Page 143 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

132 HBR Leader’s Handbook

The power of small wins

A critical aspect highlighted in Macia’s work with RRIs is creating oppor-
tunities for staff to achieve small wins. Beyond giving your team low-risk
ways of discovering and testing new approaches in real time, small wins
give your team the confidence to try new things and break out of the old
patterns of behavior (and levels of performance).
Harvard Business School professor Theresa Amabile and coauthor
Steven Kramer describe these psychological benefits in the HBR article
“The Power of Small Wins.” Their research shows that making progress
in meaningful work is the most important booster of emotions, motiva-
tions, and perceptions during a workday. The positive reinforcement of
seeing progress gives us a sense that all our effort is worthwhile for more
than just a paycheck. To counter that sense of malaise, many leaders feel
that their job is to pat people on the back and encourage them to keep
going. Unfortunately, without the visible evidence of real results, these
well-meaning gestures often come across as veiled attempts to keep up
the pressure. Instead, part of your job as a leader is to help your team
achieve those real results, even in small doses, just as Ma- cia’s rapid-
results teams gave people at XL a way of experiencing real success,
quickly.

behind if you see everybody else succeeding. So there’s a bit of competition
going on, and at the next checkpoint the lagging team moved out in front.”
At the same time, of course, the teams were learning what it took to
drive growth proactively: how to identify the right brokers to work with,
how to triage quotes that they had little chance of winning so that they had
more time available for the business that they could win, how and when to
bring underwriters and distribution people to the field, which materials
would be most helpful for brokers, how to help brokers sell different lines of
insurance to the same customers, how to work with brokers remotely when
they didn’t have a physical presence in the market, and more.