Teresa Amabile - The Progress Principle

On days when workers have the sense they're making headway in their jobs or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles their emotions are more positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. Drawing on over thirty years of research today's book focuses on a study that looked deeply inside seven companies tracking day to day events that move the inner work lives of their people.

In addition to revealing how much in their work life matters to employees and thus to companies our guests research turned up another deeper layer of meaning concerning events that are part of every workers day three types of events in particular what she calls the key three stand out as particularly potent forces supporting inner work life in this order progress in meaningful work, catalysts events that directly help project work, and nourishers interpersonal events

that uplift the people doing that work,.

It is a huge pleasure to welcome the author of that book and that research the author of the progress principle using simple wins to ignite joy engagement and creativity at work teresa amabile welcome to the show,

I thought we'd share that up front start of today's show because it's something that I'd love to cover in the future.

After I finished that research, wrote the book, gave many, many talks about the book, I started wondering, What happens when people have meaningful work, and then they need to leave that work behind? What happens when people who have been really engaged in something they're doing, have been doing a career, a job, maybe for decades? What happens? What is that experience like as they're leaving it behind for retirement?

So that was what sparked my interest in studying retirement, which I've been doing for the past decade now, with four amazing colleagues here in the Boston area. And we are right now finishing up the book, reporting on that research. The book is called, "Retiring, Creating a Life that Works for You." So I am going to be hoping that I can come on your show in the future and talk about that research, that work, and we do have some findings on creativity and progress in that book as well.

It was coming out of 215 interviews with 120 people over many years. Some of whom we followed through their retirement transition. So I hope to be able to share that with your audience in the future

It makes total sense that it's because probably they're no longer making progress.

losing yourself. But we found also that for some people, the identity issues are not that strong. They're not that extreme. And yet the retirement transition can present difficulties because of relationship issues. Some people, of course, have identity issues and relationship issues, but one of the most surprising findings was how many couples happily together for many years find that they, they really have to adjust to each other after one or both of them retires.

They have to come up with new relationships. routines and rhythms for their life, they need to rediscover each other sometimes. Because it's often the case that they have never had this much time together, since they were first dating perhaps, they were first married. Or maybe not ever, because when they first got together, they may well have already been deeply engaged in work or study. Something that occupied many, many hours of their, their waking lives every week.

And now they're sitting there looking at each other across the breakfast table and sometimes wondering, who are you really? What do we have to talk about? What is it we'd like to do with our day, our week, the rest of our lives? So that, that's an interesting challenge and , we've seen some fascinating differences in the ways that people approach that challenge. And the third challenge, this may be the biggest one, and it faces everyone, is how to restructure your life after you've retired.

And of course that has to do with the close relationships you have and the, and the more casual relationships you have, but it also has to do with the question of what are you going to do with your time? With the 35 or 40, sometimes 60 hours a week that you've been spending engaged in your work, whether you loved it or you didn't love it at all, your work structured your life for many, many years. And now it's up to you to structure your life to decide how you want to spend your time.

Do you want to be really active right from the beginning? Do you want to be, on the go, go, go, travel, or volunteer work, or perhaps finding a part time job? Do you want to get very engaged in taking care of your grandchildren, perhaps? Or would you prefer a more relaxed pace and just seeing what emerges? In your life, maybe, spending more time reading the books that you've been stacking up and waiting to get to gardening enjoying walks, becoming more physically fit.

There are great variations in what people end up finding for themselves and building this new life and how long it takes them to find a life structure that really feels satisfying for them.

there's a lot of things we are sure what my irish accent would say differently including Amabile which i had to practice before we came on to the show live, so let's get into the progress principle because i have to say it made me think about so many things reading this book and if you're a manager or ceo or your lead people in anyway or even just leading yourself understanding this principle is so valuable for your progress of work but also for your mental health i felt that

big time and also in the fact that when i think about the times i was frustrated in my working life, it's because i was no longer making any progress i was maybe in when i was a professional athlete injured or not getting selected in the team. Or in the real world when i was working in organizations many times working in innovation somebody like a cfo killing the progress killing the idea.

