The Progress Principle

Teresa Amabile: Yes. Steven Kramer and I wanted to understand deeply what really happens at work inside people's hearts and minds and whether it matters for performance. So because people at work generally keep their thoughts and their feelings and their motivations private we decided that the best way to get at all of this was to ask people to send us daily electronic diaries that we would keep very confidential but to send us daily diaries at the end of each day during the entire course of a project that they were working on so that we could have access to their psychological experiences during the entire time that they were working on a creative project. These were all professionals and we wanted to track their experiences during a significant chunk of work in their lives so we asked them to submit daily electronic diaries to us using a little form that we emailed them each morning and send it back to us at the end of the day so it took about five or ten minutes for them to complete the diary and we got an amazing response rate from the people that we recruited. We got 75 percent of these daily diary forms back and most of these people were in the study for at least three or four months and some of them up to nine months if that was as long as their project was so Monday through Friday a daily electronic diary.

Rachel Salaman: Have there ever been similar studies like that based on people's diaries?

Teresa Amabile: Not as we did it. There have been a few studies that asked people to fill out diaries at the end of a day. Occasionally it was a workday, usually the entire day, but not for more than two or three weeks at a time. The scope of the study that we have is really unprecedented, asking them to do this during the entire course of a real project that they were working on, asking them to do it every workday for many weeks and many months. No one has done that before and no one has previously used the approach we took which was to ask people to fill out some survey items in this daily diary so numerical scales in terms of their emotions that day and their motivations. Others have done something like that. We also asked open ended questions which was briefly describe one event from the day that stands out in your mind, one of the events in the workday, and it can be any event at all as long as it's relevant to your work or your team's project so that is really quite a unique aspect.

Rachel Salaman: So how did you actually analyze all that data and come to your conclusions which form the foundation of your book "The Progress Principle"?

Teresa Amabile: Let me describe the database to you a little bit. We had 238 professionals in 26 project teams in seven companies in three industries and those 238 people in sum submitted almost 12,000 daily diary entries to us. So that was an extraordinary treasure trove of data. It was also a huge undertaking to try to analyze it. The numerical responses were fairly straightforward to analyze but the event descriptions, which were by far the richest part of our data, were very challenging. What we did was to go through each of those event descriptions and categorize all of the events that were described. There were a total of almost 64,000 specific events described in these 12,000 daily diaries so we categorized those to look at what events were impacting people. We also got performance measures which were separate from the diaries. Co-workers and supervisors rated these individuals on their creativity, their productivity, their commitment to the work and their collegiality and we were able to draw connections between the events, people's inner work lives, that is their psychological experience and their performance.

Rachel Salaman: And what were the biggest surprises to emerge from all that data?

Teresa Amabile: There were a number of surprises. First of all we discovered how very rich and deep people's inner work lives are. Let me just define inner work life for you. Inner work life is the confluence of people's emotions, perceptions and motivations that they experience as they react to and try to make sense of the events in their workday. So emotions are pretty obvious, emotional reactions or overall mood for the day. Perceptions are your thoughts, your judgments, your impressions of what's going on and what the organization is like, what your co-workers are like. Your impressions and your judgments of the actual work that you're doing and even of yourself as an employee inside the organization. Those are all your perceptions, your judgments, your thoughts, and motivation is the drive to do something, your sense of what it is you need to do, and your drive to do it. We found that the most important kind of motivation for creative productivity is intrinsic motivation. That's being really excited about the work, being passionate about the work itself. So the combination of all those is inner work life and we found that inner work life really matters a great deal to people. People wrote in a lot of depth in some of these diary entries about their own experiences that day, the ups and downs in their emotions, their motivational state. They certainly told us a lot about their judgments, their thoughts about what was happening. We never asked them to report any of that, all we said was report an event that occurred today but it was as if that report would be incomplete to them without telling us how they thought about it, what they felt, how it affected their motivation so that was a surprise to us, the richness of inner work life. Another surprise was how strongly inner work life influences performance.

We found that when people have more positive emotions, more positive perceptions of the organization and their co-workers and their bosses and when they have stronger intrinsic motivation they are much more likely to be creative on that day, to be productive, to be committed to the work and collegial within their own work environment. So their connection between intrinsic motivation and performance was a surprise given that there are a number of researchers and some practitioners both who believe that people perform better when they're stressed and even when they're unhappy.

Rachel Salaman: How can a manager use that knowledge about the inner work life to get the best out of their team?

