Sometimes the greatest of insights for one field come from another: Such is the case of ingesting “How to Read a Book,” the genteel, thoughtful, and thorough guide to critical reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, originally published in 1940. The work is an indispensable guide to reading for learning, understanding, and wisdom, but one passage, partway through, is arresting in its simplicity and for how it relates to working together.
For Adler and Van Doren, books are indispensable because they are absent teachers. For those of us no longer in school, we often must rely on the written word in order to accelerate our understanding of life. To that end, the authors argue that the teacher’s profession is parallel to two other noble ones: that of the farmer and the physician.
The farmer is in the business of growing plants, the physician of curing patients, the teacher of educating students. But the very grammar of those clauses betrays a misunderstanding: The farmer does not grow the plant, the plant does; the physician does not make the patient healthier, the patient grows healthier; and the teacher cannot command the pupil to learn, that growth must happen within the student.
Instead, what these noble professions do is arrange the circumstances for the beings they are caretaking—or curating if we can use the word in its older Latin meaning—so they may flourish. Put pithily, you cannot tell a flower to grow—but you can help it to. The farmer is mindful of the seasons and plants seeds when most suited; the physician understands a patient’s case history and integrates treatment within that larger context; the teacher understands where the student is coming from and then can make the material relatable.
The manager can be added to that list. The people we work with are not so unlike the plants the farmer grows, the pupils the teacher teaches, or the patients the doctor treats—to stretch the agricultural metaphor, you cannot tell any of the flowers, cucumbers, or corn stalks in your office to grow. The growing happens within them. And one does not need to be a leader or manager in title to encourage the growth of others.
So how do we lead and manage in ways that help people to grow, rather than tell people to grow? To want to work, rather than have to work? By looking at the forefront of organizational theory, we can see it’s actually a matter of managing progress, not people.
Principles of Progress
Teresa Amabile is a professor and a director of research at Harvard Business School. For decades her work focused on the nature of creativity, though as of late her focus has shifted to the inner lives of people at work. She studies how we relate to our achievements, both as individuals and within organizations. She has published in both the academic and popular press, perhaps most notably with the “Progress Principle,” coauthored with her husband, Steven Kramer.
Her research—including one study of 238 individuals making nearly 12,000 diary entries—skewers the widely held idea that fear and high pressure ensure achievement. Instead, as she writes in one essay for HBR, knowledge workers are more creative when they have a positive experience of work, when they think well of their organization and colleagues, and when they find their work to be meaningful—and, thus, intrinsically motivating. And when they are achieving, when they are making progress.
It doesn’t need to be monumental. While there are, indeed, heroic moments within a career, Amabile notes that a more commonplace victory can be enough, such as a programmer rooting out a difficult bug. We can extrapolate this to other cases: the nonprofit director making a draft of a grant application, the high school teacher finishing a day without having to raise his voice, the executive wrapping up her tasks in time to have dinner with her family. When people have these slow, steady, and daily markers of progress, they feel fulfilled, and they end the day looking forward to the next one, rather than walking out of the office door with an undead shuffle.
So, just as the farmer tills the soil to help seeds germinate, the manager can help arrange the workflow of her direct reports to help meaningful progress take root.
Excerpted with permission from “Everything Connects”: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability by Faisal Hoque with Drake Baer (McGraw Hill, 2014). For more information, visit www.EverythingConnectsTheBook.com.
Serial entrepreneur, innovation thought leader, and author Faisal Hoque is founder of Shadoka, MiND2MiND Exchange, B2B ForeSight, and other companies. He is a student of life, entrepreneurship, and humanity. He left Bangladesh at the age of 17 and now calls America his home. Formerly of GE and other global brands, Hoque is author of several innovation, management, and leadership books. He was named one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Technology alongside entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Larry Page, and others, by the editors of Ziff-Davis Enterprise. Hoque regularly chairs and speaks globally at CEO summits, business schools, and leadership forums.