Absolutely had a dramatic effect on your mental health as an innovator or change maker so maybe we'll open with that because that would make it hyper relevant to our audience

But you know what? We didn't think so. Because the managers in the companies where we did this diary study, many of the managers seemed oblivious of the importance of progress, because they did virtually nothing to pay attention to whether their people, their teams, were able to make regular progress. In their work, so we did a little survey of nearly 700 managers and executives from companies around the world. We asked them a simple question. We're going to list 5 motivators.

We're going to ask you of these motivators rank order them in terms of how important you think they are. For people in their work. We had the usual suspects. We had tangible reward for the work, pay, promotion, that sort of thing. Recognition for the work. We had clear goals in the work, interpersonal support, and of course we had progress.

Now, we know from our research that progress was number 1 by far in terms of being able to motivate people day to day to really get into their work, engage in it, innovatively, creatively, productively these. 669 managers. did not rank Progress as the number one motivator. In fact, they didn't rank it as the number two motivator, or the number three, or the number four motivator. They ranked it, on average, over all these people, it was ranked dead last.

In fact, only 5 percent of these managers ranked Progress number one. If they had been making their choices randomly, 20 percent of them would have selected progress. Number 1, it's as if they were saying, we don't think this is that important. And it's more important than anything else. So that. To me is the most shocking finding of this and why I felt so driven to write this book and to get the word out. And I've written a number of articles with this message.

I've tried to speak with as many groups as I can. And I'm so delighted that you're bringing this message to your audience. Because it's not top of mind and I can understand that. Managers have a lot to think about in their work. It's not easy. They have to think about their strategy. They have to think about what are their customers doing, what are their customers wanting and needing. They have to think about their competitors.

They have to think about what's going on in the in the local environment, the local economy. They have to think about what's going on in the global economy. What are the social and demographic trends that might be affecting our business now and in the future? There's a lot, and it makes it so easy to stop thinking about what's going on internally with the people who are actually executing your strategy. They need the catalyst that you mentioned.

They need the nourishers you mentioned on a regular basis. They need at least a bit of attention every day, every week, so that they can simply be enabled to do their best work. That is to make progress in their work.

I considered that i was setting the bar low enough that he would succeed so it was slightly difficult but it would be slightly more difficult but not too difficult and i think it's that sweet spot that to your point he's making progress but then i also understood the neuroscience of that that there's a dopamine hit behind this every time when you achieve it's almost like having your to do list everyday and as you take things off being you get it open me in here and

then at the end of the book you talk about the checklist and the importance of this daily checklist and i'm jumping to there because i know, many of our listeners are extremely busy and may not get through the entire show so i thought this was so so important that i bring it right from the back of the book right to the front. And share this with our audience particularly if you're a manager.

, Teresa Amabile: you want to use a checklist, like this, to help yourself think about what your people need to make progress. Now, that means you need to be in close enough touch with them either observing them frequently, ideally communicating with them about how the work is going, what they need, what might be getting in the way.

So I'm going to go through the catalysts, which are on the checklist. I'm going to go through the nourishers as well. But let me first of all say, Initially, you want to just ask people, find out if they feel they're making progress on the most important work that they need to do. And if not, why not? If so, what's helping to catalyze their progress so that you can make sure that those supports stay in place for them. The opposite of progress, of course, is setbacks.

So you do want to have progress and setbacks right at the top of your checklist this note are people Making progress in their most important work and you want to look specifically at the catalysts for progress Are these things that you're doing? Are these things that your people have. The opposite of the catalyst are the obstacles. So as I go through the catalyst, you can easily imagine what the opposites are.

And those are things that you want to try to scrub from your work environment as much as possible , and dampen them down as much as you can as a manager. The first catalyst is simply clear goals and meaningful work. Make sure that people understand how what they do every day connects to something that matters, whether it's setting up the laboratory for the scientists, so that everything they need the next morning.

is in place, they can do their work in trying to discover new drugs to treat serious diseases. I actually spoke with a janitor, the head of maintenance services at a pharmaceutical, a biopharma company several years ago, and he talked about how meaningful he felt his work was. Because he and his team were enabling the scientists to get in there and do the work of helping to cure diseases. He was able to connect what he was doing to that meaningful goal.