Teresa Amabile: That leads me to describe our second big discovery which was also a surprise to us. When we went through and analyzed all these events that people reported and looked at the connection between the events and inner work life we found that the single most important event in boosting inner work life was simply making progress on meaningful work. Simply having some kind of step forward in work that the person cared about even if it was a very small step forward, another surprise, even a small win could have a major positive impact on someone's inner work life. So this was a surprise to us, we thought that inner work life would be most influenced by inter personal events, getting recognition, getting a pat on the back from someone, having a pleasant interaction with a boss or a co-worker, we thought that that would really be the strongest predictor of inner work life. That did matter, those kind of events did boost inner work life, but the single most prominent event dwarfing all other events on people's very best inner work life days was making progress in meaningful work even if it was a small win. So managers can use this by not worrying about trying to get inside people's heads, not worrying about becoming an emotional intelligence genius, but simply supporting people in making progress on meaningful work.

Rachel Salaman: So that sounds very simple but I'm sure it's not simple in practice is it from your experience?

Teresa Amabile: No, it's not simple at all. For one thing managers don't really understand the incredible motivational power of progress. We did a little survey, after we did our main study we surveyed nearly 700 managers from companies and industries around the world and we just gave them in the survey five motivational factors, five tools that they could use to motivate employees. We lifted them out and we said among these five which do you think is the most important and which do you think is the second most important tool and so on. These were motivators that most people would think of. We included incentives, we included recognition, we included inter personal support, we included clear goals and we included progress in the work, making progress in the work. We found that managers ranked progress last out of all our motivators when in fact our data showed that it's the most important motivator. They ranked it last and in fact only five percent of these managers chose progress as number one. Even if they were making these choices randomly 20 percent of them should have chosen it as number one but they didn't. They were actively saying they didn't think that supporting progress was that important when it's crucially important and we found that in the companies that we studied most managers did not effectively support progress every day. In fact many of them did it inconsistently or actually, this is really bad, they would sometimes hinder people's progress. I'm really confident that it was unwitting hindrance almost all of the time but nonetheless they were hindering people's progress.

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Rachel Salaman: So this could be like a magic charm for a lot of managers who don't yet realize the power of progress to their team.

Teresa Amabile: Absolutely and there are some very straightforward mechanisms that we discovered that managers can use to support progress in the work. We call these catalysts. Would it be useful for me to describe what these catalysts are?

Rachel Salaman: Yes please do, in fact I was going to ask you about that next so please go ahead.

Teresa Amabile: Sure. There are seven catalysts. These are everyday actions that managers can take and in fact co-workers can do these for and with each other, at least some of them, but I'd like to focus mostly on what managers can do because they really hold so much more power and they have the access to resources. So fundamentally important is for managers to set clear goals in meaningful work. So there are two pieces there. First of all they have to help people understand how their work serves a valuable purpose for the organization, for customers, for the community, for the society, for the world, whatever it is. They have to help every employee make a connection between what they're doing and some real value. That's crucial, there has to be that meaning and some purpose in the work and there have to be clear goals so people have to know exactly what they're moving towards, what it is they're trying to accomplish. We saw so many organizations where managers would set relatively vague goals and sometimes very vague goals for projects or they would constantly switch the goals so that people had no sense really of what their priorities were or why they mattered so clear goals and meaningful work. Coupled with that is the second catalyst allowing autonomy in the work. So people should have clear goals but they should also have a sense if they can use their creative brains to decide how they're going to achieve those goals in the work. The opposite of that of course is micro management, trying to dictate everything for people to do which is impossible to do well if people are doing very complex creative work which is the kind of work that we were studying and I think the kind of work that most organizations really want to support. So clear goals and autonomy. The third catalyst is providing sufficient resources for the work. Not necessarily lavish resources but at least sufficient resources for people to be able to get the job done. Providing sufficient time is the fourth catalyst. Interestingly we found that there's an optimal level of time pressure which is kind of a low to moderate time pressure seems to be most effective for creative productivity. If people have no sense of time urgency at all they can develop the sense that the work isn't very important. So there needs to be some sense that this is important work, there's an urgent need for it, but people have to have enough time to be able to explore alternative solutions or they will not be able to be innovative in what they're doing.

