Empowering Managers to Drive Organizational Growth: A Simplified Checklist Approach
Two researchers, Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer, conducted an impressive study to try to find an answer to 2 questions:
1- How do positive and negative work environments arise?
2- And how do they affect People’s creative problem-solving?
To find answers to these questions, they collaborated with different companies in different industries and recruited 238 people in 26 project teams in 7 companies in 3 industries.
They told these 238 people that they would email everyone on the team a diary form DAILY that included several questions about the day.
Most of these questions were about their perceptions, emotions, and motivations during the day. And that this process will last for around 4 months.
After 4 months, Teresa and Steve could gather 12000 individual diary reports or feedback.
After they analyzed these reports, they discovered that people are more creative and productive when their inner work lives are positive- when they feel happy, are intrinsically motivated by the work itself, and have positive perceptions of their colleagues and the organization.
They also discovered that when people reported that they had a ‘’good day’’, this was usually because of 3 things that happened during that day:
a- They felt that they made ‘’meaningful’’ progress during that day. This progress is made by them or the team.
b- They felt supported by others in the form of actions that directly support work or a project, including help from a person or a group. Examples can be setting meaningful goals, sufficient resources, autonomy, and supporting colleagues. The researchers called these actions ‘’catalysts’’.
c- They felt respected and they heard words of encouragement and praise. These words were directed at the person himself and not the work or the project. Besides respect, recognition, and praise, some other examples can be emotional comfort and opportunities for affiliation with others. The researchers called these events ‘’nourishers’’.
On the other hand, when people reported that they had a ‘’bad day’’, this was usually because of 3 things:
a- They felt that they made almost no progress and that the day contained a setback.
b- They felt that others were not trying to support their work or projects. In fact, the actions that showed support were rare. The researchers called these actions ‘’inhibitors’’.
c- They felt disrespected or not appreciated and the day went with almost no words of encouragement. The researchers called these events ‘’toxins’’.
One important point to keep in mind is that on a good day or a bad day, nothing was 100%.
For example, on a good day, the employees didn’t feel the support of everyone around them 100% of the time. There were actions that showed a lack of support but the actions that showed support were significantly higher. The same with praise and words of encouragement.
Now let us speak about the importance of progress mentally and emotionally.
Why is progress so important to us as humans?
Imagine with me this situation.
You are going to the gym each day to improve your physique, but after several weeks of going, you see no improvements.
You didn’t lose weight and you are not seeing any change in muscle mass. Or at least, that is how you feel when you are evaluating yourself. Would you be happy?
I bet that you will not feel happy. And I bet also that it will be just a matter of a few more weeks before you stop going to the gym if you don’t see any progress.
We are conditioned to have life goals and to seek to make progress, no matter if this progress is in our health, careers, our relationships with others, our love lives, or in any other thing.
And if you want to test this concept, let me ask you to get back with your memory and to remember something that you were doing and you felt that you were in a state of flow.
And flow means that you are totally engaged and that you cannot feel the time or get distracted easily. You are in full focus mode. Think a little bit and try to remember such an experience.
Did you recall something?
If yes, then what you will discover is that your most enjoyable part was not before you started, or even when you finished, but when you were making progress, building, and improving.
And here is something else that you will discover. Our progress in most of the things in our lives is faster during our first 25 to 30 years.
During these years, you are progressing at school and moving from one level to another waiting for the day that you will graduate, find a job, and start earning money. In parallel, you are making progress in learning, thinking, making friendships, and even in your love life and hobbies all at the same time.
And suddenly after the first 30 years, most people's progress in life becomes obsolete and progress changes to become routine tasks such as driving kids to school, working to pay expenses, and saving for the future without real aim for progress or without aiming to achieve something specific.
And this point specifically gives significant importance to the part of making progress at work.
For people to feel happy and alive, they must feel that they are making progress toward a meaningful goal to them.