And I think it's because that company did a great job of occasionally bringing in patients who had been helped by their medicines. And inviting everyone in the company to come to these sessions. Or to watch the video of, the patient talking about how their lives had been transformed and the goals have to be clear, not just meaningful, but clear people need to know what they're doing and why it matters. The next is autonomy. So, even as people are having those clear goals.

They need to feel that they have autonomy. They have some freedom in deciding how to meet those goals, that they can use their own ideas. They can use their own creativity to get there. Next is sufficient resources. You can't do the work if you don't have the necessary resources, and I'm not talking about lavish resources, which can actually kind of smother a project.

I'm talking about the resources that people really need to get their work done, so that they're not spending all of their time trying to find those resources rather than doing the work. The next is simply help with the work. When things are really difficult, getting people the expertise that they need, the information that they need, or perhaps sitting down and helping yourself in any way that you can. The next catalyst is in some ways, the most difficult for managers to do.

And that is having an atmosphere where everyone views problems and mistakes as learning opportunities, rather than opportunities to bury it, pretend it didn't happen, or opportunities to castigate people and blame. No, let's look at what happened. Let's see what we can learn from it and move on from there. The next catalyst is open idea flow. And that is within the group, ideally within the department and within the whole organization, a sense that new ideas are welcome.

And I'm sure you've seen this in your innovation research yourself, your innovation practice. Ideas are welcome. Not that every idea will be accepted. Of course not. But every idea will be respected enough to get a fair hearing and finally sufficient time, but not too much. We found that people do their optimal work and make the best progress. when they understand that there is an urgent need for what they're doing, that adds to the meaningfulness of it.

But when they have enough time to think, when they have enough time to explore for that creative solution, that's going to really serve better the purpose that they have for , that clear and meaningful goal. So those are the seven catalysts. I'll go through them quickly again, clear goals and meaningful work, Autonomy. sufficient resources, help with the work, learning from problems and successes, open idea flow, and sufficient time, but not too much.

So those are the factors that catalyze progress. And you can imagine the opposite of each of those. Try not to do those things. Well, the catalysts, I mean, they seem so simple and they seem so straightforward, but as you show in your research, and I want to share the depth of the research here, I mentioned the 12, 000 and the seven companies, these were real companies. I want to share that with our audience, real companies anonymized.

The people were anonymized and these people talk at time every day to daily diary, what was going on in their inner work life. And I want to share what that term means as well.

But before we do share that research, I'd love you to do share, share the opposite, just for anybody who's unaware of that, because there was stuff like autonomy, but there's a sweet spot with all these things that , autonomy is great, but sometimes people feel somebody who's giving them autonomy with no direction means that they don't care or they're scattered, et cetera, or the opposite. In times of crisis, a manager might think they're.

Giving guidance, but they're micromanaging and there's a, there's a lot in there. So it's probably very useful to show the opposite. I'd love if you would.

As long as they are making progress toward that goal, allow them as much autonomy as possible. Micromanaging is definitely the opposite of autonomy. That's almost never the way to go. There does need to be a balance of the clarity of goals. But the autonomy in achieving the goals.

Efficient resources, you know, I've seen a number of cases where people were so starved of resources, resources that I knew existed in the organization, because I had a bigger picture of what was going on in the organization, but they didn't have access to those resources because they didn't have a manager who was advocating for them. They couldn't get access, for example, to the equipment they needed. To do that next experiment .To test this new product, or to test this manufacturing

process that they were developing . All it would take was a little bit of attention on the part of the manager to say, oh, well, we, you know, we can work out the schedule so that the departments can seamlessly share this equipment. Rather than the department that happens to have the biggest bully for their manager, getting the access to the equipment all the time. Right? So there are a lot of political issues in organizations.

That managers can cut through, but the people doing the work cannot cut through those. The opposite of that is simply ignoring the fact that people are struggling. And not realizing that sometimes simple access to an expert who exists in the organization , could get them over the hump , of a complex project where they're suffering setback after setback, learning from problems and successes. there are 2 forms of opposites there. 1 is pretending that it didn't happen and never talking about it.

