The Progress Principle by T. Amabile and S. Kramer - Book Summary
This is my summary of ‘The Progress Principle’ by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. My notes are informal and tailored to my own interests at the time of reading. They mostly contain quotes from the book as well as some of my own thoughts. I enjoyed this book and would recommend you read it yourself (check it out on Amazon).
Inner work life
Inner work life is the combination of perceptions, emotions, and motivations that people experience as they react to and make sense of events in the workday.
Perceptions: sensemaking about workday events - favorable or unfavorable, and sometimes quite nuanced, impressions about managers, the organization, the team, the work, and oneself; sense of accomplishment.
Emotions: reactions to workday events - positive or negative, triggered by any event at work; overall mood.
Motivations: desire to do the work - the drive whether to do something or not, what to do, how to do it, when to do it.
Inner work life is a system, a set of interdependent components that interact over time.
A key aspect of a system is that you can’t explain what is going on by looking at just one or two elements.
It’s impossible to understand your inner work life at any moment without considering the interplay of all three elements (perceptions, emotions, motivations).
We continually react to everything that happens at work.
We determine whether the work we are doing is important and how much effort to exert.
We make judgements about the people we work with, including our superiors. Are they competent or incompetent? Should we respect their decisions?
We spend so much of our lives at work, and because most of us are so invested in the work we do, our feelings of success as individuals are tied to our day-to-day sense of ourselves at work. If we believe that our work is valuable and we are successful, then we feel good about this key part of our lives. If our work lacks value or if we feel we have failed at it, then our lives are greatly diminished.
People’s inner work lives are also influenced by other events that don’t happen at work, like changes in the company’s stock price or hassles in their personal lives.
As a leader, your actions - even seemingly trivial ones - could have a potent effect on people working in the trenches of the organization.
People try to hide their inner work life.
Most organizations have unwritten rules against showing strong emotions or expressing strong opinions - especially if they are negative or contrary to prevailing views.
Even if people are comfortable confiding in a peer, they are usually loath to reveal themselves to superiors.
Example: Even if your blood boils when the chairman of the board dismisses the careful analysis you have just presented, you will probably smile pleasantly as you inquire about additional data that might be helpful.
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The inner work life effect
Individual performance is closely tied to inner work life.
If people do not perceive that they and their work are valued by a trustworthy organization, if they derive no pride or happiness from their work, they will have little drive to dig into a project. And without a strong drive to deeply engage the problems and opportunities of a project, people are unlikely to do their best work.
The inner work life effect: Inner work life influences people’s performance in four dimensions: creativity, productivity, work commitment, and collegiality.
Creativity: coming up with novel and useful ideas.
Productivity: getting work done on a steady basis, turning out consistently high-quality work, and ultimately completing projects successfully.
Work commitment: When people persevere through difficulties, help their coworkers succeed and do what it takes to get the job done.
Collegiality: any action that contributes to team cohesiveness; it is what team members demonstrate when they support each other interpersonally, act as if they are all part of the same team and work effort, and show that they care about how well the team functions.
Three types of events stand out as particularly potent forces supporting inner work life, in this order:
Progress in meaningful work.
The progress principle: of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.
Real progress triggers positive emotions like satisfaction, gladness, even joy. It leads to a sense of accomplishment and self-worth as well as positive views of the world and, sometimes, the organization.
Examples: small wins, breakthroughs, forward movement, goal completion
Catalysts (project-related):
Events that directly help project work.
Seven major catalysts:
Setting clear goals. People should know where their work is heading and why it matters. They need unambiguous short- and long-term goals. When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and unmotivated.
Allowing autonomy. A key aspect of autonomy is feeling that one’s decisions will hold. If management generally overrides people’s decisions, they quickly lose motivation to make any decision, which severely inhibits progress.
Providing resources. Lavish resources aren’t required, but access to necessary equipment, funding, data, materials, and personnel is. Withholding necessary resources or rendering them difficult to access engenders a sense of futility, anger at having to waste time scrounging or doing “grunt work,” and a perception that the project must not be very important.
Giving enough time - but not too much.
Help with the work. Help can take many forms, from providing needed information, to brainstorming with a colleague, to collaborating with someone who is struggling. Employees become dejected when help is inaccessible, frustrated when it is withheld by someone important to the project, and infuriated when they perceive that someone is actively hindering their work.
Learning from problems and successes. Inner work life was much more positive when problems were faced squarely, analyzed, and met with plans to overcome or learn from them. Inner work life faltered when problems were ignored, punished, or handled haphazardly. Learnings from success matters, too. Successes, even small ones, should be celebrated and then analyzed for knowledge gained.
Allowing ideas to flow. Ideas flowed best when managers truly listened to their workers, encouraged vigorous debate of diverse perspectives, and respected constructive criticism - even of themselves.
Nourishers (people-related):
Interpersonal events that uplift the people doing the work, such as encouragement, showing respect, comforts, fostering collegiality, and other forms of social or emotional support.
Example: top managers stop by to encourage the team with refreshments over the holiday weekend and commend them on their great work at the end of the project.
4 major nourishers:
Respect:
Recognition. However large or small the tangible value of rewards for good work may be, and however formal or informal the recognition for such work, people feel respected when their efforts are acknowledged. Give employees’ ideas serious attention, signaling that they and their insights are valued.
Honesty. Dealing with people honestly shows respect. When people realize that a manager is misleading them - even when attempting to spare their feelings - they can conclude that the manager does not trust their professionalism.
