To aid creativity and achieve more, try doing less

August 27, 2013 | Editor's Pick Popular

By Chuck Leddy, Harvard Correspondent

Teresa Amabile compares much of work life to running on a treadmill.

People constantly try to keep up with the demands of meetings, email, interruptions, deadlines, and the never-ending need to be more productive and creative. Yet on many days they seem to make no progress at all, especially in creative endeavors.

“Many companies are running much too lean right now in terms of the number of employees,” said Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a director of research at Harvard Business School. So the treadmill speeds up, compelling time-strapped employees to do ever more with less.

Instead, it often would be better to do less, said Amabile. The single most important thing managers can do to enhance workplace creativity is “protecting at least 30 to 60 minutes each day for yourself and your people that’s devoted to quiet reflection,” she said.

Amabile has spent the last 35 years researching life inside organizations and how it influences employees and their performance (what Amabile describes as “inner work life”). Her research has spanned individual creativity and productivity, team creativity, and organizational innovation. Much of her work is included in her 2011 book “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work,” co-written with Steven Kramer, Amabile’s husband.

During an interview, Amabile discussed how the ever-accelerating treadmill lessens creativity.

“In the short term, people become less engaged in their work if their creativity isn’t supported,” she said. “They will also be less productive because they often can’t focus on their most important work.

In the long term, companies may lose their most talented employees, as well as losing out because they won’t have the innovative products, innovative services, and business models that they need to be competitive.”

Instead, said Amabile, companies should unleash creativity by taking people off that treadmill.

“Managers and employees need to work together to constantly prioritize, to figure out what is truly important, what they can forget about, and what can they push to the back burner in order to reduce time pressure.

My colleague here at HBS, Leslie Perlow, found that, in a department of harried engineers, it was powerful to simply declare ‘quiet time’ in the morning, three days a week: no meetings with or phone calls to colleagues, no interruptions, no expecting immediate responses to emails. People were way more productive. They also felt less stressed and more satisfied with their work.”

Amabile described a time-pressured employee “who moved to the room where the boxes were stored and stayed there for the entire day, really getting into a flow state” of uninterrupted creativity. However achieved, immersion is vital.

Managers, Amabile reminded, should be removing obstacles to creative work, especially in times of deadline pressure when uninterrupted immersion is critical. She offered the example of “one team that had a limited time frame to solve a problem with $145 million at stake. What the managers did was to clear the decks for that team, to get people off the treadmill. You have to basically stop that treadmill. Sometimes, that means physically separating” people from distractions like telephones and email.

Managers also should provide employees with meaningfulness and a sense of progress, Amabile said. Her research has said that the latter (“The Progress Principle”) is the biggest catalyst for creative work. Yet most managers don’t understand how important “small wins” are to an employee’s intrinsic motivation. “We know from our research with employees that ‘making progress in meaningful work’ was the No. 1 day-to-day motivator, and by a huge margin. Managers are really unaware of how important it is for them to facilitate progress every day, and to clear away obstacle to progress,” said Amabile.

To work creatively, people “have to feel like they’re on a mission. They have to understand why it’s important to get it done now; otherwise, it’s like a death march. Meaningfulness is important, as is understanding the urgency, buying into it, and being able to focus.” Managers can support these factors, thereby nurturing employees’ intrinsic motivation when time pressure is unavoidable.

If intrinsic motivation is so important to creativity, are extrinsic motivators (higher pay, promotion, and recognition) irrelevant? Amabile said that supporting intrinsic motivation “doesn’t mean that extrinsic motivators need to be absent. Most of us operate under a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the creative work we do. It’s also important to make a living for what we do, to get recognition for what we do. What matters is that intrinsic motivation be stronger than extrinsic.”

Simply put, Amabile contends that individuals who can get off the treadmill when creativity is needed, and managers and companies who support them in doing so, will attain higher levels of success.

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Teresa M. Amabile

Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration
Director of Research

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. She is also a Director of Research at the School. Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Dr. Amabile received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1977. Her research investigates how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Originally focusing on individual creativity, Dr. Amabile's research expanded to encompass individual productivity, team creativity, and organizational innovation. This 35-year program of research on how the work environment can influence creativity and motivation yielded a theory of creativity and innovation; methods for assessing creativity, motivation, and the work environment; and a set of prescriptions for maintaining and stimulating innovation. Dr. Amabile's current research program focuses on the psychology of everyday work life: how events in the work environment influence subjective experience ("inner work life") and performance (creativity, productivity, and commitment to the work).