Which just leads to feelings of shame and embarrassment. Or calling people out, calling individuals out for having made a mistake or for having tried something that failed. Which also leads to shame, and pulling back, , and risk aversion. So the ideal is to say, yeah, this didn't work right, or yes, this was a mistake. But what can we learn from it? Let's try to extract some failure value here.

Because almost always it is possible, at least to extract a lesson of how not to do things in the future. But sometimes there's a real gem of learning within a mistake or a setback and the projects that we studied, the project teams that we studied, were all working on complex problems that required creative solutions and you can't work on a creative problem without making some mistakes without having some dead ends that you follow, you have to have an atmosphere of psychological safety.

That's a term that , my colleague, Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School has written about so eloquently and done so much important research on. If you can establish that psychological safety in the organization, where you yourself, the manager , will, Admit when you've made a mistake, when you've tried something that, okay, folks, we tried this new approach. It's not working. Let's regroup. Let's do something else that frees everyone up to feel that they can take reasonable risks.

They can be creative and it's not going to be the end of the world if it doesn't work out and finally sufficient time I saw so many cases of what we call being on a treadmill Where people feel that they're just running constantly from one thing to the next with no time to think that's Never optimal for creativity. Yeah. Sometimes creative work has to be done under the gun when there's a truly urgent need for a solution.

If that's the case, it's important to clear the decks and, allow people to simply focus on that problem and not be distracted by meetings and administrative paperwork. And that sort of thing, but to really focus.

Can I tell a little story here from, from our diaries?

Was 1, where we saw more catalysts and nourishers during those 8 days than we saw in some other teams, the entire period of months that we followed them for 1 thing. Top management made very clear how important this project was. So everyone knew that it really mattered. It was a meaningful goal. The top management also cleared the decks for that team, told them, don't worry about anything else that's been on your plate right now.

You can set aside all the other projects and simply focus on this problem. Everyone on the team pulled together. In fact, one person postponed her vacation week, so she could come in and work with her teammates on this, intensely important project. Certain groups in the organization helped out, helping to do analyses or bringing in information that might be useful. No one showed more catalysts and nourishers, though, than that team leader.

She Got in there rolled up her sleeves and worked right alongside everyone else solving 1 technical problem after another and she kept everyone's spirits up by doing things like singing a silly song as midnight approached on the 7th night. Well, the outcome was a success. A true example of creative productivity, they did it. And their feelings during that time you might think were terrible, but they were not. It was just the opposite. They were energized by this.

They felt an incredible sense of camaraderie. In fact, 1 guy on this team said in his diary, things have been crazy. We've been working around the clock, but everyone has been staying on the cheery side of the street. God help me. I do love them so, so, I mean, it was just a marvelous, marvelous story.

Extremely negative like we all would but you were surprised by the opposite but it was because of this goldilocks effect of several different catalysts one of them was so simple a senior manager drop by with some she called it fancy mineral water.

And in the book you write perhaps for the first time in a long while the top manager was humanized he had done something in inverted commas nice, he had shown that he noticed her work and he cared but the managers gesture, Altered perceptions of the work itself, which are even more central to the way that progress operates on the inner work life, because high level managers almost never stopped by to encourage the team in any way and his action signified to the team how important

this project was to the organization that. Seemingly simple gesture that seemingly meaningless gesture had such a dramatic effect on inner work life of people and i'm using that as a segue to share that before we then share the research and the depth of research that you did here.

He understood what experts they were in this particular problem solving realm, and he recognized them. He recognized them as individuals and as a team for what they were doing. The second nourisher is encouragement. Of course, he was encouraging them and what they were doing. The third nourisher is emotional support. I don't think he specifically showed emotional support, but that team leader absolutely showed emotional support. She was there for her people.

If they were struggling with something professionally or personally, they could talk to her. And the fourth one, affiliation and camaraderie. Well, you saw it all over that story, right? Someone giving up her vacation week. someone else saying we're all working around the clock doing just crazy hard things, but we love each other. We're in this together. It was really an almost perfect example of the seven catalysts and the four nourishers.

