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http://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-smallwins/ar/1 http://hbr.org/product/baynote/an/10106HBKENG?

referral=00505&cm_sp=baynote-_featured_products-_-10106-HBK-ENG The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work What really sets the best managers above the rest? It's their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives-consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly. As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explain in "The Progress Principle", seemingly mundane workday events can make or break employees' inner work lives. But it's forward momentum in meaningful work-progressthat creates the best inner work lives. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day. The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. It also explains how to activate two forces that enable progress: (1) catalysts-events that directly facilitate project work, such as clear goals and autonomy-and (2) nourishersinterpersonal events that uplift workers, including encouragement and demonstrations of respect and collegiality. Brimming with honest examples from the companies studied, "The Progress Principle" equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the

insights they need to maximize their people's performance. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/articl e/pii/S0003066X0767172X Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems Argues that the massive scale on which social problems are conceived precludes innovative action because bounded rationality is exceeded and dysfunctional levels of arousal are induced. Reformulation of social issues as mere problems allows for a strategy of small wins wherein a series of concrete, complete outcomes of moderate importance build a pattern that attracts allies and deters opponents. The psychology of small wins is discussed with respect to cognitive limitations, affective limitations, stress, and enactment of environments. It is concluded that the strategy of small wins incorporates sound psychology and is sensitive to the pragmatics of policymaking. (62 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/small_win s_and_feeling_good.html Small Wins and Feeling Good

When you have a daunting mountain to climb, it is often best to break it into molehills. In his classic paper, "Small Wins," University of Michigan psychologist Karl Weick argued that large social problems are best broken down into smaller ones with concrete achievable goals. Social problems as

enormous as, say, unemployment, can be so overwhelming that solutions seem unattainable; therefore, people often avoid tackling them or come up with single, grand programs that fail. Breaking such problems down into a series of more modest steps, all on the path to the ultimate goal, reduces fear, clarifies direction, and increases the probability of early successful outcomes - boosting support for further action. The power of small wins applies just as well to problems in business. Our recent research discovered how critical it is for teams and individuals working on complex problems to achieve small wins regularly. Because setbacks are so common in truly important problems, people become disheartened unless they can point to some meaningful advance most days, even if that advance is seemingly minor, and even if it involves nothing more than extracting insights from the day's failures. This strategy propels long-term goal achievement. In his terrific book, Good Boss, Bad Boss (also here), Stanford University professor Bob Sutton argues that "big, hairy, audacious, goals" are not only daunting, but they are usually too obvious and too broad to provide useful guidance for day-to-day work. Similarly, authorPeter Sims emphasizes the importance of incremental goal-setting in Little Bets.

wins in our personal lives, too. In his book Feeling Good, Dr. David Burns discusses how important it is to keep track of, reflect on, and celebrate not just our major achievements, but also our seemingly minor ones. In the extreme, attention to small wins can help people lift themselves out of depression; this is one of the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy. An example: People suffering from depression can find it difficult to maintain an exercise program, even though any kind of physical activity can reduce depressive symptoms. So, a goal like working out at the gym for an hour each day can seem unthinkable, and that work-out never happens. As Burns writes "You may assume you must do everything at once instead of breaking each job down into small, discrete, manageable units which you can complete one step at a time." This means that it's much more effective to start with a modest goal like simply taking a walk around the block. By keeping track of success in meeting such a goal, and celebrating it, depressed people can begin to build their goals and start enjoying more, larger, successes. Small wins in personal life can keep all of us feeling good. A number of studies have found that major life events seldom have lasting effects on subjective wellbeing. For instance, winning the lottery does not usually make people happy over the long run. But, as Sloan School of Management Mochon and his Professor Daniel colleagues found,

A surprising angle on all this: To maintain emotional health, each of us needs small

regular minor boosts from ordinary activities can have a cumulative and lasting effect. They found, for example, that people who regularly attended religious services felt happier after doing so, and that those boosts built up over time. The more frequently people attended services, the happier they were. Results were similar for regular exercise and yoga practice. With all the pressures and distractions in our lives, it is all too easy to have our smaller achievements go unnoticed, even by ourselves. Think back on the past few days. Did you achieve any successes that did not make it onto your radar screen? Take a moment now and congratulate yourself. And if you wish, share some with us so that we can celebrate with you. Teresa Amabile is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. Steven Kramer is a psychologist and independent researcher. They are the authors of the article "The Power of Small Wins" (Harvard Business Review, May 2011) and the forthcoming bookThe Progress Principle. http://hbr.org/product/the-power-of-smallwins/an/R1105C-PDF-ENG The Power of Small Wins What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an

analysis of knowledge workers' diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that is critical to performance) than making progress in meaningful work. If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it's a good bet that he or she achieved something, however small. If the person drags out of the office disengaged and joyless, a setback is likely to blame. This progress principle suggests that managers have more influence than they may realize over employees' well-being, motivation, and creative output. The key is to learn which actions support progress--such as setting clear goals, providing sufficient time and resources, and offering recognition--and which have the opposite effect. Even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. On the flip side, small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect. And the work doesn't need to involve curing cancer in order to be meaningful. It simply must matter to the person doing it. The actions that set in motion the positive feedback loop between progress and inner work life may sound like Management 101, but it takes discipline to establish new habits. The authors provide a checklist that managers can use on a daily basis to monitor their progress-enhancing behaviors.

http://blogs.hbr.org/sutton/2010/06/hey_bo ss_enough_with_the_big_h.html

Hey Boss Enough with the Big, Hairy Goal

Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now I'm following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the third belief: "Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day."

