...solve thorny business challenges in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea
Your manager skills can either reinforce or undermine the success of your accountancy firm
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The unsung hero of business life is the humble manager.
But being a great manager can be really difficult.
And what every business leader understands, is that:
“People don’t quit bad businesses, they quit bad managers.”
If your team or firm is to succeed, great managers are critically important.
Your manager skills can propel your firm toward success.
Your manager skills can enhance the lives of your team and everyone working within your firm.
Your manager skills can enhance the relationships you have with your clients.
Or … they can undermine the success of your firm!
Inner work conversations are game changers...
Ask yourself – who do I talk with the most, in a typical working day?
We generally talk to ourselves more than to anyone else! This is normal human behaviour. Everyone in your firm is talking to themselves too. We all live our lives in our minds.
Powerful research shows that these inner work conversations about our perceptions, feelings and motivations ultimately determine the success of your people and the success of your firm.
Your 70% impact lever...
If we’re talking extremes, your people are either enthusiastically engaged in their work or living work lives of quiet, unhappy desperation.
Effective manager skills are the biggest lever for improving your team’s engagement.
For many years, country by country, workplace by workplace, the research company Gallup have conducted one of the world’s largest studies into team engagement.
Millions of data points and supporting research point to 2 key insights:
- 1Improve team engagement and you’ll experience better results in your firm
- 270% of team engagement improvements are determined by managers
Managers in possession of effective skills and work habits are crucial to your firm's success.
The knowledge, skills and habits of your managers directly influence the inner work conversation of every team member, every day. When managers positively influence these inner work conversations, every day, your firm will achieve better results..
4 outcomes – 1 key skill...
Your firm achieves a breakthrough when your managers build the knowledge and skill to positively influence your team’s inner work conversations.
“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
Amabile and Kramer’s research suggests that this is not simply about an inner work conversation – it’s about your team’s inner work life!
Because they were able to access nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from people working in both successful and failing businesses, they were able to identify key patterns that determine whether people are:
- 1More or less PRODUCTIVE
- 2More or less CREATIVE
- 3More or less COMMITTED
- 4More or less COLLABORATIVE
All four outcomes are directly influenced by a single managerial insight and skill.
Your one key skill...
The research clearly suggests that:
"
“When you don’t manage for progress, no amount of emotional intelligence or incentive planning will save the day.
“Our research inside companies revealed that the best way to motivate people, day in and day out, is by facilitating progress.”
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle
For example, millions of people, especially young men between the ages of 15 and 35, become immersed in computer fantasy worlds such as the World of Warcraft.
What keeps them hooked? To a large extent, it’s two things: constant progress indicators and achievement markers.
Both of these insights leverage the progress principle.
It’s difficult to get a sense of progress unless you’re aware that you have actually made progress in your work, every day – ensuring this is the skill of a great manager (and of great computer games).
When progress is visible to people every day, you tap into their intrinsic motivation for doing good work. And many studies prove that intrinsic motivation beats any form of carrot-and-stick (extrinsic) motivation, hands down.
Manage meaningful work...
“...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
As an example, if you are employed by an innovative household goods manufacturer, making a game-changing mop will feel like meaningful work.
Making design progress in a small way, every day, can feel rewarding, engaging and motivating. But if a leadership directive then demands that this innovative new mop be dropped in favour of refreshing older existing products, the meaning drops out of your work world.
You can imagine the harmful inner work conversations this team of people would be having in their minds, as well as the effect of their level of engagement in their new roles.
On a grander scale...
When Steve Jobs, in need of a new CEO, was trying to woo John Sculley away from his wildly successful career at PepsiCo, he famously 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?”
Mops, fizzy water, computers or your product/service matters not – building a meaningful connection around the work your people is what really matters.
Great managers look for and build meaningful connections between people and their work.
As the researchers suggest: “...making progress in meaningful work is the most powerful stimulant to great inner work life.”
The research also shows that it does not matter whether a manager is working in a thriving or a failing firm. Managers who recognise progress in meaningful work, every day, see their people become more productive, creative, committed and collaborative.
Daily responsibility?!
As you go about your work, you and your people have inner work conversations – every day.
The research insights from the 12,000 diary entries points to good managers influencing these inner work conversations – every day.
Very few managers recognise the vital importance of every team member seeing and feeling that they have made meaningful work progress each and every day. The great managers make the most of this insight.
- Great managers positively influence inner work conversations every day and positively influence their team’s results.
- Weak managers negatively influence inner work conversations and business results every day because they don’t ensure daily progress is made and recognised.
Help your people see progress – every day. Help them see how their work is meaningful – every day. By doing this, you’ll positively influence their inner work life and achieve stronger results for your firm – together.
Do what, exactly?
As the researchers suggest: “It is as simple, and as difficult, as creating the conditions for people to succeed at important work.”
In short order:
- Agree clear goals to ensure that your people understand the purpose and importance of their work. Establish connections between daily tasks and your broader organisational objectives so that your team see how their contributions matter. Doing this will build meaning for your team.
