Teresa Amabile and her colleagues were interested in researching what makes people happy, motivated, productive and creative at work.
To do that, they asked creative knowledge workers to keep a confidential electronic diary about their workday. The form, sent to 238 workers each day for a period of several weeks, consisted of a few survey questions asking them to describe their psychological state and to note something that happened that day.
The researchers called this psychological state “inner work life,” which has three components.
The first is people’s emotions, their emotional reactions to what happened during the day. The second is their perceptions, their judgments, their thoughts, their impressions of what’s going on and what it means. The third is their motivation, their drive to do what they’re doing.
After categorizing all 65,000 events described in the 12,000 submitted diaries, they determined, first, that an employee’s inner work life was crucial, and second, that it was highly influenced by one simple thing.
“There was one kind of event that stood out. It was way more prominent than anything else, and that was simply making progress in meaningful work,” said Amabile, a professor and director of research at Harvard Business School and co-author of “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Creativity, and Engagement at Work.”
Amabile spoke to Faith & Leadership while visiting the Duke University School of Nursing as the 2014 Harriet Cook Carter keynote speaker. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What did the diaries tell you about employees?
We had two main discoveries. The first we call the inner work life effect -- that inner work life drives performance. On those days and weeks and months when people were having the most positive inner work life, they were more likely to perform better.
And they were more likely to be better colleagues to each other, which raises everybody’s level of performance.
Q: What was your second discovery?
We said, “All right, if inner work life is so important for performance, what influences inner work life?”
We looked at what was actually going on in the workplace when people had their most positive inner work life days.
There was one kind of event that stood out. It was way more prominent than anything else, and that was simply making progress in meaningful work.
When people felt that they were moving forward in work that they cared about, they were much more likely to have a positive inner work life experience that day.
I want to say something about meaningful work. There were some diaries where we found people had gotten a lot done on work that they didn’t care about, work that was meaningless to them. When people made a lot of progress on that kind of work, it didn’t necessarily boost inner work life.
But when they made progress in meaningful work, they had more positive emotions, more positive perceptions and stronger intrinsic motivation for what they were doing.
Interestingly, we found that this happens not only for huge breakthroughs or spectacular failures. It also happens with small events. We found that the progress principle applies even when people make small steps forward -- small wins.
I have to tell you this happens in the negative direction as well as the positive direction. So on people’s worst inner work life days, the single most prominent event by far was setbacks in the work.
We also found that negative events have a stronger impact on inner work life than positive events do.
Q: What does this mean for managers?
One of the most important implications of the small-wins finding is that managers really do have to sweat the small stuff. They have to pay attention to whether their people are making progress on their most important work, and if they’re not, why not.
We found in analyzing these diary stories that there were a number of pretty simple things that managers could do to support progress. We call these the catalysts to progress.
First of all, people need clear goals on meaningful work. You’d be amazed at how many people of those that we studied really didn’t have a clear sense of what goals they were supposed to be achieving in their work or why it mattered.
I would think that that would be relatively straightforward for people who are working in religion. I would think that their ministries would have a high degree of meaning for them -- helping people who are searching, for example, or helping people who are bereaved, or helping people to find a better path in life. That strikes me as very high meaningfulness.
The tricky part for the religious leader is to help people connect the sometimes very tedious day-to-day work that they’re doing to that higher purpose.
It’s stressful, but we found leaders who are able to do that, who are able to connect even the most mundane tasks to the higher purpose of the organization, to the people we’re trying to serve in this organization.
What’s really useful is to actually expose people who are doing the work to those who benefit from it. I have a colleague at Wharton whose name is Adam Grant.
He wrote a wonderful book called “Give and Take.” He found that simply bringing in a beneficiary, a recipient of the services that an organization provides, to spend five minutes talking to people about how they benefited can increase motivation and increase productivity tremendously.
He found that those people [in a call center for university fundraising] who had a visit with a student in person showed much higher retention and higher productivity. They made many more calls than the people in the other groups, and they raised more money.
