On the way to results

I've forgotten nearly every job interview question ever asked of me. But this one? This one has sat in the way back of my head since the day it was asked early, early, early in my career:

"I'm results focused. Results are what matter. Are you results focused?"

Ahhhhh … errrmmm … no! I'm results obsessed!

Ha! I mean, how else do you answer that question? 

Industrialized management has a long history of waiting until a thing changes, a grand outcome or a result, before acknowledging the work, and yes, while outcomes and results are important, so is alllllllll the work that goes into making those outcomes and results happen. 

I don't remember the interviewer's name. Can't look up how it's gone for him since. But clearly that gentleman 1) wasn't all that good at interviewing and 2) had found success in his industrialized results first! approach.

Some twenty years on from that fateful day, with at least half a career in tow, and dedicated time to diving into these topics for reasons only the universe knows, I can see what is missed when the focus is results only: how much meaningful progress goes into making a result happen.

Teresa Amabile's research found that making progress in meaningful work is the single biggest factor in daily motivation. Meaningful progress—small, specific, visible forward movement on work that matters to you. It's the meaningful progress that matters. 

But our system of work measures results. Volume up. Readmissions down. New initiative launched. Quarterly targets hit.

Managers are confused, too. When Amabile asked managers what they thought motivated people most, progress ranked dead last. They thought recognition, incentives, clear goals, and interpersonal support mattered more.

Progress isn't just "work on the way to results." Progress, meaningful progress, is the actual source of motivation, engagement, resilience, and ultimately performance that makes results possible.

It's totally cool if you, too, are results obsessed; but here's the thing: even when those organizational results align with your own interests—because you want to be good at your job, because you care about being employed, because you want the situation to improve—the organization rarely celebrates the progress it takes to get there. 

And that's a motivational miss. Yes, the result can be meaningful progress. However, it's just one moment in the work. The other moments matter just as much: The presentation you aced. The late night walking a travel nurse through line maintenance. The barrier you finally broke through. The code you committed. The meeting with the referring physician you nailed. Whatever it is that matters to you.

Amabile found that people often don't recognize their own progress—we're too close to it, or we've been conditioned by results-obsessed environments to dismiss anything short of completion as not counting. Yet the progress is happening. The feeling is available. 

Yes, even in pursuit of results.

But the organization isn't going to give you this. So track the progress.

And celebrate that. Because that's what keeps you going. Then celebrate the result, too.

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

“AI slop is a sort of liquid nothingness that will pour through culture, searching for whatever’s fungible and displacing it. What’s really being tested here is human taste. Will we accept a simulacrum of a work of art or craft as a satisfactory substitute for the real thing? Will we even notice the difference?” Dead, Loud and Snotty by Nicholas Carr

“The core issue these AI-centric models will need to figure out over the coming years is not necessarily technical, but rather organizational design. For a primary care workforce that feels overburdened and underpaid as the loss-leader for the industry, 10x’ing the capacity of that workforce will require building trust more than it will building tech.” Weekly Health Tech Reads 2/8/25 by Kevin O’Leary

“In other words, it’s not that generative AI is that good, it’s that software industry models in the U.S. are shaped around monopolization, offering low quality and bad security for high prices, increasingly with customer support from chatbots. So poorly done AI-built software is just not that much worse than what exists now. If you’re going to get customer support from AI, does it really matter if that chatbot is run on your own server or on one from Salesforce or SAP? And since software vendors don’t accept liability when their software causes your company to screw up, is your own custom software really that much worse?” The $2 Trillion Collapse of Bitcoin and Terrible Software Companies by Matt Stoller

“Complex systems can be predictable even when any individual node in the system seems unknowable.” Mysterious Predictability by Seth

Thanks for reading. Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

How To Work is healthcare-focused work design inspiration (from the experts!) to nudge your perspectives and practices into better alignment with the world of work as it is, and away from what it was. Here’s my take on what we’re working through.