Small wins that represent genuine progress on meaningful work can dramatically boost motivation—and the effect compounds over time.
Tired of setting goals that fizzle out by February? Discover the key to sustained motivation with Teresa Amabile’s groundbreaking “Progress Principle.” In this episode, we share practical steps to apply this research to your personal and work goals, helping you turn ambitious resolutions into meaningful progress that lasts.
Resources from the Episode
Dealing with Interruptions on a Scrum Team
The Progress Principle book
Go Deeper
- Personal Goals: For more on how to set clear, effective goals for your own personal development, check out our Effective Goal Setting self-paced online course.
- Team Goals: For more on how to help your team set and accomplish clear and effective goals, join our upcoming Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop.
Episode transcription
Richard Lawrence
Have you noticed how January brings this wave of ambitious goal-setting? New Year’s resolutions, company OKRs, team objectives… There’s something about a fresh start that makes us feel like anything’s possible.
Peter Green
And Richard, as you know, I’m a dyed in the wool optimist. Unfortunately, the statistics are kind of sobering. About 80% of New Year’s resolutions don’t make it past February. And even carefully crafted work goals often meet the same fate.
Richard
I gotta tell ya, though, I’m looking forward to the gym getting quiet again, in February. But that’s not who I’m talking to, here. For our listeners, there’s good news.
There’s fascinating research that shows a better way to actually stick to your goals. And it’s not what most people think.
Peter
But first, The Humanizing Work show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations get better at leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit the contact page on our website, humanizingwork.com, and schedule a conversation with us if your organization wants to see stronger results in those areas.
Richard
Peter, I know you’ve recently revisited Teresa Amabile’s work in “The Progress Principle.” What did she discover about what really keeps people motivated?
Peter
Yeah, that’s a fantastic book. I recommend all of our listeners check it out. Her research is really interesting, and really well executed. Amabile and her team invited professionals in multiple companies to keep a daily journal, and then analyzed those thousands of journal reports to find patterns in what made for people’s best days at work. The entries asked two questions, just 1) what’s something that happened today? and 2) what’s your level of motivation as you leave work today? And then, they could look for correlations and they could tell whole stories about what was going on in these various projects that they were tracking.
What they found was surprising. And that was that it wasn’t a big breakthrough, or even connecting with a customer, or any of the other things we know can be motivating. What Amabile found is that the single biggest factor. by far. in motivation and engagement was making some small progress on work that mattered to someone.
Richard
That’s really interesting because it goes against how most of us think about and try to make progress on goals. We tend to either only give ourselves credit for achieving big outcomes or try to just get any little thing done—those “quick wins” that are often more quick than win.
Peter
It’s so true. It’s not just about getting things done. Amabile called it “The Progress Principle” because it’s the progress that matters. But it can be incremental progress. So, small wins—as long as they represent genuine progress on meaningful work—can boost people’s motivation and engagement dramatically. And what’s particularly interesting is that this effect compounds over time.
Richard
So, let’s talk about how to apply this research to make those ambitious January goals actually stick.
First, because progress needs to be meaningful to be motivating, it’s important to know what meaningful means. So, before you jump into action mode, take a breath and get clear on why the goal matters.
So, let’s say you’ve got a departmental goal for the quarter to “increase revenue by 20%.” That might be worth doing, but the corporate speak version of that goal doesn’t carry meaning with it.
So, dig into what it really means from a human perspective. What does success with that goal create for people? Maybe it’s about helping more customers solve their problems, or making sure your team has the resources to do their best work in the future.
When things get tough (and they always will), having a clear “why” makes all the difference. In a work context, I find it’s often useful to connect my goals to both organizational and personal purpose.
Peter
Ya. Love that. Once you have that solid “why” for the goal, the next practical step is usually to find the “just right” progress for today.
It’s kind of a tricky balance: you want progress that’s small enough that you can actually get it done, but meaningful enough to matter. It’s tempting to take on too much (“I’ll redesign the entire system!”) or settle for busy work that feels productive but doesn’t really move you toward your goal, like “Maybe I’ll just organize all these project folders today.”
Instead, I like to ask myself: “What’s one small piece of real progress I could make today that would actually matter?”
Richard
This, by the way, is the point of all our story splitting content. User stories are about making meaningful but incremental progress on user-facing software. Good stories strike that balance between small enough and meaningful enough.
Third thing, to put this into practice, is because the Progress Principle says it’s not just making progress that motivates us, it’s seeing the progress, you need to make your progress impossible to miss.
Create a system that shows you—clearly and unavoidably—whether you’re making progress.
For a personal goal, maybe you keep a simple journal, put up a progress board where you can’t miss it, or check in with a friend who’s working toward similar goals.
For a team, visualize the work you’re doing in such a way that you can easily trace daily effort to progress on larger outcomes. This is why we like hierarchical product backlogs for product teams. Big things break down into smaller things and small things trace up to bigger things.
Peter
Ya. Really, it’s whatever works for you—just make it so obvious you can’t ignore it or talk yourself out of seeing it.
And then, fourth, to apply the Progress Principle to achieve your goals, guard your focus.
We often know what meaningful progress looks like, but we let other things crowd it out during the day. I like to block off time in my calendar for goal-focused work and then get a little bit selfish about protecting that time. I consider those calendar blocks as an investment in keeping my promises to myself. So, when someone else, or something else tries to steal that time, I can ask “Is this really more important than the meaningful goal I committed to?”
By the way, this can be really difficult in some contexts. For example, if you’re on a Scrum team that struggles with emergent work getting in the way, check out episode 68, where we gave some practical advice on dealing with interruptions on a Scrum team. [https://www.humanizingwork.com/dealing-with-interruptions-on-a-scrum-team/]
Richard
To summarize…
The Progress Principle says that making small but meaningful progress on work that matters is key for sustaining motivation.
And to use that to make your goals stick this year…
Get clear on why your goals matter—from a human perspective
Find your “just right” progress every day
Make your progress impossible to miss, and
Guard your focus
Peter
We’d love to hear from you. Share in the comments on YouTube or on LinkedIn…what are you going to do to apply this to a meaningful goal in your life or work this year?
Richard
And if you’d like help building this into your work system—whether that’s crafting a compelling vision, learning how to break down big outcomes into meaningful small steps, or setting up systems for making progress visible and increasing focus—reach out to us through our website, humanizingwork.com.
Thanks for tuning in to the Humanizing Work Show. See you next time!
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