Your managerial skills can either reinforce or undermine your business success…

We all know the difference that great managers can make to a business. If you stop for a few minutes and list the managers in your team, including yourself, you will probably be able to identify those who have good managerial skills and those who do not.

Are you a good manager? How do you know?

Great managerial skills are critically important to the success of your business, but being a great manager is difficult.

As the saying goes, ‘people don’t quit bad businesses, they quit bad managers.’

This saying is true because of the impact that managers have on your team, every day. So, think about the managers in your business and ask yourself this one question:

The one ‘BREAKTHROUGH QUESTION’ you must ask to help yourself…

Having great managers in your business is essential – they motivate and engage your team, create a positive working environment, ensure that the team stays aligned with your business purpose and goals and build great relationships with your team and customers.

Great managers have the skills necessary to provide clear direction, support team development, sort disagreements and make strategic decisions.

They often bridge the gap between senior leadership and the team, ensuring smooth communication channels and a precise transfer of information.

Ultimately, a great manager plays a crucial role in your business success by developing a high-performing team and maintaining a culture of high behavioural standards.

Is this you? Do you have managers who do this?

On the flip side, bad managers are poor communicators, lack leadership, make the wrong decisions or don’t make decisions at all.

They often fail to clearly define the work needing to be done. They might micromanage or, conversely, be too ‘hands off’. They may constantly drop last-minute deadlines on their team or focus on mistakes rather than on wins.

The primary focus of a bad manager is often themselves, and they will take the credit for something their team has done or blame the team for something they themselves have done. They find competent team members a threat rather than an asset and often lack emotional intelligence, making them unable to resolve conflicts or build strong relationships within the team. Over time, their negative impact can lead to low team engagement, high team churn, customer complaints, lost business, lost profits and a toxic workplace culture.

I think we all know the type of manager we would prefer. So how do you develop your managerial skills and those of the managers in your business?

You use The Progress Principle, developed by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, written about in their book – The Progress Principle, Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work.

There are many facets to this principle, but we will take you through why it matters and how to use it to great effect to develop your managerial skills and those of the managers in your business.

Inner work conversations

"I like to talk to myself because I’m the only one whose answers I accept." – Oscar Wilde

You might not have heard of the phrase ‘inner work conversations’, but you will have had them – with yourself! We all talk to ourselves, all the time, in our heads. This is perfectly natural and normal human behaviour.

Inner work conversations are important because they help us resolve problems or issues. We ponder different decisions to ensure we make the right one (or the one we think is right). We will very often prepare a conversation or scenario in our heads based on what someone might say or do.

At work, our inner work conversations might be concerned with planning tasks, with deciding what we are doing today or with the next big job. We may inwardly grumble about the people around us. Through this process, we gain clarity on which team members matter and can be trusted, how important our work is and how managers and leaders make us feel.

These internal dialogues help us process emotions and feelings, gain clarity, improve self-awareness, solve problems and, in the long run, make us more resilient. They can enhance motivation, boost confidence and guide us in adapting to change. Ultimately, engaging in meaningful inner work conversations allows us to be more deliberate in the decisions we make and in the actions we take.

So why do they matter when it comes to building your managerial skills or the skills of the managers in your business?

Inner work conversations about our perceptions, feelings and motivations ultimately determine the success of your team and the success of your business.

If we are talking extremes, your team can be either positively engaged in the work they do or deeply unhappy.

Building your managerial skills will have the biggest impact on boosting your team's engagement.

For many years, in many countries and in many workplaces, the research company Gallup have carried out one of the world's largest studies into team engagement.

The data they amassed – and it was considerable – showed 2 key insights:

When you improve the engagement of your team, your business results will also improve

70% of those improvements in team engagement are determined by managers

The knowledge, skills and work habits of yourself and your managers are crucial to the overall success of your business. When you and your managers positively influence the inner work conversations of your team members, you will have a more engaged team, a happier working environment and a more profitable business.

Inner work life

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."  – Steve Jobs

Building your managerial skills and improving team performance isn’t just about influencing their inner work conversations, it's about changing your team’s work life – the life they lead working in your business. If they are unhappy, demoralised or frustrated with the behaviour of you or another manager, they will leave.

And it’s not just about the tasks they perform.

“Inner work life is the confluence of perceptions, emotions and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workday.”  – Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle.

Four outcomes and 1 key - The Progress Principle

"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."  – Winston Churchill

Progress – this is the key to improving your team's inner work life.  When progress is visible to your team every day, you tap into their intrinsic motivation for doing great work.

Their perception of the work changes, their emotions about the work are positive and their motivation to do good work is high.

