It turns out that ordinary scientists, marketers, programmers, and other unsung knowledge workers, whose jobs require creative productivity every day, have more in common with famous innovators than most managers realise. The work day events that ignite their emotions, fuel their motivation, and trigger their perceptions are fundamentally the same.
The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the work that eventually earned them the Nobel Prize. After the excitement of their first attempt to build a DNA model, Watson and Crick noticed some serious flaws.
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According to Watson, “Our first minutes with the models… were not joyous.” Later that evening, “a shape began to emerge which brought back our spirits.” But when they showed their “breakthrough” to colleagues, they found that their model would not work. Dark days of doubt and ebbing motivation followed.
When the duo finally had their bona fide breakthrough, and their colleagues found no fault with it, Watson wrote, “My morale skyrocketed, for I suspected that we now had the answer to the riddle.” Watson and Crick were so driven by this success that they practically lived in the lab, trying to complete the work.
Throughout these episodes, Watson and Crick’s progress — or lack thereof — ruled their reactions. In our recent research on creative work inside businesses, we stumbled upon a remarkably similar phenomenon. Through exhaustive analysis of diaries kept by knowledge workers, we discovered the progress principle: Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a work day, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.
Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high quality product or service, everyday progress — even a small win — can make all the difference in how they feel and perform.
Of all the things that can boost inner work life, the most important is making progress in meaningful work.
The power of progress is fundamental to human nature, but few managers understand it or know how to leverage progress to boost motivation. In fact, work motivation has been a subject of long-standing debate. In a survey asking about the keys to motivating workers, we found that some managers ranked recognition for good work as most important, while others put more stock in tangible incentives.
Some focused on the value of interpersonal support, while others thought clear goals were the answer. Very few ranked progress first. (See the sidebar ‘A Surprise for Managers.’ on page 43)
If you are a manager, the progress principle holds clear implications for where to focus your efforts. It suggests that you have more influence than you may realise over employees’ well-being, motivation, and creative output. Knowing what serves to catalyse and nourish progress — and what does the opposite — is the key to effectively managing people and their work.
In this article, we share what we have learned about the power of progress and how managers can leverage it. We spell out how a focus on progress translates into concrete managerial actions and provide a checklist to help make such behaviours habitual. But to clarify why those actions are so potent, we first describe our research and what the knowledge workers’ diaries revealed about their inner work lives.
Inner Work Life and Performance
For nearly 15 years, we have been studying the psychological experiences and the performance of people doing complex work inside organisations. Early on, we realised that a driver of creative, productive performance was the quality of a person’s inner work life — the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions over the course of a work day.
How happy workers feel; how motivated they are by an intrinsic interest in the work; how positively they view their organisation, their management, their team, their work, and themselves — all these combine to push them to higher levels of achievement or drag them down.
To understand such interior dynamics better, we asked members of project teams to respond individually to an end-of-day email survey during the course of the project — over four months, on average. The projects — inventing kitchen gadgets, managing product lines of cleaning tools, and solving complex IT problems for a hotel empire, for example — all involved creativity.
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The daily survey inquired about participants’ emotions and moods, motivation levels, and perceptions of the work environment that day, as well as work they did and events that stood out.
Twenty-six project teams from seven companies participated, comprising 238 individuals. This yielded nearly 12 000 diary entries. Naturally, every individual in our population experienced ups and downs. Our goal was to discover the states of inner work life and the work day events that correlated with the highest levels of creative output.
In a dramatic rebuttal to the claim that high pressure and fear spur achievement, we found that, at least in the realm of knowledge work, people are more creative and productive when their inner work lives are positive — when they feel happy, are intrinsically motivated by the work itself, and have positive perceptions of their colleagues and the organisation.
Moreover, in those positive states, people are more committed to the work and more collegial toward those around them. Inner work life, we saw, can fluctuate from one day to the next — sometimes wildly — and performance along with it. A person’s inner work life on a given day fuels his or her performance for the day and even the next day.
Once this inner work life effect became clear, our inquiry turned to whether and how managerial action could set it in motion. What events could evoke positive or negative emotions, motivations, and perceptions? The answers were in our research participants’ diary entries. There are predictable triggers that inflate or deflate inner work life, and, even accounting for variation among individuals, they are much the same for everyone.
The Power of Progress
Our hunt for inner work life triggers led us to the progress principle. When we compared our research participants’ best and worst days (based on their overall mood, specific emotions, and motivation levels), we found that the most common event triggering a ‘best day’ was any progress in work by the individual or the team. The most common event triggering a ‘worst day’ was a setback.
Consider, for example, how progress relates to one component of inner work life: Overall mood ratings. Steps forward occurred on 76% of people’s best-mood days. By contrast, setbacks occurred on only 13% of those days.
Two other types of inner work life triggers also occur frequently on best days: Catalysts, including help from a person or group, and nourishers, events such as shows of respect and words of encouragement. Each has an opposite: Inhibitors, actions that fail to support or actively hinder work, and toxins, discouraging or undermining events. Whereas catalysts and inhibitors are directed at the project, nourishers and toxins are directed at the person. Like setbacks, inhibitors and toxins are rare on days of great inner work life.