Managers often think their job is to inspire their people with "stretch goals" clear objectives that will be hard to meet, but that would have a dramatic impact on the organization's success. That this kind of ambitious goal-setting is a hallmark of 2. effective leaders, and of high-performance organizations, is an old theme in behavioral science. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham in particular have produced a brilliant and compelling stream of research over the past 35 years demonstrating that difficult, specific goals lead to better task performance. In a more popular mode, Jim Collins has convinced thousands of managers of the value of "BHAG's" big, hairy, audacious goals. There's no denying that ambitious goals are essential to motivation. But my view is that the best bosses don't spend much time thinking or talking about them. There are a few reasons for this: 1. They are strategically obvious. What if I asked you to guess at the stretch goals of various teams, ranging from the grizzled sailors on the Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, to the U.S. Soccer team now competing for the World Cup in South Africa, to a giant retailer 3.

like Target Stores? You wouldn't know the exact numbers to name, but you'd know the nature of their goals: the captains are trying to catch x tons of crab, the soccer team is trying to win y number of games (culminating with the championship), and Target is trying for a z percent gain in market share, or profit margin, or stock price. Even if a goal is a more noble, relating to employee retention, for example, or carbon footprint reduction, it will not be surprising. For most organizations in most industries, success is measured on well known and accepted yardsticks. Sure, there are differences and they do matter, but ambitious goals rarely send people in directions they didn't realize they needed to go. They're too blunt to provide daily guidance or satisfaction. Tell a division that it needs to double its revenues in the next five years and people will not likely see what they should individually do differently to achieve that. A good boss lays out the path to a big goal, and works with people to break it down into objectives that more clearly imply the necessary actions. Focusing attention on the little steps not only clarifies what people need to accomplish on a daily basis, it also allows people to enjoy Small Wins, as Karl Weick called them in his wonderful 1984 article in The American Psychologist. (Here is the pdf.) They're too daunting. Weick also points out that organizations tend to be stymied by big goals that have not been broken into bite-size pieces. Faced with seemingly huge and overwhelmingly difficult challenges, people freeze up or even freak out. So the best bosses not only outline the steps, they talk and act like each is not overly difficult which quells people's fears and enhances their confidence that, if they just keep moving, everything will turn out fine.

In Good Boss, Bad Boss, I share a story from a CEO I know who set a monumental revenue target for his organization. The number he named was so high that it would take the most successful sales campaign the company had ever run to make it. Adding to the pressure, the business was on the ropes. It had lost some key accounts, and nothing less than the revenues he targeted could save it from large-scale layoffs. Few on his team were inspired by the audacity of the goal. Immediately fears were expressed that it could never be realized given the severe time pressure, limited resources on hand, do-or-die imperative, and the tough market CEO led a conditions. But rather than simply repeat the discussion of what it would realistically take to make the campaign a big success. Before long, the list of "to do's" had stretched to over 100 tasks, causing even more doubts to be vocalized. The turning point came when the CEO asked the group to sort that list into "hard" and "easy" tasks. When a task was declared easy, he asked who could do it and by what date. Within 15 minutes, the group realized that they could accomplish over half the tasks in just a few days. The anxiety level dropped, and stage was set for a succession of small wins. How did it all turn out? The company did run the most successful sales campaign of its history. This was in 2009. Better yet, the power of the CEO's approach carried over to the next year. The senior team (with much less guidance from him this time) used a similar small-wins strategy for a 2010 campaign that generated even more business

than 2009's thanks in part to their higher confidence level and in part to the skills they'd gained at breaking down tasks. They knew how to get the myriad easy ones out of the way so they could focus on the harder (but still manageable) ones. I'm eager to hear if all this is consistent with your own experience. For the moment, here's my conclusion: great bosses do set very challenging goals and communicate them to their followers. But you're a bad boss if, once those goals are known and accepted, you keep mindlessly invoking them. Rather than continually drawing people's attention to that distant horizon, help them see what they can and must accomplish right now. Let them proceed calmly, with confidence, and with the motivation that comes from taking clear little steps and they may just accomplish those big hairy goals. Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. His new book is Good Boss, Bad Boss, forthcoming from Business Plus.

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