So I think that managers of religious organizations could use that quite effectively, by letting their office staff interact with some of the people who are benefiting from the ministries of the church.
So clear goals and meaningful work. Coupled with that, managers need to give people autonomy in how to achieve those goals. Allow them to use their own ideas, use their own creativity, use their own specific knowledge to figure out how to meet those goals as much as possible. They feel responsible for making the progress in their work.
Other catalysts for progress are very simple. Making sure people have the resources that they need to get the work done -- another challenge in religious organizations, right, where resources are often tight, but I’m not talking about lavish resources. I’m talking about making sure that people have the sufficient resources so that they’re not spending all their time trying to find those resources rather than actually getting the work done.
Sufficient time to do the work. What you need to do as a manager is constantly ask yourself, “Are people working on the most important things? What things can I put on the back burner?”
One of the most important ones is learning from failure, learning from problems, learning from mistakes. Rather than harshly criticizing people when something goes wrong, sit down and talk with them. What happened here? Let’s try to understand why this thing we tried didn’t work.
Q: Aside from those catalysts, are there other implications for managers?
It’s also very important for managers to pay attention to what we call the nourishers. These are things that directly nourish the human spirit of employees, of people at work.
The first is basic respect and recognition, treating people with civility; the second nourisher is encouragement when the work is difficult; third is emotional support. I would hope that religious leaders are good at this, because ideally they’ve got pastoral skills.
And finally, affiliation and camaraderie. If you are working with more than one person in your organization, in your team, allow them opportunities to get to know each other as people. That sense of trust that they develop can have huge positive carryover to the work context.
If you can get that sense of camaraderie going, it will have huge benefits, not only in the well-being of the employees, which should be important, but also in their performance, because we found a positive feedback loop.
When people had better inner work lives, which is what these nourishers are all about, they’re more likely to perform better, and when they perform better, that makes them feel great. That’s the progress principle.
So we have this positive feedback loop. If it goes in the wrong direction, you can get negative spirals, where people feel like they’re in a dysfunctional organization.
Q: Can that be reversed, especially if there’s an overall organizational culture that’s not conducive to the kind of progress you talk about?
It can be reversed, but it’s difficult. People who are at the top of an organization are the best ones to be able to reverse a negative spiral. Unfortunately, often they’re responsible for the negative spiral.
Sometimes it means that a new leader needs to come in. If you are a new leader going into an organization that has been dysfunctional, that has a negative culture, you can make a tremendous difference, first of all, yourself showing respect and recognition for people.
You could also model catalysts for progress. You can set clear goals. You can give people autonomy who directly report to you, and as you model that as the way we manage in this organization, they will do that for their subordinates.
That’s how you change the culture one event at a time, and the more powerful you are in the organization, the more impact your own behaviors have on that culture.
If you’re a lower-level leader in an organization that’s dysfunctional, perhaps because of the people at the top, you can still make a difference. You can create a kind of oasis for your group within that larger dysfunctional organization by the way you manage, by the way you use the nourishers and the catalysts for the people who report to you.
That’s a very stressful and difficult position to be in, because you’re trying to protect your group from the wider dysfunctional organization. It is possible, though, and we have a great story in our book about a team that actually did that.
Those team leaders were under a lot of strain, but they did a magnificent job of maintaining positive inner work life for the people in that team. It was one of the best-functioning teams in that very dysfunctional organization.
Q: Might managers also make people anxious if workers feel their progress is constantly being monitored?
You as the leader, the manager, are in a way the servant of them, in the sense that you want to enable them to do their best work. If you can convey that, then asking about progress -- “How are things going in your work? What do you need that you don’t have? What could I do to grease the wheels for you?” -- changes the entire conversation.
It changes people’s attitudes. It makes them feel that they are working as a partner with that leader, that they want that leader to succeed. They want the entire organization to succeed, because that leader cares about them and cares about their experience of work every day.
