pace summary

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PACE stands for Progress, Alignment, Capabilities and Engagement. It comes from two primary sources: The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work by Amabile and Kramer and The ACE Advantage: How Smart Companies Unleash Talent for Optimal Performance by Schiemann. It also draws on the work of Daniel Pink in Drive: The Surprising Truth About what Motivates Us and A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future as well as other authors that will be quoted in this summary.

PACE is really about talent optimization as defined in The Ace Advantage: “achieving the highest performance and future potential from the talent that you have invested in. Talent is defined as the collective competencies, values and attitudes, experiences, and behaviors of all sources of labor. Talent management is defined as all activities, processes, or behaviors that support the optimization of talent. And sustainable talent management is focused on achieving the long-term optimization of talent – not just performance for this week or this quarter.

Progress

According to the Progress Principle, the secret to how Google succeeded in the top five companies for work for in America “is creating the condition for great inner work life – the conditions that foster positive emotions, strong internal motivation, and favorable perceptions of colleagues and the work itself.” It starts with giving people something meaningful to accomplish. It requires giving clear goals, autonomy, help, and resources. It depends on showing respect for ideas and the people who create them. In short, “the secret to amazing performance is empowering talented people to succeed at meaningful work.”

Inner work life is the mostly invisible part of each individual’s experience – the thoughts, feelings, and drives triggered by the events of the workday. Most managers do not understand inner work life well enough to ensure clear sailing and avoid onrushing disaster.

Little things can mean a lot for inner work life. Small positive and negative events are tiny booster shots of psychological uppers and downers. In managing people, you really do have to sweat the small stuff. Happy workers make better workers.

High performance has four dimensions: creativity, productivity, commitment, and collegiality. Creativity – coming up with novel and useful ideas – is probably the most crucial aspect of performance in today’s business world. But creativity alone is insufficient. Productivity means getting work done on a steady basis, turning out consistently high quality work, and ultimately completing projects successfully. Commitment to the work, the project, the team, and/or the organization is something people demonstrate when they persevere through difficulties, help their coworkers succeed, and do what it takes to get the job done. Collegiality is any action that contributes to team cohesiveness; it is what team members demonstrate when they support each other interpersonally, act as if they are all part of the same team and work effort, and show that

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they care about how well the team functions. Each dimension of performance fluctuates with each component of inner work life.

Making headway on meaningful work brightens inner work life and boosts long-term performance. Making progress leads to positive inner work life, which creates the progress loop (the self-reinforcing process in which progress and inner work life fuel each other). Making progress in meaningful work is the most powerful stimulant to great inner work life. At the opposite end, setbacks in any sort of meaningful work – hitting dead ends while trying to solve a vexing problem, being blocked in attempts to meet a goal, or failing to find crucial information – are the biggest downer. Other sources of setbacks include being micromanaged, having resource request rejected, finding out that someone else’s action had harmed the project, being ridiculed, being ignored, and being overly pressured.

Other factors that contribute to inner work life include the catalyst factor and the nourishment factor. Catalysts are actions that directly support the work on the project, including any type of work-related help from a person or group. The opposite of catalysts are toxins. These negative actions include failing to support the project, as well as actively hindering the project in some way. Where catalysts are triggers directed at the project, nourishers are interpersonal triggers, directed at the person including respect, encouragement, comfort, and other forms of social or emotional support. The opposite of nourishers are toxins. These negative actions include failing to support the person, as well as actively disrespecting the person.

If managers want to foster great inner work life, they should focus first on eliminating the obstacles that cause setbacks because one setback has more power to sway inner work life than one progress incident. Some surprising evidence:

• The effect of setbacks on emotions is stronger than the effect of progress. • Small losses can overwhelm small wins. • Negative team leader behaviors affect inner work life more broadly than do positive team

leader bahaviors. • People may expend more cognitive and emotional energy on bad events than good ones. • Other types of negative events – not just setbacks – are more powerful than their mirror-

image opposite events. • The connection between mood and negative work events is about five times stronger than

the connection between mood and positive events. • Employees recall more negative leader actions than positive actions, and they recall the

negative actions more intensely and in more detail than the positive ones.

The seven major catalysts include 1) setting clear goals 2) allowing autonomy 3) providing resources 4) giving enough time – but not too much 5) help with the work 6) learning from problems and success and 7) allowing ideas to flow. Organizational culture forces that shape

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specific catalyst and inhibitor events include 1) consideration for people and their ideas 2) coordination and 3) communication.

The four major nourishers include 1) respect 2) encouragement 3) emotional support and 4) affiliation. If you are a team leader, you may have even more power than top managers to create a supportive or debilitating work environment for members of your team. You can even attenuate the negative impact for members of your team. The most successful leaders know how to nourish the inner work lives of those they lead. According to Peter Drucker: “The goal of management is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.” His view is that a manager’s job is to serve employees by ensuring that their needs for challenging work and satisfying work lives are fulfilled.