As a result, they are more productive, creative, cooperative and engaged.

Amabile and Kramer call this The Progress Principle.

The progress principle is the concept that making even small progress in meaningful work is one of the most powerful factors in boosting motivation, engagement and creativity.

In their book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, they explain that this concept is based on research showing that “employees feel most motivated and satisfied when they experience a sense of forward movement in their tasks. Even minor accomplishments can create positive emotions, reinforce intrinsic motivation and enhance overall performance.”

The principle also highlights the important role that managers and the working environment play in supporting or hampering progress.

When you or your managers celebrate small wins, share constructive feedback and remove obstacles, this creates a positive environment for your team, and they stay engaged and productive.

However, setbacks, lack of recognition and red tape can demotivate your team and stifle their creativity.

When you understand the progress principle and apply it to the way your leaders and managers work alongside your team, you create a workplace culture that nurtures continuous improvement and enhances team wellbeing.

Three manager conversations

“…of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.” – Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle

When great managers build a meaningful connection around the work their team do, it has a positive influence on the inner work conversations of the team’s members.

You and your managers need to recognise the importance of each team member seeing and feeling that they have made meaningful work progress, every day.

The analysis of the diary entries to which Amabile and Kramer had access showed that on 75% of what the participants considered to be good days (when their moods and emotions were high and when they had a positive perception of the work environment), they reported having made progress in some aspect of their work.

Conversely, progress only appeared on 25% of what the participants considered to be their worst days.

Progress is clearly vital to the engagement of your team and to the success of your business, but you have to deliberately make it show up in some form every day.

How do you do this?

Seeing and feeling that daily progress is being made (and resolving setbacks) is the hands down, most influential insight, from the 12,000 daily work diaries.

But everyone’s perceptions, emotions and motivations are unique – positive and negative. They’re connected to any number of impressions about managers, the business, the team, the work, and even themselves.

When every manager builds skills around 3 core elements, they directly influence their people’s productivity, creativity, cooperation and engagement:

You’ll know from reading the Business Breakthrough report how to tackle progress and setbacks. Here’s how you recognise catalysts or constraints and recognise nourishing or toxic conversations:

Have daily conversations with your team using the progress checklist – below.

Make these conversations intentional, plan them in and take responsibility for them being part of your daily routine. Make sure Catalysts, Inhibitors, Nourishers and Toxins show up when talking about progress and setbacks.

Progress is the single most important factor when it comes to the engagement of your team. It’s vital that they see and feel progress every day in the meaningful work they do in your business.

This is the responsibility of you and of your managers. You need to be a manager obsessed by daily progress.

Your progress principle checklist

Here’s the progress principle checklist taken from Amabile and Kramer’s book, The Progress Principle. Following this is one for you to use and complete with your own team. You can use this every day to build the engagement and motivation of your team for the meaningful work they do.

The book and other resources

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 – progress – that 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) nourishers – interpersonal 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.

Click here to read the book.

What people are saying about this book:

The book...is one of the best business books I’ve read in many years.” – Daniel Pink

The authors have done a good job in reminding us all that "it’s people, stupid" who lie at the heart of successful organisations.” – Nita Clarke, People Management Magazine (UK)

It's a very instructive read that I highly recommend… a groundbreaking book.” – Huffington Post

This practical orientation for managers makes the book an important resource for organizations experiencing a decline in productivity and employee engagement.” – CHOICE Magazine

Here is a TEDx talk from Teresa Amabile – one of the authors of The Progress Principle.

She starts with a startling 1846 quote from Henry David Thoreau – “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Amabile shares some of the insights she gathered when writing her book with Steven Kramer and talks about job dissatisfaction and the crisis of disengagement, and she shares stories of software engineers Marsha and Tom and the way they were made to feel in their working environment.

Amaline’s TEDxAtlanta talk is both interesting and insightful. Click the video below to watch it.

Here is another video from Brian Johnson of PNTV, where Brian shares his 5 highlights of the Amabile and Kramer book, The Progress Principle.

1. Inner Work Life – How you are feeling emotionally about what you are doing? Do you have a purpose? Is it meaningful?
2. Small Wins – Tackle meaningful goals first to create momentum, which will positively affect your inner work life.
3. Progress Loop – Small, frequent, incremental wins have a compound effect. Make sure to identify downs that may lead you to the opposite direction (negative – opposite of progress).
4. Catalysts – It is essential to have clear and specific goals. Without them, there will be a waste of time and energy, a lack of progress.
5. Checklist - Create a checklist of your basic fundamentals.