And nothing can make them feel this feeling better than feeling that they are making progress in the place where they spend 8-10 hours each day for more than 35 years of their lives.
As a person in a managerial role, how can you use progress to your advantage to help your team and the organization?
If you are in a managerial role, then there are three layers that you must influence: the layer reporting to you (your team), the layer above you (your bosses), and the lateral layer (other managers in other functional areas).
Understanding how to employ the progress principle within your team can help you do all three.
While the two researchers, Teresa and Steve, propose that you use a ready-made checklist that they published, I always encourage, that you use a checklist as well BUT with a slight deviation. This deviation is that YOU create your own checklist.
And when I work with leaders who are struggling with disengaged teams, I encourage them to create their own checklists along with their team members.
I ask them to create a draft of a very simplified checklist. This checklist should take less than 2 minutes to fill by any person.
And it should contain questions, relevant to the three criteria that researchers Teresa and Steve proposed as a result of the study that I mentioned previously.
The checklist should reveal 3 things:
1- If they are making progress or not.
2- If they believe that the organization and the people around them are helping them achieve their company goals and project goals.
3- If they feel respected and they hear words of encouragement and praise, or if they feel that they are not getting enough respect or not acknowledged enough for their good work.
However, keep something important in mind, we do not just ask these questions directly. We break down each question into minor elements so that it becomes easier for each employee to find answers without getting confused or falling into the trap of the positive illusion bias that we talked about in the last article.
For example, in point number 2 which I mentioned previously, instead of asking a team member if he/she believes that the organization and the people around them are helping them achieve their project goals, you can think first about ‘’what does it mean that the organization and the people around them are helping them in the first place?’’. And break down this answer.
For example, the organization can help them by providing enough financial resources, enough manpower to get the job done, making the internal processes easier, getting updated and easy-to-use software…etc.
The list is long, and you can come up with as many ideas as you want based on your company, industry, and functional area, and then turn these ideas into check-box questions that you can send to the team members.
You do not need to come up with 10 or 20 questions. Start small and then you can expand the checklist later if you need to.
Remember, this checklist should be dynamic. You should be consistently making improvements and changing it along the way.
Also, before implementing this style, you must make it clear to team members that you are altogether the owners of this checklist, that you will all contribute to refining and improving it, and that its main purpose is not to supervise them or to show that they are not making progress, its goal is to support them. And this is why they have to be honest and open to contribute.
A tip based on experience: even if you made it clear to the team members that this checklist is to help them, you must expect resistance and lack of enthusiasm from several team members. This resistance will get less if you are able to create small wins fast after the first days of implementing the checklist.
They must see that because of this checklist, some things are changing. If they kept providing you with their input and nothing changed, then the enthusiasm will go lower and lower.
After gathering the information from them daily, you can start searching for patterns. And then you can use the information to:
1- Understand what they consider ‘’meaningful progress’’.
If they write that they made progress on a specific day, you can always ask them to share with you what happened exactly and what type of progress, and then you can ask them ‘’why they consider this meaningful progress?’’
of course, make it clear that you are asking them these questions to understand what they consider meaningful progress and not because you are underestimating any achievement or progress that they make.
Knowing what they label as ‘’meaningful progress’’ can help you a lot in choosing the type of work and tasks that you assign to each team member and will make it easier for you to show them later the value of what they do and to make it clear that it is meaningful and purposeful.
2- Deliver feedback.
A lot of employees complain that their managers rarely deliver constructive feedback that helps these employees grow and develop.
On the other hand, one of the biggest challenges that leaders face is to deliver consistent feedback that can grow their team members. There are 2 reasons for this:
a- The manager is not always available with each team member.
So, unless the team member goes to the manager and speaks up about a certain situation, or unless the manager witnessed something by coincidence that happened during a meeting, or unless someone complained about something specific about the behavior of a team member, then consistent constructive feedback will be very hard and rare.
b- People (especially managers) are not trained to run a ‘’revealing discussion’’.
