Progress-focused

In a new article in Harvard Business Review Dan Cable and Freek Vermeulen, both professors of organizational behavior and strategic management, argue for the complete abolishment of contingent pay for top managers. They offer the following 5 arguments:

Since long, it has been known that how we interpret events in our lives has a strong influence on our feelings and behavior and, because of that, also on future events in our lives. An example of an event which can have a strong emotional impact is to get personally rejected. As new research by Howe & Dweck (2016) shows, the degree to which people can recover from personal rejection depends on how they think about personality.

Coert Visser, September 6, 2013 In their large-scale study, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have discovered that making progress in meaningful work is a main contributor to a positive work life and to good performance (Read more about this study, here ). Here are a few practical suggestions to harness the power of meaningful progress.

Coert Visser, September 12, 2013 By focusing on progress in meaningful work, your work experience and your performance are stimulated . It is useful to make explicit what progress you have achieved, for example by keeping a progress diary . If you don’t make progress explicit it may well be that you are not aware of the progress you are actually making. This is because progress can remain largely invisible if you don’t consciously focus on it. The reason for this is that we usually focus our conscious attention mainly on what has gone wrong and on what we still have to do. Progress which you have already made is thus easily overlooked.

Coert Visser, September 9, 2013 Making progress in meaningful work is one of the most motivating factors for employees. Therefore, it is important to talk about and to describe desired and achieved progress, frequently. But did you know that negative occurrences such as setbacks and failures can have a 2 to 3 times stronger (negative) effect on motivation than positive factors? This was shown in a study by Amabile and Kramer .

Coert Visser, September 7, 2013 In 5 steps to harness the progress principle I mentioned the research finding that progress in meaningful work is extremely motivating. In other words, the more you think that your work contributes to what is valuable to you, the more motivating it will be for you to achieve progress in this work. To speak of meaningful work, means to go beyond a simple task or results focus. To do meaningful work means that, as an employee, you have the feeling that completing the task or achieving the results is linked to an underlying purpose that is valuable to you. Here is an example.

Coert Visser, Juli 1, 2012 In 2011, Teresa Amabile, a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Steven Kramer, a developmental psychologist published the book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work which is one of the most compelling cases yet for focusing on progress in work. In the book they report on a large scale study into worker performance and motivation. One thing Amabile and Kramer did was to survey more than 600 managers from dozens of companies, asking them to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors: recognition for good work, incentives, interpersonal support, making progress and clear goals. The majority of these managers, chose “recognition for good work”. But a multiyear study which tracked day-to-day activities of 238 people in 26 project teams in 7 companies in 3 industries showed that these managers were not right about this. The study exami...

In progress focused work we argue for positive, goal oriented ways of communicating. As much as possible we try to avoid negative expressions such as anger or blame because these generally needlessly threaten both the issue and the relationship. Sometimes people ask whether such negative communication might be effective or even necessary in certain situations. They argue that these negative expressions might create a sense of urgency and pressure in your conversation partner to go along with your expectations. Based on this idea they may even argue that feigning anger is a good way to get people to go along with your expectations. This tactic, according to them, could be applied in conflict situations, negotiations and in conversations in which performance expectations need to be clarified.

Some time ago I wrote about economist Richard Wolff's book Democracy at work. A cure for capitalism in which he argued that capitalism is inherently threatening to democracy and that a fundamental change is needed in the direction of Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs) which would be an alternative to capitalism ( read my explanation of this argument here ). While I found the book interesting, I wasn't convinced that capitalism should be replaced. Now, there is a book by another economist, also one who is very critical about current day capitalism and concerned for the protection of the democracy, Robert Reich . The book is called Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and it argues not for the replacement of capitalism but for its rescue.

Neuroplasticity is the property of the brain to keep developing throughout life. Over the last decade or so more information has become available about how great this capability of the brain is. In this post I write about how important neuroplasticity's role can be in healing diseases and in this post I discuss some skeptical views on neuroplasticity. Since I started reading about neuroplasticity, about 10 years ago, I began to wonder how far the possibilities of brain training could go. One of the questions which interested me in particular was the question of to which degree age-related problems can be prevented or reversed. A topic about which I was specifically curious is presbyopia, the condition in which aging people are progressively less able to focus. This condition usually starts around age 40 and, from what I read, from age 50 nearly everybody is so affected by it that reading glasses are necessary in order to read.

Recently I have referred to the influence on modern societies of ideas and values from the Enlightenment. Here I call Enlightenment values an important basis for the progress which has happened in the Western world over the last two centuries and suggest that the rest of the world can benefit from them as much (which is actually happening more and more).

I'd like to introduce two concepts: level-thinking and progress-thinking. Below, I will explain what I mean with these two terms and argue for putting less emphasis on level-thinking and more on progress-thinking. Level-thinking is a way of thinking in which people, when they assess other people or themselves and when they set goals, emphasize the achieved level and desired level.  Progress-thinking is a way of thinking in which people, when they assess or set goals, emphasize achieved and desired progress. These two ways of thinking have a number of different characteristics and consequences which I will describe below.

