Aidan McCullen: A close analysis of nearly twelve thousand diary entries
together with the writers daily ratings of their motivations and emotions
shows that making progress in one's work even incremental progress,
is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation.
Then any other workday event the key to motivation doesn't depend
on elaborate incentive systems in fact the people in this study rarely
mentioned incentives in their diaries.
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,
Teresa Amabile: Thank you so much.
Aiden.
I'm delighted to be here with you and your audience
Aidan McCullen: it's so great to have you been dying to cover this book for
such a long time and the good news for audience i have a copy of this book up
for grabs for those people are signed up to our sub stack but firstly, teresa
i want to come to you and say thank you for covering this book because I
know that your work has moved on and you have made progress in your own
research and moved on to something else.
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.
Teresa Amabile: Aidan.
I appreciate that.
I smile when I realize that you and I pronounce the main word
in my title differently, and that's absolutely fine with me.
As you just , so concisely put it, the work That led to the book, The Progress
Principle, showed that of all the events that happen at work that can
make for a truly wonderful workday, the single most important is simply
making progress in meaningful work.
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
Aidan McCullen: We would absolutely welcome that and maybe you'll give
us a few insights into that because I often think about this and I've
seen it with people when they retire.
If they're too interwoven their identity is too interwoven with their career they
really struggle with work life after work and they go back to the office
they think maybe they might fulfill life with golf or whatever they have decided
but soon enough that drives up and.
It makes total sense that it's because probably they're
no longer making progress.
Teresa Amabile: I think that's a big part of it.
In fact, that is one of the main findings of our research.
That is that identity issues can loom large as a person retires, especially for
those who closely identified with either the work itself or their organization,
maybe their team, their profession.
If they felt that they were their work, , they didn't have much of
an identity outside of that work.
I am a lawyer.
I am a surgeon.
I'm an engineer.
I am a marketing specialist.
That transition can feel like.
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.
Aidan McCullen: You've whet our appetite for this show as well because preparing
for that obviously has to happen before the event itself so you have to do the
work before you discover just like an innovation you do the work before the
crisis so the crisis isn't so bad which is a beautiful way for the progress
principle the progress principle i should say i keep interchanging it so i've been
trying to pronounce it the way you do,
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
Teresa Amabile: You noted that many managers don't give the
sufficient thought, and that was one of the biggest surprises to us.
After we discovered the progress principle, and how, that is, how
important it is for people to be able to make at least some progress
in their work on a regular basis.
We told , some groups of executives about this finding.
And we often got a kind of puzzled look from them, or maybe a shrug.
Well, sure.
Yeah, people feel good when they Make progress.
Sure.
Yeah, everybody knows that.
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.
Aidan McCullen: i thought about this teresa as a parent , i
remember my younger guy.
Never played soccer before and he's crazy about soccer now but his friends were
ahead of him a few years and knowing how, you can actually create positive habits
i brought him out regularly and your book helped me even think back over that
and i thought about why he has done so well was because each day we practiced.
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.
Aidan McCullen: 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.
Teresa Amabile: Of course.
Yes.
And you actually use the phrase.
That's the key here with autonomy.
You want direction.
People can get, if they have too much autonomy, there's no direction.
You need to combine the clear goals with the autonomy, right?
So people should know which mountain we're going to climb.
That's the clear goals, but they should have autonomy as much as
possible in deciding how to climb it as long as they're getting there.
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?
Aidan McCullen: Please do.
Teresa Amabile: So this was a fascinating story of an information management
team that was about, , six people working on an incredibly important
project for the company with 145 million at stake for the company.
And they had only 8 days to solve this problem.
It was a problem having to do with their most important customer.
This information management team.
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.
Aidan McCullen: You beat me to it and i absolutely love that story it
was one i definitely wanted to share if you don't mind i'll just quote
a little piece from here because.
This can show how simple a small gesture can be so this lady who
had she had a family by the way so she came back from holidays having
a family left the family etc.
And you expected to see her diary entry being.
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.
Teresa Amabile: Yes, thank you , for quoting that.
Because I'd forgotten that little bit about stopping by with mineral water.
And I think the next night he stopped by with pizza.
They were working late and he came with some boxes of pizza, right?
Yeah, I see you nodding.
Yes.
And the other thing I wanted to mention was there were nourishers there, right?
The four nourishers are, first of all, respect and recognition.
He was showing That he respected their work.
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.
Aidan McCullen: It's a great story and let's mention that before i keep
bringing you off track by the way i've only got like five percent of
my notes and again i have a copy of the book up for grabs i highly
highly recommend the book it can be.
Somewhat hurtful reading in times i was sad reading the diary entries of many
many of the people because i empathized as well because i've been there.
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
Teresa Amabile: Absolutely.
And think about, you correctly noted that inner work life is the perceptions,
emotions, and motivations that people have as they react to and try to make
sense of the events going on around them.
What sense did they make of this?
The sense they made of it was, we don't matter.
Our ideas don't matter.
Our efforts are fruitless.
What does that do to perceptions of the organization and self perceptions?
What does that do to emotions?
You can hear it in, in, in that description.
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.
Aidan McCullen: Very sad very sad and that's what i mean
the empathy you have with that because these are real companies.
Let's share how you did this how you did this research because the appendix in
the book is huge because of the amount of research that you and your colleagues did.
Teresa Amabile: Yes.
Listeners, you don't have to read the research appendix.
I will give you the, I will give you a very high level version right now.
, 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.
Aidan McCullen: Beautiful absolutely beautiful i had a quote that was a
call to action for leaders but you absolutely nailed it there is exactly
the right concept of helping people make progress clear the obstacles
give them encouragement give them nourishment mental nourishment
psychological nourishment it is such a powerful book for leaders but also for.
Any individual to also diary to diary on progress, because it's very, very useful.
And you do include that at the end of the book as well.
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?
Teresa Amabile: You can look at my faculty page on HBS.
.EDU The Harvard Business School website, , there's a faculty page on me and it
talks about my work that I'm doing.
It, , , has a link to the progress principle book there.
And, , I don't yet have my new book up there because we're still working on
the cover, but it will be there soon.
And the, , book that you've been talking about with me here is called the "Progress
Principle colon using small wins to ignite joy, engagement and creativity at work".
And my new book is called "Retiring colon Creating a Life That Works for You".
And it will be coming out in fall 2024.
Aidan McCullen: Absolutely gold author of the progress principle Teresa
Amabile, thank you for joining us
Teresa Amabile: Thank you so much, Aidan.
It was my pleasure.