For example, let us say that you are a manager and you have a 1:1 meeting with your team member.
Usually, the manager makes an opener by saying something like ‘’And, how is everything going? How was your week?’’, and the team member will answer by saying ‘’fine’’ and then will start thinking about the latest 1 or 2 problems/projects/success stories that he/she was thinking about before the meeting.
This approach can make the team member forget 1 or 2 minor but important details that happened 6 days ago and make him/her remember either the most significant ones emotionally or the ones that happened lately.
Moreover, the information that the team members will share is usually generic and not structured and they are surface-level information.
And because there is no structure and the information sharing is not going deep enough, it becomes a problem for the manager to understand how he/she can interfere and deliver constructive feedback, or mentor his/her employee.
By creating your own checklist together with your team, you can understand what areas to focus on, this will lead to clearer information shared by the team members and will result in lots of opportunities for you as a leader where you are able to give the team members constructive feedback.
3- Discover repetitive problems and remove obstacles.
By looking at the input that you are getting daily and from each team member, you will be able to discover repetitive problems faster and see patterns. You can work on eliminating these problems with the support of other lateral leaders and upper management.
Besides really helping your team and the organization in solving these problems, you will be able to expand your network and also build a powerful brand.
4- Inspire your employees to show them their contributions and small wins.
A lot of times, in the middle of our busy schedules, we forget to pause and evaluate our days and witness our progress and small wins.
Also, because of the ‘’negativity bias’’, we are used to spotting and remembering problems and setbacks far more than finding and remembering successes and good moments.
The checklist will help your team members in finding progress and small wins each day and this can boost their motivational level.
5- Show management that there is consistent progress.
As a leader, and if your team is really making consistent progress, then you will have plenty of material to show to the management regarding the progress of your team.
Of course, you do not need to show daily progress, but you can show just some highlights and acknowledge the great work of your team in front of the upper management, which will not only help your team but will also help you personally as a leader.
These 5 points are just some of the benefits of coming up with your own checklist (and if you have a problem coming up with your own checklist or the team is not collaborating, then reach out to me and I can advise).
A personal story relevant to this point: one of my clients went one step extra. He didn’t only create a checklist that he is consistently refining and testing with his team members. But he also implemented this checklist on an internal system or software that all of his team members use on a daily basis.
And this was a smart move because simply if I created with you a checklist that will take you less than 2 minutes to fill, and I implemented it inside a software or a program that you are using daily. Then there is a big chance that you remember to fill it daily.
The Checklist and Project Management.
In Project-oriented organizations, or in other words, companies that rely mainly on projects to make revenue such as the Automotive industry, creating such a checklist and transforming it into a Framework that can be implemented in all the business unit projects can be super helpful.
The Project management office can collaborate with project managers to create and roll out the framework, and then the project managers can use the framework or in other words the checklist with their teams.
If this step is made correctly by the Project management office and project managers, it can lead to incredible results such as better team motivation, more clarity, and higher engagement levels.
But remember, this is only if it is applied in the right way.
And as usual, it is now the right time to remind you of something crucial.
Changing what is happening inside our organizations nowadays is crucial. All of us are responsible and should hold each other accountable if we want to change something.
So, no matter who you are, what your title is, and where you are located, I want you to believe that we -as humans- are powerful and that you and I can make a difference.
Start with yourself and what you can do.
Do not say ‘’I am still young’’, or ‘’I am in a managerial role, but I do not have enough authority’’, or ‘’I am only 1 person, and I cannot do anything’’. You always can do something. It just starts with believing and that is what I am inviting you to do.
To believe in what we are trying to achieve together. And not only for a better future for me and you but also for my kids and your kids and the next generations.
Let us create a workplace that is attractive, healthy, and optimum for the new generations. Let us once leave something in this world better than we found it. Let us build something now, that our kids and the new generations will thank us for later. And let us do it together…This is my vision.
P.S.: If you are a fan of listening while commuting, you can find the audio version of this article here.
