Recently, I interviewed Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Teresa’s research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life – the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivation that people experience as they react to events at work. With Steve Kramer, a psychologist and independent researcher, they coauthored The Progress Principle ; visit its website.
Rahim Kanani: Describe a little bit about the origin and motivation behind writing The Progress Principle.
Teresa Amabile: My coauthor, Steve Kramer, and I wrote The Progress Principle because we felt we had made important discoveries – and we wanted to tell people. The book describes the findings of a multi-year research project that my colleagues and I conducted to discover what makes people happy, motivated, creative and productive at work. To do this, we asked 238 people working on creative teams to send us a confidential electronic “diary” at the end of each work day for the entire length of a project. The diary form asked them to provide ratings on a number of items, including their mood, motivation, productivity, and creativity that day. But the most important item asked them to describe one event that stood out in their mind from that day – any event that was relevant to their work. In the end, we had nearly 12,000 of these dairies, describing people’s experiences over nearly 12,000 days at work.
We found that work is truly important to most people. They want to succeed and they want to make a contribution to something. Contrary to conventional wisdom, work is not merely about business; it is very personal to the people doing it.
Rahim Kanani: What’s the relationship between what you describe as “inner work life” and performance?
Teresa Amabile: “Inner Work Life” is the constant stream of emotions, perceptions and motivations that people experience as they go through their work days. Throughout the day, people react to events that happen and try to make sense out of them. These emotional reactions and perceptions affect their motivation for the work – all of which have a powerful influence on their performance. We found that when people have a positive inner work life, they are more creative, productive, committed to the work, and collegial toward their coworkers. And when they have poor inner work lives, the opposite is true – they are less creative, productive, committed and collegial.
Rahim Kanani: And in that vein, what is the “progress principle”?
Teresa Amabile: Given inner work life’s importance to performance, we wanted to understand what factors create good and bad inner work life. To do this, we compared the days on which our participants had their very best inner work life experiences with their very worst days. What we found was that, of all the events that occur on best days, one stood out well above the rest – simply making progress on meaningful work. We call this the “progress principle.”
When we talk about meaningful work, we do not necessarily mean lofty goals like curing cancer, only that the work be of value to the person doing it. In fact, meaningful work can be as ordinary as providing customers with a useful service or a quality product. But for the progress principle to take effect, the work must be meaningful in some way to the person.
There is a dark side to this story, however. The number one event that diminishes inner work life is simply having setbacks in the work. In fact, the negative effect of setbacks on inner work life can be 2-3 times greater than the positive effect of progress.
Rahim Kanani: What are the “catalyst factor” and the “nourishment factor”?
Teresa Amabile: We identified two factors or classes of events that are key to people’s inner work lives and their progress. The catalyst factor includes events that directly enable progress in the work. Catalysts include things like providing clear goals for the work and providing people with sufficient resources to accomplish those goals. The opposite of catalysts are inhibitors; these make progress difficult or impossible. They are the mirror image of the catalysts, and include giving unclear goals, micro-managing, and providing insufficient resources.
Nourishers directly support people’s inner work lives and include actions like showing respect and providing emotional support. Their opposite is toxins, which include being disrespectful or creating a hostile work environment.
Nourishers and catalysts work together to provide a work environment where workers can thrive and be fully engaged in their work, and where they can feel the sense of accomplishment that comes from making progress on meaningful work.
Rahim Kanani: How would you apply these learned insights to leading and managing social sector organizations?
Teresa Amabile: Probably the biggest challenge to social sector organizations is obtaining the capital needed to provide the resources for people to make progress in their work. This requires social sector managers to be very savvy about determining which resources are absolutely essential. And, while resources can be expensive, most of the other catalysts that enable progress are not. Clear goals, providing people with autonomy, and simply giving people help can do much to catalyze progress. And all the nourishers are free! So, much can be achieved with limited resources.
But social sector organizations also have a huge advantage over other organizations. Because they generally have the goal of helping people, the meaningfulness of the work is often both apparent and compelling, and the staff is usually highly motivated. In spite of this, it is often easy to lose the connection between the day-to-day work of an organization and its overall mission. So, leaders must make sure that employees understand how what they do contributes to that mission, and make it clear to them that those contributions are important. One way to help promote this connection is suggested by the research of Adam Grant and his colleagues. They have shown that workers’ motivation is increased if they can have some direct contact with people who have benefited from the services they provide.
Rahim Kanani: Reflecting on your research, how much of what you discovered has its roots in thoughtful and respectful human relations?
Teresa Amabile: We believe that the progress principle is deeply rooted in thoughtful and respectful human interaction. We have found that having positive inner work life is critical to making progress and vice versa. The nourishers, which help to sustain inner work life, actually include being respectful, giving emotional support, and creating an environment of camaraderie and affiliation.
But even the catalysts are rooted in developing positive human relations. Catalysts are all about helping other people to succeed at their work. Of course, the organization benefits. But we believe that, when managers truly understand the progress principle, they come to realize that one of their primary roles is to actually serve subordinates by providing them with the catalysts and nourishers needed to succeed.
Finally, the importance of meaningful work is about human relations, because people really want more from work then just a paycheck. They also want to feel that they are making a contribution to something – and that “something” usually involves other people.
Rahim Kanani: Going one step further, what does that tell you about leadership and management?
Teresa Amabile: The servant leadership movement and Peter Drucker have both made the point that managers and leaders must start by serving their subordinates. The progress principle supports that idea, and provides the reason why – By supporting people and their work you not only get happier workers, you get better performance.
The progress principle has another key implication for managers. Interestingly, the progress does not need to be a major breakthrough or accomplishment. Many of the progress events that lead to good inner work life are actually just incremental steps forward. And the same is true of setbacks; even small setbacks have a negative impact on inner work life. Because the effects of setbacks are stronger than progress, it is critical that managers remove obstacles that can block progress – even seemingly minor daily hassles in getting the work done. Another implication is that managers should break big goals down into smaller, achievable ones, so they can maximize the sense of progress that workers can experience. If you focus only on some momentous end goal, then you will not achieve the sense of progress that can come from a series of small wins – which, ultimately, achieve that same goal.