How leaders kill meaning at work

Here is an excerpt from still another outstanding article written by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, featured online by The McKinsey Quarterly (January 2012), published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, obtain information about the firm, access other resources, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle [Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, August 2011], found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”: the constant flow of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that constitute a person’s reactions to the events of the work day. Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line. [See Sangeeta Agrawal, James W. Asplund, James K. Harter, Emily A. Killham, and Frank L. Schmidt, “Causal impact of employee work perceptions on the bottom line of organizations,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, July 2010, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 378–89.]  People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.

In our book and a recent Harvard Business Review article [See Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, “The power of small wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011, Volume 89, Number 5, pp. 70–80.], we argue that managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions. These include dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off project teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers.

But what about a company’s most senior leaders? What is their role in making—or killing—meaning at work? To be sure, as a high-level leader, you have fewer opportunities to directly affect the inner work lives of employees than do frontline supervisors. Yet your smallest actions pack a wallop because what you say and do is intensely observed by people down the line. A sense of purpose in the work [See Robert Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best . . . and Learn from the Worst, New York: Business Plus, 2010; and Sutton’s related article, “Why good bosses tune in to their people,” mckinseyquarterly.com, August 2010.], and consistent action to reinforce it, has to come from the top.

[Next, Amabile and Kramer identify and then discuss the "four avoidable ways" or “traps” by which "leaders kill meaning at work. To read the complete article, please click here.]

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Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School and co-author of the aforementioned The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work.  Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Steven Kramer is an independent researcher and writer in Wayland, Massachusetts. He is also co-author of The Progress Principle. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology from UCLA, and his doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Virginia.

The Ten Most Important Business Challenges and Which Book to Consult for Each

Whenever asked to recommend business books, I immediately inquire, “What is the single greatest challenge that you and your organization now face?” Of course, responses vary but over time, these seem to be the ten challenges most frequently cited, followed by the book(s) I think will be most helpful. Obviously, “one man’s opinions”….

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

• Joseph Michelli’s The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

 

INNOVATION

• Tom Kelley’s The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization

 

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

• Roger Nierenberg’s Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening OR James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner’s The Leadership Challenge (4th Edition)

 

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT

• Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter’s 12: The Elements of Great Managing

 

NEW HIRE TRANSITION &  ORIENTATION

• George B. Bradt and Mary Vonnegut ‘s Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time

 

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

• Jeanne Ross’s Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution

 

PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

• Dean Spitzer’s Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success

 

PERSUASION & INFLUENCE

• Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion OR Carmine Gallo’s The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Office

 

TALENT EVALUATION & MANAGEMENT

• George Anders’ The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Does OR Bill Conaty and Ram Charan’s The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers

 

TEAMWORK

• Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Coming for the August First Friday Book Synopsis – the new Wellbeing, and a business book classic, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits

We had a wonderful gathering of book lovers and serious learners at the First Friday Book Synopsis this morning – a surprisingly good attendance for a 2^nd Friday of July morning.

Next month, Karl Krayer will present a synopsis of the new, important book,  Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath, Ph.D. and James K. Harter (Gallup Press, 2010).  (You can read Bob Morris’ review of this book on our blog book here).

I will present a synopsis of the business book classic, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm, by Verne Harnish (Select Books, 2002).  This is a rare choice for us, to present a book that has been around a while.  We have only done this a couple of times.  The first business book classic we presented was Servant Leadership by Robert Greenleaf.  There are a few books that stand the test of time so well – books that either came out before we began the First Friday Book Synopsis in April 1998, or, a book we just happened to miss.  Such selections are ones that we feel that we need to include for the value they bring.  So, for August, I will present this immensely practical book by Verne Harnish.  (You can read Bob Morris’ review of this book on our blog here).

Mark your calendars now, and plan to join us on the first Friday of August, August 6.

David Brooks on “well-being”

Here is an excerpt from an article in The New York Times (March 30, 2010) in which David Brooks provides some thought-provoking perspectives on national and individual well-being. To read the complete article, please visit
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html?ref=todayspaper.

The Sandra Bullock Trade

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?

On the one hand, an Academy Award is nothing to sneeze at. Bullock has earned the admiration of her peers in a way very few experience. She’ll make more money for years to come. She may even live longer. Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don’t win.

Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

This isn’t just sermonizing. This is the age of research, so there’s data to back this up. Over the past few decades, teams of researchers have been studying happiness. Their work, which seemed flimsy at first, has developed an impressive rigor, and one of the key findings is that, just as the old sages predicted, worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through.

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To read the complete Brooks article, please visit
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html?ref=todayspaper.