The Power of Progress
An interview with Teresa Amabile by Sarah Green Carmichael
Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor and a coauthor of The Progress Principle, explains the importance of small wins at work in this edited interview with HBR’s Sarah Green Carmichael.
Sarah Green Carmichael: What is the progress principle?
Teresa Amabile: It’s the surprising impact of simply making forward movement on meaningful work, on the people who are doing the work. My coauthor, Steven Kramer, and I studied nearly 12,000 daily diaries of people working on creative project teams to look at their inner work life. Inner work life is our term for the perceptions, emotions, and motivations that people experience as they react to and make sense of the events in their workday.
What we found was that when people’s inner work lives were more positive, they performed better. We asked ourselves, if inner work life has such an impact on performance, what leads to good inner work life? We found that, of all the things that can drive people in their work and make them feel good about it, the single most important is simply making progress on work that they find meaningful. That’s the progress principle.
That sounds simple, but I think we’ve all had days when we felt like we weren’t making much progress. So how much progress do you really need to make to get that feeling?
Surprisingly little. We call this the power of small wins. For example, a computer programmer was trying to track down a bug in a program, and simply solving that little problem led to an extraordinarily positive inner work life that day. Tackling that bug yielded great emotions, very powerful motivation, and positive perceptions of the work environment. Fixing a bug is a seemingly small thing. But we found that 28% of really minor—seemingly trivial—events had a strong impact on people’s inner work lives in the positive direction and, unfortunately, in the negative direction, too.
What happens when that negative direction takes hold?
Unfortunately, with all kinds of work events, negative is stronger than positive. The negative inner work life impact of having a setback, for example, is two to three times stronger than the positive impact of making progress. So it’s particularly important to avoid the minor hassles that can derail people’s work during the average workday.
If you’d like to harness the power of these small wins and hopefully avoid some of the hassles, and you’d like to feel like you’re making more progress, what should you do?
There’s a lot that people can do for themselves to try to harness the progress principle. The most important is to focus. Many people in organizations are under a lot of time pressure, feeling high workload pressure. It’s really easy to slip into being on a treadmill. That’s our term for running all the time, feeling like you’re juggling a lot of balls that are thrown at you, but not making real progress on the important work that’s really going to use your creative brain, and that the organization really needs to become the innovative leader in its field.
Each of us should try to preserve at least 30 to 60 minutes a day when we’re not going to be distracted by other demands, when we can really focus on the work that’s most meaningful to us and most important to the organization. Sometimes that means you have to come in a half hour before anyone else or stay a half hour later. Sometimes you need to go to a coffee shop or find an unused conference room, just to get that focus.
The other thing you can do is keep track of your small wins each day. That can be very motivational.
TERESA AMABILE is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. Her current research program focuses on psychological and social aspects of the retirement transition. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL is an editor and columnist at Bloomberg Opinion and a former executive editor at Harvard Business Review. Follow her on Twitter @skgreen.
Adapted from “The Power of Progress,” on hbr.org, August 9, 2011.