Teachers’ perceptions and actions can have a great impact on students’ beliefs, motivation, effort and performance. One way in which teachers affect their students is in the way they evaluate students’ performance. Falko Rheinberg (1980) showed that some teachers tend to compare students with each other – this is called a social reference norm orientation (social RNO) – while other teachers tend to compare a student’s current learning outcomes with his or her previous performance – this is called an individual reference norm orientation (individual RNO).

Stereotyping can have all kinds of harmful consequences. This article shows that people who are subject to stereotyping can be hindered in their performance by it. Also, the article shows that stereotyping can stand in the way of an fair and accurate assessment of stereotyped individuals. In this article you can read that stereotypes can affect people at a very young age, often even without them being aware this influence. This article shows evidence that not only negative stereotypes may impede performance but also positive stereotypes.

On several occasions I have been critical about positive psychology (for example see here ). To summarize my worries and criticisms briefly, my impression was and is: (1) that positive psychology puts too much emphasis on individual factors as determinants of behaviors and too little on situational factors, (2) that positive psychology emphasizes happiness too much as a criterion, (3) that positive psychology focuses too much on strengths and virtues as causes of human flourishing, and (4) that commerce and science appear to be too much intertwined.

In my earlier article Reasons for skepticism about happiness research I mentioned some skeptical comments to research and publications about happiness (I'll paraphrase what I said there): (1) Happiness is important but the importance of happiness is exaggerated. Happiness should not be the ultimate life goal. It is of relative importance. There are many other things in life which are as important. Trying to maximize happiness is an unwise strategy, (2) Much research into happiness is correlational and does not allow for conclusions about causation of happiness. Still, the suggestion (or at least the interpretation by the public) of publications is often that when a variable correlates with happiness it causes happiness, (3) There are reasons to question the validity of self-reported happiness. Research by Sean Wojcik demonstrated that conservative generally rate themselves as happier than democrats but appear unhappier when assessed through two objective methods (text analysis b...

Sometimes people make the following two assertions about progress-focused work: (1) progress-focused work is not focused on problems but on progress, and (2) progress-focused work is not focused on the past but on the future. These assertions sound enthusiastic and I'd rather not be a killjoy but I find it important to contradict them. Neither talking about the past, nor talking about problems is a taboo in progress-focused work. Indeed, both are important elements in virtually every progress-focused conversation. I'll explain below.

There is an interesting new working paper by two Harvard Business School researchers: Toxic workers (Housman & Miner, 2015). They analyzed a large data set containing a range of information about more than 50,000 workers from 11 firms. Their analyses were aimed at gaining insight into which personal and situational circumstances lead to toxic behavior and into which effects toxic behaviors have. In the working paper they present some interesting findings and they make some recommendations for management and HR-policy. Below, I will briefly summarize the findings and add some personal remarks.

How you look at your own progress determines how competent and motivated you will feel. A way of working which is not well-suited for this, is to grade your own competence level. There are at least three reasons why this type of self-assement is slippery and unreliable: (1) the Dunning-Kruger effect, (2) the curse of knowledge, and (3) the raised bar.

A new article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (photo) in Harvard Business Review says that strengths based coaching may backfire. The article says that the strengths-based approach has become a very popular approach about which many books have been written. An exponent of this popularity is the Gallup questionnaire StrengthsFinder. The article makes the following five claims about the strengths-based approach:

Research into self-determination theory has shown that doing things we find interesting has many positive effects. Doing interesting work in intrinsically rewarding. This means that the doing of the work is so interesting and pleasurable that we need no encouragement to want to do it. When we do such activities we tend to be more engaged, we learn and perform better and we persist longer. By the way, what makes activities interesting is not only determined by the content of the activity bit also by the context in which we are doing it, for example the pleasant social interactions we have when doing the activity.

Research has shown that many people tend to overestimate their own capabilities. This overconfidence may undermine performance and relationships with other people. This tendency of people to be overconfident is often thought to be universal. New research, however, shows that this is not the case. It shows that people with a fixed mindset are more vulnerable to overconfidence.

Being able to change your beliefs is necessary for keeping on playing a positive role in the world. Not being able to think critically about your own beliefs and to change them when they are not true eventually will keep you from playing a constructive role. An ultimate example of the inability to change one's views can be found in religious fanatics who create death and destruction while believing they are doing something good. Letting go of beliefs can be important but also hard.

Recently, a debate took place between Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley on the one site and Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton on the other side. The debate was about the motion 'human kind's best days lie ahead'. Pinker and Ridley defended the motion, Gladwell and de Botton argued against it. You can watch the debate here .

How can it be that we sometimes keep holding on to certain beliefs of which we could know, and perhaps deep inside do know, that they are not true? Think about things like magical thinking, superstition and views which logically can't be true and things we have proven to be untrue? In a new article, Believing What We Do Not Believe: Acquiescence to Superstitious Beliefs and Other Powerful Intuitions , Jane Risen looks at this question from the perspective of dual process models such as Kahneman's model distinguishing system 1 and 2 thinking.