Progress Principle Quotes

“the secret to amazing performance is empowering talented people to succeed at meaningful work.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“If management generally overrides people’s decisions, they quickly lose motivation to make any decision, which severely inhibits progress.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“key to leveraging the progress principle: giving people meaningful work.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“as long as the work is meaningful, managers do not have to spend time coming up with ways to motivate people”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“Because they spend so much of their lives working, people deserve the dignity of having positive lives at work.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“In light of our results, managers who say—or secretly believe—that employees work better under pressure, uncertainty, unhappiness, or fear are just plain wrong. Negative inner work life has a negative effect on the four dimensions of performance: people are less creative, less productive, less deeply committed to their work, and less collegial to each other when their inner work lives darken.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“Our research inside companies revealed that the best way to motivate people, day in and day out, is by facilitating progress—even small wins. But the managers in our survey ranked “supporting progress” dead last as a work motivator.3”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“promoting positive inner work life doesn’t only make people feel better; it also leads people to do better work.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“Work that is devoid of meaning, interest, and joy can lead to lives that feel very empty indeed.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“If you want to foster great inner work life, focus first on eliminating the obstacles that cause setbacks. Why? Because one setback has more power to sway inner work life than one progress incident.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“But if the testing is decoupled from the programming task, if it is done by someone else, that programmer cannot enjoy an immediate uptick to inner work life. The key, then, is to design each job so that, in the act of carrying out the work, people gain knowledge about the results of their effort. Ideally, this should be a feature of every job in every contemporary organization. Is it, in yours?”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“management should enrich the lives of the people working inside the organization—by enabling them to succeed at work that has real value to their customers, the community, and themselves.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“This is how a manager creates a climate of psychological safety—by focusing on the work and what can be learned from it, rather than berating subordinates for errors.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

“work-related psychological benefits for employees translate into performance benefits for the company.”
― Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work