And i'll just quote a little piece here because this will actually be a nice way to introduce the companies and the research that you did. This company you anonymized as carpenter the book opens with this company selling off whatever assets is left of the company auctions of the furniture and some of the key workers, standing there in the auction lot looking on distraught. And four years previously.

Carpenter had brought in a new top executive team which reorganized all the divisions into cross functional business teams with each team managing a set of related product lines, this company at the time was top of the game recognized as being innovative. When interviewers asked for the company's success formula, these executives told a compelling story about the new model they were bringing in.

Each team was to function as an entrepreneurial group, autonomously responsible for everything from inventing new products to managing inventory and profitability. Best of all they would have the resources of a substantial corporation to back them up with minimal interference.

Fast forward then to another excerpt i took this was a fateful product meeting that took place and this was from a diary entry by one of the people in that this product review meeting proved to be a major event for the people of the domain team. This will make so much sense to so many of our audiences. Teresa, |" Like the slash of a sword, it cut down months of the team's product development work.

Not only did it provoke unhappiness and frustration, it soured people's views of management and drained motivation of the work. Well- meaning as we know they were carpenters managers did not understand the power of what you call inner work life, the perceptions, emotions and motivations that people experience as they react to and make sense of the events in the workday."

That is such a crucial part of the book and one that our audience which are many change makers many people working in longer term projects even in transformation that. They can be Working on something and then all of a sudden new management come in change direction and all the work all their progress is just gone overnight

And, and what does it do to motivation? Kills it. It kills it. So, yes, of course, sometimes managers do need to change direction. They need to change strategy because external conditions have changed dramatically. But they can do it in a way that doesn't kill inner work life. They can do it in a way that says, Oof, this is a body blow to us. And we know it's going to feel even worse to you. We respect what you've done. You have done great work.

And maybe someday we can return to developing this product line, to developing these great ideas that you have. What you have done will not be lost. But please work with us. To go in this new direction That is not at all what this company did this company that we call carpenter. They just came in by Fiat. Okay, what you've done, it's all off the table. This is what you're going to be doing now. And that company became a drain.

It became a drain where the very best people were just leaving in droves and they couldn't, stop that brain drain. And within just, I think it was three years after that incident that you described there, the company was doing very poorly, , innovation had dried up to a trickle, profitability had tanked, and the company was acquired by a smaller rival. And then it was being completely sold off. And that's the auction that you described.

And some people, , this was a company town, pretty much people from the community, many of them, former workers here, we're standing around watching this auction and seeing , , their desks and their chairs and their, workstations being, auctioned off, just standing there, some of them with tears in their eyes.

, we decided that the best way to understand what really happens at work inside people's hearts and minds was to ask them to fill out a very short, Confidential electronic diary for us every day during the entire course of a project because of my fascination with creativity and innovation and how important that is for for the success of any business. And any social initiative, by the way, any nonprofit as well, I wanted to study people working on complex, creative projects.

So we, we sought teams of people who are doing such projects because work like that does not get done by individuals any longer. We're in a world where teams do this sort of work. So we went to a number of companies. asking if we might, they might allow us to recruit their teams doing complex creative projects. This was mostly product development. Sometimes it was process development. Sometimes it was solving complex client problems.

About half the companies we approached said, yes, and we ended up with 7 companies participating in this research, a total of 26 project teams within those 7 companies and 239 individuals in those teams. And a team would sign up , if really just about everyone on the team , was willing to participate in the teams varied in size from 3 people to 9 people. And that's fairly typical in organizations. for your questions. The projects people were working on varied in length.

The shortest was 3 months and the longest was 9 months. We use a number of techniques to keep people motivated to fill out these electronic diaries for us at the end of each workday, Monday through Friday. We just sent it in the email. It was a very short survey with some numerical questions on it about their emotions, perceptions and motivations that day, specifically. And the most important question at the end of the diary, the daily diary was.