One of the best ways to put in motion the progress principle is to use the Progress Checklist (see Appendix 1) every day. It only takes about five minutes at the end of the day. The aim of the Progress Checklist is managing for meaningful progress, because that is the real job of a manager inside the organization.

Because inner work life and progress exert mutual influence, the ideal is to keep positive progress loops – virtuous cycles – going as long as possible and abort negative ones – vicious cycles – as soon as possible.

Because emotions are contagious, managers should take care of their own inner work life in order to resonate positive energy to those they lead.

Five Reasons why Optimism Is Better than Pessimism include:

#1 We need four times more positive emotional attractors than negative emotional attractors

Neuroscientists, according to co-author of Becoming a Resonant Leader and Primal Leadership Richard Boyatz, discovered that an optimal ratio of positive emotional attractors to negative emotional attractors is around four for us to be engaged at work. It’s true that we can be too optimistic. Some negative emotional attractors are needed for us to conduct the occasional reality check. Not every scientist agree on the ratio of 4:1, but all agree that more positive is needed than negative emotional attractors.

#2 Setbacks are five times more powerful than progress

We also need five times more progress than setbacks according to author of The Progress Principle, to stay motivated at work. Since setbacks have a more powerful negative impact, more progress is needed to keep us motivated.

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#3 It takes up to four hours to recover from strong emotions

According to Gary Harper, author of the Joy of Conflict Resolution, it can take up to four hours for us to recover from strong emotions such as anger.

#4 Emotions are contagious

When we are positive, others around us tend to be positive. When we have negative emotions, others tend to pick up on them as well. You emotions are contagious, especially if you are the team leader. So if you want an optimistic team that can produce results, you need to be optimistic yourself.

#5 Optimism is just plain more fun than pessimism

This one is my personal opinions, unlike to first four reasons that are based on scientific research. After all, who wakes up in the morning hoping they will have a day full of negativity, setbacks and angry co-workers. It’s just plain more fun to enjoy the company of those we work with and share a healthy work environment full of positivity and optimism.

Fifteen ideas for developing and maintaining optimism include:

1. Discover Yourself

a. Clear the clutter

b. Discover your passions

c. Build on your strengths

2. Reach for the Stars

a. The power of personal vision

b. Living life by design

c. Put it in writing

3. Elaborate

a. How to get from here to there

b. The power of collaboration: you can’t do it alone

c. The hierarchy of goals: the mountain (life vision); the boulders (life goals); rocks (annual goals); pebbles (weekly goals); sand (weekly objectives)

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4. Act

a. Taking that first step

b. Make the time for high importance low urgency activity

c. The power of renewal

5. Measure

a. Revisiting vision and the hierarchy of goals

b. The daily checklist

c. Celebrate your success

Alignment

Alignment is the level of clarity and congruity between the person and the organization’s goals, direction, values, customer expectations, or other similar factors. Do employees understand the direction and chief goals of the organization? Do they understand and behave in accordance with the values that the company espouses and promotes? Do they understand and act consistently with the brand promise to customers? Are they in sync with other units, teams, or individuals in trying to achieve critical organizational priorities, often referred to as horizontal or network alignment?

Capabilities

Capabilities, is often thought about too narrowly as simply employee competencies – the experience, knowledge, and skills we immediately search for in résumés to see if someone is qualified to join our organization, school, or club. Students spend hours trying to gain competencies to add to their résumés in order to get into better schools, classes, clubs, and organizations.

From a customer perspective, however, competencies are only one of the three critical ingredients needed to maximize Capabilities. When customers want to purchase a service or product, such as a refrigerator, they want the experience to match their expectations. This means that employee competencies (for example, understanding the product and empathizing with the customer), information (for example, prior orders or preferences, pricing, and warrantees), and resources (for example, delivery and installation) must come together at the moment of truth for the customer.

The customer-centric definition of Capabilities is the extent to which the organization effectively creates and optimizes the talent, information, and resources needed to meet customer

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expectations. What makes this a broader definition especially useful is that it can be applied both inside and outside the organization. Everyone in an organization has a customer or a stakeholder for his or her services, whether he or she interfaces directly with the external customer or supports someone within the organization who does.

Engagement

Engagement is often thought of as the motivational energy that someone expends on a task or the level of commitment a person makes to an endeavor. Cloaked in the language of job or company satisfaction, Engagement as traditionally defined gave an incomplete picture of the relationship between the employer and the employee. Satisfaction alone is not enough to ensure organizational success. An employee can be satisfied with a job or a company without demonstrating additional oomph. Or the energy may be ineffectively directed.

Engagement is about finding people who willingly exert extraordinary effort and act as advocates for the organization; they are more than simply satisfied employees. Engagement – with its component parts of satisfaction, commitment, and advocacy – represents a powerful engine for any group or organization.

Alignment is all about what and where you focus your time and Capabilities. Do I focus on task A or task B? Which is most valuable at a given time to the organization? Where does the strategy suggest it should be spent? Capabilities is about how you apply skills, information, and resources to meet customer expectations. And Engagement is about why you deploy your Capabilities lackadaisically or with zest.

pace summary

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