Helping with the work is another catalyst, making sure that people have access to the information they need, the human resources to be able to support the work. Fostering collaboration within a group can be crucial so making sure that people are able if they're struggling with technical difficulties of any kind if they're able to find the resources that they need in terms of other people to help them and we found many effective team leaders who rolled up their sleeves, got in there and worked alongside people trying to tackle the projects. The sixth catalyst is helping people to openly learn from problems as well as from successes. It's so easy to slip into a mode where if a problem occurs in the work, if there's an error, if there's a failure at something it's so easy to try to affix blame, to try to understand who did this, why did you mess up or to hide something that went wrong. It's much more effective to have an environment where people feel psychologically safe to discuss something that didn't work out so they can be used as a learning opportunity. What value can we extract from this failure, what does tell us about what might work, what might not work, how can we do things differently in the future rather than personal attacks to really attack the work and attack the problems in that way. We saw this happen effectively unfortunately in not nearly enough of the working environments that we've studied. And the seventh catalyst is fostering a free exchange of ideas about finding mechanisms whereby people can share their ideas and not that every idea is going to be developed but that every idea will get a fair hearing that really keeps people engaged in their work and helps them to make progress because they're able to get input from many others and give input to many others.

So those are the catalysts that can directly support progress and you can imagine the opposite of each of these which we call inhibitors. It's important for managers to seek out those inhibitors that might be standing in the way of their team and reduce them as much as possible and to support the catalysts to make sure that they themselves are providing catalysts and making sure that the catalysts are there for people to make progress in their work daily. We have another set of factors that are important management tools which support in a work life rather than supporting progress. There's a synergy because better inter work life links to better performance which is progress and that in turn leads to better inter work life. So if you nourish people's inter work lives that will also of course support progress, support positive performance. Would you like me to describe those people supports?

Rachel Salaman: Yes. Now these are what you in the book call nourishers so if you could just describe them for us.

Teresa Amabile: Yes. There are four nourishers, the first is respect and recognition. Letting people know that they are valued by the organization, by you the manager, and recognizing them for good efforts. It doesn't have to be anything fancy but it should be consistent, it should be day by day when people are doing good work to know that the work is appreciated, that you notice the good work that they're doing. The opposite of this is at its worst incivility but often people just ignore the work that people are doing and assume well they're doing their job and that's what they should do but to at least acknowledge from time to time I understand that you're working very hard on this, I appreciate that, that can go a long way. The second nourisher is encouragement in the face of difficult challenges expressing a confidence in people that we know that this is difficult work that requires a lot of creativity and a lot of innovation, we have confidence that you can do it. The third nourisher is emotional support. If people reveal that they have professional difficulties or personal difficulties to validate that, to acknowledge it. To say I know that you're having a difficult time right now and I'm sorry for that or better yet to try to help people in whatever way possible. Again not to become a psychologist, not to try and analyze people, and not to pry into private matters but if someone shares with you as a manager that they're having difficulty with something to have an openness to that and to try to help. Finally providing opportunities for people to affiliate with each other, to bond with each other, at work because we all need the human connection with each other. We need to feel that we can trust people that we're working with, that we want to do well so that our team looks good, so that our team is effective as a unit. So as a manager it's important to look out for brewing interpersonal problems which are obviously common whenever people are trying to work together and to try to solve those interpersonal conflicts before they can get out of hand and to give people team building opportunities. To give people opportunities to occasionally have fun together.

Rachel Salaman: Now how hard is it for managers to remember and deliver all of those things to all of their team members as well as take care of their everyday responsibilities that might be in different areas?

Teresa Amabile: It really is challenging because most managers, whether they're at the team leader level or at the C suite level have a lot of things on their plate. They need to be thinking about overall strategies, short term and long term strategies. They need to be scanning the external environment, what's going on on our markets, what's going on in society that might be impacting what we should do in the future. They need to look at resources, they need to look at their financial situation so there are so many things that are competing for their attention and their time. For that reason we recommend having a daily discipline of spending even just five to ten minutes probably towards the end of the day to think about the work that your immediate subordinates are trying to do and whether they've been able to do that effectively that day.

For one thing, by the way, this means that you need to stay close enough in touch with what's happening so that you don't have to go to every person and ask them specifically every day okay what progress did you make, what was happening here, because that veers into micromanagement but ideally you'll be close enough to keep in the flow of everyday events so that you will be able to see what's happening, what's working, what isn't working for people. So just to take a daily assessment of the progress that your pupil's made, what catalysts were there, what inhibitors might have been standing in the way. Might there be some toxins which are the opposite of nourishers that are interfering with people's ability to feel good at work and then to look at all. Just scan the day, look at the forces impinging on the team and the dynamics going on inside the team and say alright what one thing can I do tomorrow or for the rest of this week that can help these people make more progress in their work. If they're making good progress what can I do to sustain that progress, to enhance it.

Rachel Salaman: I'd like now to bring in the ideas of Frederick Herzberg which resonate with what you're saying and there's more information about Hertzberg's ideas on the Mind Tools site. He believed you need to remove factors for dissatisfaction as he called them, these are things like annoying company policies or work conditions, and then separately work on factors for satisfaction like achievement and recognition. So how do your ideas relate to Herzberg's?