Events on worst-mood days are nearly the mirror image of those on best-mood days (see the exhibit ‘What Happens on a Bad Day?’ on page 43). Here, setbacks predominated, occurring on 67% of those days; progress occurred on only 25% of them. Inhibitors and toxins also marked many worst-mood days, and catalysts and nourishers were rare.
This is the progress principle made visible: If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the work day, it’s a good bet that he or she made some progress. If the person drags out of the office disengaged and joyless, a setback is most likely to blame.
When we analysed all 12 000 daily surveys filled out by our participants, we discovered that progress and setbacks influence all three aspects of inner work life. On days when they made progress, our participants reported more positive emotions. When they suffered setbacks, they experienced more frustration, fear, and sadness.
Motivations were also affected: On progress days, people were more intrinsically motivated — by interest in and enjoyment of the work itself. On setback days, they were not only less intrinsically motivated but also less extrinsically motivated by recognition.
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Perceptions differed in many ways, too. On progress days, people perceived significantly more positive challenge in their work. They saw their teams as more mutually supportive and reported more positive interactions between the teams and supervisors.
Perceptions suffered when people encountered setbacks. They found less positive challenge in the work, felt that they had less freedom in carrying it out, and reported that they had insufficient resources. Participants perceived their teams and supervisors as less supportive.
Our analyses establish correlations but do not prove causality. Were these changes in inner work life the result of progress and setbacks, or was the effect the other way around?
The numbers alone cannot answer that. However, we do know, from the diary entries, that more-positive perceptions, a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, happiness, and even elation often followed progress.
Here’s a typical post-progress entry, from a programmer: “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.” Likewise, we saw that deteriorating perceptions, frustration, sadness, and even disgust often followed setbacks.
As another participant, a product marketer, wrote, “We spent a lot of time updating the Cost Reduction project list, and after tallying all the numbers, we are still coming up short of our goal. It is discouraging to not be able to hit it after all the time spent and hard work.”
Almost certainly, the causality goes both ways, and managers can use this feedback loop between progress and inner work life to support both.
Minor Milestones
When we think about progress, we often imagine how good it feels to achieve a long-term goal or experience a major breakthrough. These big wins are great — but they are relatively rare. Even small wins can boost inner work life.
Many of the progress events our research participants reported represented only minor steps forward. Yet they often evoked outsize positive reactions. Consider this diary entry from a programmer in a high-tech company, which was accompanied by positive self-ratings of her emotions that day: “I figured out why something was not working correctly. I felt relieved and happy because this was a minor milestone for me.”
Even ordinary, incremental progress can increase people’s engagement in the work and their happiness during the work day. Across all types of events our participants reported, a notable proportion (28%) of incidents that had a minor impact on the project had a major impact on people’s feelings about it. Because inner work life has such a potent effect on creativity and productivity, and because small but consistent steps forward, shared by many people, can accumulate into excellent execution, progress events that often go unnoticed are critical to the overall performance of organisations.
Unfortunately, there is a flip side. Small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect on inner work life. Our study and research by others show that negative events can have a more powerful impact than positive ones. Consequently, it is important for managers to minimise daily hassles.
Progress in Meaningful Work
We’ve shown how gratifying it is for workers when they are able to chip away at a goal, but recall what we said earlier: The key to motivating performance is supporting progress in meaningful work. Making headway boosts your inner work life, but only if the work matters to you.
Think of the most boring job you’ve ever had. Many people nominate their first job as a teenager — washing pots and pans in a restaurant kitchen, for example, or checking coats at a museum. In jobs like those, the power of progress seems elusive. No matter how hard you work, there are always more pots to wash and coats to check; only punching the time clock at the end of the day or getting the paycheck at the end of the week yields a sense of accomplishment.
In jobs with much more challenge and room for creativity, like the ones our research participants had, simply ‘making progress’ — getting tasks done — doesn’t guarantee a good inner work life, either. You may have experienced this rude fact in your own job, on days (or in projects) when you felt demotivated, devalued, and frustrated, even though you worked hard and got things done. The likely cause is your perception of the completed tasks as peripheral or irrelevant.
In 1983, Steve Jobs was trying to entice John Sculley to leave a wildly successful career at PepsiCo to become Apple’s new CEO. Jobs reportedly asked him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” In making his pitch, Jobs leveraged a potent psychological force: The deep-seated human desire to do meaningful work.
Fortunately, to feel meaningful, work doesn’t have to involve putting the first personal computers in the hands of ordinary people, or alleviating poverty, or helping to cure cancer. Work with less profound importance to society can matter if it contributes value to something or someone important to the worker.
Meaning can be as simple as making a useful and high quality product for a customer or providing a genuine service for a community. It can be supporting a colleague or boosting an organisation’s profits by reducing inefficiencies in a production process. Whether the goals are lofty or modest, if they are meaningful to workers and it is clear how their efforts contribute to them, progress toward them can galvanise inner work life.
In principle, managers shouldn’t have to go to extraordinary lengths to infuse jobs with meaning. However, they can make sure that employees know how their work is contributing. And, they can avoid actions that negate its value.
All the participants in our research were doing work that should have been meaningful; no one was washing pots or checking coats. Often, however, we saw potentially important, challenging work losing its power to inspire.
