their role is to be “tough” and “business-like”, but this can have negative effects. In this context, it is critical to remember that negative events are much more powerful than positive events. In fact, just a few toxic behaviors by people in senior positions can overwhelm many nourishing actions by lower level leaders.

 

The authors attended a meeting of top executives to discuss these studies. They asked the executives if they thought inner work life was important, and most expressed the belief that it was. When asked what they did to support inner work life, they offered incentive plans, competitive salaries, and recognition programs (extrinsic rewards). When asked if they paid attention to daily progress, the response was that people should be self-motivated and not require support. The diaries clearly show that a steady supply of catalysts and nourishers was important, but the discussion with the executives shows that this is also a blind spot for many leaders.

 

The final segment of the book was about self-nourishment. It is hard to nourish others and provide catalysts to them when your own inner work life is suffering. An unexpected consequence of keeping the daily diaries was revealed at the end of the study when people began to report of the positive effect of keeping the diary. These records helped people recognize their accomplishments and consequently their own progress. Disciplined journaling, and the reflection that was required, helped people identify how they were feeling, what was happening (good and bad). Some guidelines from the experience of the diarists include:

• Identify what events stand out
• Identify what progress made, what/who catalyzed or nourished you
• Indentify what setbacks happened, what/who inhibited or poisoned you
• Identify who you helped

 The effect of progress in improving inner work life is generally underappreciated. Increasing the productivity of people and improving their inner work life has a common basis – focus on helping people make and recognize their daily progress. Drive out hassles and disrespectful behavior.

 *text in italics is directly quoted from the book