Teresa Amabile: This work builds beautifully on Herzberg's pioneering research. He found that there are certain forces that can lead people to become dissatisfied with their jobs, forces like inadequate pay, inadequate benefits, having a difficult physical work environment. It is important to make sure that those things are not negatively impacting people at work. Most of the environments that we studied those were not an issue so people didn't have to worry too much about those dissatisfiers. There were a couple of work environments we studied where people were very concerned about job security, that is absolutely a dissatisfying in Herzberg's model, and we certainly found that to be the case. If people felt that they were at risk of termination because the organization was going through a downsizing that was an enormous negative force on their inter work lives. So, yes, it is very important to make sure those dissatisfiers are not present and certainly to make sure that there are no toxins in the environment, that people aren't disrespecting each other, that there aren't a lot of interpersonal clashes within that work environment. All of that is very important to look out for but on the positive side what Herzberg focused on as the real motivators for people, he found that the most important is achievement and that sits beautifully with our discovery of what happens day by day on the ground in real time. People feeling great when they make progress in meaningful work, that's what managers need to focus on, whatever they can do to support that, and yes the recognition, that's one of the primary nourishers. So those two forces together supporting people and supporting their progress make for great inter work life and ultimately for a higher level of creative productivity inside the organization.

Rachel Salaman: Now Herzberg thought you should try and remove the dissatisfiers before working on the satisfiers but in your model can managers work on both things at once, getting rid of the setbacks and also building the positive in their work lives at the same time or should it be one first and then the other?

Teresa Amabile: I think if they could be done simultaneously they should be done simultaneously because there are always dangers of new dissatisfiers popping up and I think it's important to make sure that those are impinging on people as little as possible at the same time that you're trying to support progress. Let me say something about setbacks. Setbacks aren't necessarily due to the dissatisfiers that Herzberg talked about. Setbacks are in fact an absolutely inevitable part of complex innovative work, the kind of work that we were studying. People do experiments when they're trying to invent something new, when they're trying to bring a new product or new service to market. That always entails setbacks, that always entails some degree of failure. What's important is for managers to help people understand that these setbacks are actually part of the pathway to getting to that final solution to figuring out how to make this thing work. So that's why it's so important to have an atmosphere where you're learning from setbacks and to figure out if there any inhibitors that are causing the setbacks. So if the setbacks are occurring because a support group inside the organization isn't getting the suppliers that people need or isn't getting them the information that they need then that is absolutely something that the manager needs to take care of and remove as an inhibitor but you shouldn't kid yourself. As a manager you will never be able to remove the possibility of setbacks in the work and you shouldn't try because if you did that would mean that you had rendered the work so simplistic that it was no longer valuable.

Rachel Salaman: Now in your book you offer some tips for creating an environment for optimal innovative performance. What are your key points there?

Teresa Amabile: There are three climate factors, three working environment factors, that are really essential and these should come from the highest levels of the organization. If these are in place it's very likely that the climate of the organization will respond a lot of catalysts and nourishers for inner work life and for that daily progress that will lead to positive spirals. The first of these three climate factors is consideration, people respecting each other and the value of each other's ideas. The second is coordination, these are systems and procedures that facilitate smooth collaboration between individuals and across groups inside the organization and the third is communication, clear, honest respectful and free flowing information about the work and about the organization. If people at the very top levels of the organization can do these things consistently and if managers all the way down the line can do the same that will establish an atmosphere in which most people in the organization are showing each other consideration in which they are trying to coordinate their efforts effectively and in which they're communicating openly and non-defensively about ideas and about what's going on, that does have to start at the top.

Rachel Salaman: So if someone was listening to this and wanted to improve the inner work life or their team and themselves what steps would you recommend that they took say tomorrow to start them along that road?

Teresa Amabile: I think the most important thing to do tomorrow is to ask yourself what can I do to support people's progress in their most important work. What can I do to help clear the decks of meaningless work, work that isn't necessary. What can I do to supply catalysts that will jump start people's progress in their work. That's the first thing, that's the most important thing. The second is to ask yourself do people feel nourished as human beings in this workplace, do they really. It's easy as a manager to say oh yes of course they do but to ask yourself deeply is that true, do I see evidence that people feel that way and to find ways to find those nourishers that we talked about.

Rachel Salaman: Teresa Amabile, thank you very much for joining us.

Teresa Amabile: You're very welcome Rachel, it was my pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Teresa's book again is "The Progress Principle, Using Small Wins To Ignite Joy, Engagement And Creativity At Work." You can find out more about it at www.progressprinciple.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.