Before joining HBS, Dr. Amabile held several research grants as a professor at Brandeis University, including "Creativity and Motivation," from the National Institute of Mental Health, and "Downsizing Industrial R&D," from the Center for Innovation Management Studies. She was awarded the E. Paul Torrance Award by the Creativity Division of the National Association for Gifted Children in 1998, and the Leadership Quarterly Best Paper Award by the Center for Creative Leadership in 2005. In November 2011, she was named to the international Thinkers50 list.

Dr. Amabile has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications to various groups in business, government, and education, including IDEO, Johnson & Johnson, Grunenthal Pharma, and the Society for Human Resource Management. In addition to participating in various executive programs at Harvard Business School, she created the MBA course, Managing for Creativity, and currently teaches the the new FIELD course to first-year MBA students. Dr. Amabile was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She is a director of Seaman Corporation and a trustee of Canisius College, and has served on the boards of other organizations.

Dr. Amabile is the author of The Progress Principle, Creativity in Context, and Growing Up Creative, as well as over 150 scholarly papers, chapters, case studies, and presentations. She serves on the editorial boards of Creativity Research Journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and Journal of Creative Behavior. Her papers include: Creativity (Annual Review of Psychology), Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity (Academy of Management Journal); Changes in the Work Environment for Creativity during Downsizing (Academy of Management Journal); Leader Behaviors and the Work Environment for Creativity: Perceived Leader Support (Leadership Quarterly); and Affect and Creativity at Work (Administrative Science Quarterly). She has also published several articles in Harvard Business Review.

Personal Website: www.teresaamabile.com

TED x Atlanta

Investigating how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance

Teresa Amabile draws from her new book The Progress Principle to explain how companies can overcome the "crisis of disengagement" occurring in the workplace.
The Progress Principle

Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work.

By Teresa M. Amabile, and Steven J. Kramer.

Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.
The most effective managers have the ability to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives-consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly. As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explain in The Progress Principle, seemingly mundane workday events can make or break employees' inner work lives. But it's forward momentum in meaningful work-progress-that creates the best inner work lives. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in seven companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day. The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. It also explains how to activate two forces that enable progress: 1) catalysts-events that directly facilitate project work, such as clear goals and autonomy and 2) nourishers-interpersonal events that uplift workers, including encouragement and demonstrations of respect and collegiality. Filled with stories from the companies studied, The Progress Principle equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the insights they need to maximize their people's performance.

Table ContentsExcerpt Review
Do Happier People Work Harder?

The New York Times, Sept. 3, 2011

In this New York Times opinion piece, Teresa Amabile and coauthor Steven Kramer outline actions that business leaders can take to reignite passion for work and revitalize creative productivity even in tough economic times.
The Power of Small Wins

Harvard Business Review, May 2011

Want to truly engage your workers? Help them see their own progress.
By Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer
Idea in Brief
What could be more important for managers than increasing their teams' productivity? Yet most managers labor under misconceptions about what motivates employees-particularly knowledge workers-to do their best work.
On the basis of more than a decade of research, which included a deep analysis of daily diaries kept by teammates on creative projects, the authors clarify the matter once and for all: What motivates people on a day-to-day basis is the sense that they are making progress.
Managers who take this finding to heart will easily see the corollary: The best thing they can do for their people is provide the catalysts and nourishers that allow projects to move forward while removing the obstacles and toxins that result in setbacks. That is easily said, but for most managers it will require a new perspective and new behaviors. A simple checklist, consulted daily, can help make those habitual.
Teresa M. Amabile (mailto:tamabile@hbs.edu) is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Creativity in Context (Westview Press, 1996). Steven J. Kramer (steve@progressprinciple.com) is an independent researcher, writer, and consultant in Wayland, Massachusetts. He is a coauthor of "Creativity Under the Gun" (HBR August 2002) and "Inner Work Life" (HBR May 2007). Their book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, is forthcoming from Harvard Business Review Press.