Of all the events that happened today, think of one that stands out in your mind. It can be any event at all, as long as it's relevant to your work or this project that you're working on. And we tell them it could even be something from their personal life, as long as it was relevant to their work. And we asked them to describe the event very concretely, what happened, and who was involved. That was how , we were able to study.

The impact of these day by day events inside organizations on people's inner work life, and we were able to study the impact of inner work life on people's work. Not only did we have these diaries, but we also got assessments. Of each individual's creativity and productivity and Colleagueship and commitment to the work every month from their closest colleagues and their supervisors. So we had these, these external measures of people's performance.

And we made our 1st discovery, putting that performance data together with the inner work life data, which we had from every daily diary. We knew about emotions, perceptions, and motivations from those daily diaries. And the first discovery we call the inner work life effect.

And that is on those days, and those weeks, and those months when people are having their most positive emotions, , their most positive perceptions of the organization, their team, Even themselves, and when they have the strongest intrinsic motivation, that is being really jazzed about the work, really excited about the work.

And those days and weeks and months, that's precisely when people are most likely to be creative in their work, productive, show the highest level of commitment to their work, and be better colleagues to each other, which of course raises the level of everyone else's performance around them. So that's the inner work life effect. And then we thought, okay, if inner work life is so important to performance, what makes a difference for inner work life?

And that's when we discovered the progress principle. We went in and looked at people's very best inner work life days, you know, the best emotions, motivations and perceptions and the very worst. And we looked at whether there were differences in the kinds of events occurring on those days. And, oh boy, did we find huge differences. The single biggest differentiator. was whether people were making progress in their work or having setbacks in their work.

The best inner work life days, 76 percent of those best inner work life days had a progress event. 67 percent of the worst inner work life days had a setback, which is the opposite of progress. It's feeling like you're being stalled in your work, you can't move forward, or maybe you're, even going backwards. It's We did find other positive events, of course, and other negative events, but none of them even came close to being as important , as progress or in its negative form setbacks.

We even found what we call the power of small wins. And that is the progress principle even operates with really small step forward, steps forward, things that to us as observers looked almost trivial, but they could be so meaningful and so energizing and motivating to people on the day that they happen. An example is again from that information management team. I was talking about before we had an engineer who was working at a very complex.

Computer program for an important client and there was a bug in the program that he wasn't able to identify for a few days and we saw him in his diary every day say, ah, this bug is driving me crazy. I can't figure it out. And then later in the week, he said, I smashed that bug. That's been frustrating me for almost a calendar week. That may not be an event to you, but I live a very drab life, so I'm all hyped. Most of my team members who would know about this are out today.

So I have to sit here rejoicing in my solitary smugness. That is one of my very favorite diary entries, which is why I've memorized it. His joy was palpable and in the ratings he gave for his emotions, perceptions, motivation that day, as you might imagine, we're all at the top of the scale. That's a really small thing, right? In the, in the grand scheme of that guy's Career, even in the grand scheme of that project, it was no big thing. It was just a bug.

But the thing is, it was a big thing to him on the day that it happened, , and he was happy for days after that. And we know from our research , , in this research program, that being happy, you're more likely to be creative and productive and more committed to the work that you're doing and a better colleague. To other people. And interestingly, we found that 28 percent of small events had a really big impact on inner work life the day that they happened.

Unfortunately, negative events have a stronger impact in the negative direction than positive events have in the positive direction 3 to 4 times as strong an impact. So that means ideally for every. Step backward and there are always going to be steps backward. You need to help people have a couple of steps forward if you're going to truly promote positive inner work life. If you can do that with, the concrete obvious management 101 things you do, those catalysts and those nourishers.

You are likely to set some positive spirals in motion where people are having good inner work life because of the nourishers you're giving them. They're therefore more likely to make progress, especially if you have catalysts in place. And that in turn, that progress is going to lead to better inner work life, which will in turn lead to more creative and productive progress.

Teresa, I'm aware that you're under time pressure and I could talk to you all day.

As I said, I think I got about 7 percent through my notes here, but for people who want to find out more about your work, your research, and indeed your forthcoming book, where's the best place to find you?

And my new book is called "Retiring colon Creating a Life That Works for You". And it will be coming out in fall 2024.