- Remove obstacles that could slow down progress or that could create frustration. Help your team access the tools, time and support they need to do their jobs effectively.
- Celebrate small wins every day by recognising daily achievements and small improvements that push the project forward – don’t concentrate solely on the big milestones.
STOP thinking that individual performance depends only on something inherent in each team member’s character.
START helping your team, every day, to make and see progress in work they care about. When you do, you positively influence your team’s inner work conversations and build the results of your firm.
Start with 4 helping hands here or read on for the full Business Breakthrough. Use your device's back arrow to return to this point.
BEWARE: Losses beat wins....
As powerful as daily progress is for improving inner work conversations and the performance of your people, the research shows that the negative impact of setbacks is more than two times stronger than the impact of progress!
Setbacks can cause uncertainty, doubt or confusion and can quickly lower motivation for the work. Great managers focus first on eliminating the obstacles that cause setbacks. Involving your team in resolving and preventing future setbacks (without blame) helps you repair inner work conversations and helps your people move back to daily progress.
Rather than pointing the finger of blame or making excuses when setbacks happen, great managers recognise the 3 fingers pointing back at them and engage with their team in 3 types of conversation.
©Freepik
3 manager conversations
1. Progress or Setbacks
2. Catalysts or Constraints
3. Nourishment or Toxins
Great managers take responsibility for these 3 conversations in their daily managerial routine.
They make these conversations deliberate, systematic and disciplined by using the progress principle checklist every day, in the same way that a commercial pilot uses a pre-flight checklist every flight to ensure the safety of the plane and all the passengers.
Go to the downloadable resources for an example checklist as suggested by the research.
This Business Breakthrough report is focused on progress conversations because they have the biggest impact. Check out the book, The Progress Principle, for more stories and details on Catalysts and Nourishment, or go to the downloadable tools for a quick-fire list of examples.
Now that you know how vital seeing and feeling progress on meaningful work is to your people, are you ready to become a manager of daily progress?
4 helping hands for you…
Whatever project you’re on or whatever work you’re doing, you intuitively know that when you feel you’re making daily progress, you feel like you’ve had a good day.
Why not put these 4 things to work so you can improve the sense of daily progress with all of your people? Rather than practicing amateur psychology to try to manage the internal work conversations of your team, simply focus on making daily progress:
1
Reinforce and better communicate the value of the work your people do (and make work meaningful).
2
Be attentive when setbacks happen and work together on resolving and preventing them. Always recognise and celebrate small (progress) wins.
3
Make daily progress visible, tangible or measurable for everyone in your team (as the computer game designers do).
4
Use the progress principle checklist every day so that you ‘fly safe’ every day at work – just like the pilots who use their pre-flight checklist every time they fly.
Click here to read this whole Business Breakthrough . Use your device's back arrow to return to this point.
TIME TO DISAGREE
“But people don’t show you how they feel or what they’re thinking.”
You’re right, people prefer to keep their inner work conversations to themselves.
It can therefore be very difficult to predict what they are thinking and feeling!
Rather than concerning yourself with the inner dialogues of your team, the research suggests you concentrate on doing what great managers do and focus on the daily progress of meaningful work.
“Helping everyone see progress EVERY DAY seems too intense for us.”
Most managers respond the same way about the intensity of daily progress. However, seeking out small wins can be relatively easy.
You know that your people are having inner work conversations multiple times throughout every working day. If you avoid progress conversations or fail to establish constant progress indicators and achievement markers as the computer games makers do, you’ll likely see a dip in engagement.
What can you and your team create to make daily progress tangible, visible, measurable? Answer this question and you’ll be managing daily progress and building team engagement.
ULTIMATE ARGUMENT: “How do I know this will work for me and my business?”
Until you test the progress principle checklist every day for a few weeks, you won’t know (you’ll find the checklist in the download tools).
The research suggests that the progress principle is applicable whether you’re working in a thriving firm or in one that is failing – demonstrating that the daily progress skills of the manager are profoundly important.
©Macrovector/Freepik
Tell me more...
The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, explores how making progress in meaningful work drives motivation, engagement and overall job satisfaction.
Based on extensive research, the book highlights that small, everyday accomplishments have a profound impact on an individual’s emotions and performance.
Through real-world examples and data from hundreds of workplace diaries, the authors describe how managers can develop a positive work environment by recognising progress, removing obstacles and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
The Progress Principle, Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
A key takeaway from The Progress Principle is the importance of the "inner work life," which refers to the combination of emotions, motivations and perceptions that influence an employee's performance.
The book emphasises that managers play a vital role in either boosting or hindering progress through their actions and feedback. By focusing on small wins and creating conditions that support meaningful work, businesses can enhance creativity, productivity and employee wellbeing.
With its practical insights and research-backed strategies, The Progress Principle serves as a valuable guide for leaders looking to inspire and sustain high levels of motivation in their teams.
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Please use these tools and resources to build your managerial skills to enable your team to see the progress they are making, to find meaning in their work and to positively influence their inner work conversations.
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