A question of (achieving) progress

According to the results of a study by Harvard Professor Teresa Amabile and colleagues, the strongest predictor of a healthy and productive relationship between people, their company and their work (something they termed the “inner work life”) was the ability to make progress on something meaningful every day. Enter the Progress Principle (Check out the book by the same name)!

It prompts the question -- how has the ability to make progress played out in large enterprises over recent years?  Here's how I've seen progress become stifled. 

The explosion of specialization -- chopping work into tiny pieces and dividing them up into multiple roles -- has been a major downer for people and productivity in large organizations. Let me be clear here, I'm not dismissing the role of specialists, but critiquing the over-specialization of work into roles that require multiple people to get something done. Let me explain.

Whatever gains have been realized from this over-specialization have surely been more than lost by the staggering interface costs incurred along the way.  When what could be done by one end-to-end role is broken down into many roles, we then need a “team”, and a series of meetings, to take even the smallest steps forward -- often like forcing people to run three-legged races to get anywhere.

In addition, when you chop human roles into pieces -- like parts for a machine -- you then need lots of managers, and rules, to hold the machine together and to keep the wheels from stopping or falling off. So over the years large organizations have compounded the damage: employing a team to do what a person could have done better, and then adding layers of managers to review and approve, or send back for rework, the recommendations of teams. 

In my experience, people get frustrated spending all their waking hours in meetings. And in those meetings, here’s what you witness: team members report feedback and instructions from their bosses, members strategize about how to get approval from the next committee, members discuss PowerPoint slides to convince managers and committees to agree with their plan, members discuss timeline for next meeting to incorporate next round of feedback from bosses. Rinse and repeat! Ironically, the teams can take a break from the meeting treadmill occasionally to attend a town hall so they can be reminded how empowered they are!

If making progress, achievement, is a big deal to people – perhaps the biggest deal on a day-in-and-day-out basis – then we need to get out of people's way, free them from the three legged race and enable them to be end-to-end owners of the progress they desire to make in the world!