Basic civility. Incivility signifies strong disrespect.
Encouragement.
A manager’s own enthusiasm can help to increase employees’ motivation for the work.
Express confidence that people are capable of doing the work well. (cf. Dale Carnegie: give a man a fine reputation to live up to)
Emotional support. Simply acknowledge people’s sorrows and frustrations, as well as their joys. Empathy is better than simple acknowledgment. This goes for emotions arising from events at work, like frustration at stubborn technical problems, and events in personal life, like grief following a loved one’s death.
Affiliation. Actions that develop bonds of mutual trust, appreciation, and even affection with coworkers. Provide opportunities for people to become acquainted with their colleagues face to face and find ways for them to have fun together.
The negative forms - or absence of - the key three events powerfully undermine inner work life:
Setbacks in the work. Just as progress is the biggest stimulant to inner work life, setbacks are the biggest downer. Setbacks in any sort of meaningful work are a fact of life. Examples: hitting dead ends while trying to solve a vexing problem, being blocked in attempts to meet a goal, failing to find crucial information.
Inhibitors (project-related): events that directly hinder project work
Toxins (people-related): interpersonal events that undermine the people doing the work
Negative events are more powerful than positive events, all else being equal.
Small everyday hassles at work hold more sway than small everyday supports. Try to reduce daily hassles. This means that even your small actions to remove obstacles impeding the progress of individuals and teams can make a big difference for inner work life.
Even seemingly mundane events - such as small wins and minor setbacks - can exert potent influence on inner work life. Small wins often have a surprisingly strong positive effect, and small losses a surprisingly strong negative one.
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‘The Progress Principle’ also covered many more insightful topics. You’ll find them below in alphabetical order.
Cognitive biases
Happiness bias:
When people tend towards more positive interpretations of an event, and vice versa.
Sensemaking:
When something happens that grabs your attention, you start sensemaking - trying to figure out what it means. Your mind poses a series of questions, especially if what happened was ambiguous or unexpected; these questions and their answers make up your perceptions.
This can range from immediate impressions to fully developed theories about what is happening and what it means.
Example:
If upper management canceled your team’s project without warning or explanation: do these managers know what they’re doing? Are my teammates incompetent? Am I? Does the work I do have real value?
Each of us interprets each workday event against our own backstories in our organizations.
Example: There was a long backstory to Bruce’s perceptions when he heard that the Spray Jet Mop program was off his team’s priority list. After nearly 20 years at the company, he knew that something had changed dramatically after the new management regime took over. He had watched their pattern of decisions. He knew that Jack Higgins and his corporate boss, COO Barry Thomas, had seemed skittish about developing radically new products. Bruce compared their style, unfavorably, with the relentless innovative spirit of prior generations of top Karpenter management, who had driven the company to the pinnacle where the rest of the world still held it. Against this backstory, as he interpreted what happened to his favorite project in the product review meeting, Bruce drew his decidedly pessimistic conclusions.
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Emotions
Emotions vary along two key dimensions: degree of pleasantness, and degree of intensity.
Example: you can be mildly annoyed by a brief outage of the corporate intranet or enraged by a flippant response to a new idea you floated in a management meeting. Both are unpleasant emotions, but the latter is much more unpleasant and much more intense.
Examples of emotions
The joy you feel when you finally solve a difficult problem
The frustration when your solutions fails
The disappointment when the board rejects your strategic plan
The pride when a fellow manager recognizes your creativity at a company meeting
The gratitude when an assistant helps you find critical information
The anger when you discover that your subordinates have missed a milestone because another team failed to do its work
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Motivation
A person’s grasp of what needs to be done. A combination of:
A person’s choice to do some task
Desire to expend effort at doing it
Drive to persist with that effort
3 sources of motivation:
The different forms of motivation can coexist in the same person, at the same time, for the same work.
Extrinsic motivation:
The motivation to do something in order to get something else.
If extrinsic motivators are extremely strong and salient, they can undermine intrinsic motivation; when this happens, creativity can suffer.
Example: if the CEO reminds you of that marketing strategy deadline twice a day. Now overwhelmed by the sense that you are working primarily to make the timeline, you can lose the excitement of creating something great. You may begin to focus narrowly on just getting the job done, rather than exploring for a truly novel “killer” strategy.
Examples of extrinsic motivation:
Your motivation to take a position because the pay and benefits can’t be beat.
To work 14-hour-days all week just to meet a deadline that you consider arbitrary.
To do whatever it takes to win an industry award.
To produce a position paper that you know will look good for your performance review.
Intrinsic motivation:
Doing the work because it is interesting, enjoyable, satisfying, engaging, or personally challenging.
Relational or altruistic motivation:
Arises from the need to connect with and help other people.
Many people are driven to do well for a person or a group they like and respect.
Examples:
The camaraderie that comes from collaborating with congenial colleagues
The belief that our work has real value to a person, a group, or society at large (can be general: “my work helps people with Type I diabetes”; can be specific: “my research could lead to a treatment for my diabetic child”)
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Systems thinking
A key aspect of any system is that you can’t explain what is going on by looking at just one or two elements.
Example: The thermostat continuously reacts to changes in temperature caused by the fan and compressor; the compressor needs a signal from the thermostat; the fan can’t deliver cool, dry air unless the compressor functions well; and proper car temperature requires all of these elements working harmoniously.
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