The Progress Principle: Making Progress in Meaningful Work

The Progress Principle: “Of all the things that can boost inner work life, the most important is making progress in meaningful work.”
Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

This post is based on the work of Teresa Amabile on progress principle. I encourage you to watch her YouTube videos or read her book (check links at the end of this blog post) as I’m gonna only mention the results of her research:

study of workers from 26 project teams from 7 companies (238 individuals)
participants were asked to write diary about their inner work life (“the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions over the course of a workday”) –> which brought nearly 12,000 diary entries.

And what did they find? That the days with the most positive inner work life were the most productive ones!

Now, the question they asked is what was the cause of this great inner work life at certain days? Since they had the data (work diaries) they could answer this question. And the answer was surprisingly simple: it is all about making progress in meaningful work.

In an analysis of knowledge workers’ diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life […] than making progress in meaningful work.
Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

And this is what was called “the progress principle”.

It seems to me that armed with this knowledge it is my duty as a manager to help my people achieve this progress every day. But what can I, a manager, do?

Progress Principle Requires Meaningful Work

The first step seems to be obvious. Make your people work on something that is meaningful to them. As the authors noted:

“[…] the work doesn’t need to involve curing cancer in order to be meaningful. It simply must matter to the person doing it.”
Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

This can be facilitated by a certain organization of work. A common practice at the software development teams is that the work isn’t assigned to people by team lead or manager (“Mark you will do task #123 and Ann, you take care of #456”) but rather selected by team members themselves (e.g. during daily scrum). This serves many purposes that are beyond the scope of this blog post (e.g. elimination of SPOFs, knowledge proliferation, development of new skills etc.) but what matters here is that it gives people a chance to grab a piece of work that they feel attracted to. And I could only imagine that people will rather choose something that is meaningful to them.

And What About a Dull Work?

Not every task at work is exciting. If the work you can offer your team is dull and uninspiring, then it will be harder to find it meaningful. Not impossible, but harder. Consider the following quote:

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.
Quarry Worker’s Creed

You can help your “quarry workers” to see their tasks as more meaningful by pointing out the ultimate purpose that their everyday toil serves. That is the first thing you could do to help them see their work as meaningful.

“[…] managers can make sure that employees know just how their work is contributing.”
Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

Make Progress Possible

Assuming that the work is meaningful, the next step would be to create an environment where everyday progress is possible.

So you (an important note! “you” in this paragraph means “you + your team”) can adjust your way of working so it makes sense for your team and helps you move foreward. To achieve this you take care of people development, you introduce short feedback loops (also in technical sense – by using TDD and frequent deployments) and use the right tools for the job that make faster progress possible. You also create an environment of psychological safety with culture of experiments & “it is OK to fail” attitude, and introduce just enough processes so they are helpful. You work on the granularity of tasks so you can often observe their movement on the board and be delighted with it.

And then one day you have it – an environment and a way of working that fits your context and makes it possible to progress on meaningful work every day. Good job!

Are We Done? Close, But Not Yet

Meaningful work – checked. Progressing every day – checked. Hm… seems like we have everything needed for the progress principle to work in our favor:

The Progress Principle: “Of all the things that can boost inner work life, the most important is making progress in meaningful work.”
Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

Well, not quite. What I have learned is that it is not sufficient for your team to make progress. The devil lies in ~~the details~~ perception. They are making progress but do they see it? If asked, would they say “Yes, I made some progress today. I achieved something meaningful.”? In my experience, the answer often is “no”. They might feel that they just did what they do every day. Nothing to be proud of, nothing to celebrate, nothing special, nothing worth mentioning. The code & tests were written and reviewed, the cards were moved from one column on the board to the next one… but somehow all this work it doesn’t feel like progress.

Hm, what can we do about it? I will try to answer this question in the next blog post.

In the meanwhile check the valuable links below. See ya!